Valerio Tricoli - 2006 - Metaprogramming From Within The Eye Of The Storm

 

Bowindo – Bowindo08  146.88MB FLAC

Metaprogramming From Within the Eye of the Storm begins inside a contradiction. The eye of a storm is theoretically calm, but that calm exists only because violent forces are rotating around it. Valerio Tricoli places the listener in a comparable psychological position, somewhere between inward stillness and an exterior world undergoing continuous transformation. Voices, electronics, acoustic fragments, tape movement, environmental traces, and abrupt changes of perspective gather into one extended composition whose center never remains entirely secure. The piece does not merely surround a quiet observer with chaos. It questions whether the observer can be separated from the storm at all.
“Metaprogramming” ordinarily means altering the rules through which another program operates. Applied to consciousness, it suggests examining and potentially changing the mental systems that shape perception before deliberate thought begins. Memory, expectation, language, fear, habit, and cultural training continually organize experience, often without announcing their presence. Tricoli’s composition works at this hidden level. Sounds repeatedly appear to possess recognizable identities, then lose them through editing, layering, repetition, or changes in scale. A voice becomes texture. A physical object becomes an electronic disturbance. A distant recording suddenly feels uncomfortably close. The listener’s first interpretation is rarely permitted to remain intact.
The piece belongs to musique concrète, but it does not behave like a museum exercise demonstrating the respectable transformation of recorded objects. Tricoli’s world is more unstable and psychologically charged. He does not simply invite the listener to admire how cleverly one sound has been converted into another. Transformation itself becomes the subject. Every source seems capable of escaping its original function, yet the resulting freedom is not necessarily comforting. Once a voice has been detached from its speaker and rearranged, it can continue producing emotion without preserving the person’s full identity. Once an environmental sound enters composition, it becomes part of another reality whose relationship with the original event may be impossible to recover.
This separation gives the album its peculiar haunted quality. Recorded sound always arrives from the past, even when the delay is only a few seconds. A microphone captures an action, but playback returns the action after the body has moved on. Tricoli intensifies that temporal fracture until the composition feels populated by moments that do not agree about when they are occurring. One fragment seems like memory, another like immediate physical danger, and another like an event being imagined before it happens. The eye of the storm becomes a room where past, present, and anticipated experience rotate around one another without forming a dependable chronology.
Voice is especially important because it promises access to another consciousness. A person speaking normally provides language, emotion, intention, and bodily presence at once. Tricoli breaks that unity. Speech may remain partly understandable, but processing, interruption, and competing sounds prevent it from functioning as transparent explanation. We hear somebody, yet cannot always determine where that person stands in relation to the composition. The voice may be narrator, victim, observer, memory, or another object being manipulated by the recording system. Human presence becomes undeniable but difficult to locate.
The structure avoids a conventional progression from confusion toward clarity. Instead, the composition repeatedly creates temporary forms and allows them to be damaged. Quietness may open enough space for a small sound to acquire enormous importance, only for a sudden concentration of activity to change the apparent dimensions of everything heard before it. Harsh events do not merely provide contrast with delicate passages. They reveal that delicacy was unstable all along. Likewise, calmer regions retain the pressure of the disturbances that preceded them. The storm continues invisibly inside the silence.
This makes the album physically involving despite its abstract construction. Tricoli composes with apparent distance, weight, and direction as much as with pitch. Some events seem pressed against the ear, while others appear to occur behind walls or across an open landscape. The listening space expands and contracts without warning. A modest sound can abruptly feel larger than the room because nothing surrounding it provides a reliable measurement. The ear becomes a movable point inside an architecture continually rebuilding itself.
There is also dark humor in the work’s refusal to behave properly. Sounds interrupt one another at inconvenient moments. Human utterances acquire strange proportions. Abrupt edits expose the artificial machinery beneath apparently immersive environments. Tricoli does not pretend that the studio has created an entirely natural world. The seams remain audible, reminding us that every atmosphere is being constructed through choices, machines, and acts of exclusion. Even the most convincing illusion can be cut open by the movement of tape or the arrival of an incompatible fragment.
As Tricoli’s first solo full-length, Metaprogramming already contains many concerns that would become central to his later work: the unreliability of memory, the physicality of recorded voice, the transformation of everyday sound into psychological evidence, and the uncertain border between internal and external reality. Yet the album does not feel like an immature sketch for later accomplishments. Its relatively compact duration gives it a compressed, nervous intensity. Ideas appear before the listener has settled into the previous one, creating the sensation of a mind discovering that its own structures may be operating independently.
The title ultimately describes both the composition and the act of hearing it. Tricoli rearranges recorded material, but the music also alters the listener’s interpretive program. We begin by attempting to identify sources and understand their sequence. Gradually those habits become less useful. Attention shifts toward relationships, pressure, memory, and the emotional consequences of not knowing. The piece does not remove us from the storm. It teaches us to notice that the supposed calm center was another construction, temporarily formed within forces that never stopped moving.

James Blackshaw & Lubomyr Melnyk - 2013 - The Watchers

 

Important Records – IMPREC375  243.46MB FLAC

The Watchers brings together two musicians whose work already seemed to be approaching the same landscape from opposite sides. James Blackshaw had turned the twelve-string acoustic guitar into a source of rolling, orchestral movement, building long compositions from fingerpicked patterns whose repetition produced continual internal change. Lubomyr Melnyk had spent decades developing “continuous music,” using extremely rapid piano figures, sustained pedal, and accumulated overtones to make the instrument behave less like a sequence of struck notes than an unbroken field of sound. Their meeting therefore feels inevitable in retrospect, yet the recording retains the uncertainty of two people discovering in real time whether their immense individual languages can occupy the same room without crushing one another.
The central challenge is one of density. Blackshaw’s guitar produces intricate networks in which every string contributes another moving line, while Melnyk’s grand piano can generate a harmonic cloud large enough to obscure almost anything placed beside it. The Watchers succeeds because neither musician treats collaboration as an opportunity to perform at maximum strength. Melnyk softens and opens his continuous technique, allowing the piano’s resonance to surround rather than bury the guitar. Blackshaw sometimes reduces his own forward motion, leaving enough space for the piano’s overtones to become part of the guitar’s apparent body. Their restraint does not make the music smaller. It allows a third instrument to emerge between them, an impossible stringed keyboard whose notes seem plucked, struck, sustained, and reflected simultaneously.
“Tascheter” establishes this shared instrument gradually. Blackshaw’s repeating figures provide a bright but unsettled surface, while Melnyk’s piano enters beneath and around them, widening each harmonic change. The musicians are improvising, but the performance does not sound casual or conversational in the ordinary sense. They do not exchange short phrases or compete for the next statement. Instead, they establish currents and listen for the point where those currents begin moving together. A change initiated by the guitar may take several seconds to transform the piano, while one of Melnyk’s lower chords can alter the emotional meaning of a pattern Blackshaw has already repeated many times.
The four titles deepen this sense of orientation. Tascheter, Venant, Satevis, and Haftorang were names attached to celestial guardians or “watchers,” stars associated with different directions and seasonal positions in ancient Persian cosmology. The album title therefore suggests four points surrounding a world, each composition observing the same musical territory from another direction. Blackshaw and Melnyk do not illustrate stars through sparkling effects or cosmic grandeur. Their music is celestial because it depends upon recurrence, orbit, changing perspective, and the human desire to discover order in immense patterns.
“Venant” develops a darker and more dramatic momentum. Melnyk’s piano has enough weight to make Blackshaw’s guitar seem momentarily suspended above deep water, yet the guitar continues sending out tightly linked figures that prevent the music from sinking into solemnity. The piece demonstrates how repetition can produce narrative without conventional melody. A pattern returns, but the surrounding harmony has changed; the same notes now carry another emotional temperature. Nothing needs to announce a new section because the musicians continually modify the conditions under which earlier material is heard.
“Satevis” feels especially fragile. The interaction becomes less about combining maximum resonance than preserving a shared balance that might collapse if either musician pushes too hard. Blackshaw’s guitar can sound almost exposed against the grand piano, but that vulnerability gives the piece its human scale. Melnyk frequently allows notes to remain as shadows rather than declarations, extending the guitar’s decay and making silence seem filled with distant harmonic activity. The performance is less a duel between virtuosos than an exercise in mutual protection.
This generosity is important because both musicians possess techniques capable of inspiring amazement before emotional meaning has even been considered. Blackshaw’s fingerpicking and Melnyk’s rapid piano playing could easily turn the session into a display of impossible hands. Instead, virtuosity becomes the practical means by which sustained attention is maintained. The quantity of notes matters because it creates continuity, but the emotional force comes from pressure, hesitation, trust, and the willingness to leave openings inside that continuity. Speed ceases to feel fast. It becomes texture.
“Haftorang,” the shortest and final piece, brings their methods into the clearest alignment. Blackshaw’s cascading guitar establishes a rising and falling motion, while Melnyk’s piano surrounds it with a luminous haze. Neither instrument feels like accompaniment. The guitar gives the piano visible lines; the piano supplies the guitar with an atmosphere large enough for those lines to curve through. The effect is expansive without becoming overfilled, as though the musicians have finally learned the dimensions of the shared instrument they began constructing at the opening.
The improvisational origin gives the album a peculiar emotional quality. Both Blackshaw and Melnyk were primarily composers accustomed to developing material carefully, yet these recordings preserve the stage before revision might have removed uncertainty. Tiny hesitations remain. One musician occasionally appears to search for a route through what the other has introduced. The music does not hide the labor of listening. That vulnerability prevents its beauty from becoming immaculate. The pieces feel discovered rather than manufactured.
The title also suggests that the musicians are not the only watchers. Each is watching the other across the room, following hands, posture, dynamics, and the direction of a phrase. The recording engineers watch levels and microphone responses. Later, listeners observe the resulting music while being observed in turn by the four silent names above the tracks. Watching here is not passive. It means remaining alert enough to recognize when another person’s motion has changed the whole environment.
The Watchers is ultimately a record about compatibility without sameness. Blackshaw and Melnyk do not erase the difference between twelve-string guitar and grand piano, younger musician and elder, composed practice and spontaneous encounter. Their distinct identities remain audible, but the music reveals a shared belief beneath them: that repetition can open rather than close, that a pattern may become more mysterious through continuation, and that sustained sound can alter one’s perception of time without abandoning melody or feeling.
The session lasted only one day, but the finished record gives the impression of a musical relationship extending far beyond it. Four temporary alignments became four celestial positions, each guarding another entrance into the same continuous field. The players do not attempt to conquer that field or explain it completely. They enter, watch one another carefully, and allow the sound between them to become larger than either could have made alone.

Masahiko Okura / Gunter Muller / Ami Yoshida - 2005 - Tanker

 

For 4 Ears – CD 1759  191.69MB FLAC

Tanker is music made from signals so small that the listener begins questioning where one instrument ends and another begins. Ami Yoshida’s voice avoids recognizable singing and frequently avoids sounding human at all. Masahiko Okura removes the alto saxophone from melody, jazz phrasing, and conventional breath-driven expression, concentrating instead upon air, reed pressure, mouth noise, minute squeaks, and the resonances of hollow tubes. Günter Müller surrounds these sources with subdued electronic movement, low-frequency pulses, granular activity, and sounds whose percussive ancestry has been processed almost beyond recognition. The trio does not establish a foreground and background. Every contribution enters the same uncertain scale, where a tiny vocal click can possess as much structural importance as a broad electronic field.
“Shibuya,” the twenty-seven-minute opening performance, was recorded live at Koendori Classics in Tokyo in April 2004. Its development is patient enough to make ordinary listening habits feel oversized. The musicians do not fill silence merely to demonstrate participation. One sound enters, remains briefly exposed, and changes the conditions under which the next sound will be heard. Yoshida’s chirps, glottal contractions, whistles, and high falsetto fragments sometimes resemble birds, insects, escaping steam, faulty electrical devices, or organisms too small to be seen. Yet comparing them too firmly with external sources misses part of their strangeness. Her voice is most powerful when it remains suspended between categories, unmistakably produced by a body but refusing the emotional and linguistic duties normally assigned to vocal performance.
Okura’s alto saxophone and tubes inhabit nearly the same territory. He frequently suppresses the instrument’s expected projection, reducing it to breathy flutter, tongue movement, stopped air, reed vibration, and small resonant events occurring within the instrument’s physical construction. His tubes further detach breath from the familiar cultural identity of the saxophone. Air enters a hollow structure and returns as pitch, turbulence, pulse, or colored noise. At moments it becomes difficult to determine whether Okura or Yoshida has produced a particular squeal, bubble, or dry exhalation. Their sounds do not imitate one another intentionally so much as reveal that voice and reed instrument begin from related bodily machinery: breath, cavities, pressure, moisture, membranes, and controlled obstruction.
Müller provides neither accompaniment nor a decorative electronic atmosphere. His low pulses and tremulous surfaces alter the apparent dimensions of every acoustic event. A tiny sound from Yoshida can suddenly seem suspended inside a vast room; one of Okura’s dry reed noises can acquire a metallic shadow or continue after its physical source has stopped. Müller began as a percussionist, and that history remains audible even when he performs entirely through iPod and electronics. His sounds retain an elastic rhythmic intelligence. They may not form recognizable beats, but they expand, contract, scatter, and gather like percussion released from the obligation to mark regular time.
The live performance gradually grows from isolated particles into a more continuous polyphonic field. This change is not achieved by everyone simply becoming louder. Sounds begin overlapping, answering, and partially concealing one another. A Yoshida whistle may emerge through Müller’s electronic bubbling while Okura’s breath produces another nearly identical frequency nearby. The trio becomes one composite instrument whose internal organs cannot be viewed separately. What initially seemed fragile develops surprising density, but the music never abandons transparency completely. Even at its busiest, enough space remains to inspect how individual textures rub against one another.
The remaining three pieces change the method radically. “Kitashinagawa–Lupsingen 1,” “2,” and “3” connect two distant locations through recording rather than simultaneous performance. Okura and Yoshida created material in Tokyo’s Kitashinagawa area and sent it to Müller in Lupsingen, Switzerland, where he added and organized electronic contributions. The geographical connection is preserved in the titles, making the route travelled by the sound part of each composition. These are not conventional live improvisations among three people reacting within one room. They are meetings across time, distance, storage media, and differing knowledge of what the others have already done.
This separation gives the later tracks a denser and more constructed quality. Müller is no longer reacting only to an event disappearing as it occurs. He can listen repeatedly, identify small openings, place lower frequencies beneath acoustic fragments, and construct electronic continuations from details that might have passed unnoticed during live performance. Okura’s tubes and Yoshida’s voice consequently appear like sharply preserved organisms inside a larger electronic environment. Their sounds are sparse, but each entrance possesses greater weight because the surrounding field has been shaped to receive it.
The title Tanker initially suggests a huge vessel carrying liquid, oil, chemicals, or other materials across enormous distances. The studio used for the Tokyo recordings was itself called Tanker, but the accidental maritime metaphor fits the album beautifully. The pieces transport fragile acoustic cargo between Japan and Switzerland. Breath, mouth sounds, reed vibration, and tiny vocal events are captured, stored, sent across the world, and unloaded into Müller’s electronic system. The material arrives intact enough to remain recognizable but is placed inside another structure whose scale and movement change its meaning.
A tanker is also an object defined more by what it carries than by its external shape. This recording behaves similarly. Its quiet surfaces contain several histories of experimental improvisation: the Tokyo onkyō scene’s concentration upon small sound and silence, European electroacoustic improvisation’s fusion of acoustic instruments with live electronics, Müller’s development from amplified percussion into digital processing, Okura’s dismantling of reed technique, and Yoshida’s insistence that a voice need not communicate language or conventional human emotion. None of these histories is explained directly, yet each travels inside the four pieces.
The contrast between “Shibuya” and the “Kitashinagawa–Lupsingen” sequence makes Tanker especially valuable. The first piece preserves risk and simultaneous attention. The trio must decide in the moment whether to answer, interrupt, withdraw, or remain silent. The later tracks explore correspondence, editing, and delayed reaction. Neither method is presented as more authentic. Live improvisation creates one kind of collective intelligence, while long-distance construction permits another, built from repeated listening and the ability to respond after the original gesture has become an object.
The album asks the listener to make a similar adjustment. At first, its scale may seem almost empty. Familiar markers such as melody, regular rhythm, lyrical meaning, and instrumental virtuosity have been withdrawn. Gradually, another abundance becomes audible. A breath has several stages. A whistle contains grain. An electronic pulse changes shape as it decays. Silence possesses depth because the previous sound remains active in memory. Tanker does not reduce music to almost nothing. It enlarges events normally considered too small to become music.
The trio’s greatest achievement is making this concentration feel physical rather than academic. Yoshida’s voice remains attached to lungs, throat, tongue, lips, and bodily vulnerability. Okura’s air continues encountering resistance inside reeds and tubes. Müller’s electronics carry processed traces of touch and percussion even when their sources are hidden. The music may approach abstraction, but it never becomes immaterial. It is filled with breath, friction, pressure, signal, and the strange intimacy of hearing mechanisms that usually remain concealed inside performance.
Tanker ultimately connects three people by dissolving the obvious evidence of three separate identities. Voice becomes instrument, instrument becomes environmental noise, and electronics acquire bodily rhythm. Tokyo and Lupsingen meet inside recordings whose smallest particles remain alert and difficult to classify. The album does not overwhelm through volume or accumulation. It works by changing the listener’s magnification until a nearly inaudible squeak, bubble, or pulse opens into an entire acoustic habitat.

Jon Mueller / Bhob Rainey / Jim Schoenecker - 2004 - Untitled

 

Crouton – crouton no. 23  225.92MB FLAC

This untitled meeting among Jon Mueller, Bhob Rainey, and Jim Schoenecker feels like music heard through overheated air. Objects lose their firm outlines, distances become unreliable, and sounds that should belong to familiar instruments repeatedly arrive wearing the wrong physical bodies. A saxophone may resemble metal being rubbed inside a narrow pipe. Percussion can become an electrical drone or a low vibration moving through the floor. Synthesizer tones appear so dry, rough, and irregular that they might have been produced by bowed objects, damaged motors, or air escaping from some improvised mechanical apparatus. The trio’s achievement lies not in disguising their instruments through spectacular effects, but in reducing the differences among breath, impact, resonance, and current until the source of each event becomes beautifully uncertain.
“Shredded Paper, But” lasts less than two minutes and functions like a scrap found before the larger document begins. A high metallic squeal, faint whistle, and scattered surface noises establish the album’s scale immediately. These are not tiny sounds presented as delicate ornaments. They are enlarged through concentration until each one seems capable of altering the entire room. The title itself stops before completing a thought. Something has been shredded, but the qualifying “but” leaves the sentence hanging, as though the missing continuation were scattered among the fragments. The music behaves the same way. Every event implies a cause or context that remains outside the recording.
The twenty-five-minute “Here Teething Moths Have Passed” opens the album’s principal acoustic chamber. The title suggests damage so small and gradual that it may not be recognized until the material has already been transformed. Moths do not demolish a structure through one dramatic attack. They leave tiny absences, weakened fibers, powder, and holes whose pattern becomes visible only later. Mueller, Rainey, and Schoenecker work through comparable erosion. Silence is punctured by rubbing, breath, miniature impacts, faint electronic activity, and noises that seem to chew slowly through the available space. Rather than building a conventional improvisational conversation, they alter the silence’s texture until it no longer feels empty.
Mueller’s percussion rarely announces itself through recognizable drumming. He brushes, vibrates, scrapes, taps, and activates objects in ways that conceal the usual difference between an instrument being struck and a surface continuing to resonate afterward. A packing-tape roll reportedly contributed to the strange percussion vocabulary, perfectly matching a session in which ordinary materials are encouraged to reveal hidden acoustic lives. His sounds retain physical grain, but rhythm appears through spacing, recurrence, and pressure rather than a measurable beat. A light scrape may return several times and gradually begin functioning as a pulse, even though nothing has settled into regular meter.
Rainey’s soprano saxophone undergoes an equally radical reduction. Melody, projection, and the emotional authority of the horn are largely removed. What remains is a tube receiving breath, tongue pressure, saliva, reed vibration, and the unstable mechanics of the mouth. The instrument seems to be examined from inside. Dry fluttering, faint whistles, constricted squeals, and barely formed tones make the saxophone sound less like a completed musical tool than a passageway between lungs and room. At moments it becomes impossible to tell whether a sound is being blown, bowed, rubbed, or electronically generated. That uncertainty is not a puzzle with a correct answer. It is the music’s central condition.
Schoenecker’s synthesizer does not supply the atmospheric background against which the acoustic players perform. His tones interfere with the physical identities of their instruments. A low electronic rumble can enlarge a small percussion resonance until it appears to possess enormous weight. A thin frequency may merge with Rainey’s breath and make the saxophone seem electrically powered. The synthesizer is often faceless, but this lack of personality becomes useful. It acts like heat, pressure, or altered lighting, changing the apparent nature of whatever enters it.
The extreme temperature of the recording room adds another bodily dimension. Heat changes attention. It makes time feel longer, reduces patience, heightens awareness of breathing and skin, and can cause the senses to misinterpret small signals. The trio’s sparse music seems shaped by those conditions even when no direct causal claim can be made. Long quiet regions feel airless rather than peaceful. Sudden sounds do not provide relief; they resemble another object shifting inside a sealed room. Listening becomes an act of waiting for the atmosphere itself to move.
“Holes” occupies nearly twenty minutes and develops the negative space implied throughout the album. A hole is defined by what has been removed, yet it remains perceptible because surrounding material gives it shape. The trio’s silences work similarly. They are framed by faint electronic tones, interrupted resonances, occasional thumps, and breath noises that make absence seem almost architectural. Some passages resemble an abandoned room in which unseen objects continue settling. Others produce the sensation that one enormous sound is present below audibility, revealing itself only through the smaller vibrations it causes around the edges.
The musicians resist the temptation to reward patience with a conventional climax. Density increases, percussion becomes more physical, and rougher noises enter, but the piece never transforms into a dramatic free-jazz eruption. The restraint is purposeful. A loud collective explosion would restore recognizable roles: drummer, saxophonist, electronic musician. Instead, the trio remains committed to a shared substance whose authorship cannot always be separated. Their individual egos are not erased, but their instrumental signatures are placed under enough pressure to become porous.
“Too Tattered to Read” closes the album in just over two minutes, returning to the fragmentary scale of the opening. The title could describe the entire recording. Its sounds behave like damaged writing whose marks remain visible while the original message has become unrecoverable. A croaking, caught-in-machinery voice or reed tone appears briefly, surrounded by small noises that refuse to organize themselves into an explanatory conclusion. The disc ends without repairing what has been shredded, eaten through, perforated, or worn beyond legibility.
These track titles give the album a quiet material narrative. Paper is shredded, moths pass through, holes remain, and the surviving text becomes too damaged to read. The music performs an equivalent process upon instrumental identity. Percussion, saxophone, and synthesizer enter as known categories, then lose enough recognizable information that they can no longer be read normally. What survives is not meaningless debris. It is another form of communication based upon surface, duration, proximity, and uncertainty.
The album also captures an important meeting between different American experimental networks. Mueller and Schoenecker were connected to Milwaukee’s active Crouton world, where improvised music, electronics, unusual packaging, writing, and small-edition publishing repeatedly crossed paths. Rainey brought the severe listening discipline associated with nmperign and the broader microsonic improvisational field. The trio does not sound like one musician visiting another’s established method. Their approaches meet at the point where instruments become less important than the behavior of sound itself.
Crouton was an ideal label for this object because it treated physical releases as complete artistic propositions rather than transparent containers. The orange card sleeve and Mueller’s haloed toaster drawing introduce dry humor before the disc’s nearly airless concentration begins. That image prevents the music from becoming burdened by excessive solemnity. A toaster is another machine that produces transformation through heat, converting an ordinary surface into something browned, brittle, and permanently altered. It may be the album’s secret fourth instrument.
This recording rewards repeated listening because its most important events are not necessarily the loudest. Once the expectation of obvious development has weakened, tiny differences begin carrying structural weight. A low rumble changes density. A breath sound enters from an unexpected distance. A brushed object continues resonating longer than memory predicted. The listener starts hearing not a nearly empty recording, but a crowded field operating below ordinary magnification.
Anyone who owns the original Crouton edition, remembers the circumstances of the Boston session, or knows exactly how Mueller amplified and activated his percussion could restore valuable details to this peculiar document. The music itself remains wonderfully resistant to full identification. Three musicians entered an unbearably hot room with percussion, saxophone, and synthesizer; what emerged sounds like shredded matter, insects, air pressure, machinery, and the holes left when familiar instruments quietly ate their way out of themselves.

Fragile - 2013 - Canzoni Da Etichette Morte - Raccolta CDr

Toxic Industries – Xi034  390.43MB FLAC

 Canzoni da Etichette Morte translates as “Songs from Dead Labels,” a title containing both dry humor and a small history of underground disappearance. These seven recordings were made in Italy during 2010 but originally belonged to two projects that never reached their intended destinations. The first three pieces were supposed to form an Absence Tapes release titled Foglie, or “Leaves,” while the remaining four were planned for Jersey Flesh. By 2013, Toxic Industries had gathered the abandoned material into one collection. The album is therefore built from interrupted journeys. Every track was created with an imagined physical future, perhaps a particular cassette, CDr, package, label catalogue, or group of listeners, but that future failed to materialize. The music survived while the structures intended to carry it disappeared.

This is an especially appropriate history for harsh noise wall, a form that often appears absolutely stable while concealing an enormous number of tiny internal events. Fragile, the project of Alessio Mininel, produces dense surfaces of static, distortion, low-frequency pressure, and granular agitation that can initially seem immovable. Yet sustained listening reveals constant microscopic activity. Particles scrape against one another, frequencies flicker near the edges, and apparently solid walls develop cracks, shadows, and irregular depths. The sound remains recognizable as one continuous mass, but its interior is never completely still. It resembles an abandoned building whose exterior has not changed while dust, insects, moisture, and weather continue working inside.
The project name provides the first important contradiction. Nothing about the music initially sounds fragile. It arrives as pressure, obstruction, and uncompromising density. Fragility is usually associated with thin glass, delicate bodies, unstable relationships, and objects requiring careful handling. A harsh noise wall appears to offer the opposite: a sound too thick and stubborn to be damaged. Yet the history behind this collection reveals another form of fragility. Labels vanish. Planned editions collapse. Websites disappear. Hard drives fail. Correspondence stops. A recording may exist, but its path toward listeners can break at any point. The loudest and most physically aggressive music may depend upon networks held together by one person’s time, money, health, enthusiasm, and access to a functioning duplicator.
The first three pieces once belonged to Foglie, and the image of leaves gives the walls an unexpectedly organic dimension. Leaves gather in layers, dry, break apart, and move according to forces outside themselves. A single leaf is nearly weightless, but thousands can cover a landscape, block drains, hide paths, or form dense heaps against walls and fences. Fragile’s static behaves similarly. The total sound is massive, yet it may be constructed from countless small abrasive events. What seems like one monolithic object is actually an accumulation. The ear begins by receiving the whole mass, then gradually discovers individual movements inside it, much as the eye first sees a pile before noticing curled edges, veins, tears, dampness, and differences in color.
Harsh noise wall is sometimes discussed as though its purpose were simply to refuse development. That refusal is certainly part of its identity, but Canzoni da Etichette Morte demonstrates how much psychological movement can occur inside apparent stasis. Ordinary music tells the listener where to direct attention through melody, rhythm, lyrics, and dramatic changes. Fragile removes most of those instructions. The listener must decide whether to concentrate upon the center of the wall, its higher-frequency grain, the low pressure beneath it, or sounds that may be present only as perceptual illusions. Attention begins moving even when the composition appears not to. The wall becomes a screen onto which the nervous system projects patterns, pulses, voices, machines, and distances that may not exist as deliberately placed objects.
The later four pieces were intended for Jersey Flesh, a name that suggests something more bodily and contaminated than the fallen leaves of the first project. Whether or not the material was consciously designed around that label’s identity, the change in intended destination creates another useful way of hearing the collection. Static can resemble weather and landscape, but it can also become skin, tissue, friction, breath obstruction, or the amplified activity of a body operating under extreme magnification. Harsh noise wall frequently collapses distinctions between exterior environment and interior sensation. The same frequency may evoke a storm outside a building or blood rushing inside the listener’s head.
Calling these pieces “canzoni,” or songs, is quietly provocative. Songs normally possess voices, repeated sections, memorable phrases, and structures that can be carried away by memory. Fragile’s walls resist that kind of portability. One cannot easily hum them afterward or identify a chorus. Yet each piece may still function as a song in a more primitive sense: a bounded period of sound carrying a particular emotional and physical condition. Its identity may lie not in melody but in pressure, grain, duration, and the way its frequencies occupy a room. After repeated listening, one wall can become as recognizable as a traditional song, even when describing the difference requires a vocabulary closer to materials than notes.
The collection format changes the meaning of the original recordings. The two unrealized releases would have created separate objects, each with its own title, label context, packaging, and sequence. Toxic Industries instead placed all seven pieces together beneath a title devoted to their failure to appear elsewhere. The missing editions became the concept of the edition that finally existed. This is an elegant example of underground culture converting disappointment into another artifact. The dead ends were not erased. They were preserved in the title, allowing the listener to hear the album as both music and evidence of abandoned plans.
Toxic Industries was itself part of the active Italian and European harsh noise wall network surrounding projects such as Fukte, Nascitari, Indch Libertine, Terminal Erection, and international festivals devoted to the form. These scenes operated through tiny editions, collaborations, trades, blogs, handmade packaging, and performances organized with little expectation of financial stability. Their apparent obscurity was not a lack of culture. It was a different cultural scale, one in which a few dozen copies could establish relationships across several countries. Canzoni da Etichette Morte preserves the vulnerability of that system while also demonstrating its resilience. Two proposed releases failed, but another label eventually carried the material forward.
The album’s persistence now extends beyond the CDr itself. The physical edition entered collections, the audio became a digital archive, and the blog post created another point from which the recording could be discovered. Each transfer alters the object. Artwork may be separated from disc, metadata may change, and the original social context may become harder to reconstruct. Yet the wall remains, still projecting enormous stability despite the fragile chain of people and machines responsible for its survival.
Canzoni da Etichette Morte ultimately turns failed distribution into part of the listening experience. These are not leftovers casually emptied from a hard drive. They are recordings that waited after their intended homes disappeared, then returned as a memorial to those unrealized objects. Fragile’s walls seem permanent while everything surrounding them proves temporary. Labels die, plans collapse, formats age, and memories lose detail. Static continues, dense and apparently indifferent, carrying the remains of two albums that never existed into every room prepared to stand before them.

Samartzis _ Müller _ Voice Crack - 2005 - Wireless_Within

For 4 Ears – CD 1655  310.89MB FLAC

Wireless_Within constructs an environment in which nature recordings and malfunctioning electronics cease to behave like opposites. Philip Samartzis brings field recordings, computer processing, and an installation artist’s sensitivity to acoustic space. Günter Müller contributes electronics, stored sounds, and the residual rhythmic instincts of a percussionist who had gradually transformed drums and cymbals into digital signal. Andy Guhl and Norbert Möslang operate Voice Crack’s “cracked everyday electronics,” activating broken devices, exposed circuits, radios, cables, switches, and consumer technology removed from its intended purpose. Across three long pieces, these elements do not form a conventional quartet with clearly separated voices. They become one unstable ecosystem where insects may be electrical, circuitry appears alive, and a distant human voice can feel less familiar than a burst of static.
The session took place in Melbourne during July 2002, one day after the musicians visited a rainforest in South Australia. That excursion did not produce a literal nature album, but it seems to have changed the scale at which the electronics were heard. A rainforest is filled with overlapping systems whose individual sources are often invisible. Birds, insects, leaves, water, wind, and distant animals occupy different frequencies without arranging themselves for an audience. Voice Crack’s sputters and short-circuits enter Samartzis’s environmental recordings in much the same manner. Instead of dominating the landscape as technological intrusions, they behave like another population communicating through chirps, pulses, friction, and irregular repetition.
“Tombac Toothless” opens with small signals appearing inside a broad field. Birdlike sounds, faint crackles, low vibrations, and electronic flickers establish several depths at once. Nothing remains clearly foregrounded for long. A sound may arrive close to the listener, then be absorbed into a larger atmosphere whose dimensions are difficult to measure. The title joins a metallic alloy with the absence of teeth, suggesting a material capable of hardness but deprived of its ordinary means of biting. The piece possesses that restrained tension. Its electronics scratch, hum, and gather pressure, yet aggression is continually softened by distance, processing, and the surrounding environmental space.
Voice Crack had spent decades learning how to make ordinary electronic objects reveal unauthorized behavior. Guhl and Möslang did not treat damaged technology merely as a source of novelty. Their cracked electronics exposed the instability hidden inside appliances designed to appear reliable and obedient. A radio, circuit board, toy, or cable normally conceals its internal processes behind a finished function. Voice Crack opened those objects and listened to everything manufacturers had intended users to ignore: feedback, interference, electrical leakage, unstable contact, and the noises produced when a device no longer knows what task it is supposed to perform.
Samartzis places those unruly signals inside a carefully considered spatial composition. His role extended beyond contributing sounds during the original session. He later spent considerable time editing the recordings, removing roughly half of the quartet’s activity and reorganizing what remained. That reduction is central to the album’s character. Improvisers naturally produce material by responding in real time, but a microphone preserves every response whether or not it remains necessary afterward. Samartzis treated the session as raw substance rather than sacred evidence. By subtracting layers, he allowed individual electrical events to retain air around them and transformed collective improvisation into something closer to electroacoustic composition.
“Bacchus Marsh” is more diffuse and atmospheric, its title referring to a landscape northwest of Melbourne rather than the classical god suggested by “Bacchus.” The piece feels geographically open. Electronics drift across a field containing faint environmental activity, with pulses and granular movements appearing at uncertain distances. Instead of building toward impact, the quartet allows textures to hover, recede, and reappear in altered form. The music can resemble weather passing over hidden machinery or a transmission received from a location where biological and electrical life have evolved together.
Müller is particularly important to this sense of continuity. Although his instruments included digital storage and electronics, his background in percussion gave him an unusual understanding of attack, decay, and the placement of events in time. He does not need to establish a beat for his contributions to feel rhythmic. A low pulse, soft burst, or trembling layer can regulate the movement of an entire passage. His sounds often function as connective tissue between Samartzis’s broad environments and Voice Crack’s sharper electrical fragments, preventing the album from dividing into field recording beneath improvised noise.
The title Wireless_Within describes an invisible network operating inside both the music and the listening body. Wireless transmission appears immaterial, yet it depends upon physical devices, electrical energy, antennas, atmosphere, and receivers capable of converting signals back into audible form. The album makes these hidden exchanges perceptible. Sounds arrive without revealing their sources, cross one another, disappear, and return from another apparent location. The listener becomes a receiver attempting to determine which transmissions belong to the environment, which were produced by machines, and which may be perceptual patterns created by the ear itself.
“Bleep Block” introduces more obvious digital activity, stutters, sine-like tones, street sounds, and distant children’s voices. The human presence is striking because it arrives without becoming the center. Voices drift through the electronics like memories from another location, recognizable enough to suggest ordinary social life but too remote to provide narrative explanation. The quartet’s signals seem to occupy the same public air as conversation, traffic, play, and urban movement. Technology is not sealed inside a laboratory. It is already woven through daily experience, carrying fragments of people who may never know their sounds entered an experimental composition.
The piece begins and ends around a sustained electronic tone, giving its irregular internal activity a loose circular structure. Between those points, the music becomes busier and more fragmented than the first two tracks. New signals enter rapidly, interrupting one another before stable relationships can form. This restlessness gives “Bleep Block” the character of an overloaded communication system where too many transmissions are competing for limited space. The apparent block is not silence but congestion.
Wireless_Within also carries historical weight as one of Voice Crack’s final documents. Guhl and Möslang separated shortly after the Australian sessions, ending a partnership that had begun in the 1970s and helped establish cracked electronics as a distinct improvisational language. Their work had travelled from acoustic free improvisation into amplified junk, damaged consumer devices, installations, collaborations with Borbetomagus, and the electroacoustic quartet poire_z. This album does not sound like a ceremonial farewell because nobody appears to be summarizing the past. Voice Crack remains curious, responsive, and willing to let another artist radically reshape the session.
That absence of finality makes the recording more affecting. The duo’s history does not conclude with a dramatic statement or collapse into retrospective grandeur. It disperses into birds, children, static, low pulses, and half-recognizable transmissions. Their electronics enter Samartzis’s larger environment and lose their ownership, becoming part of a soundscape that may continue after the performers have left.
The album’s deepest pleasure lies in its uncertainty. It continually asks whether a sound is natural, mechanical, recorded, synthesized, accidental, or carefully edited, then demonstrates that these distinctions may matter less than the relationships created among them. A rainforest and a broken circuit are both systems containing hidden activity. An insect and an electronic oscillator can produce similarly persistent frequencies. Human beings move through both environments, listening selectively while surrounded by signals beyond their awareness.
Wireless_Within makes that surrounding activity temporarily audible. It is not a portrait of untouched nature invaded by machines, nor a celebration of technology replacing the organic world. It presents a hybrid habitat that already exists, filled with electricity, memory, weather, damaged objects, distant voices, and transmissions passing through bodies without permission. Samartzis, Müller, Guhl, and Möslang do not attempt to control the habitat completely. They enter it, remove enough noise for its internal pathways to become visible, and allow the wireless world within ordinary experience to begin speaking in its own cracked language.

 

Gunter Muller / Norbert Moslang - 2006 - Wild_Suzuki

 

For 4 Ears – CD 1760  244.26MB FLAC

Wild_Suzuki captures Norbert Möslang and Günter Müller travelling through Japan with a compact electronic language capable of changing character from room to room. Its seven tracks are named after Nagoya, Fukuoka, Yamaguchi, and Tokyo, turning the album into a tour map without pretending to offer documentary portraits of the cities. No temple bells, railway announcements, or recognizable street recordings are required. Place enters through acoustics, electrical conditions, audience concentration, equipment response, and the different decisions two improvisers make on successive nights. The same pair of musicians carries the same basic tools from one venue to another, yet every performance develops its own pressure, grain, and internal climate.
Möslang’s “cracked everyday electronics” grew from his work with Andy Guhl in Voice Crack. The phrase describes consumer devices opened, modified, misused, short-circuited, and encouraged to produce behavior excluded from their original designs. Instead of treating a radio, cable, circuit, or electronic appliance as a finished product, Möslang enters its hidden interior. Buzzes, unstable contact, interference, feedback, pulses, and accidental rhythms become playable material. The machine is not destroyed for spectacle. It is released from the narrow function its manufacturer assigned to it.
Müller’s method begins elsewhere. Originally known as a percussionist, he gradually replaced much of the visible drum kit with microphones, MiniDiscs, sampled material, processing, and eventually iPods. Even when no conventional drum is present, his electronics retain a percussionist’s understanding of timing. Sounds arrive with carefully judged weight. A low pulse can organize an entire passage, while a cluster of minute clicks may function like a rhythm broken into airborne particles. Möslang generates unruly electrical behavior; Müller catches, positions, and redirects motion without taming it completely.
“Nagoya_1” introduces the duo through a compact field of glitches, low movement, abrasive frequencies, and momentary rhythmic alignments. The music is busy but not congested. Each sound occupies enough space to maintain its edge, allowing tiny clicks and crackles to remain visible beside broader electronic currents. The duo does not divide into soloist and accompanist. Their signals overlap until authorship becomes uncertain, but small differences remain. Möslang’s electronics often appear jagged and exposed, while Müller’s processed streams can feel smoother, deeper, or more circular.
The two Fukuoka pieces form the album’s most convincing continuous passage. “Fukuoka_1” develops through layered pulses, flickering high frequencies, and a low electronic undertow that makes the smaller events appear suspended above a moving floor. The rhythm is never stable enough to become a beat, yet the body begins following it. Patterns emerge, mutate, and vanish before settling into repetition. “Fukuoka_2” feels like the machinery has been opened further. Sharper fragments jump from the surface while bubbling tones and subsonic movement preserve continuity beneath them.
This rhythmic life distinguishes Wild_Suzuki from the extremely sparse electroacoustic improvisation often associated with the same period. Möslang and Müller understand silence, but they do not treat quietness as a moral virtue. Their music is willing to move, accumulate, grind, and become noisy. Activity does not mean carelessness. Even the densest sections leave channels through which new sounds can pass. The duo constructs thickets rather than walls.
“Yamaguchi_1” offers a partial clearing. Its activity is softer and more widely spaced, exposing the decays and afterimages surrounding each electronic event. A pulse can be heard not only when it strikes but while it recedes into the room. High signals appear like fine cuts across a darker background, while lower textures arrive with less insistence. The reduced density makes the musicians’ listening especially apparent. Each contribution seems to wait just long enough to discover what the previous sound has changed.
“Tokyo_1” restores greater pressure. Mechanical flutter, electrical abrasion, low-frequency movement, and irregular rhythmic fragments coexist without forming one stable center. The track suggests a network receiving too many transmissions at once, yet the overload remains lucid. Möslang and Müller continually adjust scale. A tiny crack suddenly becomes the most important sound in the room; a larger drone then enters and changes the apparent distance of everything around it.
The city titles encourage geographical imagination, but the album wisely refuses travelogue exoticism. Japan is not presented as a mysterious source of imagery to be collected by visiting European musicians. The cities identify where the encounters occurred and preserve the route organized by Koji Tano. His presence behind the album matters. Experimental tours depend upon people who arrange venues, contact artists, solve transportation problems, locate equipment, translate information, gather audiences, and hold fragile networks together. The dedication acknowledges that the performances existed because someone built a path through which they could happen.
“Nagoya_2” returns to the opening city with altered ears. By this point, the listener has learned the duo’s vocabulary and begins noticing differences within apparently similar materials. Static can be dry or fluid. A pulse can propel, interrupt, or merely mark distance. Feedback can behave like a sustained environment or a blade passing briefly through it. Returning to Nagoya does not complete a circle so much as demonstrate that no location or sound can be entered twice under identical conditions.
“Yamaguchi_2” closes the tour with another concentrated electronic organism. Small signals multiply around deeper currents, occasionally locking into patterns that resemble damaged dance music heard through faulty wiring. The duo never develops those suggestions into genre. Rhythm remains a temporary agreement among unstable sounds. The pleasure comes from hearing order arise without being imposed, then watching it dissolve before it can become habit.
The title Wild_Suzuki reinforces the album’s balance between travel, technology, and playful uncertainty. Suzuki is one of Japan’s most common surnames and also a globally familiar name attached to manufactured vehicles and instruments. “Wild” disturbs that familiarity. Something ordinary, standardized, and recognizable has escaped its assigned behavior. That is precisely what Möslang does with consumer electronics and what Müller does with recorded sound. The useful device becomes an unpredictable animal.
The underscore joining the two words is equally suitable. It resembles a computer filename, command, or piece of metadata, placing the title inside the digital systems through which Müller’s sounds are stored and released. Yet the music itself refuses the cleanliness associated with digital information. Signals corrode, smear, collide, and develop rough physical surfaces. Electronics are not presented as weightless mathematics. They behave like objects with friction, temperature, dirt, and appetites.
Wild_Suzuki followed the duo’s Boom_Box album, but it feels less like a studio sequel than a set of field tests. Each performance asks how their shared system responds to another room and another evening. The resulting music is intense, sometimes abrasive, frequently rhythmic, and filled with minute changes that prevent its density from becoming uniform. Möslang and Müller do not imitate machines. They collaborate with machines after removing the rules that normally keep them obedient.
The album survives as both music and itinerary. Nagoya, Fukuoka, Yamaguchi, and Tokyo remain printed inside the sequence, while Koji Tano’s organizing labor remains attached to the dedication. What travelled through those cities was not a fixed repertoire but a portable electrical ecology, rebuilt whenever cables were connected and listening began. Seven performances became one album, each carrying the smell of another room through the same cracked circuitry.

Pacing Animal - 2024 - Pacing Animal

 

Not On Label – none  337.36MB FLAC

Pacing Animal begins with an image of movement that cannot become travel. An animal confined to a space barely longer than its body walks several steps, turns, retraces the same ground, and turns again. The pacing is repetitive, but it is not empty. Each circuit carries anxiety, observation, frustration, and the preservation of energy that has nowhere useful to go. This self-titled cassette translates that condition into two side-long pieces of harsh noise, replacing forward development with pressure accumulating inside fixed boundaries. The sound circles, scrapes, shudders, and repeatedly meets the walls of its enclosure. Nothing escapes, yet nothing becomes calm.
“Godlike Organ” does not present a wall as one frozen block. Its low distortion pulses with uneven mechanical life, while higher frequencies emerge like stressed wiring or feedback searching for a narrow opening. The title suggests an enormous sacred instrument, but whatever organ exists here has been deprived of cathedral space. Its pipes have been compressed into a cage, its air supply contaminated, and its sustained tones bent into a physical rumble. The result carries something of an organ’s bodily power without its ceremonial dignity. Frequencies seem to enter through the floor and pass through the listener before the mind has time to classify them.
Pacing Animal’s use of analog electronics gives the noise a bruised material presence. The sound does not resemble a spotless digital rectangle extended across fifteen minutes. It shifts through friction, overloaded signals, low mechanical vibration, and feedback whose edges continually roughen. Distorted dragging chains appear less as theatrical decoration than as a measurement of confinement. A chain is both an object and a restriction. Every movement makes the restraint audible. The metal scrapes because something has attempted to move farther than its permitted range.
This relationship between movement and obstruction gives “Godlike Organ” its structure. The piece advances by returning to similar pressure under slightly altered conditions. A low oscillation thickens, a high squeal drills through it, and the surface briefly develops a different grain before closing again. These changes are modest enough that casual listening may receive one sustained mass, but closer attention reveals a nervous organism continually testing the perimeter. Harsh noise wall often relocates musical development from composition into perception. The wall may remain generally consistent while the listener’s attention travels through it, choosing one layer, losing it, and discovering another vibration that may have been present from the beginning.
“Nocturnal Operations” makes the enclosure feel darker and more deliberate. Night removes visual confirmation, allowing small sounds to imply larger unseen actions. The title could describe covert work, animal activity after human observation has decreased, or the private labor of a mind unable to rest. Its noise feels less like an immediate outburst than a system continuing after the room has supposedly gone quiet. Low frequencies grind beneath sharper electrical activity, while intermittent shifts suggest something adjusting its position just outside sight.
The pacing animal becomes especially disturbing at night because its movement is heard before it is seen. Steps repeat. A chain drags. The body turns. Silence never lasts long enough to confirm that the activity has stopped. Pacing Animal captures this tension without relying upon cinematic effects or literal narrative. The duo of oscillation and abrasion is enough. Repetition produces expectation, and expectation produces its own invisible architecture. The listener begins waiting for another turn in the cage even though no exact rhythmic pattern has been established.
There is anger throughout the cassette, but it is anger subjected to duration. The project does not provide the clean satisfaction of an explosion followed by release. Its aggression remains confined with the source that generated it. This makes the noise feel closer to resentment, vigilance, and concentrated refusal than simple catharsis. The animal’s pacing may look pointless to an observer, but from inside the enclosure it is one of the few remaining actions that belongs to the animal. Repetition preserves agency, however reduced. The body continues drawing its route across a space designed to prevent meaningful movement.
The project name also avoids the romantic fantasy of a wild animal roaring freely in untouched nature. This is an animal defined by captivity, its behavior shaped by architecture and observation. The harsh noise wall operates under similar restrictions. A narrow set of materials is deliberately maintained, but those limitations intensify every internal variation. The music does not need to break from noise into melody, rhythm, speech, or silence to prove that something has happened. Its significance lies in how pressure behaves when denied an exit.
The cassette edition strengthens this concept. Nineteen home-dubbed copies place the music inside another physical container: magnetic tape moving through a shell at a fixed speed. The recording itself paces from reel to reel, reaches the end of one side, and must be turned around before beginning another passage through confinement. Tape adds its own slight instability, saturation, and mechanical movement to noise already concerned with loops, friction, and restricted motion. The format is not merely nostalgic packaging. It repeats the album’s central action.
Pacing Animal’s phrase “New Wave of Harsh Noise Wall” is partly a declaration of lineage and partly a refusal to treat the form as historically completed. Harsh noise wall has accumulated familiar methods and expectations, but each new project inherits the problem of making stasis personally meaningful. Pacing Animal answers through a sharply defined image: the wall is not only a surface facing the listener. It is the cage surrounding the sound. Oscillations pace within it, feedback strikes its edges, and chains report every unsuccessful attempt at greater movement.
The two pieces are close in duration and material, yet they do not feel interchangeable. “Godlike Organ” suggests imprisoned magnitude, a grand sustained force crushed into inadequate dimensions. “Nocturnal Operations” concentrates upon hidden activity, persistence, and the fear created by repetitive motion continuing beyond visibility. Together they form less an album of separate compositions than one half-hour condition observed under two forms of light.
This debut succeeds because it does not overexplain its subject. There are no samples lecturing the listener about captivity, no narrative voice identifying the animal, and no dramatic ending that converts confinement into heroic escape. The cage remains closed. The pacing continues. That refusal gives the recording its emotional weight. Pacing Animal recognizes that repetition can be evidence of suffering, but also evidence that a living force has not become completely passive. Several steps, a turn, several steps back. Inside that brutally limited route, the entire record keeps thinking.

Lucy Railton - 2025 - Blue Veil

 

Ideologic Organ – SOMA063  197.47MB FLAC

Blue Veil begins not with a melody entering silence, but with pressure already gathering inside the cello. Lucy Railton draws the bow slowly enough that the listener can hear tone being manufactured from friction. Horsehair catches the string, resistance becomes vibration, and vibration expands into a dense harmonic field whose apparent size greatly exceeds the instrument producing it. The seven numbered phases form one forty-minute movement through this process. Rather than using the cello to carry a composition from theme to theme, Railton makes the instrument’s physical behavior the composition. Every bowed tone opens into smaller tones, rough edges, beating frequencies, and phantom sounds that seem to exist beside the notes actually being played.
The title offers an excellent image for this method. A veil hides, filters, protects, separates, and changes whatever is seen through it. Blue suggests depth, distance, twilight, melancholy, water, and the point at which a visible surface begins dissolving into atmosphere. Railton’s veil is not placed over the cello to disguise it. It is woven from the cello’s own overtones. The instrument remains directly present, yet its familiar identity is continually obscured by the acoustic consequences of sustained attention. A bowed string becomes a low electrical hum, a distant horn, a rotating motor, or several voices singing without language. The closer Railton listens to the cello, the less securely it remains one object.
“Phase I” establishes the album’s governing tension between steadiness and instability. The bow maintains a sustained path while tiny internal pulses disturb the tone. These pulsations are not externally imposed rhythms. They arise from frequencies meeting and interfering with one another, producing beats that seem to accelerate or slow while the player remains almost still. The result makes concentration physical. Railton does not decorate silence with elegant notes. She places the listener beside a vibrating body and allows the friction inside one interval to become large enough to occupy the room.
The cello has always been valued for its resemblance to the human voice, but Blue Veil avoids the instrument’s most familiar singing personality. Railton is less interested in lyrical confession than in the mechanisms that make lyricism possible. Breath becomes bow pressure, vocal cords become strings, and the wooden body acts as chest cavity. The music appears to breathe, but its inhalations and exhalations occur through changes in density rather than phrasing. A tone swells because its internal harmonics have aligned; another seems to thin when those components begin pulling apart.
“Phase II” and “Phase III” move deeper into this unstable resonance. The latter is the album’s longest early stretch and one of its most intense. Gradually shifting pitches produce high spectral tones that hover above the cello, although no second instrument appears to have entered. Lower vibrations create the sense of a massive object turning below the audible surface. Railton’s control is extraordinary, but the music does not feel like a display of technical mastery. Control is used to approach a threshold where the instrument begins generating results no single gesture can completely govern. She guides the system, then listens to what the resonance demands next.
This relationship between intention and discovery is central to the record. Railton describes her practice as composing in the moment according to resonances within the cello’s body, her own body, and the space shared between them. Blue Veil therefore occupies a fascinating position between composition and improvisation. Its tuning, pacing, and harmonic movement are disciplined, yet each sustained sound contains unpredictable consequences. Slight alterations of pressure or placement can awaken another overtone, roughen a previously pure interval, or make an acoustic pulse appear from nowhere. The written idea provides direction, but the instrument continually proposes revisions.
The division into seven phases gives the listener useful markers without turning the work into seven separate songs. Each phase feels like a change in the material state of the same substance. “Phase IV” carries greater friction and density, with tones pressing closely enough to create a nearly metallic vibration. “Phase V,” the shortest section, functions as a concentrated passage between larger regions, briefly tightening the music’s dimensions. “Phase VI” opens again, allowing lower tones and quieter harmonic shadows to become more apparent. These changes are subtle, but the album teaches the ear to treat subtlety as action.
Just intonation is important to the work, though no technical knowledge is required to experience its effect. Rather than relying exclusively upon the equally spaced tuning of the modern piano, Railton works with intervals shaped by simple frequency relationships. When these tones align, they can fuse with unusual purity; when they nearly align, they create pulses, friction, and additional spectral activity. Blue Veil uses tuning not as an abstract mathematical system but as a source of bodily sensation. Harmony is felt as vibration before it is interpreted as mood.
The recording location adds another layer of apparent contradiction. The music was captured inside a Paris church, a space normally associated with reverberation, spiritual ceremony, and sound rising into architecture. Yet the recording feels extraordinarily close. The listener is not seated politely at the back of a nave. We are placed near the strings, wood, bow, and pressure of Railton’s hands. The building does not disappear, but its spaciousness is folded into the instrument’s resonance. Instead of hearing a cello inside a church, we seem to hear a church developing inside a cello.
Kali Malone and Stephen O’Malley were ideal recording partners for this encounter. Both have built major bodies of work around duration, tuning, amplification, and the way sustained tones change perception. Railton had already worked with them on Does Spring Hide Its Joy, where cello, guitar, and sine waves entered an enormous five-hour harmonic environment. Blue Veil removes that collaborative scale and asks what remains when Railton stands alone with her instrument. The answer is not reduction. The cello contains enough hidden multiplicity to suggest an ensemble, an electronic system, and an architectural space simultaneously.
“Phase VII” gathers the album’s discoveries without converting them into a conventional resolution. At more than nine minutes, it has room to deepen, darken, and gradually dissolve. Earlier tones seem to survive as memory inside the final resonance. The music does not arrive at a triumphant chord or return to a recognizable opening statement. It thins until the distinction between tone and afterimage becomes difficult to maintain. The veil does not lift. Listener, performer, and instrument simply become less separable within it.
Blue Veil is austere, but it is not cold. Its emotional force comes from intimacy with physical processes that ordinary performance usually conceals. We hear labor, resistance, patience, minute corrections, and the vulnerability of sustaining one action long enough for hidden instabilities to emerge. Railton’s cello does not tell a story about another place. It reveals that one bowed tone already contains distance, movement, conflict, and imagined scenery.
The album also makes an important argument about virtuosity. Great playing need not mean speed, abundance, or visible athleticism. Railton’s virtuosity lies in maintaining attention while almost nothing changes externally, then recognizing that the apparently static sound has begun reorganizing itself from within. She does not force the cello to demonstrate everything it can do. She listens closely enough for the instrument to reveal capacities usually buried beneath melody.
Blue Veil ultimately transforms the cello from a vehicle of expression into a site of encounter. Wood, string, bow, body, architecture, and hearing meet inside precision-tuned vibrations that continually exceed their apparent source. The seven phases offer no lyrics or narrative instructions, yet the mind supplies images, spaces, machines, weather, and distant voices in response. Railton calls this active participation “listening-with,” a form of hearing in which the audience helps complete sounds that are implied but not fully present. Behind the blue veil there may be nothing waiting to be uncovered. The veil itself, vibrating between what is played and what the listener imagines, is the entire luminous object.

Judith Hamann - 2024 - Aunes

Shelter Press – SP157  163.56MB FLAC

 Aunes is an album about measurements that cannot be detached from the things being measured. Its title comes from the aune, an old French unit used for fabric whose actual length varied according to region and material. An aune of silk was not necessarily identical to an aune of linen. Unlike the standardized metre, the measurement retained a relationship with texture, location, and use. Judith Hamann applies this idea to music, refusing to treat duration, tuning, melody, and form as neutral frameworks imposed upon interchangeable sound. Each of these six pieces seems to discover its own dimensions through the specific bodies, rooms, instruments, weather, illnesses, and communities involved in its creation.

“By the Line” opens with warm synthesizer layers that might initially suggest ambient music, but Hamann quickly makes the environment too intimate and materially unstable for passive drifting. Clothing moves near a microphone. A voice hums softly inside thick harmonic vapor. Small recording artifacts interrupt the smoothness, while melodic fragments form without separating themselves cleanly from the surrounding texture. The line in the title may be a boundary, a measuring mark, a melodic contour, or the thread along which fabric is cut. Hamann follows it without pretending that the line exists independently of the material beneath it.
Their cello practice has long concentrated on beating frequencies, just intonation, shaking, humming, and the unstable relationship between instrumental discipline and bodily limitation. Aunes expands that investigation into a form resembling private songwriting. These are not songs in the conventional sense of verses carrying a lyrical personality toward a chorus. They are songs because each piece holds a particular emotional condition, location, and bodily gesture together. Melody enters more openly than on some of Hamann’s earlier work, but it behaves like something found inside resonance rather than placed above it.
“Casa Di Riposo, Gesu’ Redentore” documents a walk uphill toward an outdoor mass in Chiusure, Italy. Footsteps, insects, nearby voices, distant singing, and incidental environmental sounds create a social space without explaining it. The microphone moves through an event rather than standing outside it as a neutral observer. People are heard from different distances, and those changing distances become part of the composition. The recording preserves no complete documentary account of the mass. Instead, it retains the approach, the surrounding landscape, partial voices, and the sensation of arriving somewhere whose meaning already exists for the assembled community.
Hamann folds these recordings through time until the distinction between document and memory becomes uncertain. A footstep can appear as evidence of one physical walk, but repetition or editing turns it into rhythm. Distant singing may belong to a particular religious gathering, yet once separated from the complete ceremony it becomes a hovering melodic presence. The work does not erase the original location, but neither does it claim that recording can preserve a place intact. The microphone collects fragments, and composition allows those fragments to dream about where they came from.
“Seventeen Fabrics of Measure” develops the album’s central metaphor most directly. Cello, voice, and electronic material hang together through delicate relationships that seem capable of tearing under excessive pressure. The title imagines multiple fabrics, each demanding its own system of measurement. A thick material cannot be handled like a thin one; something elastic changes dimensions while it is being examined. Hamann’s tones behave similarly. A cello note is not simply a pitch lasting a particular number of seconds. It is bow resistance, room resonance, breath, harmonic activity, concentration, and the gradual alteration of the performer’s body while the sound continues.
The voice is especially important because it introduces a material whose limits cannot be concealed. Instruments can appear to produce pure, external tones, but humming and soft singing expose breath, throat, fatigue, and vulnerability. Hamann does not use the voice to dominate the record with words. It remains close to bodily sound, sometimes merging with cello harmonics until the two sources become difficult to separate. The instrument appears to inhale, while the voice develops the sustained, resonant qualities of a string.
“Bruststärke (Lung Song)” compresses this bodily focus into eighty-four seconds of layered whistling recorded during an asthma flare-up. The German word Bruststärke refers to chest strength or vocal power, but the piece emerges from a moment when breathing itself had become restricted. Whistling produces an imaginary aviary, full of high calls that could be birds, leaking air, or tiny electronic organisms. The beauty is inseparable from respiratory difficulty. Hamann does not turn illness into a heroic obstacle triumphantly overcome. The impaired lung becomes the specific measure through which this small song can exist.
This is the ethical and emotional center of Aunes. Standardized musical thinking often treats the body as equipment expected to execute a work correctly. Hamann instead allows the condition of the body to alter the work’s possible form. Asthma is not an error occurring outside the composition. Clothing noise is not automatically removed. Footsteps, room sounds, and imperfect vocal edges are not contamination around the true music. The material circumstances become the rule, rather than being forced to obey an abstract standard designed elsewhere.
“Schloss, Night” places wordless voice beside a church organ recorded at night. The organ carries centuries of institutional and sacred authority, but Hamann approaches it through half-open stops, wavering tones, shuffling, and clutter within the reverberant room. The instrument seems caught between functioning and breathing. Air moves through pipes without producing the full ceremonial certainty traditionally associated with the organ. Soft singing enters this unstable architecture not as a commanding solo but as another fragile current inside the building.
The room becomes an instrument whose performance cannot be entirely controlled. Reverberation lengthens sounds after their source has stopped. Small movements acquire exaggerated scale. A shuffled object may create a phantom rhythm, while distant mechanical activity begins resembling another hidden performer. Hamann listens to the church as a material body containing wood, air, pipes, stone, footsteps, and accumulated cultural memory. “Schloss” can mean castle or lock, suggesting both architecture and closure. At night, however, the locked structure opens acoustically, revealing a restless interior life.
“Neither From Nor Towards” occupies sixteen minutes and gathers the album’s methods into its most expansive statement. Overdubbed voices move beside deep, justly tuned cello tones in long, elegiac arcs. The title rejects the expectation that music must travel from a defined origin toward a recognizable destination. Hamann’s sounds do not appear rootless, but their direction is suspended. They inhabit the interval between departure and arrival, allowing melody to unfold without demanding a climax.
This piece reveals how personal the album is without turning privacy into confession. Hamann’s voice is present, yet it does not explain their life through lyrics. The cello carries emotion, but not through a theatrical solo. Intimacy arises from proximity to breathing, tuning, repetition, and the labor required to keep fragile tones together. The listener receives traces of rooms and journeys without being given a complete biography. The music protects the unknowable center of the person while allowing bodily evidence to remain audible around it.
Wilder Alison’s cover, made from an image of sewn and dyed wool, extends the title beautifully. Different pieces of fabric retain their own color, grain, and history while being joined into a larger surface. The seams are not defects to be hidden. They show how the object was assembled and where one material meets another. Aunes works in the same way. Field recordings, cello, synthesizers, organ, humming, whistling, footsteps, and clothing sounds are stitched together without pretending they were born inside one seamless studio session.
The album’s quietness should not be mistaken for vagueness. Every sound is grounded in a particular action or condition, even when editing has transformed its documentary identity. Hamann’s music is delicate because its relationships remain exposed, not because it withdraws from substance. The cello has weight. Lungs meet resistance. Fabric brushes a microphone. People gather on a hillside. Air passes through organ pipes. These physical facts create forms that could not simply be transferred to another material without becoming different music.
Aunes ultimately proposes that attentive listening requires flexible measures. The value of a sound cannot be calculated through volume, technical purity, complexity, or distance from everyday noise. Each material carries its own proportions. Hamann does not ask a weakened lung to behave like a healthy one, a location recording to behave like a studio instrument, or a private voice to behave like a public declaration. The music measures each thing through contact with what it actually is. Six songs become six fabrics, stitched across years and countries into an album whose form remains inseparable from the lives, rooms, and breathing bodies that made it possible.

Heavy Metal Vomit Party / Light Collapse - 2013 - A Crazy World With The Scorpions Playing Every State Fair / Stellar Winds In My Closet CDr

 

Torga Amun – Amun-063  456.25MB FLAC

This split places two varieties of fantasy beside one another. Heavy Metal Vomit Party imagines an America where the remains of 1980s arena rock have escaped into an endless circuit of state fairs, whiskey tents, thinning hair, deteriorating tour buses, and power ballads performed long after their original glamour has evaporated. Light Collapse looks in the opposite direction, toward stellar space, radio transmissions, and enormous forces reduced to mysterious activity inside an ordinary closet. One project turns popular music’s oversized mythology into abrasive comedy; the other compresses the cosmos into a private chamber of static. Both discover something strangely infinite inside cultural or physical confinement.
Heavy Metal Vomit Party’s title, “A Crazy World With the Scorpions Playing Every State Fair,” is funny because it is almost believable. Arena-rock bands once presented themselves as permanent rulers of stadiums, but popular culture constantly relocates yesterday’s grandeur into smaller venues, nostalgia festivals, county celebrations, casinos, and package tours. The state fair becomes an afterlife where the leather pants remain operational even as the original mythology has started developing cracks. This is not necessarily contempt for the Scorpions or glam metal. The humor depends upon affection, familiarity, and knowledge of the songs being disfigured.
“Tease My Hair, Please My Hair” immediately converts sexual bravado into follicular maintenance. Beneath the joke lies a useful insight into glam metal’s constructed masculinity. Its singers and guitarists presented aggressive heterosexual confidence while devoting extraordinary attention to clothing, makeup, hair spray, poses, lighting, and bodily display. Heavy Metal Vomit Party exaggerates that tension until the hairstyle becomes the true object of desire. The harsh noise wall functions like several decades of accumulated aerosol finally igniting above the stage.
The music does not attempt to reproduce Scorpions riffs or recognizable choruses. Instead, it converts the physical scale of arena rock into sustained distortion. Where heavy metal ordinarily uses riffs to direct power, harsh noise wall removes the directional markers and leaves pressure itself. The amplifier stack remains, but the song has melted. Guitar heroism, drum impact, crowd roar, and electrical overload are compacted into dense surfaces whose internal changes occur through texture rather than melody.
“Pining Over Fat Groupies Though Power Ballads” drags romantic longing through the backstage economy that power ballads usually conceal. Those songs transform touring musicians into wounded lovers, briefly suspending the sexual and commercial machinery surrounding rock celebrity. Heavy Metal Vomit Party refuses the clean transformation. Sentiment, appetite, loneliness, ridicule, and masculine insecurity are thrown into the same distorted container. The intentionally crude language belongs to a project interested in everything arena-rock romance attempts to perfume.
“Blantantly Ripping Off Whitesnake Lyrics” makes imitation part of the joke. Hair metal was built from recognizable materials: blues clichés, sexual innuendo, dramatic weather, dangerous women, lonely highways, angelic lovers, and promises that tonight would last forever. Originality often mattered less than delivering those ingredients with enough volume, image, and conviction. Harsh noise wall follows another deliberately restricted vocabulary, yet tiny differences in grain, pressure, and frequency give each wall its identity. The track quietly links two genres regularly accused of repetition and asks whether repetition might be the source of their pleasure.
“Getting Kicked Between the Eyes After Six” sounds like the moment when the state-fair fantasy becomes physically unpleasant. The distortion appears less decorative, and the accumulated joke begins developing fatigue. This is an important quality of Heavy Metal Vomit Party. The project’s ridiculous titles might suggest novelty noise, but the duration demands genuine listening. A joke can open the door, yet the listener must still remain inside the sound after the punch line has passed.
The splendidly titled “Send Me an Angel Because I Have Become a Pussy and Can No Longer Rock You Like a Hurricane” closes the project’s section by joining two famous Scorpions titles into a confession of collapse. The arena warrior who once promised hurricane-force sexual power now requests supernatural assistance. Aging, exhaustion, fear, and lost potency enter the mythology. The title is deliberately vulgar, but its underlying movement is almost tender. Every public image eventually encounters the body’s limitations.
Light Collapse then removes the tour bus, the fairground, and the hair spray. “Stellar Winds in My Closet” replaces cultural debris with radio-like hiss, lo-fi drone, buried movement, and cosmic suggestion. Vitaly Maklakov has described Light Collapse as beginning with detachment, space, abstraction, and recordings of radio noise. That origin is especially audible here. The noise does not strike the listener as one aggressive wall. It resembles reception: distant energy reaching an inadequate domestic receiver.
A stellar wind consists of particles streaming outward from a star, an event of almost unimaginable scale. The closet is among the smallest private compartments in a home, filled with clothing, boxes, dust, forgotten objects, and darkness whenever the door closes. Bringing these two spaces together produces the release’s finest image. The universe is not viewed from an observatory. It leaks into storage.
Radio noise is ideal material for this collapse of scale. A receiver can translate distant electromagnetic activity into intimate sound inside a bedroom. Vast distance becomes faint crackle beside hanging shirts. Whether the listener identifies an actual transmission matters less than the sensation that the static contains information whose source cannot be reached. Maklakov’s texture feels worn, earthy, and enclosed rather than polished into science-fiction grandeur.
The pairing finally reveals a common subject beneath its dramatic contrast. Heavy Metal Vomit Party examines a musical mythology after its promised immortality has been reduced to repetition. Light Collapse hears cosmic forces through low-fidelity equipment and domestic architecture. The Scorpions cannot remain stadium gods, and stellar space cannot enter a closet without becoming static. Every enormous thing must pass through a smaller container before a human being can experience it.
That may be the secret purpose of the split CDr itself. Twenty copies carried an hour of state-fair apocalypse and closet cosmology into private collections. The grandest fantasies were stored on a humble recordable disc, packaged by a tiny Russian label and passed through the underground. Rock stardom, outer space, radio interference, and harsh noise all meet inside one plastic object. The world may be crazy, but at least the Scorpions are still playing somewhere while stellar winds quietly rattle the hangers.