Telepherique / MSBR - 1993 - Amalgam 7''

Originally posted Aug 12, 2019 5:55PM

MSBR Records ‎– 004

Amalgam is a compact 1993 collaboration between Telepherique and MSBR, released by MSBR Records as MR04 on a numbered 7-inch acetate. Compared with the longer cassette collaborations that followed, the format immediately changes the scale of the work. There is no room here for twenty-minute development or extended drift. The collaboration has to exist in a much tighter physical space.
The title is appropriate. An amalgam is a material produced by combining different elements into something that is neither simply one nor the other. That describes the relationship between Telepherique and MSBR particularly well. Telepherique’s work often moves through industrial electronics, controlled atmosphere and carefully structured sound, while Koji Tano’s MSBR project was developing the harsher, denser electronic language that would become central to his later Japanese noise recordings.
MSBR was still very early in its existence at this point. Koji Tano began releasing work under the name around 1992, and 1993 was an especially active formative year, including Structured Suicide as well as split and collaborative releases with Telepherique, Taint and Smell & Quim. Amalgam therefore belongs to the period when MSBR’s vocabulary was still being established through both solo recordings and contact with other artists.
That context makes the collaboration more interesting than treating it simply as an early noise single. The international industrial and experimental underground of the period operated heavily through correspondence, small labels, mail-order catalogs and physical exchanges. A German project and a Japanese noise artist could share a release without needing the infrastructure of a large record company or conventional music industry distribution. The object itself became evidence of that network.
The 7-inch format also puts pressure on the sound. Noise and industrial music are often associated with duration, accumulation and endurance, but a small record forces concentration. Ideas have to appear quickly. Textures cannot rely on twenty minutes of gradual transformation to create their effect. Whatever relationship exists between the two projects has to become audible almost immediately.
That makes Amalgam feel closer to an experiment in collision than a fully expanded collaboration. Telepherique’s tendency toward structure and MSBR’s harsher electronic density meet in a compressed environment. Neither identity has enough space to dominate for long, which gives the record a kind of unstable balance.
The physical presentation reinforces that economy. The surviving artwork is extremely spare: black-and-white, minimal, and centered around the names Telepherique and MSBR with the Amalgam title. There is very little visual narrative imposed on the listener. The package behaves more like documentation attached to an experimental object than a conventional commercial sleeve.
The fact that the release is an acetate is also significant. Acetates are inherently more fragile than standard pressed vinyl and are usually associated with short-run or transitional production rather than mass manufacture. A numbered acetate edition therefore makes Amalgam feel even more temporary and specific, an object produced in limited quantity for a small network rather than something designed for indefinite circulation.
Seen from the perspective of the later Telepherique/MSBR collaborations, Amalgam feels almost like an early point of contact. Geplünderte Leichen in 1994 would give the pair much more room to develop a conceptual and structural relationship, while later projects around the same network would expand collaboration further. Amalgam is smaller, earlier and more compressed.
That compression is part of its appeal. It captures two developing approaches to industrial and noise music touching briefly enough to leave a physical trace.
The title says exactly what happened.
—ChatGPT

Telepherique / Contagious Orgasm / MSBR - 1996 - Contact #1 LP

Originally posted Aug 12, 2019 5:48PM

SSSM ‎– none

Contact #1 brings together Telepherique, Contagious Orgasm and MSBR in a format that is more interesting than a conventional three-way split. Rather than simply giving each artist an isolated section, the release moves between individual pieces and collaborations, allowing the three projects to overlap without completely dissolving their identities. The title fits that construction perfectly. This is not presented as a permanent group or a unified new project. It documents contact.
The material was originally released in 1996, during a period when all three projects were deeply involved in the international industrial, noise and experimental underground. Telepherique brought a German approach that could move between industrial electronics, ambient space and carefully organized sound. Contagious Orgasm had already developed a much less predictable language, often combining unsettling atmospheres, loops, fragments and sounds that seem to operate somewhere between musique concrète and psychological collage. MSBR brought Koji Tano’s much more abrasive Japanese noise vocabulary into the exchange.
That combination means Contact #1 does not behave like a record where three artists simply take turns demonstrating their specialties. The interesting moments are the places where one approach begins affecting another. Mechanical structure can loosen into something more atmospheric. Dense noise can leave enough space for small sounds to become important. Repetition can become hypnotic before another layer disrupts it.
The six pieces are “Weltgeschehen,” “Operation Crossroads,” “Fire Wall,” an untitled piece, “Thematic Apperception Test,” and “08.05.1945–08.05.1995.” Even the titles suggest a much wider field than personal expression. There are references to world events, military technology, psychological testing and historical memory. “Operation Crossroads,” for example, shares its name with the 1946 United States nuclear weapons tests at Bikini Atoll, while the final title marks the fifty-year span between May 8, 1945 and May 8, 1995.
That historical language sits comfortably beside the sound-world implied by these artists. Machinery, communication systems, contamination, psychology, technology and destruction repeatedly appear around industrial and noise music, but Contact #1 avoids turning those subjects into simple theatrical decoration. The pieces remain abstract enough that the titles operate more like coordinates than explanations.
“Thematic Apperception Test” is an especially appropriate title in that regard. The actual psychological test asks a person to construct stories around ambiguous images. Experimental sound can operate in a similar way. When conventional melody, lyrics and recognizable song structures disappear, the listener begins supplying relationships and narratives to sounds that may never have been intended to represent anything specific.
The packaging reinforces that ambiguity. The cover is built from stark black-and-white photographic material rather than conventional artist portraits. Bodies, machinery, structures and textures are difficult to separate cleanly. The images appear documentary but do not immediately explain what they document. The typography is equally restrained, allowing the three artist names and Contact #1 title to function almost like identifying information attached to evidence.
That restraint is useful because three projects this distinctive could easily have produced artwork overloaded with industrial clichés. Instead, the design feels closer to an archive or technical file. The physical cassette shown here carries that imagery into another format, turning a collaboration originally associated with the mid-1990s international noise network into another circulating tape object.
Contact #1 also sits inside a larger web of collaboration. Telepherique and MSBR had already worked together earlier in the decade, while Contagious Orgasm and Telepherique would continue collaborating in later years. Koji Tano’s MSBR project was particularly active in collaborative releases, working with artists from different countries and different approaches to noise. In that environment, collaboration was not simply a guest appearance. It was a method for creating situations where established working habits could be disrupted.
That is what makes Contact #1 more compelling than three unrelated tracks placed on the same record. Each artist arrives with a recognizable vocabulary, but the release is constructed around the possibility that those vocabularies might interfere with one another.
The word “contact” is therefore doing a lot of work. Contact can mean communication, collision, contamination, exchange or simply two things touching long enough to leave evidence on each other.
This release preserves that evidence.
—ChatGPT

Telepherique & MSBR - 1994 - Geplünderte Leichen CS

Originally posted Aug 12, 2019 6:01PM

Drahtfunk-Products ‎– 042 

Telepherique and MSBR’s Geplünderte Leichen is a 1994 cassette collaboration that uses the language of a body being handled after death as the organizing structure for Side A. The title translates roughly as “Plundered Corpses,” and the five pieces move through a sequence that is almost procedural: “Wem Gehört Die Leiche?” asks “Whose corpse is it?,” followed by “Präparieren” (prepare), “Sezieren” (dissect), “Organentnahme” (organ removal), and finally “Entsorgung” (disposal). Rather than giving the cassette a loose horror theme, those titles make it read like a sequence of operations.
The first three tracks are almost exactly the same length, each just under three minutes, which gives the beginning of Side A a clipped, sectional feel. “Wem Gehört Die Leiche?” establishes a relatively restrained industrial/noise environment before “Präparieren” pushes the high-frequency activity further forward. “Sezieren” is noticeably harsher and more electrically active, with a brighter, more abrasive upper register and greater overall intensity. Even without the titles, those first three pieces feel increasingly invasive.
“Organentnahme” changes the pacing. At more than six minutes it is roughly twice the length of any of the opening pieces, allowing the material to develop rather than simply strike and disappear. The sound remains mechanical and abstract, but there is more time for layers to accumulate and separate. Small changes in texture become more important because the piece is no longer working as a compact burst. “Entsorgung,” at nearly seven minutes, extends that process further and closes Side A with one of its most sustained passages. The first side therefore moves from several short procedures into two longer stretches that feel less like separate events and more like the aftermath of what the titles have already described.
The collaboration itself is important because Telepherique and MSBR came from different but overlapping strands of the international industrial and experimental cassette underground. Telepherique’s work frequently moves between industrial structure, electronics, ambient space and musique concrète-like sound organization, while MSBR, the project of Koji Tano, became strongly associated with Japanese noise and harsh electronic work. Geplünderte Leichen does not simply alternate between “German industrial” and “Japanese noise.” The interesting territory is where those tendencies interfere with one another.
That becomes particularly clear on Side B. Instead of another numbered set of short pieces, the entire side is presented as one long, approximately twenty-two-minute work. It has the scale to move through several different densities without announcing boundaries. There are stretches where the sound seems almost suspended, followed by areas where the spectrum thickens and the recording becomes more abrasive. Low mechanical tones, sharper electronic frequencies and broad bands of noise coexist without settling into a conventional rhythm.
The absence of obvious percussion is important. Much of the movement comes from texture itself: sounds entering, receding, accumulating, scraping against one another, or changing density. It gives the cassette a physical quality without relying on beats to create momentum. The listener is not carried forward by a groove. Instead, attention gets pulled toward surfaces, pressure and changes in the electronic environment.
The recording also benefits from being heard as a cassette-era object rather than as spotless digital noise. There is a softness around some of the harsher material and a continuous low-level background that keeps even the quieter passages from becoming truly empty. On Side B especially, silence never feels entirely silent. The medium leaves a floor underneath the electronics, which suits music built around gradual changes in density.
The artwork follows the same logic. Black-and-white imagery, clinical typography and stark photographic material give the package the character of documentation rather than decoration. The design does not romanticize the medical/body imagery. It presents it bluntly, almost like evidence. That visual restraint makes the titles more disturbing than an exaggerated gore aesthetic would have.
The cassette is also unusually balanced in duration. Side A’s five pieces total just under twenty-two minutes, while Side B runs a little over twenty-two minutes as one continuous work. That symmetry gives the object two very different structural halves: one divided and named, the other prolonged and uninterrupted. Side A tells the listener where one stage ends and another begins. Side B removes those signposts.
Geplünderte Leichen works because it does not depend on shock alone. The titles provide an explicit conceptual frame, but the audio itself remains abstract enough that it never turns into simple sound-effects theater. There are no obvious cinematic gestures telling the listener exactly what to imagine. The body-processing language sits beside electronics that are mechanical, abrasive and sometimes strangely spacious.
Thirty years later, the cassette still feels specific to a period when international noise and industrial artists could build entire collaborative worlds through small labels, mail exchange and limited physical editions. Telepherique and MSBR did not need to resolve their different approaches into one unified style. Geplünderte Leichen sounds more interesting because both identities remain partly visible inside the same object.
Side A names the procedure. Side B lets the machinery continue running after the labels disappear.
—ChatGPT