Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, Oren Ambarchi - 2022 - "Caught In The Dilemma Of Being Made To Choose" This Makes The Modesty Which Should Never Been Closed Off Itself Continue To Ask Itself: "Ready Or Not?

 

Black Truffle – none

With pats on the head, just one too few is evil one too many is good that’s all it is arrives as a triple-LP document of scale, stamina, and constant reinvention. The title alone already behaves like one of Keiji Haino’s performances: long, contradictory, teasing, severe, and resistant to being reduced into a slogan. It suggests affection and punishment, scarcity and excess, goodness and evil, all balanced on the difference between one gesture too few and one gesture too many. The music follows that unstable logic. Across nearly two hours, Haino, Jim O’Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi move through power-trio force, fractured electronics, voice, flute, homemade instruments, bass, drums, and long stretches where no single description remains accurate for more than a few minutes.

The album documents the trio’s final performance at SuperDeluxe in Tokyo in November 2018. That room had become the central site of their collaboration, hosting the annual meetings through which the group developed from an unlikely one-off encounter into one of the most durable improvising trios of the twenty-first century. The closure of SuperDeluxe gives this recording an additional layer of finality, but the music does not behave like a farewell ceremony. There is no careful summary of earlier achievements and no sentimental attempt to recreate a familiar peak. The trio continues doing what had kept the project alive: entering each performance as though its internal laws still needed to be discovered.

Haino begins from a position of multiplicity. Guitar, electronics, voice, flute, snare, oboe, and a homemade instrument identified only as “strings of dubious reputation” all pass through his hands. The changing instrumentation does not produce a suite of neatly separated demonstrations. Each sound opens another unstable direction. A vocal cry can break through the instrumental density like a crack in a wall, while a flute phrase can suddenly expose air inside music that had seemed completely saturated. His guitar remains capable of immense volume and physical aggression, but its force is never merely decorative. Distortion becomes a method of thought, a way of testing how much emotional information can remain audible after the signal has been pushed beyond ordinary clarity.

O’Rourke’s six-string bass gives much of the performance its gravitational center. He does not use the instrument only to support Haino’s guitar or lock with Ambarchi’s drums. The bass becomes a broad, unstable field of its own. At times it lumbers forward with the weight of a damaged rock riff. Elsewhere it blurs into fuzz, electronics, and low-frequency pressure until the distinction between note and atmosphere disappears. His electric guitar and synthesizer contributions further complicate the trio’s shape, allowing him to shift from foundation to interference without announcing the transition.

Ambarchi’s drumming is central to the album’s physical impact. His playing can be direct and crushing, using repeated patterns to create the sensation of a huge object gathering momentum. Yet he is equally attentive to spacing, resonance, and the emotional effect of a single strike. The drums do not merely push the performance forward. They regulate pressure. A dense passage can suddenly become more dangerous when Ambarchi reduces his activity, leaving bass and guitar exposed inside the room. When he returns to full force, the impact feels architectural, as though another section of the building has begun moving.

The first side begins with the question, “My ‘Watashi Dake?’ is definitely not included in this unequal treaty, is it?” The phrase immediately places individuality inside a suspicious agreement. “Watashi dake” can be understood as “only me,” and the music repeatedly tests the relationship between solitary expression and collective force. Each musician possesses a highly recognizable language, but the trio’s power comes from the moments when those identities stop behaving independently. Haino’s guitar can merge with O’Rourke’s distorted bass until only one enormous stringed body remains. Ambarchi’s percussion can become so closely tied to their attack that rhythm and noise appear to be produced by the same mechanism.

The second piece turns political and anatomical oppositions into a combinatorial puzzle: right brain, left brain, right and left, right wing and left wing. The title mocks the desire to divide experience into manageable halves. The music refuses those divisions. Precision and chaos coexist. Rock repetition appears beside free improvisation. Electronic abstraction occupies the same space as the direct bodily force of drums, breath, and strings. No side remains pure enough to claim authority over the other.

The trio often works through long development rather than immediate climax. A figure may appear simple at first, then acquire weight through repetition. Haino can hold back, allowing bass and drums to establish a rough terrain before entering with a sound that changes the scale of everything around it. O’Rourke may reduce his contribution to a low electronic movement that is felt more than heard. Ambarchi can maintain a pulse until it stops functioning as meter and becomes environmental pressure. These transformations require time. The extended sides are not indulgent containers but the natural duration of music that develops through accumulation, erosion, and altered perspective.

The third title imagines critical consciousness abandoned in the corner of a shower room inside a fifty-three-story apartment building inhabited by extraterrestrial lifeforms. It is absurd, but the absurdity is exact. Thought has not disappeared in an abstract philosophical void. It has been misplaced in a ridiculous architectural detail inside an impossible social environment. The music shares this ability to combine cosmic scale with physical specificity. A vast electronic roar can be interrupted by a small scrape, a breath, or the brief metallic report of a single struck object.

The fourth piece moves through the frustration of attempting to destroy something completely, only to discover that cowardice and unreality are too widely distributed to permit change. Haino’s titles do not explain the improvisations, but they create a charged field around them. Violence, futility, spiritual pressure, and the limits of expression hover over the performance without becoming a fixed program. The musicians do not illustrate the sentences. They create sound capable of carrying similarly contradictory weight.

The fifth side contains one of the album’s broadest structures. Its title begins with division, calls for reconnection, asks the listener to recognize the self as both a point and the longest line, then commands that it become light. The movement from fragmentation to illumination matches the trio’s deepest method. Individual sounds remain separate enough to produce friction, but connection emerges through duration. A point becomes a line because it continues. A gesture becomes structure because the other musicians respond to it. Light does not arrive as purity. It is produced by collision.

The sixth piece questions whether the sacred feeling of expression has been replaced by vulgar vibrations resembling a half-hearted class reunion. This is one of Haino’s sharpest titles because it turns artistic failure into a social embarrassment. The trio answers by refusing half-heartedness. Even their quietest passages carry commitment. Nothing sounds casually decorative. Every tone seems tested for necessity, and every eruption risks damaging the balance that made it possible.

The final side places language itself under pressure. “There are always things I wish to say but I can only convey them in this language August 6 August 9” connects personal limitation with the dates of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The phrase does not permit easy interpretation. It joins the private need to speak with historical catastrophe, implying that expression can never be separated from the conditions that shape its language. The music closes the album without neutralizing that tension.

With pats on the head, just one too few is evil one too many is good that’s all it is is large because the trio’s language requires room for contradiction. It is a rock record that repeatedly abandons rock, an improvisation that discovers recurring structures, and a final concert that refuses to behave like an ending. Haino, O’Rourke, and Ambarchi leave SuperDeluxe not with a monument, but with evidence of continued risk. The room disappears, the performance ends, and the group’s history becomes fixed on three records. Yet the music remains unresolved, still balancing on that impossible point between too little and too much.

Henry Kaiser, Mari Kimura, Jim O'Rourke, John Oswald - 1994 - Acoustics

 

Les Disques Victo – VICTO CD 025  274.55MB FLAC

Acoustics presents itself through color before sound. The cover is filled with blurred bands and overlapping stains that resemble tie-dye, chemical diffusion, heat patterns, or pigments spreading through wet paper. No single color occupies the surface for long. Yellow moves into violet, orange dissolves into blue, and warmer flesh tones drift beside cooler greys. The image does not illustrate four musicians performing, but it accurately describes the album’s central action: separate materials entering the same field, retaining traces of their identity while continually changing one another at the edges.

The music brings together Henry Kaiser, Mari Kimura, Jim O’Rourke, and John Oswald in a studio improvisation built from guitar, violin, saxophone, electronics, and additional instruments whose roles are rarely stable. Released in 1994 by Les Disques Victo, Acoustics contains eleven pieces arranged less like isolated compositions than sections cut from a larger changing environment. Several titles name colors or transitions between colors, reinforcing the cover’s visual logic. “Warm Grey to Pale Yellow,” “Yellow, Sanguine, Dark Bark & Violet,” “Tawny from Ivory,” “Aqua,” and “Salmon Fades Tawny” suggest gradual transformation rather than fixed states. The record behaves the same way. One instrumental texture shades into another until the listener can no longer locate a clean boundary.

Henry Kaiser’s guitar supplies one of the album’s most recognizable physical voices, but recognition rarely lasts. His playing can move from dry string attack to bent harmonics, fractured chords, metallic scraping, and electronic color without announcing a change in technique. Kaiser’s long involvement with free improvisation allows him to treat the guitar as a complete field of possibilities rather than a vehicle for riffs or melodic leadership. A short gesture may function like punctuation, while a sustained tone becomes part of the room around the other players.

Mari Kimura’s violin introduces an entirely different form of instability. The instrument can sing with narrow melodic focus, scratch against the grain of the ensemble, or descend into unusually low registers through the subharmonic techniques that became central to her work. Her sound often moves between classical precision and raw physical friction. A bowed line may appear elegant for a moment, then begin to splinter under changes in pressure, speed, or pitch. The violin does not float above the group as a lyrical voice. It repeatedly enters the same difficult material as the guitars, saxophone, and electronics.

Jim O’Rourke is credited with multiple instruments rather than one fixed role, and that flexibility suits the album’s structure. His contribution can be heard through changes in density, low-frequency movement, sudden instrumental color, and the careful placement of sounds that seem to redirect a piece without dominating it. At this stage of his career, O’Rourke was moving rapidly among electroacoustic composition, free improvisation, tape work, noise, and experimental rock. Acoustics catches that mobility before any one public identity had hardened around him. He behaves less like a specialist than a destabilizing presence, capable of altering the scale of the music from inside.

John Oswald’s alto saxophone introduces breath, reed friction, sharp attack, and a sense of physical interruption. His playing is not limited to conventional free-jazz eruption. He can enter through short acidic fragments, sustained multiphonics, clipped bursts, or phrases that seem to imitate and deform something another musician has just played. Oswald’s long interest in quotation, transformation, and musical identity remains relevant even when no obvious borrowed material appears. He listens for shapes that can be repeated incorrectly, exaggerated, or turned inside out.

The quartet’s strongest moments occur when individual instruments become difficult to separate. Violin and saxophone can occupy similarly strained upper registers, while guitar harmonics and electronic tones blur into the same bright surface. Low bowed sounds may merge with processed guitar or an unidentified instrument until the ensemble appears to be producing one collective object rather than four independent voices. This is not seamless fusion. The edges remain rough, and the music often gains energy from the friction between incompatible textures.

The short opening piece establishes that method quickly. Sounds appear almost before the listener has identified the room, then begin changing color through proximity. The transition promised by “Warm Grey to Pale Yellow” feels less like a narrative development than a shift in light. A dark texture thins, brighter frequencies become visible, and the piece ends before the new condition can stabilize.

The longer second piece gives the group room to develop a more tangled structure. Here the musicians move through bursts of activity, suspended passages, scraped surfaces, and sudden changes in scale. One player may introduce a concentrated figure while the others gather around it without agreeing whether to reinforce or destroy it. The performance resembles several people mixing pigments on the same surface, each addition changing every color already present.

“Cadmium,” played by Kimura and Oswald, narrows the personnel and exposes the relationship between violin and saxophone. Both instruments are capable of continuous tone, violent attack, and minute changes in pitch, but their physical sources remain distinct. Bowed string and blown reed circle one another, sometimes converging into a shared line and sometimes separating into two abrasive bodies. The duet makes the album’s color metaphor especially clear. Similar shades can intensify one another without becoming identical.

“Tawny from Ivory” returns the full group to a broader field. The title describes one color emerging from another, and the music develops through comparable contamination. Pale, exposed sounds gather density. Quiet gestures accumulate roughness. What begins with open space gradually acquires darker edges, though the transition never becomes a simple rise in volume.

“Aqua,” a Kaiser and Kimura duet, creates one of the album’s more fluid passages. Guitar and violin move through reflection, imitation, and contrast without settling into accompaniment and lead. Notes bend around one another, while scraped and sustained textures make the instruments seem partially submerged. Water is not imitated literally. Instead, the duet creates the instability associated with looking through a moving surface, where every recognizable shape arrives already distorted.

The later pieces continue reorganizing the quartet into full-group passages, trios, and duos. This changing personnel prevents the hour-long album from becoming one continuous mass. Each reduction reveals relationships that may be less visible inside the complete ensemble. Kimura and O’Rourke create a compact study in string pressure and unstable resonance. Kaiser, O’Rourke, and Oswald explore a rougher triangular balance of guitar, electronics, and reed. When all four return, the listener hears the accumulated knowledge of those smaller encounters inside the larger sound.

The editing is central to the album’s identity. Acoustics does not present one untouched session from beginning to end. It arranges fragments and performances into a sequence where abrupt transitions become part of the composition. A dense section may be followed by a brief color change, then a duet, then another full-group eruption. This can make the record feel less like a concert and more like a cabinet of connected specimens. Each piece contains its own internal life while belonging to the same larger experiment.

The title Acoustics is deceptively plain. It might suggest an emphasis on natural instrumental sound, yet the album continually complicates the distinction between acoustic and electronic material. Guitar, violin, and saxophone remain physical instruments, but processing, unusual technique, and collective density detach them from familiar identity. The record is concerned with acoustics in the deeper sense: how sound behaves in space, how one frequency changes the perception of another, and how bodies, strings, reeds, circuits, and rooms produce relationships that no single instrument controls.

The closing “Warm Grey” returns to the color introduced at the beginning, but it does not restore an original state. After an hour of mixtures and transformations, the grey now contains traces of everything that passed through it. The brief final piece feels like residue rather than resolution, a surface left after the brighter pigments have been absorbed.

Acoustics captures four improvisers treating identity as temporary material. Guitar, violin, saxophone, and electronics enter clearly enough to be recognized, then continually stain one another. The cover’s spreading colors become an exact visual model for the sound: no clean borders, no permanent center, and no shade untouched by what gathers beside it.

Jim O' Rourke, Zeena Parkins, Toshinori Kondo, David Shea, DJ Low, Dirk Wachtelaer - 1998 - Fear No Fall

 

Lowlands – LOW011  347.40MB FLAC

Fear No Fall is less an album by a fixed group than a document of six musicians repeatedly changing the terms of their own meeting. Jim O’Rourke, Zeena Parkins, David Shea, Toshinori Kondo, DJ Low, and Dirk Wachtelaer were brought together during the Klapstuk Festival in Leuven, Belgium, in October 1997 for a series of improvisational concerts with shifting lineups. The finished CD draws from those combinations rather than presenting one permanent ensemble. Duos become trios, trios expand into the full sextet, and every rearrangement alters the balance between acoustic instruments, electronics, sampling, percussion, and processed sound. The title suggests courage, but the music is not heroic. Its strength comes from entering unstable situations without trying to control them too quickly.

The opening duet between Zeena Parkins and Jim O’Rourke establishes the album’s language of uncertain sources. Parkins uses electric harp and shortwave tuner, while O’Rourke works with guitar, analogue synthesizer, and harmonica. The harp does not remain a delicate or ornamental instrument. Strings are amplified, scraped, struck, and surrounded by electrical interference until resonance becomes texture. O’Rourke answers without settling into the expected role of guitarist. Sustained tones, metallic vibration, and electronic color overlap the harp until the two instruments seem to produce one damaged body.

That blurring is central to the entire record. Fear No Fall gathers musicians whose methods already resist clean identification. David Shea’s sampler can introduce fragments of piano, voice, environmental sound, or instrumental memory without preserving their original context. DJ Low uses turntables, loops, samples, and soundscapes, treating recorded material as something flexible and unstable. Toshinori Kondo’s electric trumpet begins with breath and brass but quickly enters the world of effects, distortion, and electronic extension. Dirk Wachtelaer’s drums and sampler connect physical percussion with reproduced sound, while Parkins and O’Rourke continually move between recognizable instrumental gestures and abstraction.

The shorter trio of Parkins, Shea, and Wachtelaer demonstrates how quickly these musicians can establish a complete environment. Harp, samples, and percussion might suggest a clear division of labor, but the performance avoids it. Percussive sounds may originate from strings or sampler as easily as drums. Sustained tones pass between electronic playback and acoustic resonance. Instead of building a composition around one leader, the trio listens for temporary openings. A sound enters, creates a possible direction, and is either supported, contradicted, or allowed to disappear.

The meeting between Shea and O’Rourke produces another kind of uncertainty. Both musicians are deeply concerned with editing, recorded sound, and the compositional possibilities of fragments, yet the live setting removes the security of later revision. Samples and electronic tones must be placed in real time. A recognizable sound can appear for only a moment before another layer changes its meaning. The piece feels assembled and spontaneous at once, like a collage whose pieces continue moving after being attached.

Kondo and Wachtelaer create one of the album’s strongest physical contrasts. Electric trumpet can cut through almost any environment, but Wachtelaer does not merely provide rhythmic backing. His drums create shifting surfaces beneath Kondo’s processed sound, while the sampler extends the percussion beyond the visible kit. Kondo’s trumpet moves from sharp attack to smeared electronic tone, sometimes sounding less like brass than a signal crossing damaged equipment. The duet retains the energy of jazz improvisation while abandoning familiar soloist-and-accompanist roles.

The full-group performance is the album’s broadest test. With all six musicians active, the music could easily become a crowded demonstration of incompatible techniques. Instead, the density remains surprisingly dimensional. Parkins’s harp may form a nervous web beneath Kondo’s trumpet. Wachtelaer’s drums and DJ Low’s loops create rhythmic pressure without settling into a dependable groove. Shea’s samples introduce traces of other rooms and other musics, while O’Rourke’s guitar and synthesizer occupy the unstable middle ground between acoustic attack and electronic atmosphere.

The sextet does not achieve coherence by smoothing away difference. It succeeds because each musician remains willing to change scale. A dominant sound can shrink into background residue. A quiet loop can become structural simply by continuing. A trumpet phrase may briefly organize the entire ensemble, then dissolve into the surrounding electronics. Improvisation becomes less about producing an endless stream of ideas than about adjusting the weight of what is already present.

DJ Low’s trio with Kondo and O’Rourke brings recorded rhythm and live instrumental action into especially close contact. Turntables and loops can imply repetition, but the other musicians refuse to treat that repetition as fixed. Kondo bends his trumpet around the samples, while O’Rourke’s guitar and synthesizer alter their depth and apparent speed. The result has some relationship to electronic groove, dub, and turntablist culture, yet it remains too unstable to function comfortably inside any of them.

The closing trio of Kondo, O’Rourke, and Parkins joins three instruments capable of moving between physical gesture and electronic transformation. Trumpet, guitar, and electric harp each begin from strings, breath, or touch, but amplification expands them beyond those origins. The performance repeatedly creates the sensation of several signals crossing in midair. Sharp attacks produce long electronic shadows. Harp resonance merges with guitar sustain. Kondo’s trumpet rises through the combined field, not as a heroic final voice, but as another unstable frequency searching for space.

Fear No Fall belongs to a late-1990s moment when improvisation was absorbing laptops, samplers, turntables, electronics, and live processing without yet having standardized how those tools should behave together. The album does not present technology as futuristic decoration. Machines are simply additional sources of uncertainty. Samples fail to remain quotations. Effects obscure instrumental identity. Loops provide rhythm while making time feel less dependable.

The festival structure is essential to the outcome. Because the musicians performed repeatedly in changing combinations, each set became part of a larger social experiment. A duo revealed one relationship, then a trio introduced another musician capable of disturbing it. By the time all six played together, they had already encountered one another from several angles. The CD preserves that changing network rather than pretending the sextet was a conventional band.

The title can therefore be understood as practical advice. Fear no fall does not mean that failure is impossible. It means that the music depends upon entering situations where collapse remains available. A sample may arrive too loudly. A rhythmic idea may fail to connect. Six strong personalities may produce confusion instead of form. The musicians accept those risks because improvisation without the possibility of failure would become only another method of control.

What survives is a record of temporary structures. Electric harp, trumpet, guitar, harmonica, drums, turntables, shortwave radio, synthesizers, piano fragments, and samples enter combinations that never need to be repeated. Fear No Fall does not document the birth of a permanent ensemble. It captures a five-day zone in which six musicians continually rearranged themselves, allowing each new lineup to reveal another version of what the music could become.

KGD Project (Kondo, Watchelear, Dj Grazhoppa) - 2001 - Find A Planet

 

Spiritual Nature – SN-003  312.03MB FLAC

Find a Planet begins with a combination that should feel unstable: Toshinori Kondo’s electric trumpet, DJ Grazzhoppa’s turntables and programmed beats, and Dirk Wachtelaer’s acoustic drums and electronics. Instead, the album quickly establishes its own gravity. Scratches, loops, hard drum strikes, keyboard haze, and Kondo’s processed horn circle one another without settling into jazz, hip-hop, drum and bass, or electronic improvisation. The title gives the music a destination, but the record is less concerned with reaching a new world than with assembling one from incompatible materials.

The project developed in stages rather than through a single conventional session. Grazzhoppa and Wachtelaer began recording in Amsterdam in November 1999, building foundations from turntables, beats, and drums. Kondo later added electric trumpet and keyboards in Kawasaki during March 2001, then mixed the completed album. That distance is audible without making the record feel disconnected. Rhythm arrives with the physical immediacy of two musicians working together in a room, while Kondo often seems to enter from another location entirely, transmitting his trumpet into their structures like a signal received after a long journey.

Grazzhoppa’s turntables do more than decorate the beats with scratches. They give the album its sense of disturbed memory. Brief vocal pieces, instrumental traces, surface noise, and sharply cut gestures appear as information recovered from another transmission. Some fragments are recognizable for only a second before the hand redirects them. Others become rhythmic material, repeating until their original identity matters less than their placement. The turntable continually reminds the listener that recorded sound can be treated as an instrument, but also as debris: material from an earlier world pulled into a new environment.

Wachtelaer’s drumming provides the bodily center. His acoustic kit does not simply reinforce programmed rhythms. It argues with them, thickens them, and exposes their mechanical regularity. A sequenced beat can establish the grid, but the live drums add pressure, hesitation, and uneven force. Cymbals open space around the electronic low end, while snare and tom accents make the tracks feel less like finished productions than systems still being tested. The interaction is especially effective when it becomes difficult to separate Wachtelaer’s programmed beats from Grazzhoppa’s. The rhythm seems to belong to the project rather than to either musician.

Kondo moves through that machinery without surrendering the individuality of his trumpet. His electric sound is bright, smeared, and frequently altered until brass begins to resemble a human voice passing through damaged communications equipment. Notes bend at their edges, sustain beyond natural breath, or break into rough bursts that hang above the rhythm. He can play melodically, but melody is rarely allowed to become comfortable. Effects produce shadows around the horn, making one phrase appear larger than the body that created it.

The keyboards widen the record’s atmosphere. They do not dominate with elaborate harmony or obvious themes. Instead, they create suspended backgrounds against which trumpet and rhythm can change scale. A small scratch becomes more isolated when placed against a broad electronic field. A drum break becomes more physical when the surrounding keyboards recede. These adjustments allow the album to move between compact hip-hop construction and open, almost cosmic space without requiring dramatic transitions.

The planetary language running through the titles gives the sequence a loose geography. “Platform 7,” “Moon,” “Space Junk,” and “Zone Zero” suggest departure points, distant bodies, discarded machinery, and a final location emptied of familiar coordinates. The names fit the music because KGD Project treats genre as territory that can be crossed without remaining inside any one border. The album launches from recognizable beat culture, passes through electric jazz, turntablism, dub, and experimental electronics, then arrives somewhere that cannot be claimed completely by any of them.

This combination did not emerge from nowhere. Kondo had already demonstrated how naturally his processed trumpet could enter beat-based music through his collaboration with DJ Krush on Ki-Oku. That record placed melancholy trumpet lines inside spacious downtempo production, allowing jazz phrasing and hip-hop construction to meet without either becoming novelty. Find a Planet is rougher and more collectively unstable. Grazzhoppa’s cuts are more exposed, Wachtelaer’s drumming keeps disturbing the programmed surface, and Kondo’s horn is often used as electrical matter rather than as a lyrical lead voice.

Grazzhoppa also brings a battle-DJ sharpness that prevents the album’s space imagery from becoming weightless ambience. His scratches have attack. They slice across sustained trumpet and keyboards, producing friction between the continuous line of breath and the abrupt mechanics of vinyl manipulation. Kondo may stretch a note outward while Grazzhoppa divides time into short pieces beneath it. Wachtelaer stands between those approaches, capable of extending a groove through repetition or breaking it apart with physical accents.

The album’s approximately fifty-minute duration is divided into ten compact constructions rather than a few extended improvisations. That format disciplines the trio. Ideas have enough time to establish a climate, but they do not drift indefinitely. Each piece concentrates on a slightly different balance of beat, live percussion, scratching, trumpet, and keyboard atmosphere. The cumulative effect matters more than a track-by-track narrative. Find a Planet gradually teaches the listener how its world operates, then changes the proportions without rewriting the fundamental laws.

“Space Junk” could serve as a description of the trio’s entire method. The project gathers sounds that might be treated as leftover material—scratches, fragments, beat components, distorted breaths, electronic residue—and gives them orbital relationships. Nothing needs to be polished into seamless fusion. The rough joins are essential. Acoustic drums remain acoustic drums even when surrounded by programming. Turntables retain the abruptness of manipulated recordings. Kondo’s horn remains connected to lungs and metal despite the processing. The music works because the borders are audible.

The title also gains another meaning from the album’s construction across Amsterdam and Kawasaki. The musicians did not need to occupy one room at one moment for the project to develop a shared identity. Sound traveled between locations, accumulated additional parts, and was reorganized through Kondo’s final mix. Find a Planet becomes an early example of collaboration functioning through distance without losing physical character. The result never resembles files politely exchanged and layered. It feels active, contested, and alive.

KGD Project continued onstage, where the trio’s music took on a more immediate energy, but this studio album possesses its own carefully assembled personality. Its rhythms are built, struck, scratched, displaced, and rebuilt. The trumpet can become melody, warning, atmosphere, or a streak of light crossing the beat. The turntables convert musical history into movable matter. The drums ensure that the planet being constructed has weight beneath its surface.

Find a Planet ultimately succeeds because it does not announce a utopian merger of jazz and hip-hop. It offers something stranger: three musicians using different relationships to time. Grazzhoppa cuts and repeats recorded time, Wachtelaer produces time physically through impact, and Kondo stretches breath through electronics until a moment appears capable of continuing beyond the body. Their planet is made from those competing clocks. It is uneven, crowded with debris, and held together by rhythm, but it supports life.

Alessio Riccio / David Shea / Ellery Eskelin - 2003 - Drawing Opus2, Paul Klee

 

Unorthodox Recordings – Unhx/005  432.69MB FLAC

The cover of Drawing – Opus 2: Paul Klee immediately establishes a world of fragile connections. Three thin, birdlike figures stand or balance above a geometric base, their bodies reduced to narrow lines, angles and small dark shapes. The cloudy grey background gives the drawing depth without providing a recognizable landscape. Names and title run vertically along the left edge, making the sleeve itself resemble a page removed from a portfolio rather than a conventional jazz cover. Nothing appears solid, yet everything seems related through balance. One line supports another, a small mark changes the direction of a figure, and the empty areas carry as much visual weight as the drawn forms.

Alessio Riccio, David Shea and Ellery Eskelin approach Paul Klee through that same tension between precision and uncertainty. Drawing does not attempt to provide pleasant background music for looking at paintings, nor does it translate individual pictures into literal sonic illustrations. Instead, the musicians work with qualities central to Klee’s visual language: line, interruption, repetition, disproportion, mechanical movement, childlike figures, damaged architecture and the ability of a few marks to imply an entire imaginary environment. Sounds are placed like strokes on paper. Some remain isolated, while others connect into structures that seem capable of collapsing after the next gesture.

Riccio’s percussion is the album’s physical foundation, but the word “drums” barely describes his activity. Conventional kit playing appears beside manipulated tape, live loops, randomized percussion, water drums, metal claves, shakers, bell chimes, processed metal and a specially constructed gong sculpture. These materials allow rhythm to behave as color and shape rather than simply meter. A drum pattern may establish forward movement, then be repeated or electronically displaced until it resembles a machine trying to remember how it was built. Small metallic sounds glitter at the edge of the stereo field, while larger impacts create temporary walls.

David Shea enters this environment through samples, digital piano and keyboards. His sounds rarely function as a smooth electronic background. Samples can appear as torn pieces of another composition, fragments whose original circumstances have disappeared. Piano figures supply recognizable pitch and touch, but their regularity is often disturbed by Riccio’s loops or by electronic layers that change the apparent dimensions of the room. Shea’s presence makes the music feel edited while it is still occurring. Acoustic gestures and reproduced sounds occupy the same plane, leaving the listener uncertain whether a particular event has just been played, recalled or reconstructed.

Ellery Eskelin’s tenor saxophone supplies the most continuous human line. His tone retains the physical evidence of breath even when the electronics and percussion become fragmented. He can move through broad phrases, irregular slurs, low honks and rough multiphonics without becoming a conventional soloist placed in front of an electroacoustic rhythm section. The saxophone is another drawing tool. At times it resembles a heavy black stroke crossing a delicate field. Elsewhere it becomes a thin, curling line forced to navigate around blocks of percussion and sampled sound.

That relationship prevents Drawing from settling into either free jazz or electronic composition. Eskelin often phrases with the urgency and elasticity of an improviser responding to a rhythm section, but the ground beneath him refuses to remain dependable. A pulse may appear only to be looped, divided or interrupted. Shea’s piano can suggest harmonic direction, yet a sample may enter and change the meaning of the surrounding notes. Riccio can support the tenor with recognizable drumming, then dissolve that support into scattered impacts. Jazz interaction remains present, but its usual architecture has been opened and rearranged.

The titles provide another connection to Klee without forcing the music into direct representation. “Strange Garden,” “Death and Fire,” “The Gray One and the Coast,” “Clown,” “Destroyed Labyrinth” and “The Timid Brute” name places, figures and conditions that already sound partially abstract. They suggest pictures in which recognizable objects have been simplified until they operate like symbols. The music behaves similarly. A garden becomes a gathering of delicate metallic sounds and irregular growth. A clown becomes a figure whose humor cannot be separated from discomfort. A labyrinth is not represented by footsteps and walls, but by musical paths that double back, disappear and reconnect somewhere unexpected.

The extended opening, “Luna of the Barbarians,” gives the trio enough time to introduce this language without immediately explaining it. Percussion, tape and electronics establish a terrain filled with small movements, while the saxophone moves through it as both visitor and disruptive force. The length matters because the piece does not develop through a conventional sequence of themes. It accumulates marks. A repeated sound becomes a boundary; a saxophone phrase creates a possible route; an electronic intrusion erases part of the map. By the end, the musicians have constructed a large environment from gestures that initially seemed unrelated.

Elsewhere, the trio works in shorter, more concentrated forms. These pieces resemble individual drawings pinned inside a larger exhibition. Each establishes its own proportions and exits before the internal logic becomes comfortable. Abrupt endings are important. A sound does not always need to resolve simply because it has attracted attention. Like a line ending at the edge of a page, the cutoff can define the shape more clearly than an extended conclusion.

“Underwater Garden” adds Mirko Guerrini’s bass flute, deepening the connection between breath and environment. The flute’s lower register enters less forcefully than Eskelin’s tenor and seems partially absorbed by the surrounding textures. Its air and low vibration suggest movement beneath a surface rather than a melody placed above it. The piece does not imitate water literally. Instead, familiar instrumental shapes appear distorted by the medium around them, as though heard through changing pressure.

The garden appears repeatedly across the sequence, but it is never a peaceful pastoral space. Klee’s imagined landscapes often contain a mixture of play, construction and unease, and Riccio’s music preserves that ambiguity. Bells, shakers and light percussion can sound bright without becoming innocent. A looping groove may initially feel playful, then become restrictive through repetition. Shea’s samples can introduce recognizable human or instrumental traces that quickly turn strange when removed from their source. Beauty survives, but it is always vulnerable to rearrangement.

“Outbreak of Fear” makes that vulnerability explicit. Eskelin’s forceful breathing and repeated figures encounter percussion and keyboards that appear organized but never fully safe. Fear is not represented by theatrical shrieks or a simple increase in volume. It emerges when repetition begins to close around the performers. A pattern that initially provides orientation becomes a trap, and the tenor’s physical strength starts sounding like resistance against a system already in motion.

This is where Riccio’s idea of a percussion “Metalanguage Unit” becomes especially useful. The collection of drums, objects, electronics, tapes and looping devices allows him to speak about rhythm through multiple materials at once. A beat can be performed, sampled, randomized and returned in altered form. Metal can act as punctuation, atmosphere or melodic color. The percussionist becomes drummer, sound designer and editor without separating those roles. Rhythm is not merely what moves the composition forward; it is the process by which the composition remembers and changes itself.

The album was recorded in 2003, when the meeting between acoustic improvisation and digital processing still carried visible seams. Drawing does not hide those seams. Samples do not melt into a polished electronic surface, and the saxophone does not pretend to belong naturally inside every constructed layer. The friction is part of the design. Riccio, Shea and Eskelin preserve the different physical origins of their sounds, then discover relationships through placement rather than forced unity.

The closing “The Timid Brute” contains the contradiction that runs through the entire album. A brute suggests weight, force and direct action; timidity suggests retreat, hesitation and exposure. The music repeatedly balances those qualities. Eskelin can produce an enormous tenor sound, yet place it cautiously among fragile electronic events. Riccio’s drums can strike with authority, then withdraw into tiny metallic details. Shea’s samples can fill the space or appear as distant remnants. Strength and uncertainty are not opposites here. Each makes the other audible.

Drawing – Opus 2: Paul Klee succeeds because it does not reduce Klee to whimsical abstraction or decorative modernism. It recognizes the discipline beneath the apparent play: the careful balance of line, form, space and movement required to make a strange figure stand upright. Riccio, Shea and Eskelin construct music through the same problem. Percussion, samples, piano, saxophone, tape and electronics remain precariously connected, each capable of changing the scale of everything around it. Like the figures on the cover, the album survives through balance rather than stability.

Vibraphenomenology + The Rita - 2024 - Wave Crack Fold Formations 2xCD

 

Phage Tapes – PT:481  501.07MB FLAC

Wave Crack Fold Formations arrives as a six-panel digipak containing two discs, each occupied by a single piece lasting almost forty-five minutes. The physical construction already belongs to the work’s central idea. The package unfolds, the recording divides into two nearly equal surfaces, and each disc carries a prolonged mass of sound that can be entered at any point without revealing an obvious beginning or conclusion. This is not simply a long harsh-noise collaboration expanded to fill two CDs. Vibraphenomenology and The Rita use duration, repetition and small internal changes to examine how one continuous force can produce waves, folds, fractures and repeating patterns of damage.

The project developed through extended live recording sessions accompanied by discussion. Its conceptual direction came partly from accounts of contemporary shipwreck survivors who became fixated on the same broken forms of ocean waves appearing day after day. That image gives the album an unusual psychological center. A person stranded at sea does not experience the ocean as picturesque scenery. Water becomes an endlessly repeated condition, continually changing while refusing to provide meaningful difference. Each crest resembles the previous one, yet any individual wave may contain enough force to overturn a vessel, break a hull or erase the boundary between passenger and ocean.

Vibraphenomenology and The Rita translate that condition without using field recordings of surf as obvious illustration. The sound is electronic, compressed and materially abrasive. A Soma Lyra-8 synthesizer, Soma Ether wideband receiver, vintage radio and gated fuzz effects provide the primary tools. Each device introduces a different relationship to instability. The Lyra-8 behaves less like a conventional keyboard than a network of interacting oscillators whose behavior can shift according to touch, feedback and internal connection. The Ether receiver turns surrounding electromagnetic activity into audible material. Radio brings fragments of distant transmission. Gated fuzz repeatedly opens and closes the signal, cutting continuous noise into impacts, pulses and broken rhythmic edges.

These sources allow the record to suggest water without imitating it. The noise rises, folds over itself, breaks and recedes, but it never becomes a peaceful environmental recording. Low pressure gathers beneath sheets of rough static. Midrange bursts strike the surface and disappear. Higher frequencies flash like foam appearing briefly along a dark crest. The wall is present, but it does not remain perfectly immobile. Its texture changes through repeated compression and release, producing the sensation of a mass whose surface is constantly being destroyed and rebuilt.

The gated effects are especially important because they prevent density from becoming featureless. A sustained signal is divided into short openings and closures, making the electronics resemble a wave repeatedly hitting a resistant object. Each impact appears similar, but the material receiving that impact is gradually changing. In a boat hull, stress may begin as a nearly invisible fissure before widening through repeated pressure. On the album, a small rhythmic interruption can similarly grow into a dominant structural feature. What initially sounds like a flaw inside the wall eventually becomes the pattern organizing it.

The title joins three processes rather than offering three synonyms. A wave transfers energy through movement. A crack records the point where material can no longer distribute that energy safely. A fold allows material to change direction without necessarily separating. The recording continually moves among those conditions. Signals flow, bend, collide, divide and remain connected. Noise becomes a way of hearing matter under pressure before, during and after rupture.

The first disc establishes an extended field in which repetition is never completely trustworthy. Broad sections can appear nearly static, yet close listening reveals unstable borders. Pulses do not always return with identical weight. Radio residue briefly contaminates the electronic surface. A rough oscillation may recede enough to expose another layer that had been hidden beneath it. These changes are not arranged as conventional events leading toward a climax. They resemble variations in a wave field, where local disturbances appear inside a much larger system that continues regardless of any one movement.

The second disc does not function as a sequel or resolution. It returns to the same problem from another position, extending the listener’s exposure until the distinction between repetition and change becomes increasingly uncertain. After enough time, the ear begins inventing landmarks. A particular crackle, low surge or gated rhythm seems familiar, though it may never have appeared in exactly that form before. This mirrors the survivor’s fixation described in the project notes. Under prolonged isolation, repeated waves stop being anonymous. Small variations acquire enormous significance because the surrounding condition refuses to end.

That psychological dimension separates Wave Crack Fold Formations from a purely formal noise experiment. The two long pieces can be heard as studies of texture, but the shipwreck framework turns texture into an environment of threat. The ocean does not need intention to become terrifying. It is dangerous precisely because its force operates without recognizing the person subjected to it. The electronic wall has a similar indifference. It does not dramatize fear through screaming voices or sudden cinematic shocks. It continues. The listener must adapt to its scale rather than expecting the recording to adapt to ordinary musical attention.

The wideband receiver and vintage radio deepen this sense of isolation. Radio normally promises contact: a voice, signal, station or message traveling across distance. Here transmission is absorbed into the larger noise body. Any suggestion of communication becomes unstable and incomplete. A shipwreck survivor might imagine rescue in every distant mechanical sound, but the signal may be atmospheric interference, damaged equipment or nothing capable of answering. The Ether receiver makes the invisible electrical activity surrounding the session audible, revealing that an apparently empty environment is already crowded with forces that human perception ordinarily excludes.

The collaboration also fits The Rita’s long investigation of harsh noise as concentrated texture. Sam McKinlay has repeatedly built work around specific physical surfaces, movements and obsessions, treating the wall not as generic extremity but as a method for examining materials under pressure. Wave Crack Fold Formations extends that approach through Vibraphenomenology’s interest in vibration, reception and phenomenological attention. The result asks not only what a breaking wave sounds like, but what prolonged exposure to breaking does to perception.

The references to folds add another layer. A fold does not destroy continuity; it creates complexity by turning a surface back through itself. Inside these recordings, noise repeatedly hides and reveals its own layers. One frequency covers another, rhythmic gates carve temporary openings, and distorted signals overlap until their origins become inseparable. Texture is produced by those relationships rather than by a collection of isolated sounds. The wall becomes a stack of folds held together under pressure.

A cracked hull offers the inverse image. Its lines show where cohesion has begun to fail. The exterior mark is evidence of forces moving through the material, often long before total breakage occurs. Vibraphenomenology and The Rita make that evidence audible. Their noise is full of seams, abrasions and narrow gaps that seem to trace the internal stress of the larger mass. The cracks do not merely interrupt the wall. They reveal how it was constructed.

Across nearly ninety minutes, the album refuses the relief that might come from reaching land, receiving a message or watching the storm pass. Its length is not excess added to a simple concept. Duration is the mechanism that transforms the concept into experience. A few minutes can demonstrate a texture; forty-five minutes forces the listener to inhabit it. Repeating the process on a second disc turns habitation into endurance and makes microscopic variation increasingly important.

Wave Crack Fold Formations ultimately treats harsh noise as a form of material thought. Wave, hull, crack, fold, electrical signal and human attention are placed under the same pressure. The recording does not explain shipwreck or reproduce the ocean. It builds an electronic condition in which repetition can become obsession, texture can become evidence and a nearly static wall can contain continuous breakage. The two discs do not lead out of that condition. They keep folding it inward until the sound resembles both the force striking the vessel and the fractured surface left behind.

Violent Onsen Geisha - 1996 - The Midnight Gambler

 

My Fiance's Lifework Productions – none  443.99MB FLAC

The Midnight Gambler arrives in the deliberately reduced packaging associated with Pure, the RRR Records subsidiary that issued a remarkable run of experimental CDs during the 1990s. Instead of a conventional jewel case crowded with explanatory notes, the disc was housed in a black wallet sleeve, closed with a rough multicolored label. It looks less like a professionally marketed album than an unidentified object retrieved from a drawer, its surface offering few instructions about how the music should be understood. That anonymity suits Violent Onsen Geisha perfectly. The name suggests a group, but the project was essentially the work of Tokyo artist Masaya Nakahara, whose recordings repeatedly scramble the boundaries between noise, collage, comedy, popular music and domestic accident.

The absence of proper song titles strengthens that effect. Twelve pieces are presented without descriptive names, ranging from fragments lasting less than half a minute to two long constructions exceeding sixteen and twenty-two minutes. The listener is given duration but almost no narrative guidance. There is no convenient sequence of titled compositions to interpret and no stable genre structure to follow. The album must be entered as a field of events: voices appear, sounds are damaged, rhythms form and disappear, and stretches of apparent organization are interrupted before they can become comfortable.

Its opening twenty-two-minute piece provides the album’s central statement. Rather than developing one theme, Nakahara condenses a tremendous quantity of incompatible material into a rapidly mutating collage. Found voices, distorted music, crude electronics, bursts of feedback and pieces of mass culture collide as though several damaged radio broadcasts were being transmitted through the same frequency. The edits are not clean enough to feel like virtuosic studio demonstration. Their roughness is essential. Sounds are allowed to scrape against one another, producing a physical sensation of tape being stopped, restarted, accelerated or pulled sideways.

This is why describing Violent Onsen Geisha simply as harsh noise misses much of what makes the project unusual. Noise is present, sometimes in punishing quantities, but it is only one substance among many. Nakahara can place a sentimental melody beside screaming, throw a comic voice into an abrasive electronic passage or let a recognizable rhythm stagger forward until another sound knocks it apart. The method resembles plunderphonics stripped of its academic neatness. Recorded culture becomes a junk pile in which television, pop, advertising, conversation and accidental noise possess equal value.

Humor is central, although it rarely arrives in the form of an obvious joke. Much of it comes from timing. A threatening wall of sound may collapse into something trivial; a tiny vocal fragment may be repeated until it becomes ridiculous; a passage that appears to be approaching a climax may simply stop. The shortest pieces function like abrupt edits left exposed between larger constructions. Lasting twenty or thirty seconds, they do not behave like interludes designed to help the record flow. They puncture the flow, making the listener reconsider whether the preceding section was serious, comic or both.

That uncertainty separates Nakahara from the heroic image often attached to extreme noise. The Midnight Gambler does not present distortion as a demonstration of masculine endurance or technical power. Its violence is unstable and frequently embarrassed by its surroundings. Feedback can be overwhelming, but it may share space with kitsch, foolishness, cheap effects or mundane voices. Every attempt at grandeur is vulnerable to interruption. The record seems suspicious of any sound that presents itself as important, including its own most ferocious passages.

The longer sixteen-minute piece pushes this approach into a more suspended form. Where the opening feels densely compressed, the later construction gives individual materials more time to establish an atmosphere. Repetition becomes more noticeable, and the spaces between events carry greater weight. Yet stability remains temporary. Nakahara’s collages are governed by the expectation that any environment can be invaded. A voice, burst of music or abrasive edit enters not because it completes a pattern but because it damages whatever pattern has begun to emerge.

Across the second half, the pieces become shorter but not more conventional. Four-, six- and three-minute sections briefly suggest separate compositions, though their shared vocabulary keeps them connected to the same unstable world. The album behaves like a collection of recordings found on mismatched tapes rather than a carefully unified studio statement. That apparent disorder is deceptive. Nakahara’s strongest work depends upon close control of contrast. The impact of an eruption comes from what surrounds it; an absurd sample becomes funnier because it has been placed beside something severe; a weak or degraded sound becomes expressive when it interrupts a fuller recording.

The final eight-minute section introduces live material, allowing the collage method to collide with the pressure and uncertainty of performance. In a studio, even the crudest edit remains a decision preserved on tape. Live noise is less secure. Room acoustics, equipment overload and audience presence become additional materials that cannot be completely controlled. The result does not resolve the record. It leaves it open, as though the earlier private constructions have escaped into a public space and begun dismantling themselves.

The Midnight Gambler appeared during an especially active period for Nakahara. In 1996 alone, Violent Onsen Geisha also released Nation of Rhythm Slaves and Teenage Pet Sounds, while Nakahara worked on remixes for artists operating much closer to Japan’s pop and alternative mainstream. That movement between underground noise and recognizable popular culture helps explain the album’s breadth. Nakahara did not treat pop as an enemy standing outside experimental music. It was already inside his work, available to be sampled, mocked, damaged or momentarily enjoyed.

His fictional mythology around Violent Onsen Geisha extended the same attitude into the project’s identity. Nakahara encouraged stories that the name represented a real band whose members had died one by one, leaving him as the survivor. The invention transformed the ordinary fact of a solo recording project into a grotesque show-business legend. Like the music, it used fragments of familiar culture—band histories, tragedy, publicity and underground rumor—then rearranged them into something obviously suspicious but difficult to dismiss completely.

Nearly thirty years later, the album still sounds unruly because it refuses the stable signs by which experimental records are usually classified. It is too fragmented to become pure harsh noise, too abrasive to settle into comedy, too impulsive to resemble formal electroacoustic composition and too strange to function as simple satire. The black sleeve and anonymous sequence preserve that refusal. The Midnight Gambler offers no clean account of itself. It opens a container filled with damaged entertainment, domestic sound, electronic violence and bad jokes, shakes everything together, and allows the collisions to become the composition.

VA - 2024 - F.L.A.W. 2xCS

 

No Label – none  624.27MB FLAC

Tracklist:

A1 Psywarfare – TURN IT UP!A2

A2    Kakerlak – Perdurable Introgression

A3 FLESHLICKER – Hair Love

A4 Skin Graft – Endurance

A5 Paranoid Time – Total Nonstop Blackouts (Slit Throats Cut)

B1 Aaron Dilloway – Major Flaw

B2 Knifedoutofexistence – A Moment Leaves Its Mark

B3 Body Carve – Striated Anterior Blowhole

B4 OVMN – Anti-Fascist Warning Alarm

B5 Hypertrophy – Big Strong Men

C1 Leah P – Mire

C2 Form Hunter – Rotten Structure

C3 The Rita – Resin Toe Razor Cutting

C4 Heat Signature – Two Layer Trap

C5 Perfected Grave Vault – Forget Laws and Warrants

D1 John Wiese – CPP

D2 Unsustainable Social Condition – Fidrych

D3 Parasite Nurse – The Burning Desire to Fade Into Obscurity

D4 Black Leather Jesus – This Mouth at Play

D5 Shredded Nerve – Precipice

F.L.A.W. is constructed as both a compilation and a physical record of an event. The two professionally duplicated cassettes are housed together in a black polypropylene case, accompanied by a twelve-page booklet and a miniature poster. That amount of printed material gives the release the density of a small festival program rather than an ordinary tape compilation. Zac Reinhard’s visual work extends across the package, while the severe black housing makes the set feel sealed and utilitarian, like equipment prepared for transport. It is an appropriate container for nearly one hundred minutes of exclusive material by the twenty artists assembled for Final Live Audio War, held in Cleveland on October 12, 2024.

The title immediately establishes a useful contradiction. A flaw is an imperfection, but the initials expand into something far more declarative: Final Live Audio War. One meaning suggests damage, error and weakness; the other promises confrontation, volume and collective force. Noise has always occupied the space between those ideas. What conventional recording attempts to eliminate—distortion, overload, faulty signals, mechanical friction and unstable amplification—becomes the central material. Across these four cassette sides, the flaw is not corrected. It is isolated, enlarged and allowed to consume the surrounding structure.

This is not simply a sampler of interchangeable harsh-noise tracks. The lineup brings together several generations and methods of American and international noise practice. Aaron Dilloway, John Wiese, The Rita and Black Leather Jesus appear beside Skin Graft, Shredded Nerve, Unsustainable Social Condition, Leah P, Fleshlicker, Form Hunter, Knifedoutofexistence and other artists whose work carries the form into different physical, conceptual and regional territories. The compilation’s importance comes from those differences. Each contributor operates inside a shared language of abrasion, repetition and damaged sound, but each places the pressure somewhere else.

Roman J.’s audio and visual curation gives the collection its larger shape, while Wyatt Howland’s mastering keeps radically different recordings at a consistently forceful level. Mastering a compilation like this involves more than making everything loud. Some pieces depend upon thick, nearly motionless walls; others use sudden cuts, exposed voices, high-frequency detail, tape loops or rapidly changing clusters of sound. If every recording were pushed toward the same surface, their individual structures would disappear. Here, the transitions preserve contrast without turning the collection into a sequence of disconnected demonstrations.

The first half establishes a broad vocabulary. Psywarfare’s opening command, “TURN IT UP!,” functions almost as an instruction printed inside the music. From there, the compilation moves through Kakerlak’s decayed electronics, Fleshlicker’s more erratic collisions and the heavy endurance suggested by Skin Graft. Paranoid Time and Aaron Dilloway bring forms of interruption in which repetition never produces security. A loop may return, but each return makes it less stable. Voices become objects; recognizable sounds are worn down by recurrence; silence and sudden impact become tools for controlling the listener’s attention.

Dilloway’s presence is especially appropriate because his work has long treated magnetic tape as something more physical than a neutral recording medium. Loops drag time in circles, preserving small accidents until they become the center of a piece. That sensibility suits the cassette format itself. Listening to F.L.A.W. requires turning tapes over, moving from one side to another and hearing the slight mechanical character of playback. The format divides the compilation into four bounded stretches. It prevents nearly one hundred minutes of noise from becoming a single undifferentiated digital stream.

Elsewhere, the set reveals how many different meanings can hide inside the phrase “harsh noise.” Knifedoutofexistence allows emotional weight to enter through sustained abrasion. Body Carve compresses violent texture into a shorter attack. OVMN’s “Anti-Fascist Warning Alarm” makes alarm both a sound and a political position, while Hypertrophy’s “Big Strong Men” turns its title toward the posturing that can accompany extreme music. Leah P’s “Mire” suggests entrapment rather than forward movement: sound as a substance that surrounds the listener and makes every gesture heavier.

The Rita represents another extreme of concentration. Sam McKinlay’s work has repeatedly narrowed noise toward obsessive surfaces, particularly the nearly static pressure of harsh noise wall. In this context, “Resin Toe Razor Cutting” does not merely add another loud piece. It changes how motion is perceived. After cut-up material and volatile transitions, an unyielding texture can make tiny fluctuations feel enormous. Heat Signature and Perfected Grave Vault then continue the compilation’s movement between layered confinement and more aggressively signaled structures, preventing any single noise vocabulary from claiming the entire program.

John Wiese’s brief “CPP” is the shortest contribution, but its compactness matters. Wiese’s editing can make a small piece feel crowded with internal events, demonstrating that duration and density are not the same thing. Unsustainable Social Condition, Parasite Nurse, Black Leather Jesus and Shredded Nerve carry the final portion into increasingly bodily territory. Black Leather Jesus brings the history of American group-based noise performance into the set, while Shredded Nerve closes with a title—“Precipice”—that leaves the listener at an edge rather than offering resolution.

The festival behind the tapes is central to their meaning. Noise recordings can be produced alone through careful editing, but live noise depends upon bodies, rooms, equipment and shared tolerance. Final Live Audio War placed twenty distinct practices into one Cleveland event, creating a temporary community around sound that often seems hostile to ordinary ideas of community. The “war” was not simply artist against audience or volume against hearing. It was also a collision between approaches: composition against improvisation, movement against stasis, private obsession against public performance and individual control against malfunction.

The word “Final” adds another layer. It gives the event the atmosphere of a conclusion even when the artists and their practices continue. Underground events are temporary by nature. A room is secured, equipment is carried in, sets happen, merchandise changes hands and the gathering disappears. Documentation can preserve names and sounds, but it cannot reproduce the pressure in the room. F.L.A.W. does not pretend otherwise. Its exclusive studio and recorded contributions become a parallel object: not a transparent recording of the festival, but a physical collection built around the same participants.

The booklet and mini-poster therefore matter as much as decoration. They restore faces, names and visual identities to music that can become anonymous when reduced to digital files. The double cassette asks to be handled, opened, reversed and stored. Its physical divisions turn a huge compilation into four encounters, while the black case gives those encounters a single body. F.L.A.W. captures a wide section of contemporary noise without trying to smooth out its contradictions. It presents the scene as a field of competing methods held together for one date, one city and one concentrated act of listening. The result is not a correction of noise’s flaws but a celebration of everything those flaws make possible.

Morton Feldman, Judith Wegmann, Andreas Kunz - 2021 - For John Cage

 

ezz-thetics – ezz-thetics 2-1036  382.18MB FLAC

The physical division of For John Cage across two CDs is a practical necessity, but it also creates an unintended threshold inside Morton Feldman’s ninety-minute composition. The first disc ends after 44 minutes; the second resumes for another 46. Nothing in the music behaves like a conventional first and second movement, yet changing discs briefly returns the listener to ordinary time. A hand reaches toward the player, the room becomes noticeable again, and then Judith Wegmann’s piano and Andreas Kunz’s violin reopen the quiet space they had been constructing. The interruption makes the scale of the work tangible. This is not background stillness or an enlarged miniature. It is an environment that must be entered, left and entered again.

Feldman wrote For John Cage in 1982 for violinist Paul Zukofsky and pianist Aki Takahashi, and it was first performed during a concert celebrating Cage’s seventieth birthday. The dedication carries the history of one of twentieth-century music’s most important friendships, but the piece does not attempt a musical portrait of Cage. There are no obvious quotations, jokes or demonstrations of chance procedure. Instead, Feldman seems to consider what Cage made possible for him: a freedom from inherited ideas of development, climax and resolution, and permission to treat sound as something worthy of attention before it becomes part of an argument. Feldman and Cage reached different musical conclusions, but both changed the listener’s relationship with attention.

This 2021 recording gives that attention an unusually spacious acoustic body. Recorded at the Mazzini Stiftung in Grenchen, Switzerland, it places Wegmann at a Bösendorfer 280VC while Kunz plays with a Baroque violin bow. Those details are not decorative specifications. The Bösendorfer possesses a deep, lingering lower register, while the lighter Baroque bow allows Kunz to produce violin tones that can appear without the continuous pressure and polished projection associated with a modern concerto performance. Neither instrument is pushed toward brilliance. Their sounds bloom, hover and withdraw into the room, leaving resonances that sometimes seem nearly as important as the notes that caused them.

Wegmann and Kunz take slightly more than ninety minutes, considerably longer than many recorded performances of the piece. The tempo does not feel stretched for effect. It feels as though each sound has been given enough room to complete its entire physical existence. A piano chord is not finished when the keys are struck, and a violin tone is not limited to the movement of the bow. Both continue changing after their initial appearance. Overtones separate, vibrations weaken, and the surrounding silence slowly absorbs what remains. The performance listens to those changes rather than rushing ahead to replace them.

The opening establishes the work’s materials with deceptive simplicity. Small piano figures are followed by restrained violin responses. Sometimes the order reverses; sometimes the two instruments overlap or briefly seem to occupy the same line. The relationship is conversational, but not in the dramatic sense of two personalities debating. Feldman wanted the instruments to inhabit the same space, almost as though violin and piano were parts of a single composite instrument. Wegmann and Kunz achieve this without sacrificing their differences. The piano has weight, attack and decay. The violin can sustain, bend and alter its pressure from within a note. What joins them is not matching tone color but matching concentration.

Patterns return throughout the piece, although repetition in Feldman is rarely exact enough to become a dependable cycle. A compact figure comes back with one pitch displaced, a pause lengthened, an accent softened or the instrumental roles exchanged. The listener recognizes something without being able to say precisely what has been recognized. Memory begins to operate imperfectly. After forty or sixty minutes, a phrase may feel familiar because it appeared earlier, because it resembles another phrase, or simply because the entire work has taught the ear to recognize its particular shapes. For John Cage gradually becomes its own unstable memory system.

This uncertainty distinguishes the piece from minimalism built upon a clearly audible process. Feldman does not give the listener a machine whose operation can be followed. Nor does he use quietness to create passive serenity. The music contains unease, weight and occasional darkening. Low piano notes can make the room suddenly seem larger and less secure. A violin response may resemble a sigh without becoming an expressionist gesture. Closely spaced pitches create momentary friction, and the musicians sometimes move through stop-and-start passages whose hesitant articulation feels almost physical. The surface remains restrained, but the emotional temperature is continually shifting underneath it.

Kunz’s control is especially important because the violin can too easily introduce theatrical emotion into such exposed writing. He avoids exaggerated vibrato and refuses to turn sustained notes into declarations. His playing can be pale, grainy, tender or slightly resistant, but it never treats Feldman’s fragility as prettiness. The Baroque bow helps give individual tones a finely tapered shape. They enter the acoustic like narrow threads and then meet the heavier strands of Wegmann’s piano. Feldman’s interest in handmade Middle Eastern carpets is often used as a metaphor for his late music, and here it is particularly useful: recurring figures resemble patterns woven from materials whose tiny irregularities keep the design alive.

Wegmann’s performance is equally free from ornamental sensitivity. She does not announce every chord as a precious object. Some sounds arrive almost neutrally, while others carry unexpected depth because of register, spacing or resonance. Her restraint allows the Bösendorfer to speak without turning its richness into Romantic grandeur. Even when a low interval acquires mournful force, she does not underline it. This produces one of the recording’s central paradoxes: the less the musicians insist upon expression, the more emotionally exposed the music becomes.

For John Cage asks for a form of listening that modern life steadily erodes. Its duration cannot be reduced to a few representative minutes because its meaning lies partly in what happens to perception over time. Early in the performance, silence appears to separate events. Later, it becomes part of the same fabric, holding the fading piano, the suspended violin and the listener’s uncertain recollection together. By the end, ninety minutes have passed without a conventional destination being reached. The piece has not told a story, built a monument or delivered a final answer. It has altered the dimensions of the room. Wegmann and Kunz make that alteration feel patient, intimate and complete: two instruments gradually becoming one space, then leaving the listener alone inside it.

Lettera 22 - 20254 - Blue Telepathy 7'' & CS

 

Dead Mind Records – DMR62  368.98MB FLAC

Blue Telepathy is built as a small archive rather than a single recording. The folded box contains a black 7-inch, a cassette, a sixteen-page full-color collage booklet, an A3 poster and a sticker, with only 150 copies assembled by Dead Mind Records. That collection of objects immediately changes the way the music is encountered. The 7-inch holds the two short pieces, each lasting about four minutes, while the cassette contains two longer works of nearly twelve minutes apiece. Playing the complete release therefore requires a change of format, machine and physical pace. The needle must be lifted, the record turned, the cassette inserted and the mechanism engaged. Blue Telepathy cannot pass through the room as one frictionless digital stream. Its construction continually returns attention to surfaces, playback devices and acts of handling.

That arrangement suits Lettera 22, the northeastern Italian duo of Riccardo Mazza and Matteo Castro. Their music is assembled from concrete sound, field recordings, analog instruments and tape manipulation, but those categories do not remain neatly separated. An environmental recording may be edited until its original source becomes unrecognizable. An electronic signal can acquire the irregular texture of something found outdoors. Mechanical rhythm appears without becoming percussion, while tape hiss makes the supposedly empty background audible. The duo does not present field recordings as transparent windows onto particular locations. Places enter the work already altered by distance, memory and recording technology.

The title suggests communication without ordinary language, but the telepathy in this box is neither clean nor instantaneous. It arrives through interference. Signals have been recorded, transferred, cut, layered, damaged and divided between vinyl and cassette. Whatever one mind attempts to send to another must cross noisy material territory before it can be received. The word “blue” gives that transmission an emotional temperature: cold, nocturnal, bruised and melancholy. Blue Telepathy feels less like reading someone’s thoughts than intercepting fragments of a message after the person who sent it has disappeared.

The 7-inch concentrates this idea into two compact sides. “I” and “II” last 4:25 and 4:01, durations that demand severe editing when the raw materials include environmental recordings and slowly changing electronic textures. The result is not miniature ambient music. Each side behaves like a sealed chamber in which several layers are placed under pressure. Tape noise, distant impacts, electrical movement and distorted surges crowd together without becoming a simple wall. Space remains inside the density. Sounds can appear very close to the listener while another layer seems to be occurring far beyond it, creating the impression of simultaneous rooms or landscapes occupying the same piece.

Vinyl gives these shorter constructions a hard physical boundary. A side begins when the stylus enters the groove and ends when it reaches the runout. Lettera 22 can build ambiguity inside that frame, but the medium itself remains decisive. The two pieces arrive like transmissions that have been forcibly cut off. Their brevity also sharpens the contrast between detailed quiet and sudden electronic pressure. When distortion enters, it does not merely make the recording louder. It momentarily destroys the depth that the duo has constructed, flattening distant and nearby material into one overloaded plane before the space gradually opens again.

The cassette allows “III” and “IV” to behave differently. At 11:52 and 11:44, these pieces have time to establish environments, obscure them and leave behind altered remains. Tape is not simply a container here; its hiss belongs to the compositions’ atmosphere. The medium supplies a continuous veil through which individual events must pass. Small noises seem less like isolated studio effects than objects located somewhere within a larger terrain. A low pulse can resemble machinery operating beyond a wall. A scraping texture might be metallic contact, an insect-like vibration or the residue of an earlier sound stretched beyond recognition.

Lettera 22 repeatedly approaches rhythm without settling into a beat. There are distant repetitions and mechanical exchanges, but they do not organize the pieces into predictable measures. Rhythm appears as evidence of activity: something rotating, signaling, striking or attempting to restart. These traces suggest abandoned infrastructure that has somehow continued operating after its human purpose has been forgotten. The machines do not become characters, yet their interactions carry a strange behavioral quality. One pulse appears to wait for another. A signal repeats as though expecting an answer. The title begins to make sense as communication occurring between devices as much as between people.

Blue Telepathy also avoids the soft reassurance often attached to immersive environmental music. Its spaces are not designed for escape, meditation or healing. The field recordings do not lead toward untouched nature, and the electronics do not open a polished science-fiction future. Everything feels weathered and partially inaccessible. Even when the volume recedes, the quiet remains watchful. The listener is placed inside a landscape whose history cannot be reconstructed, surrounded by fragments that imply events without revealing what happened. Memory exists here as texture rather than narrative.

The printed matter extends that uncertainty beyond sound. A sixteen-page collage booklet and large poster require a different scale of attention from a conventional cassette insert. Images can be examined, unfolded, placed beside the playing objects and reorganized by the viewer. Collage is the visual equivalent of Lettera 22’s editing process: materials removed from their original contexts acquire new meanings through proximity, cropping and collision. The package turns Blue Telepathy into a portable exhibition, with the record and cassette functioning as audio components among the paper evidence.

That completeness makes the limited edition feel purposeful rather than luxurious. The box does not inflate thirty-two minutes of music with unrelated merchandise. It divides one idea among several materials, each with its own type of memory. Vinyl preserves sound as a visible spiral. Cassette tape hides it inside a shell and physically transports it from one reel to another. The booklet fixes fragments into printed sequences, while the poster enlarges the visual field beyond the dimensions of the box. Every object communicates differently, and none delivers the entire work alone.

Blue Telepathy ultimately describes transmission as an imperfect material process. Mazza and Castro do not imagine two minds meeting in pure, silent space. Their signals travel through hiss, distortion, magnetic tape, vinyl grooves, printed images and the acoustics of whatever room receives them. Information is lost, but the loss produces atmosphere. The missing explanation becomes more powerful than a completed message. Across four untitled pieces, Lettera 22 creates a shadow world in which machines continue exchanging signals, landscapes retain traces of vanished activity and memory returns as damaged sound. The box does not decode those transmissions. It gives them enough physical forms to keep circulating.