Minóy & PBK - 2012 - Cloisters CDr

 

Attenuation Circuit – ACR 1025  216.00MB FLAC

The cover resembles weather attempting to become architecture. Blue, gray, violet and black washes spread across the surface without settling into recognizable walls, while small dark forms appear suspended inside the stains. The title floats above them in quiet lowercase letters, almost too delicate for the mass accumulating underneath. A cloister is normally an enclosed walkway surrounding an open courtyard, a protected space designed for repetition, contemplation and withdrawal from ordinary life. Minóy and PBK construct an acoustic version, but theirs has been damaged by transmission. The corridors are filled with shortwave interference, overloaded electronics, distant voices and reverberation so heavy that every sound appears to have wandered through several rooms before reaching the listener.
The date on this edition can be misleading. The CDr appeared in 2012, but the music was recorded and mixed by PBK in 1987, during the cassette underground that gave Minóy much of his strange international visibility. The later edition is therefore less a contemporary album than a doorway reopened. More than twenty years separate the original recording from its physical reappearance, and that temporal distance becomes part of the listening experience. The sounds do not arrive as clean archival evidence. They seem already haunted by the years they spent existing through tapes, partial circulation, private collections and memory.
Minóy, born Stanley Keith Bowsza, created an enormous body of work from Torrance, California, while participating in a worldwide mail-art and home-taping network. His recordings frequently transformed inexpensive electronics, radio material, loops, voices and excessive processing into environments that felt far larger than the domestic rooms where they were made. PBK, the project of Phillip B. Klingler, developed a related practice of intuitive collage, sustained electronics and unstable studio construction. Their collaboration does not sound like two separate artists politely contributing identifiable layers. It resembles one contaminated system in which individual ownership has been dissolved by repeated mixing and reverb.
This loss of clean authorship suits the title. Cloistered life traditionally minimizes personal display in favor of ritual, repetition and submission to a larger order. The individual voice remains present, but it is shaped by architecture and communal practice. Here Minóy’s voice repeatedly rises through PBK’s electronics, yet it never becomes the commanding center of the music. The surrounding sound bends, multiplies and partially erases it. He calls outward, but the cloister answers by returning an altered version of the call.
The thirty-one-minute title piece begins as a large, slow-moving field whose boundaries are difficult to locate. Keyboard-like tones, static, radio fragments and heavier electronic pressure overlap until foreground and background exchange positions. A sound that initially appears distant may gradually become the dominant surface without any obvious moment of arrival. Another layer can remain almost hidden for several minutes before the listener realizes it has been supporting everything above it. The piece develops through these perceptual changes rather than through conventional events.
This is “ambient” music only if ambient is permitted to remain uncomfortable. The work surrounds the listener, but it does not offer the smooth neutrality associated with decorative atmosphere. Its drones are corroded, crowded and slightly hostile to the space they occupy. Rust appears to have entered the electronics. The tones are sustained, yet their surfaces keep shedding particles. What seems still from a distance becomes busy and damaged under closer attention.
Minóy’s vocals are initially placed low enough in the mixture to behave almost subliminally. A howl may emerge as another frequency before its human source becomes apparent. This creates a peculiar emotional instability. The listener hears distress without immediately identifying a distressed person, then suddenly recognizes lungs and throat inside the machinery. The electronics have not merely accompanied the voice. They have disguised it as part of the weather.
That transformation prevents the vocal performance from becoming theatrical in the ordinary sense. Minóy’s cries can sound anguished, ecstatic, ridiculous and devotional within the same stretch of recording. These conditions do not cancel one another. The extremity of the treatment makes sincerity and absurdity difficult to separate. A voice drenched in cheap spring reverb can resemble a prophet inside a cavern, an amateur singer trapped in broken equipment, or a household ghost discovering that the walls answer back.
The famous Radio Shack mixer reverb is central to this architecture. Reverb normally supplies the illusion of a room after the original sound has been captured. Here the illusion becomes larger than the source. Every gesture produces a tail that overlaps with later gestures, causing the past to remain acoustically present. The recording continually accumulates its previous actions. The cloister is constructed from memory that refuses to decay at a normal rate.
This inexpensive effect also complicates ideas of professional sound. An expensive studio might have produced cleaner depth, but cleanliness would weaken the work’s personality. The spring reverb rattles, smears and gives the entire mix a metallic afterlife. Its limitations become compositional strengths. Rather than simulate a believable cathedral, it creates an impossible structure whose corridors bend back into the equipment.
Shortwave radio introduces another spatial contradiction. A cloister represents withdrawal from the world, while radio receives signals traveling across enormous distances. Voices and fragments from outside enter the enclosed environment without bringing complete information. Geography becomes audible but unreadable. A signal has crossed borders and atmosphere only to arrive as partial speech, static or electronic shadow.
This was one of cassette culture’s central experiences. Artists could be physically isolated while participating in an international network of recordings, letters and collaborations. The tape itself became a small architectural enclosure containing distant people. Someone working privately in California could send sound outward and receive transformed material from another location. Solitude and community were no longer opposites. The cloister had acquired a postal system.
“In Shadow” intensifies the ritual character while revealing the collaboration’s peculiar humor. For much of its duration, the track appears to be another cavernous industrial invocation. Minóy’s voice struggles with a dense field of reverberant electronics, and repeated calls seem directed toward some absent god or unseen authority. Eventually the performance reveals itself as a mangled treatment of the old popular song “Me and My Shadow.”
That revelation changes everything heard before it. What seemed like original ceremonial language becomes a standard song stretched beyond social recognition. The familiar image of a person walking with his shadow is already appropriate for this collaboration. A shadow follows the body while remaining a separate, distorted likeness determined by light and surface. PBK’s electronics act as Minóy’s shadow, but Minóy’s voice also shadows the electronics. Neither can be considered the original object once the mix has folded them together.
The choice of an old standard is not merely comic vandalism. Popular songs survive through recognition, repetition and stable melodic identity. Minóy attacks that stability while preserving enough residue for the song to return unexpectedly. Memory is placed under pressure. The listener may recognize a phrase, lose it beneath noise, then hear it reappear as though an old broadcast has broken through the wall.
There is tenderness hidden inside this damage. “Me and My Shadow” concerns companionship reduced to its most minimal form: even when alone, the singer remains accompanied by the dark outline produced by his own body. Minóy’s treatment turns that companionship into something less reassuring. The shadow may be loyal, but it is also inescapable. It repeats every movement without sharing consciousness. Inside the massive reverb, singer and shadow become trapped in an endless delayed response.
The music’s humor matters because it prevents the album from hardening into self-important darkness. Minóy could create genuinely disturbing atmospheres while remaining willing to howl a sentimental standard through malfunctioning electronics. The absurdity does not destroy the seriousness. It reveals that solemnity is another effect, one that can be generated, overloaded and made unstable like any other signal.
“Endgame” is the shortest piece, though at more than ten minutes it still has enough space to establish its own pressure system. The title suggests a final phase in which possibilities have narrowed and every remaining action carries consequence. Yet the music does not sound like a clean conclusion. It vibrates, surges and continues producing residue, as though the system has been told to end but lacks a mechanism for shutting down.
The electronics feel more concentrated here. Sustained tones and dense reverberation create a fundamental trembling, while Minóy’s voice returns as an intermittent disturbance within the larger field. The composition seems less interested in reaching a destination than in studying what remains after development has been exhausted. Endgame is not silence following destruction. It is machinery continuing after its original purpose has disappeared.
Across the three pieces, PBK and Minóy develop what PBK later called “noise ambient,” a useful term because neither half can comfortably dominate the other. Noise supplies friction, instability and damaged information. Ambient supplies duration, space and immersion. The music is neither a series of attacks nor a passive background. It creates environments whose atmosphere is itself abrasive.
This approach anticipated a great deal of later dark ambient, drone and industrial collage without sounding neatly absorbed into any of those categories. Its loops remain too awkward, its voice too exposed and its surfaces too materially strange for genre polish. The work retains the feeling of discovery, of artists learning what happens when available technology is pushed into a relationship it was not designed to support.
The 2012 CDr gives this unstable cassette-era material another physical body. A recordable compact disc occupies an intermediate historical position: more digitally precise than a home-dubbed tape, but still capable of being made and circulated in small quantities outside industrial manufacturing. It preserves the music while retaining the handmade, limited character of the network from which the music emerged.
The remaster cannot return the listener to 1987, nor should it try. Every reissue changes the artifact it carries. Tape saturation, equipment noise and crude processing become newly visible through digital playback. What once sounded like a contemporary experiment now also sounds like evidence of obsolete machines and vanished methods of circulation. The recording gains history without losing its capacity to overwhelm.
That balance is the achievement of Cloisters. It is old music that does not behave politely as an archive. Its walls still move. Its voices still fail to remain human. Its radio signals still arrive without explanations, and its spring reverb continues manufacturing rooms that never physically existed.
Anyone who received the original cassette, corresponded with either artist, or knows more about the exact exchange and assembly of these recordings could add valuable details. The official credits establish who performed, recorded and remastered the work, but cassette culture often stored its most important history in letters, package inserts and personal memory. Cloisters survives as a large enclosed sound, but its doors remain open to anyone who can describe how it first traveled through the world.

John Cage - 2007- Four Walls 3xCD

 

Brilliant Classics – 8850  568.58MB FLAC

The cover presents a long brick corridor narrowing toward a triangular opening, with a thin strip of reflected light dividing the floor. It is an almost brutally literal image for Four Walls: architecture converted into emotional pressure, perspective promising escape while making the distance toward it appear unnaturally long. Yet the three discs inside immediately complicate that enclosure. This is not merely a recording of one John Cage composition. It is a passage through almost sixty years of work for piano, voice, violin and percussion, beginning with songs written by a composer still searching for his language and ending with music in which performers are invited to inhabit time rather than obey it. The walls remain, but every disc discovers another way to listen through them.
Four Walls occupies the commanding first position because it reveals a John Cage often concealed by his later reputation. The familiar public Cage is the smiling philosopher of chance, silence, mushrooms, Zen, radios and indeterminacy, the composer who supposedly removed personal emotion from music and opened the concert hall to whatever sounds happened to enter. Four Walls comes from 1944, before that identity had fully formed. It is tightly composed, entirely diatonic and psychologically charged. Its materials are extremely limited, yet those materials repeat with such pressure that simplicity becomes claustrophobic. Cage does not escape emotion here. He locks emotion inside a room and watches it pace.
The original work was a dance drama created with Merce Cunningham around a dysfunctional family: a loving but powerless mother, a silent father, rebellious children, a fiancé, speaking relatives and a chorus of “mad ones.” That plot sounds almost shockingly conventional beside the abstract Cage-Cunningham collaborations that would later separate music and dance into independent systems. Four Walls belongs to the unstable beginning of their partnership, when narrative, family psychology, desire and confinement still stood plainly onstage. The original production received only one performance and then largely disappeared, leaving the piano score as the surviving architecture of a theatrical event that can no longer be fully reconstructed.
That absence gives every recording an uncanny condition. The pianist performs rooms whose inhabitants have vanished. Scene numbers remain, dances interrupt the action, and one brief vocal interlude preserves Cunningham’s words, but the bodies and gestures that originally explained the sequence are missing. The listener must build a family from contrasts: loud against soft, high against low, rhythmic against sustained, sound against silence. Domestic conflict has been reduced to musical opposition.
Giancarlo Simonacci’s piano is therefore not merely accompaniment awaiting dancers. It must carry the entire psychological structure. Repeated white-key figures can sound innocent at first, almost childlike, but recurrence changes their meaning. A phrase heard once may seem transparent; heard again after a silence, it begins to resemble fixation. Cage’s limited harmonic field does not produce serenity. It creates the sensation that every character is trapped inside the same available vocabulary, unable to discover the note that would let the drama escape its pattern.
This is one of the great revelations of Four Walls: repetition can be emotional without becoming Romantic. Cage does not need swelling orchestration or elaborate chromatic anguish. A simple figure can acquire dread because it returns at the wrong moment, remains too long or occupies a register from which nothing answers. Silence becomes the space between family members who cannot communicate. The piano’s clarity makes the estrangement more severe because nothing is hidden by complexity.
The vocal scene, “Sweet love my throat is gurgling,” arrives like a person suddenly speaking from inside an instrumental dream. Lorna Windsor’s soprano does not turn the work into conventional opera. The voice appears briefly, carrying language through a structure that has otherwise communicated through spatial and dynamic contrast. Its physical imagery is peculiar and vulnerable: love enters through the throat, the same channel used for breath, speech, swallowing and distress. Once the voice disappears, the piano seems lonelier for having briefly acquired a human witness.
The Seasons, composed three years later, transforms the first disc’s emotional enclosure into a cycle. Prelude, winter, spring, summer and fall proceed with formal balance, each season separated by another prelude before the opening material returns as finale. Cage was becoming increasingly interested in Indian aesthetics and in the relationship between emotional states and natural processes. The result is not pictorial weather music. Winter does not merely shiver, nor does summer burst into obvious heat. Each season functions as an interior condition, a way of arranging energy.
Placed after Four Walls, The Seasons feels like architecture opening onto time. The family drama was caught inside a house whose conflicts could only repeat. Seasonal change offers recurrence without imprisonment. Winter returns, but it returns as part of a larger order that includes transformation. The cycle does not solve human suffering, yet it places private emotion inside processes too broad to belong to one personality. Cage is beginning to move from psychological narrative toward the acceptance of change itself.
The second disc turns from rooms and seasons toward the human mouth. Its early Three Songs and Five Songs preserve a young composer still working with recognizable lyric expression, but even here words are treated as acoustic material rather than transparent messages. Vowels stretch, consonants interrupt, and the piano may support, contradict or simply coexist with the sung line. The songs reveal that Cage’s later fascination with language did not arise from a rejection of poetry. He had long been interested in what happens when words enter a musical structure and lose some of their ordinary explanatory power.
Forever and Sunsmell pushes voice into percussion, where singing must coexist with struck, shaken and resonant objects. The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs reduces accompaniment even further: the performer sings while striking the closed piano. The instrument is no longer primarily a keyboard. Its wooden body becomes a drum, a piece of furniture and an architectural surface. A piano associated with harmonic civilization is returned to impact.
The effect is theatrical but also philosophical. Cage does not destroy the piano; he notices that it was always more than its keys. The lid, frame, strings, pedals and resonance are all possible instruments once inherited etiquette is suspended. The same transformation occurs in the voice. It may carry a literary text, but it is also breath, pitch, saliva, muscular effort and vibration inside bone. Voice and piano meet not as melody and accompaniment but as two physical bodies capable of being struck by air or hand.
Four Dances broadens this bodily theater through piano, voice and percussion, while She Is Asleep divides itself into two strikingly different worlds. Its first section uses twelve tom-toms, creating a field of tuned skin and impact without melodic instruments. The second joins voice to prepared piano, the instrument Cage had altered by inserting materials between its strings. The familiar keyboard now activates a hidden percussion ensemble inside the piano’s body.
The prepared piano is often treated as Cage’s clever invention, a novelty that converts one instrument into many. In this collection it sounds more fundamental than that. Preparation makes the instrument acknowledge contact. Every pitch depends upon metal, rubber, wood, pressure and placement. The piano no longer pretends that musical notes arrive from an abstract realm untouched by matter. A key causes a mechanism to strike a string whose behavior has been physically changed. Sound becomes evidence of an encounter.
A Flower and Nowth Upon Nacht return to the intimate scale of voice and struck piano, but the decades separating them make the pairing remarkable. Cage could return to a simple combination late in life without merely repeating an early technique. By 1984, language had passed through years of mesostics, chance operations and experiments in dismantling ordinary syntax. The later voice does not need to communicate through conventional continuity. Words can appear as luminous fragments, each one briefly complete before another changes the field around it.
The third disc begins with Nocturne for violin and piano, one of Cage’s most unexpectedly tender compositions. The stated aim was to soften the inherent distinction between the instruments. The violin sustains while the piano uses resonant chords and clusters, allowing their separate attacks to blur inside a shared atmosphere. The title carries Romantic history, but Cage approaches nocturnal feeling without grand confession. Darkness becomes a condition in which boundaries are less visible.
Six Melodies continues that reduction. Piano and violin exchange isolated tones and intervals without a conventional division between melody and accompaniment. The music is spare, but not empty. Every note alters the balance because so little surrounds it. These pieces belong to the same period as Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts, when he was seeking a music of stillness, continuity and reduced ego before fully adopting chance procedures.
The relationship between David Simonacci’s violin and Giancarlo Simonacci’s piano becomes one of mutual permission. Neither instrument must dominate or complete the other. A violin tone may begin, remain exposed and disappear without being harmonically justified. A piano note may stand alone rather than functioning as part of a chord progression. The duo creates companionship without dependence.
Then the set jumps four decades into Cage’s final Number Pieces, and the nature of musical relationship changes again. Two4 and Two6 are named according to the number of performers and their position within Cage’s series of works for two musicians. Instead of fixing every event into ordinary measured notation, Cage supplies flexible time brackets within which actions may begin and end. The performers share a duration but are not forced into synchronized conversation.
This late method realizes an idea that Cage and Cunningham had explored for decades: coexistence without subordination. Two people can occupy the same time without one becoming accompaniment to the other. Their sounds may overlap, miss each other or create relationships nobody planned in advance. Independence does not prevent connection. It makes connection an event rather than a requirement.
Two4 places a largely microtonal violin against piano material consisting mostly of shorter sounds. Long bowed tones move through a field where piano events appear and vanish according to their permitted windows. Time feels spacious because each sound carries awareness of everything that could have happened around it but did not. Silence is not a blank separating notes. It is the shared territory in which both performers make decisions.
Two6 goes further by leaving its time brackets empty and giving the musicians collections of possible materials. The violinist may choose sustained intervals, microtonal motion or silence; the pianist draws partly upon transformations related to Erik Satie’s Vexations and ascending pitch sequences. Cage provides conditions rather than a single obligatory path. Composer, performer and circumstance divide responsibility for the result.
Hearing this after Four Walls completes an extraordinary historical arc. In 1944, Cage built a drama from precise contrasts and repeated materials, using structure to contain psychological intensity. Near the end of his life, he created structures that protected freedom, allowing performers to choose how sound would inhabit time. The early walls hold emotion in place; the late brackets open windows whose exact positions cannot be predicted.
Yet the two approaches are not opposites. Cage never abandoned structure. Chance did not mean carelessness, and freedom did not mean shapelessness. Whether composing every piano figure or defining intervals of possibility, he remained fascinated by frames. A wall is a frame around space. A season frames change. A song frames words. A time bracket frames choice.
The three-disc design makes that continuity unusually audible. Cage is frequently introduced through isolated monuments: the prepared piano, 4′33″, chance operations or a famous anecdote about listening to silence. This collection replaces the monument with a corridor. Early songs lead toward percussion; percussion enters the piano; theatrical drama opens into seasonal cycle; lyrical violin writing becomes near-weightless coexistence.
The performances also resist the idea that Cage requires eccentric presentation. The musicians approach the scores as chamber music demanding concentration, balance and precision. That seriousness does not domesticate the experimental elements. It reveals how much craft was always inside them. Striking a piano lid, preparing strings or choosing a sound within a flexible time window still requires touch, judgment and responsibility.
The title Four Walls may therefore be accidentally perfect for the entire box. Every instrument begins with boundaries: the piano’s case, the violin’s body, the singer’s throat, the percussionist’s skin and metal. Cage does not escape those enclosures by pretending matter is irrelevant. He listens to the walls, strikes them, alters them and eventually allows performers to decide when their sounds will cross.
This set leaves the familiar caricature of John Cage outside the corridor. Inside is a composer of family anguish, peculiar songs, nocturnal tenderness, ritual percussion, seasonal balance and radically gentle social structures. The rebel remains, but rebellion appears less as destruction than expanded permission. The piano may be played on its keys or its lid. A voice may sing words or expose breath. Two musicians may meet without being commanded to agree.
By the final silence of Two6, the distant opening in the cover image no longer looks like an escape from confinement. It looks like the shape produced when walls are placed carefully enough to reveal the space between them.

John Cage - 2005 - 44 Harmonies & Cheap Imitation 2xCD

Mode – mode 144/45  507.47MB FLAC

The cover is almost aggressively uneventful: a pale green field, modest white lettering, no portrait, no historical illustration and no visual clue that the two discs contain more than two hours of music assembled from the remains of early American hymns and Erik Satie. Its restraint prepares the ear correctly. Nothing here announces itself through spectacle. The recording asks what remains when familiar music is relieved of its original function, stripped of explanatory words and allowed to exist as isolated intervals, durations and silences. The result is not destruction exactly. It is music after part of its social memory has been carefully removed.
The two works belong together because both are acts of affectionate interference. Cage does not quote earlier composers in order to display historical learning or produce recognizable collage. He enters existing music and changes the conditions under which it can continue. In 44 Harmonies, hymns and anthems from the period surrounding the American Revolution lose selected notes through chance operations. In Cheap Imitation, the rhythmic structure of Erik Satie’s Socrate survives while its pitches are replaced. One work subtracts from a collective musical past; the other rebuilds a beloved composition after legal restrictions made its direct use impossible. Both ask whether identity lives in notes, rhythm, memory, function or the listener’s desire to recognize a source.
The 44 Harmonies originated inside Apartment House 1776, Cage’s enormous Bicentennial musicircus. The title imagined early American musical traditions existing like residents in separate rooms of one building, audible simultaneously without being synchronized into a single patriotic statement. Protestant hymns, Sephardic songs, Native American music, African American calls and hollers, marches, tunes and instrumental fragments could coexist without being forced to agree. Cage’s apartment house was therefore an alternative to the official national pageant. America was represented not as one triumphant melody but as incompatible sounds sharing time and territory.
That conception was generous, but it was not free from historical difficulty. To divide the country’s inhabitants into several representative traditions risks turning vast, internally diverse peoples into symbolic rooms within a structure still designed by one composer. The year 1776 also cannot mean the same thing to colonial Protestants, enslaved Africans, Indigenous nations and Jewish communities. The Declaration’s language of freedom existed beside slavery, dispossession and restricted citizenship. Cage’s refusal to harmonize those histories into one official anthem is meaningful, yet the categories themselves reveal the limitations of any artistic attempt to summarize a nation.
The 44 Harmonies concentrate upon one particular room in that apartment house: white Protestant congregational music by Supply Belcher, William Billings, Jacob French, Andrew Law and James Lyon. These hymns helped early communities sing themselves into collective identity. Their harmonies carried worship, instruction, mourning, social discipline and a sense of shared belonging. Cage removes the texts and subjects the notes to chance, leaving structures that still resemble sacred music while no longer declaring doctrine.
This subtraction creates a peculiar spiritual condition. The harmonies sound devotional, but the object of devotion has disappeared. Cadences begin forming and then encounter missing steps. Chords retain the upright clarity of hymnody while being detached from the words that once gave them theological purpose. The music seems to remember belief without being able to state what was believed.
Irvine Arditti’s arrangement makes that condition especially vivid. The original harmonies may be played on a keyboard instrument, where multiple notes can emerge from one performer and one mechanism. Dividing them among two violins, viola and cello turns each chord into a small society. Four musicians must sustain, enter, withdraw and breathe together. A vertical harmony becomes the result of several bodies maintaining a temporary agreement.
The Arditti Quartet is famous for navigating some of the most technically demanding and densely notated string music of the modern era. Here its precision serves extreme simplicity. The challenge is not surviving a barrage of extended techniques or rhythmic complexity. It is maintaining purity when every entrance is exposed. A slight imbalance, an unnecessary swell or an expressive vibrato could change the fragile proportions of the entire sonority. Virtuosity becomes the discipline of not adding what the music has not requested.
The quartet’s largely vibrato-free tone creates an almost glasslike surface. The instruments blend without losing their individual grain, producing harmonies that can resemble an organ, a distant choir or one large stringed instrument whose internal parts have been separated across the room. Bowed sound also gives each note a life that a keyboard cannot provide. A chord is not struck and allowed to decay. It is held through continuous physical effort, and its apparent stillness contains four bows making microscopic adjustments.
This physical continuity exposes Cage’s paradoxical relationship with harmony. As a young composer, he accepted Schoenberg’s judgment that his lack of harmonic instinct would leave him facing an impassable wall. Cage spent much of his career finding ways around that wall through rhythm, percussion, chance, silence and the acceptance of environmental sound. Yet 44 Harmonies returns directly to chords, thirds, sixths and tonal remnants. He does not suddenly embrace functional harmony as a system of progression. He frees individual harmonies from the obligation to lead anywhere.
The pieces therefore feel both ancient and strangely suspended outside history. A chord may contain the unmistakable flavor of eighteenth-century hymnody, but without ordinary syntax it becomes difficult to determine whether it is beginning, continuing or concluding. The listener recognizes the architecture while finding many of its corridors missing. These are houses with doors opening onto air.
Duration varies dramatically. Some harmonies pass in little more than thirty seconds; others stretch beyond ten minutes. The short pieces resemble fragments preserved after a larger manuscript was damaged. A few intervals appear, establish a delicate relationship and vanish before the listener can decide what they were meant to accomplish. The longest harmonies transform subtraction into environment. Sparse sonorities and long silences make every return feel architectural, as though another part of an abandoned meetinghouse has briefly become visible.
“Harmony IV: Lift Up Your Heads, O Ye Gates” and “Harmony V: The Lord Descended” together occupy nearly half an hour near the beginning of the cycle. Their titles retain biblical grandeur, yet the music has been emptied of rhetorical certainty. There is no choir proclaiming the text, no congregation affirming it and no harmonic machinery driving toward revelation. What remains is spacious, patient and curiously vulnerable. The gate may lift, the Lord may descend, but the music refuses to stage either event as spectacle.
Elsewhere, names such as “Funeral Anthem,” “Reflection,” “Wisdom,” “Rapture,” “Tempest” and “The Lord Is Ris’n” offer emotional and religious instructions that the sounds only partially obey. “Rapture” appears twice, derived from Supply Belcher, but its remnants do not explode into ecstatic release. Cage’s deletions leave rapture full of openings. The title promises transport while the quartet remains attentive to individual tones and the silence surrounding them.
The place names are equally haunting: Cookfield, Mansfield, Dover, Littleton, Brunswick, Bellingham, Detroit, New York, Greenwich, New Windsor, Litchfield and Bloomfield. Hymn tunes often carried geographical names that allowed melodies to function as portable communities. On this recording those names form an alternative map of America, one made from settlements, congregations and remembered singing rather than borders. Yet the map is incomplete. The voices of the communities have been removed, and the quartet performs their musical remains from another century and another cultural position.
This could feel like an act of sterilization, turning lived religious practice into refined contemporary chamber music. Cage’s method risks converting social history into beautiful abstraction. The performance does not restore the specific congregations, beliefs or conflicts from which the hymns emerged. It cannot. What it offers instead is an opportunity to hear how much historical authority was embedded in apparently ordinary tonal movement. Once selected notes disappear, the remaining sounds stop concealing themselves as natural order. Each interval becomes a decision again.
Chance operations are crucial to that transformation. Cage did not simply edit according to modern taste, removing whatever sounded too conventional. Chance interrupted his preference and prevented the resulting harmonies from becoming a predictable style of elegant fragmentation. Some original relationships survive almost intact; others are reduced until their logic becomes skeletal. The method neither preserves nor destroys consistently. It produces uneven historical erosion.
That erosion resembles the way cultural memory actually works. Certain songs, names and rituals remain vivid while neighboring information disappears. A community may preserve a melody but forget the circumstances that made it necessary. A nation celebrates a founding date while suppressing the experiences that contradict its preferred story. Cage’s missing notes become small acoustic absences inside a larger inherited narrative.
The forty-four pieces are not arranged to form conventional dramatic development. Listening to them continuously can cause individual titles and sources to blur, but that blurring is productive. After enough time, the quartet stops sounding like an ensemble presenting miniatures and begins resembling a device for examining harmony under changing conditions. Density, register, duration and silence become the true subjects.
The experience is calm without being decorative. These performances could remain quietly in a room, but attentive listening reveals persistent dislocation. Cadences do not provide the usual psychological reassurance. Familiar tonal colors appear without explaining why they are present. The music repeatedly resembles home while withholding the route back to it.
After more than one hundred minutes of quartet sound, Cheap Imitation reduces the population to Irvine Arditti alone. The change is profound. The communal hymn fragments give way to a solitary line, and America’s contested historical apartment house is replaced by Cage’s private attachment to Erik Satie.
The work originated from a practical crisis. Cage had arranged Satie’s Socrate to accompany Merce Cunningham’s dance Second Hand, but permission to use the music was denied. Rather than abandon the choreography’s rhythmic structure, Cage created a new melodic line with the same phrase lengths and rhythmic proportions. Copyright obstruction became a compositional method. The prohibited original remained present as invisible scaffolding.
Calling the result Cheap Imitation is both self-mockery and philosophical accuracy. Cage does not pretend to have replaced Satie with an equivalent masterpiece. The title admits dependence openly. Yet imitation becomes strangely intimate because Cage preserves not the recognizable melodies but their movement through time. He follows Satie’s breathing while speaking with different pitches.
This is a deeper form of resemblance than quotation. A quoted melody allows the audience to congratulate itself for recognition. Cheap Imitation keeps the beloved source hidden inside duration. The listener who does not know Socrate can still hear a line shaped by another composition’s body. Love survives as proportion.
The violin version makes that love sound exposed. A solo violin cannot hide behind harmonic mass. Every pitch arrives alone, connected to the next by bow pressure, silence and Arditti’s control of an extremely restrained line. The three movements unfold with pale clarity, neither conventionally expressive nor emotionally empty. Arditti does not inflate the music into a Romantic lament. He allows its modal turns and pauses to retain their peculiar humility.
Cage regarded Cheap Imitation as troubling partly because it revealed personal attachment so openly. Much of his work sought to reduce the composer’s preferences and allow sounds to be themselves, but this piece existed because he loved Satie’s music and refused to let an external prohibition sever the relationship. Chance is still present in the selection of pitches, yet chance serves devotion. The composer’s affection is not expressed through emotional decoration; it is expressed through the labor of rebuilding.
Placed after 44 Harmonies, the solo piece clarifies that Cage’s use of historical material was never simply ironic. He could alter music precisely because he listened to it closely enough to understand which elements might survive transformation. The early American hymns are decomposed into resonant fragments. Satie’s melodic surface disappears while its temporal skeleton remains. In both cases, Cage treats the past as something living enough to withstand change.
The album’s apparent tranquility therefore conceals two confrontations with authority. Apartment House 1776 responds to official national commemoration by replacing unified patriotic narrative with simultaneous, unsynchronized traditions. Cheap Imitation responds to copyright refusal by composing around the forbidden object. Cage does not attack either authority through loud protest. He changes the structure of the situation until another kind of music becomes possible.
The Arditti performances are ideal for this quiet resistance. Their accuracy never turns the works into academic specimens. Precision allows the missing material to remain audible as absence. The quartet gives every surviving interval enough space to vibrate independently, while Arditti’s solo playing lets Satie’s invisible rhythm guide the line without turning imitation into impersonation.
This double CD is ultimately about inheritance without obedience. Cage receives hymn tunes, national history, Satie, copyright restrictions, conventional harmony and the institutions of classical performance. He neither rejects them completely nor accepts their original terms. He removes, rearranges, translates and continues.
What emerges is music of extraordinary gentleness, but its gentleness should not be confused with passivity. To leave a harmony unresolved can be a refusal. To let different histories coexist without synchronization can be political. To preserve the rhythm of forbidden music while changing every pitch can be an act of loyalty performed through disobedience.
The forty-four harmonies and the three parts of Cheap Imitation leave the past recognizable but unreachable. We hear rooms from an apartment house whose residents have changed, hymns whose words are absent, a Satie work whose melodies cannot appear and a composer who discovered that subtraction could be another form of care. The missing notes do not create emptiness. They create the space in which history begins vibrating again.

Sindre Bjerga - 2010 - Hermetically Sealed Static Operation

Operator Produkzion – OPERPRODUKT77  70.36MB FLAC

 The cover places three repeated black shapes inside a narrow rectangular chamber, stacked vertically against an unexpectedly pink field. They could be microscopic organisms, leaking laboratory vessels, dark balloons, cells dividing incorrectly or an abstract diagram of fluid passing through sealed compartments. The image appears scientific without explaining the experiment. Repetition suggests that an operation is being performed, but each repeated form looks slightly too organic and unstable to remain under technical control. This is an excellent entrance into Sindre Bjerga’s music, where low-cost recording devices and damaged signals often behave less like obedient equipment than captive organisms developing their own nervous systems.

The title joins three ideas that immediately begin working against one another. “Hermetically sealed” describes something protected from outside air, moisture and contamination. “Static” can mean electrical interference, a stationary condition or the residue produced when communication fails. “Operation” suggests both a controlled procedure and a machine remaining active. The complete phrase therefore describes an airtight system that is simultaneously motionless, electrically unstable and functioning. It sounds like the name of a laboratory process designed by somebody who has already lost confidence in the laboratory.
The fact that this is a live recording makes the title even better. No concert is genuinely hermetically sealed. The room enters the performance through its acoustics, electrical supply, audience movement and the physical behavior of the equipment. Every live sound is contaminated by location. Yet the recording encloses that event afterward, placing one particular evening in St. Petersburg inside a CDr and allowing the performance to travel without its original bodies, temperature or architecture. The event becomes sealed only after it has finished.
Bjerga’s wider practice has long depended upon devices associated with domestic memory rather than institutional electronic music: cassette players, dictaphones, small mixers, inexpensive effects, found recordings and objects made useful through amplification. These tools carry histories before the performance begins. A cassette does not present sound as immaculate information. It brings hiss, uneven movement, mechanical strain and traces of previous handling. Tape can preserve a voice while slowly altering the material that preserves it. Playback is always accompanied by the medium remembering itself.
This gives Bjerga’s work a peculiar emotional scale. The sounds may expand into deep drones and psychedelic environments, but their sources frequently remain intimate and vulnerable. One can imagine a small machine on a table producing an atmosphere much larger than the room containing it. The relationship between modest cause and enormous apparent result is part of the music’s fascination. Technology does not need to be advanced in order to become mysterious. A basic cassette mechanism becomes mysterious as soon as it stops behaving as an invisible servant.
Static is especially important because it is usually defined as unwanted information. Radio static occupies the space where a clear signal should be. Tape hiss is treated as contamination surrounding the recorded event. Feedback indicates that an audio system has begun listening to itself rather than transmitting its intended content. Bjerga reverses this hierarchy. Interference is not waste surrounding the music. It is evidence that transmission has a physical body.
A signal passing through equipment is changed by every stage. It encounters magnetic particles, cables, amplification, electrical resistance, speakers, air and the listener’s hearing. Clean reproduction attempts to make those encounters disappear. This performance allows them to remain exposed. Sound becomes a record of everything that prevented it from arriving perfectly.
The word “static” also describes something that does not move, but sustained electronic sound is rarely truly still. A drone may appear fixed while its internal frequencies beat against one another. Hiss can contain countless minute variations. A loop can repeat the same material while the listener’s attention changes its apparent shape. What initially seems like one surface gradually separates into layers, pulses and small irregularities. Motion migrates from composition into perception.
This is where the hermetic image becomes psychologically useful. When a limited field of sound is maintained long enough, the listener begins searching inside it. With no conventional melody or rhythm directing attention forward, hearing turns inward toward details that would normally be ignored. The sealed chamber becomes an observation cell. Nothing obvious can enter or escape, so every small fluctuation gains significance.
Bjerga’s live method complicates that enclosure through improvisation. A prerecorded loop may establish one condition, but physical manipulation can bend it away from perfect recurrence. Playback speed changes, a signal is overloaded, an object introduces another texture or a control movement exposes a layer previously hidden. The structure is discovered through handling rather than executed from a finished score. Performance becomes an operation conducted upon unstable material.
There is a useful difference between this approach and the fantasy of the electronic composer exercising complete control. Bjerga does not appear interested in making equipment disappear beneath polished intention. The machinery is allowed to retain agency. It can resist, distort and answer unpredictably. The performer establishes a system, listens to its behavior and makes decisions inside the consequences.
That process resembles alchemy more than laboratory science. The word “hermetic” itself carries an older association with sealed vessels in which materials were transformed away from outside interference. The alchemist enclosed substances so heat and reaction could generate another state. Bjerga’s vessel contains magnetic memory, electrical pressure and damaged repetition. Instead of producing gold, the operation converts obsolete or ordinary media into altered perception.
The pink cover prevents this experiment from becoming conventionally grim. Industrial and drone releases frequently rely upon black, gray, military green or corroded metal to announce severity. Here the dark organic diagrams float against a color associated with softness, flesh, artificial sweetness and cheap consumer packaging. The contrast makes the object more unsettling than another monochrome industrial sleeve might have been. The operation is severe, but its laboratory has been decorated like strange candy.
That visual choice fits the “kitchen sink psychedelia” Bjerga has used to describe his own work. Psychedelia does not require decorative guitar solos or luxurious analog synthesis. It can arise from repetition, unstable scale and ordinary objects becoming unfamiliar. A cassette player heard too closely begins to resemble a biological mechanism. A minor loop becomes architectural. Static stops representing emptiness and becomes a dense population.
The recording’s St. Petersburg origin also places it inside the touring and correspondence network that sustained Bjerga’s work. By 2010 he had already released large numbers of small-edition cassettes and CDrs through labels scattered across different countries. Performances could be captured in one city, issued by a local or regional imprint, mailed abroad and eventually reappear years later as digital archives. Each stage added another container around the original event.
Operator Produkzion’s edition of 109 copies is characteristic of that economy. It is large enough for the performance to travel internationally, yet small enough that every object required direct attention. Discs had to be duplicated, numbered, packaged, advertised and mailed. Nobody could assume that an audience would appear through automatic platform recommendations. Circulation depended upon catalogues, personal contacts, trades, distributors and listeners willing to follow unfamiliar label names into strange territory.
The CDr format embodies the title’s contradiction. A compact disc appears sealed and stable, its information protected beneath a clear surface, but recordable discs are vulnerable objects. Dye layers age, surfaces scratch and compatibility changes as drives disappear. The supposedly hermetic container is temporary. Preservation requires duplication, which means the object survives by repeatedly breaking its own seal.
The FLAC archive attached here performs exactly that rescue. It separates the sound from one scarce physical edition and places it into another network. The numbered CDr remains the historical artifact, but the download permits its contents to move beyond the original 109 owners. What was sealed becomes transmissible again.
That transition does not erase the value of the physical release. The original copy contains the printed cover, numbering, disc surface and evidence of the label’s labor. The digital archive contains another history: extraction, file naming, compression, upload and continued availability. One preserves the object’s locality; the other protects the performance from locality becoming disappearance.
Live recordings are often judged according to whether they reproduce the experience of attending. This one is more interesting when treated as a transformation rather than a substitute. The original audience experienced speakers moving air through a specific gallery. The recording converts that pressure into a portable electrical model. Headphones, laptop speakers and home systems reconstruct different rooms around it. Every playback creates another imperfect chamber.
The listener is therefore not simply receiving St. Petersburg in 2010. The original event has been nested inside several environments: gallery, recording device, CDr, digital extraction, archive, playback system and present room. Each enclosure claims to contain the performance while quietly adding its own material. The operation is never completely sealed.
This is why Bjerga’s music belongs so naturally to small-format underground publishing. His sounds are already concerned with unstable preservation, degraded memory and the secret lives of playback machines. A cassette or CDr is not merely a delivery mechanism chosen because it is affordable. It extends the subject of the work. Media remember, fail, distort and survive through human care.
Hermetically Sealed Static Operation ultimately describes less a finished composition than a condition temporarily maintained. Signals circulate. Recorded fragments lose their original identities. Noise fills the gaps between intended events. The performer operates the system while remaining partly operated by it. The audience hears an enclosure being built, pressurized and tested for leaks.
The seal inevitably fails, and that failure is the music. Air enters through the room. Memory enters through the tapes. Chance enters through the machinery. Later listeners enter through the archive. An operation designed around isolation becomes a meeting point among a Norwegian performer, a Russian gallery, a small label, physical-media collectors and unknown people receiving the file years afterward.
Anyone who attended the Experimental Sound Gallery 21 performance, obtained the CDr directly from Operator Produkzion or remembers Bjerga’s Russian tour may be able to restore details absent from the surviving listings. Information about the venue, equipment, packaging and circumstances of the concert would help reopen the chamber further. The title promises a sealed object, but the history remains porous, waiting for more voices to enter.

Charlemagne Palestine & Janek Schaeffer - 2012 - Day of the Demons

 

Desire Path Recordings – PATHWAY004  203.30MB FLAC

The cover does not show a demon emerging from fire. Fire itself has learned how to make a face. Eyes, teeth, horns, smaller creatures and half-formed profiles appear inside an enormous whirl of brown, gold and black lines, as though every flame contains another being waiting for sufficient attention to become visible. The image captures the central experience of Day of the Demons. Its sounds rarely remain what they first appear to be. A drone develops a throat. A bell becomes a warning, a toy, a public game or a religious signal. Street noise enters a ritual chamber. Children’s voices drift between innocence and dread. The longer one listens, the more inhabitants seem to emerge from the same forty minutes of recorded matter.
The title came from a story about a distant island where, on one day each year, residents remain indoors and surrender the streets to demons. Whether understood as folklore, metaphor or an irresistible piece of imaginative geography, the idea provides the album with an unusually fertile structure. Ordinary order is temporarily reversed. Humans withdraw, forbidden beings occupy public space, and the boundary between protection and invitation becomes unclear. Are the inhabitants hiding from the demons, honoring them, or acknowledging that controlled disorder is necessary for the community to survive the rest of the year? The album never answers. Instead, it constructs its own demon day, forty minutes during which voices, bells, field recordings and electronic tones are permitted to leave their assigned social roles.
Janek Schaefer’s path toward this collaboration began long before the sessions. In 1995, while studying architecture, he attended a Charlemagne Palestine performance in a church near Waterloo Station in London. One organ piece delayed the arrival of its bass for roughly twenty minutes, forcing Schaefer to reconsider duration, expectation and the physical occupation of space. Palestine also presented a straightforward field recording of Brooklyn, describing its context while circling the audience faster and faster until he was running around the pews. Schaefer later remembered the performance as formative because it demonstrated that an idea could remain direct without becoming simple-minded. Complexity did not have to announce itself through intellectual decoration. A sustained tone, an ordinary recording and a body moving through a room could create an entire architecture.
That lesson can be heard throughout Day of the Demons. Schaefer does not attempt to defeat Palestine through greater technical ingenuity or bury him beneath an elaborate turntablist construction. He creates conditions in which Palestine’s directness can coexist with his own fascination with space, memory, recording and displaced context. The album’s sophistication arises from relationships rather than from a constant display of processing. A bell heard in the street can answer a sustained tone recorded indoors. A voice can begin as human expression and end as part of the drone surrounding it. A public encounter can enter the studio composition without being polished into anonymity.
The collaboration began when Schaefer visited Palestine’s immense Charleworld Studios in Brussels. They talked, ate, drank, experimented and gradually treated the building and surrounding neighborhood as one extended instrument. In the studio they found shruti box, harmonica, electronics, voices and carillon bells. Outside, they carried a tuned octave of desk bells to a street carnival, placed them on a café table and invited passersby to play. The final album therefore contains both private communion and accidental public participation. Two internationally known experimental artists form the official partnership, but unknown pedestrians enter the recording as temporary members.
“Raga de l’aprés midi pour Aude” begins inside sustained vibration. The shruti box supplies an acoustic foundation that resembles breath held beyond normal bodily endurance. Unlike an electronic oscillator, its tone retains the slight instability of air moving through reeds. It is continuous without becoming perfectly smooth, creating a surface whose small fluctuations remind the listener that a physical mechanism is still breathing somewhere inside the sound.
The title describes an afternoon raga for Aude, but the piece does not imitate a formal Indian raga tradition. “Raga” functions more broadly as an acknowledgment that duration, drone and concentrated attention can alter the emotional meaning of pitch. Palestine had studied vocal interpretation with Pandit Pran Nath, and his long practice repeatedly sought the point where sustained sound ceases to behave as accompaniment and becomes a lived environment. His preference for “maximalism” rather than minimalism is audible here. The materials may be limited, but the aim is not reduction. It is saturation through accumulation, overtone and bodily presence.
Carillon bells connect the piece to one of Palestine’s earliest musical identities. As a young man he spent years playing the bells at Saint Thomas Church in Manhattan, learning how enormous metal instruments distribute sound through buildings, streets and public air. A carillon cannot be contained neatly around the performer. Its sound escapes architecture, reaches people who did not choose to attend and combines with traffic, weather and distance. Even when heard through a recording, the bell carries this civic scale. It belongs simultaneously to ceremony and interruption.
On “Raga,” the bells do not simply decorate the drone with sparkling highlights. They create points of orientation inside a dense atmosphere. A struck bell produces an immediate attack followed by a long harmonic afterlife, while the shruti box seems to exist without beginning or end. One instrument marks time; the other suspends it. Their interaction gives the piece its strange temporal depth. The listener can count individual strikes while feeling that the larger sound has escaped measurement.
Palestine’s voice eventually rises through this environment, nasal, strained, devotional and unmistakably physical. He does not sing from a protected distance above the instruments. His vocal tone enters their frequency field and begins competing, blending and beating against them. At moments it resembles a cantor, an animal cry or a person calling from a building whose corridors have distorted the message before it reaches us. The voice remains human, but humanity is not presented as superior to the drone. It is another resonating body within it.
This is where the album’s demonic imagery becomes more psychologically interesting than simple horror decoration. A demon traditionally enters by occupying a body, voice, object or location that previously seemed familiar. “Raga” creates a comparable perceptual instability without staging a theatrical possession. An ordinary sustained tone begins producing phantom pitches. One voice seems to multiply. Harmonica, bells and shruti box merge until instrumental identities become uncertain. Nothing literally supernatural occurs, yet the listener’s confidence in identifying sources gradually weakens.
Schaefer’s role is crucial precisely because it does not always announce itself. His architectural intelligence can be heard in the way the piece acquires rooms, distances and thresholds. Some tones appear close enough to touch, while others hover beyond the apparent boundaries of the speakers. Layers are not merely stacked according to frequency. They are placed in imagined locations. The result feels less like several instruments recorded together than a building whose chambers contain different forms of vibration.
The dedication to Aude introduces tenderness into this ominous environment. Whatever private history the name carries, it prevents the piece from becoming an anonymous exercise in ritual darkness. Someone is being addressed. The music may expand toward cosmic or supernatural scale, but its title still points toward an individual relationship. Devotion and dread are allowed to occupy the same structure.
“Fables from a Far Away Future” reverses much of the first side’s method. Where “Raga” gradually fuses its elements into one sustained being, “Fables” preserves collision, interruption and visible seams. Location recordings, public chatter, desk bells, prayers, melodica, chimes and electronic tones enter as distinct scenes. The piece behaves less like a temple and more like a street procession whose participants have arrived from different times.
The title reverses the normal direction of folklore. Fables usually come from a distant past, carrying moral instruction from ancestors toward the present. These fables arrive from a faraway future, suggesting that later generations are already inventing stories about us. The sounds we treat as ordinary may survive as mysterious evidence. A child’s prayer, a carnival conversation or the ring of a desktop bell could become the fragment through which an unknown listener imagines an extinct social world.
The “Prayer Bear” is especially suited to this future archaeology. A manufactured toy designed to comfort children through prerecorded devotion already contains several layers of displacement. Adult belief has been simplified into a script, placed inside a plush animal and activated mechanically. Intimacy is delivered through a mass-produced voice. Within the album, that voice becomes detached again, no longer functioning reliably as instruction or reassurance. Prayer is converted into found sound, but its emotional residue remains.
Children’s voices intensify the uncertainty because they can signify safety, vulnerability, indoctrination, play or memory depending upon their surroundings. Against chimes and soft electronic waves, prayer may sound comforting. When swallowed by darker tones or abrupt collage, the same words become fragile evidence of people attempting to protect themselves from forces they cannot understand. The album never mocks belief. It examines what happens when devotional language is removed from the room in which it was intended to function.
The street-carnival recordings introduce another layer of community. Schaefer and Palestine did not merely record the public from a hidden observational position. By offering the desk bells, they created a small invitation. Passersby became performers by touching an object and hearing their gesture enter the surrounding noise. The situation is simple enough to be almost invisible as art, yet it reflects Schaefer’s lesson from Palestine’s 1995 performance: direct action can produce complex consequences without requiring a complicated explanation.
Each bell strike contains a moment of consent and curiosity. Someone sees the objects, understands that play is permitted and adds a note without knowing how it will later be used. The polished album carries these anonymous gestures far beyond the original café table. A few seconds of public participation become part of a limited American vinyl edition, an official digital release and eventually a privately shared FLAC archive. The bell travels farther than the person who struck it may ever know.
This transformation raises a gentle question about field recording. Recording can preserve ordinary life, but it also removes sound from people and places that supplied its meaning. Schaefer’s work has long investigated this displacement rather than pretending microphones are neutral windows. “Fables” keeps enough contextual disorder that the street never becomes a clean sample library. Voices overlap, languages remain partially understood, and the location refuses to resolve into one picturesque image. The outside world retains its resistance.
The melodica and chimes act as unstable bridges between the public recordings and the electronic layers. Their tones can sound childlike, ceremonial or faintly comic, preventing the piece from collapsing into pure supernatural menace. Demons do not receive a uniformly dark soundtrack. They inherit toys, prayers, festival noise and awkward human participation. The album’s imagined forbidden day becomes crowded and strangely sociable.
The two sides therefore create opposite forms of ritual. “Raga de l’aprés midi pour Aude” moves inward, merging voices and instruments into a sustained devotional body. “Fables from a Far Away Future” moves outward, gathering fragments from streets, toys, strangers and electronic processing. The first sounds as though two people are attempting to summon or withstand one presence. The second sounds like the world after countless presences have escaped.
The physical edition made this relationship tangible. The translucent flame-red vinyl turned the record itself into a fiery object, while the accompanying wearable demon mask allowed the listener to become part of the artwork. A mask can protect its wearer, conceal identity or invite possession through imitation. Wearing the demon face may ward off what it represents, or it may signal willingness to join it. The packaging refuses to settle which.
The mask also changes the ordinary relationship between collector and release. A record is usually observed, handled and preserved. A wearable object asks to be activated by the body. The owner is no longer merely looking at Chris Koelle’s demonic imagery. The owner can place it over the human face and allow the album to supply the atmosphere around it. Packaging becomes low-cost ritual technology.
James Plotkin’s mastering helped translate an extraordinarily layered forty-minute work onto two sides of vinyl without reducing its contrasts to blunt saturation. The record depends upon both thick frequency accumulation and small documentary details. Bells, voices and street fragments must remain sufficiently distinct to emerge from the drones, while the larger masses need enough weight to become environmental. The mastering does not simply make the album loud. It protects its hidden inhabitants.
The FLAC archive changes the ritual again. The mask, red disc and physical act of turning sides disappear, but the music becomes available without the original edition’s scarcity. “Raga” and “Fables” can follow each other almost immediately, turning two vinyl faces into a continuous digital passage. What began with an encounter in a London church, continued through meals and experiments in Brussels, reached strangers at a street carnival and entered a small American pressing now survives as portable data.
Day of the Demons is ultimately less about evil than permission. For one imaginary day, the excluded forces are permitted outside. In musical terms, field recordings are permitted to behave like instruments, toys like liturgical devices, public strangers like ensemble members and drones like inhabited spaces. Palestine’s direct, excessive spirituality and Schaefer’s reflective architecture do not neutralize one another. They create a world in which ceremony and collage, sincerity and humor, protection and invitation remain simultaneously possible.
The demons never reveal whether they came from outside the village or were generated by the people hiding inside their homes. That uncertainty is the album’s lasting power. Its threatening presences may be supernatural visitors, recorded memories, technological ghosts or simply the unheard complexity already living inside bells, voices and public space. For forty minutes, the streets are theirs. When the record stops, the listener is left to decide whether they have gone back into hiding or merely learned to sound ordinary again.

Richard Ramirez + RU-486 - 2008 - Untitled

 

Destructive Industries – DI004  164.95MB FLAC

The cover appears to have been caught halfway between identification photograph and evidence recovered from a private ritual. A dark, hooded or masked figure bends beneath an arch of black fabric, the face almost completely swallowed except for one small reflection of light. Richard Ramirez and RU-486 are written around the image by hand, their names looking scratched onto the edge of a duplicated document rather than placed there by conventional design. Nothing explains who the figure is, what has happened, or whether concealment represents protection, submission, anonymity or threat. The cassette offers no album title to stabilize the image. Two names, two track titles and thirty minutes of sound are all the coordinates supplied.
That lack of a collective title is important. Split releases often invent a phrase capable of pretending that two separately produced works were conceived as one statement. This tape leaves the seam visible. Richard Ramirez occupies one side with “Muscle & Furs Pt. 1”; Thomas Mortigan’s RU-486 occupies the other with “Just Crawl.” The listener must turn the cassette between them, physically reversing the object and allowing one artist’s pressure to disappear before the other begins. Their relationship is not explained through a grand theme. It is created through adjacency, friendship, shared underground activity and the decision to place these particular pieces inside one shell.
Both artists were connected to overlapping American harsh-noise networks, but they entered the split from different historical positions. Richard Ramirez had been active since the end of the 1980s, developing solo work alongside Black Leather Jesus and an extraordinary population of related projects. By 2008, his methods had already traveled through junk noise, industrial abrasion, collaboration, static forms and increasingly specific investigations of queer imagery, fetish materials and bodily identity. RU-486 was much younger. Mortigan formed the project in 2005 with the stated intention of working within harsh noise and power electronics, bringing his background in industrial music, EBM, metal and cassette culture into a more direct electronic assault.
This difference in age does not turn the cassette into a master-and-apprentice arrangement. Mortigan is not merely borrowing Ramirez’s authority, and Ramirez is not presenting a newcomer as an accessory. Destructive Industries places both names at equal scale, one per side, while Mortigan’s labor as label operator gives him another form of authorship over the object. He selected, dubbed, assembled and circulated the container through which both works would enter the world. The tape therefore records more than two performances. It records a relationship between artist and publisher in which those roles continually exchange places.
“Muscle & Furs Pt. 1” is a compact example of how Ramirez could turn apparently simple source material into a difficult surface of bodily suggestion. The title is strange because its two nouns refuse an obvious grammatical relationship. Muscle belongs beneath skin, associated with force, movement, labor and the disciplined production of masculine appearance. Fur covers a body, suggesting animality, warmth, costume, luxury or a particular vocabulary of male physical type. Joined by an ampersand, they become materials placed side by side: interior power and exterior covering, flesh trained into hardness and the soft surface through which that hardness is seen.
The cover’s hidden figure intensifies these possibilities. A hood removes the face, which is normally treated as the primary evidence of personal identity, while leaving the body available to be interpreted through posture, size, clothing and imagined physicality. In many industrial releases, masking is used to create an anonymous agent of violence. Within Ramirez’s wider aesthetic world, concealment can also invoke erotic role-play, leather culture, chosen identity and the productive instability between intimidation and vulnerability. The same image may repel one viewer and invite another to recognize a coded form of desire.
The music does not need to illustrate one precise scenario for the title and image to affect it. Ramirez’s sustained distortion becomes a surface onto which the body can be projected. Dense low and middle frequencies suggest weight without revealing the object producing that weight. Gradual internal changes make the sound feel muscular, but the texture surrounding them remains frayed and tactile, closer to fabric, hair or abrasive skin than to polished electronic tone. The track does not describe a body. It generates the conditions under which listeners begin imagining one.
The “Pt. 1” designation leaves the work deliberately incomplete. A first part implies continuation, but the cassette does not provide it. This transforms the side into a fragment of a larger investigation whose remaining body may exist elsewhere, may have been planned and abandoned, or may simply be created by the listener’s expectation. Noise discographies are full of such incomplete sequences, alternate versions and titles that point toward missing companions. The absence is not always a cataloguing failure. It can make the surviving piece feel like material extracted from an ongoing private process.
Ramirez’s side also demonstrates how static or slowly changing noise can transfer compositional labor toward the listener. When obvious sections and recognizable instrumental gestures are reduced, hearing begins separating the mass by itself. A rough continuous band may divide into several perceived layers. A pulse appears at one depth and disappears when attention shifts elsewhere. Small changes become disproportionately important because there is no melody or beat announcing what deserves notice. The piece seems fixed, yet the experience of it refuses to remain fixed.
Turning to RU-486 changes the relationship between sound and command. “Just Crawl” is a more active, juddering construction of organized harsh noise, with Mortigan’s shrieking and howling vocals forced through the electronics. The title is only two words, but “just” makes the imperative especially ugly. It can mean simply crawl, do nothing else, abandon argument, surrender height and accept the floor. It can also express impatience, as though the person issuing the command has grown tired of explaining why obedience is expected.
Crawling changes the human body’s social meaning. Standing upright is associated with independence, visibility and adult authority. Crawling belongs to infancy, injury, concealment, exhaustion, animal movement and coerced submission. The command therefore attacks status before it threatens physical harm. It asks the subject to reduce himself, to occupy the lowest available plane and to move according to another person’s will. Power electronics frequently works through this compression of language, reducing complex relations of domination to a few phrases delivered with enough force that the listener feels the social position they impose.
Mortigan’s voice does not float above the electronics as a clearly understandable narrator. It enters the same damaged field, becoming another strained mechanical event. This matters because pure verbal clarity would make the track easier to classify as a statement. Distortion removes certainty. The listener receives intention, hostility and bodily exertion before receiving complete semantic information. Command becomes atmosphere. The voice may be directing somebody else, speaking to itself, reproducing a remembered authority or inviting the audience to experience the pleasure and disgust of hearing power performed.
The name RU-486 already places the project inside a contested relationship among medicine, bodily autonomy, reproduction and political control. RU-486 was the designation commonly associated with mifepristone, and adopting it as a project name imports that charged history before any individual release declares a subject. Mortigan later emphasized that RU-486 was not a white-power or conventionally political project, describing it instead as a response to things in the world that inspired and disgusted him, including violence, animal rights, personal exploration and current events. The name still ensures that the body is never completely abstract. Technology, law, morality and biological process hover behind the electronics.
“Just Crawl” belongs to RU-486’s earlier period, when Mortigan was still deliberately holding the project within harsh noise and power electronics. He later felt those boundaries had become restrictive and moved toward more composed industrial forms capable of creating detailed mental images and repeatable emotional environments. Heard from that later perspective, this side preserves the project before expansion, concentrating its identity into violent movement, vocal pressure and a narrow command. It is less panoramic than later RU-486, but the limitation has its own severe coherence.
The cassette’s two sides share bodily language while approaching it from different angles. “Muscle & Furs Pt. 1” names substances and surfaces without issuing instructions. The listener is invited to inspect, imagine and possibly desire the unidentified body. “Just Crawl” converts the body into action under command. One side is concerned with what a body appears to be made from; the other with the position it is ordered to occupy. The first builds a wall around an image. The second drives movement across the floor.
This relationship complicates the easy assumption that extreme noise is only about sonic aggression. The more interesting subject is often power over interpretation. Ramirez withholds enough information that the listener must create the body inside the sound. Mortigan supplies a blunt instruction but damages the voice until its exact target remains uncertain. Neither artist grants the audience a stable narrative, yet both manipulate the listener’s awareness of physical position. Where are you standing? What surface surrounds you? Who is looking, who is hidden and who has the authority to speak?
The small cassette edition intensifies this private scale. A C30 is not a grand album architecture. It is one short encounter per side, enclosed within a cheap, durable object that can fit into a pocket or padded envelope. Its materials are mundane: plastic shell, magnetic tape, folded paper and ink. Yet those materials carry an image of concealment and thirty minutes of deliberately hostile sound across cities and national borders. Extremity survives through ordinary manufacturing.
Mortigan later described the physical production of Destructive Industries tapes as a labor of love, with thousands of copies dubbed in real time over the label’s history. That detail changes how the aggression of the object can be understood. Every copy required patience. A thirty-minute cassette consumes thirty actual minutes of duplication, followed by handling, labelling, folding, packing and mailing. The music may stage domination and degradation, but its circulation depends upon repetitive care.
This contradiction runs through much of underground noise culture. Artists cultivate images of isolation, hostility and social rupture while participating in networks maintained by trust, cooperation and shared enthusiasm. Ramirez supplies a side; Mortigan gives it physical form; listeners send money; postal workers protect the package; collectors preserve the tape; blogs later convert it into files. The hostile object survives because numerous people perform small acts of reliability.
Its digital path adds another layer. By January 2012, Badgerstump had placed the cassette on Bleak Bliss with only a few lines of description, allowing the recording to escape the limitations of its original circulation. Fourteen years later, Private Release gives the transfer another public location in a lossless archive. The tape has moved from home duplication to international mail, private collections, blog preservation and re-uploaded FLAC without becoming culturally visible in any mainstream sense. It remains underground while traveling remarkably far.
That movement is not incidental to the release’s meaning. A cassette called untitled, showing a hidden figure and containing one track about absence of stable identity and another about crawling, has survived through people who often remain invisible themselves. Uploaders, rippers and listeners leave faint traces in filenames, dates, blog templates and dead links. The network carries the object while refusing the spotlight, much like the covered face on the sleeve.
The FLAC archive cannot reproduce the pressure of reaching the end of side A, hearing the mechanism stop and physically turning the cassette before “Just Crawl” begins. Digital playback can make the tracks consecutive, reducing the moment of decision between them. Yet the transfer preserves detail that a repeatedly played cassette might gradually lose, and it permits the two sides to continue entering new rooms long after the original label’s distribution moment has passed.
Richard Ramirez and RU-486 remains a modest release in physical scale, but its apparent simplicity conceals a dense social and bodily structure. One veteran and one younger artist share a tape without pretending to merge. One side presents muscle beneath fur, material concealed beneath material. The other forces the body downward until movement becomes obedience. Around them sits the label, the cassette, the masked image and the international preservation network that quietly refused to let the object vanish.
Anyone who owned the original DI004 cassette, remembers ordering it directly from Thomas Mortigan or knows where the later parts of “Muscle & Furs” appeared may be able to complete details that surviving listings cannot provide. Information about the edition size, the physical insert, recording methods and the relationship between these specific pieces would be particularly valuable. The tape withholds explanation, but its history remains open, waiting for somebody from the original network to stand up and speak.

Celer - 2016 - I Love You So Much I Can't Even Title This (The Light That Never Goes Out Went Out)

Self-released – none  154.01MB FLAC

 The cover appears to have been overexposed almost to the point of disappearance. White tombs, crosses and stone surfaces dissolve into the pale sky, their edges softened until architecture and light seem to occupy the same substance. A cemetery is plainly visible, yet death is not presented through darkness, decay or gothic shadow. The scene is flooded with brightness. The stones do not loom over the viewer; they appear to be evaporating. That nearly erased image is the ideal entrance into music concerned with love so excessive that language fails, a light imagined as permanent, and the subtle terror of discovering that even permanence can end.

The 2016 date identifies the Infraction reissue, but the music was created in 2008 by Will Long and Danielle Baquet-Long, during the original period when Celer was their shared project. This chronology matters deeply. The album should not be rewritten as a posthumous elegy composed after Danielle’s death in 2009. It was made while both artists were alive, working together, processing sound through tape and laptop, painting handmade sleeves in a garage and apparently treating the project partly as an exercise. Later history surrounds the music, but it did not cause it.
That distinction protects the album from an easy sentimental interpretation. Knowledge of Danielle’s death inevitably changes how later listeners receive the title, the cemetery image and the parenthetical phrase “The Light That Never Goes Out Went Out.” Yet the recording originally emerged from an active relationship, not from retrospective mourning. It contains love before loss, which may be more painful because the love does not know what the listener knows.
The title begins with an emotional overflow and ends in linguistic surrender. “I love you so much” is one of the most direct declarations available in English, but “I can’t even title this” admits that directness has already become inadequate. The feeling is supposedly too large to be named, while the inability to name it becomes the name. Danielle reportedly joked that it was the laziest title she had never written, puncturing its romantic enormity with domestic humor. The joke keeps the title human. Two people can create immense, solemn music and still tease each other about the packaging.
The parenthetical subtitle darkens that intimacy through its allusion to “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” The original song title makes permanence into a romantic promise. Celer changes the grammar after the promise has failed. The light that was defined by never going out has gone out. It is an impossible sentence, but grief and change frequently produce impossible sentences. Something believed to be permanent can end without erasing the fact that it once felt permanent.
Samuel Barber provides another route into this contradiction. His Adagio for Strings became one of the twentieth century’s most recognizable containers for public sorrow, repeatedly used to signify mourning, catastrophe and dignified emotional release. Its tremendous reputation has also invited dismissal. The same repetition that allows listeners to enter its rising emotional architecture can be criticized as obvious, excessive or manipulative. Celer takes inspiration from this contested territory, where repetition may represent either profound concentration or an apparent shortage of ideas.
Ambient and drone music face the same accusation constantly. A sustained chord is heard by one listener as a world of slowly changing harmonics and by another as something that simply refuses to progress. Repetition becomes a test of attention. The music does not continually provide new objects, so the listener must notice what is happening to the object already present.
“Isotope Shortage” begins the album with a title drawn from the language of unstable matter. Isotopes belong to the same element while differing in atomic mass, and some exist only temporarily before transforming through radioactive decay. A shortage suggests that even these altered versions of apparent sameness are becoming unavailable. The phrase converts scientific language into emotional scarcity: not merely a lack of material, but a lack of alternate forms through which something might continue.
The track’s long tones seem to hover between orchestral warmth and electronic distance. Layers gather without becoming a conventional chord progression, creating a sonority that feels both full and deprived. Sound occupies a large space, but there is no obvious source to hold onto. The listener encounters abundance without security.
Tape processing is important to this instability. Tape does not preserve a sound as an untouched ideal. It introduces grain, saturation, minute fluctuations and the possibility of physical deterioration. A loop can repeat, but each repetition is carried by vulnerable material. Even when the recorded information appears unchanged, playback depends upon movement, friction and contact.
This gives Celer’s drones a different emotional character from perfectly stationary digital tones. Their apparent stillness contains mortality. A sustained texture may seem endless while quietly carrying the evidence that it was made by finite machines and bodies. The sound promises continuity but never escapes matter.
“Ruined Repairs” makes the contradiction explicit. A repair is supposed to restore function, but here the repair itself has been ruined. The title might describe an object repeatedly patched until the patches become another layer of damage. It can also describe emotional work that does not return a relationship, body or memory to its former condition. Repair preserves something, but preservation changes what is preserved.
The music’s overlapping layers resemble this accumulation of attempted restoration. New tones do not erase what came before them. They settle over previous material, softening some edges while making the overall structure thicker. The result is not a return to purity. It is a surface made beautiful by evidence of intervention.
This is one reason Celer’s work can feel intensely emotional without behaving like a conventional narrative. There is no clear sequence of wound, struggle and recovery. The sounds do not announce a problem and then resolve it. They allow damage and beauty to remain inseparable. The listener is not told whether the repair succeeded, only that something continues to resonate.
The first two tracks are close in duration, each lasting slightly more than ten minutes. They function like paired chambers before the enormous final piece. Their titles describe scarcity and failed restoration, two forms of instability that prepare the album’s central forty-minute suspension.
“The Delay of Intolerance” is a peculiarly ambiguous phrase. It may describe intolerance postponed, a reaction held back but still approaching. It may refer to the period before a body rejects something it cannot absorb. It can also suggest that endurance has a limit, and that what appears to be acceptance may only be delayed refusal.
The word “delay” also describes one of the essential tools of this music. A delayed signal returns after its source, producing an echo, overlap or loop. Enough delay can make one event accompany its own past. The present becomes crowded by earlier versions of itself.
Across forty minutes, that temporal doubling becomes environmental. The track does not merely contain repetition; it allows repetition to alter the scale of the room. A recurring layer may initially feel close, then gradually become part of the horizon as attention moves toward another frequency. The music changes without requiring dramatic replacement. What sounded central becomes peripheral, and what seemed like background begins carrying the emotional weight.
This experience resembles memory more closely than ordinary musical development. Memories do not necessarily progress toward conclusions. They return, shift emphasis, lose detail and acquire meanings supplied by later experience. The event remains notionally the same while the person remembering it changes around it.
The long duration also places the body inside the composition. Ten minutes can be heard as a piece; forty minutes begins to become a period of life. The listener adjusts position, notices the room, becomes distracted and returns. External sounds may enter. The album’s patience allows ordinary time to mingle with recorded time.
Celer’s music does not demand that these intrusions be treated as failures of concentration. A passing vehicle, heating system or movement elsewhere in the building can merge with the sustained field. The recording establishes a climate rather than sealing itself inside a perfect frame. Listening becomes partly an encounter with the place where playback occurs.
The Barber inspiration is clearest not through direct quotation but through emotional architecture. Barber’s Adagio uses repetition and gradual rising intensity to make grief feel inevitable, almost physically accumulated. Celer removes the recognizable orchestral ascent and leaves a more ambiguous suspension. Catharsis is deferred. The music continues inhabiting the condition from which catharsis might arise without guaranteeing that release will arrive.
That refusal is important. Mourning is often represented as a process with a clean endpoint, as though sufficient emotional work converts loss into resolved wisdom. Actual memory can remain repetitive, contradictory and resistant to completion. A light may go out while its illumination continues affecting everything that was once seen by it.
The cemetery photograph selected for the 2016 edition inevitably intensifies this reading, but Will Long’s description of the sunny New Orleans setting resists the assumptions normally attached to cemetery imagery. The day was beautiful. The image was direct, yet its message was not as deliberate or simple as it might appear. Death and beauty occupied the same afternoon without explaining each other.
The overexposure preserves that uncertainty. The crosses are symbols of death, faith and promised continuation, but the brightness nearly removes them from view. The image could represent transcendence, fading memory or merely sunlight overwhelming a camera. Meaning appears because the viewer brings it, then becomes unstable under inspection.
The original handmade CDr carried another relationship between beauty and toxicity. Will remembered painting the die-cut sleeves in a garage while covering his mouth and nose against the fumes. Love, craft and danger occupied the same physical process. The object was made through direct bodily labor, but that labor required protection from the materials used to make it.
The 2016 double LP transforms that private act into a more formal edition. Taylor Deupree’s remastering gives the music another acoustic body, while Timothy O’Donnell’s design replaces the handmade sleeves with a carefully manufactured object. The reissue does not simply reproduce the 2008 release. It shows how memory changes when intimate material becomes an acknowledged work with historical weight.
The division across vinyl sides also interrupts the forty-minute final composition. A continuous digital file can sustain its atmosphere without physical intervention, but the LP listener must eventually rise, turn a record and re-enter the piece. The interruption exposes the difference between imagined continuity and material playback. Even a drone must pass through formats that impose beginnings, endings and seams.
This FLAC archive creates still another form. The scarce self-released CDr and limited vinyl pressing become portable files capable of duplication without generational loss. The physical artwork, painted fumes and act of turning records disappear, but the music can travel beyond the original circle of owners. Preservation rescues one element by separating it from others.
That is not a betrayal of the handmade object. Celer’s music is already preoccupied with what survives translation. Sound moves from instruments or sources into tape, from tape into laptop processing, from private recording into physical edition, from physical edition into remaster, and from remaster into personal archive. Every stage alters the conditions while maintaining a relationship with the same original gestures.
The album’s emotional force comes from refusing to decide whether repetition preserves or erases. Repeating a sound can keep it present, but repetition can also wear away its distinctness. Saying “I love you” repeatedly may deepen the declaration or expose the impossibility of making another person fully understand its scale. Playing a memory again may protect it or gradually replace the memory with the act of remembering.
I Love You So Much I Can’t Even Title This remains suspended inside that uncertainty. It was created by two people together, later heard through the knowledge that their collaboration would end through death, then returned to circulation with a cemetery photograph and a remaster nearly eight years afterward. The later history does not reveal the album’s secret meaning. It enlarges the space around it.
The title claims language has failed, but the music does not attempt to repair that failure with explanation. It offers duration instead. Three pieces allow love, repetition, damaged restoration and delayed rejection to remain audible without being solved. The light went out, yet the recording continues to carry the shape of the illumination.