Cloama - 2005 - Cloama

New Old Sentinel – SENTINEL-CD-01  251.51MB FLAC

 There are records that use darkness as decoration, applying ominous drones, distant voices and industrial residue to create a recognizable atmosphere. Cloama’s self-titled album does something more unsettling. Its darkness behaves as a physical condition. It changes the dimensions of the room, weakens the certainty of distance and makes familiar sounds seem connected to machinery operating beyond sight. Nothing announces itself with the theatrical confidence of horror music. The album works through slower contamination. A struck object resonates longer than expected. A voice enters without becoming a character. A low electronic current seems to continue beneath the audible recording, as though the five compositions were merely temporary openings into one larger system.

The lack of a separate album title is appropriate. Cloama functions here as both artist and environment. This is not a collection placed beneath an explanatory concept but an attempt to define the project through sound alone. The five titles establish a vocabulary of radiation, amplification, light, frequency, voltage and electrical anatomy. Even “The New Old Sentinel,” apparently the least scientific title, suggests a machine or guardian stationed where different periods meet. The album gradually constructs a world in which electronics are no longer tools used by a musician. They have become weather, landscape, nervous system and perhaps a rudimentary intelligence.

By 2005, Cloama already had a recording history extending back to the late 1990s, and Jasse Tuukki was also known through STROM.ec, whose industrial and power-electronics work pursued considerably more explicit confrontation. Cloama allowed another set of instincts to develop. It could be forceful, but it was not obligated to express force through shouted vocals, blunt impact or immediately recognizable aggression. On this album, pressure is redistributed into duration, spatial ambiguity and the uneasy coexistence of organic and electronic sound. Its violence is largely environmental. Rather than presenting a figure attacking the listener, it creates a place whose basic laws no longer feel trustworthy.

The distinction becomes especially revealing when this record is placed beside Revisionist Knowledge, another Cloama album issued in 2005. That release included harsh live-without-audience performances, vocals, amplifiers and more direct power electronics, followed by studio electronics. The self-titled album turns toward experimental ambient, musique concrète and electroacoustic drift. These are not opposing personalities so much as two methods of handling the same energy. Revisionist Knowledge pushes outward, making conflict visible. Cloama draws the force inward until it becomes atmospheric pressure. One record confronts the body; the other infiltrates perception.

The cover photograph initially appears almost modest beside the dramatic imagery common to industrial music. It shows a shallow pool or stream surrounded by broken stone, debris, branches and exposed lengths of cable or wire. The water is pale green and cloudy, disturbed by a small area of white movement. Nature has not disappeared, but neither is it untouched. The scene looks like a place where runoff, construction waste and vegetation have entered an uneasy truce. Nothing in the image is monumental. Its unease comes from uncertainty about what has entered the water and where the cables lead.

That photograph quietly contains the album’s entire method. Water transmits movement while concealing depth. Electricity remains invisible until it produces an effect. Debris records previous activity without explaining what happened. Cloama combines sounds in the same manner. Each composition allows signals to pass through a murky field where source, treatment and distance become difficult to separate. The listener encounters consequences without receiving a clean account of causes. A vibration may have begun as metal, voice, guitar, synthesizer or field recording, but processing has carried it downstream.

“Radiation Amplifier” begins with resonance rather than assault. Bell-like or bowl-like impacts occupy a broad empty space, recalling ritual percussion without settling into ceremonial imitation. The important quality is not exoticism but the way each strike illuminates the darkness around it. Sound appears briefly, travels outward and reveals the dimensions of an otherwise invisible chamber. Low ambient layers accumulate underneath, while electronic fragments and concrete noises disturb the apparent stillness. A sampled voice or broadcast trace enters as evidence of a human world that can no longer be reached directly.

The title presents a useful contradiction. An amplifier ordinarily increases the strength of a supplied signal. Radiation may pass unnoticed through a space until an instrument detects and translates it. Cloama’s amplifier seems designed to enlarge what was already present but unavailable to ordinary hearing: residual currents, atmospheric interference, electromagnetic ghosts and the submerged activity of supposedly silent objects. The composition does not feel created from nothing. It feels received. Tuukki behaves less like a performer demonstrating control than an operator adjusting equipment until the surrounding environment begins confessing.

Toward the conclusion, a strummed or plucked texture introduces a recognizably tactile gesture. After the abstract electronics, the sound suggests fingers, strings and physical contact, but it does not restore normality. Instead, it makes the earlier machinery seem closer to the body. The distinction between acoustic source and electronic treatment has already weakened. The string may be natural, amplified, looped, distorted or merely something that resembles a string. Cloama repeatedly uses this uncertainty not as a puzzle to be solved but as the album’s central emotional condition.

“The New Old Sentinel” expands that condition across eleven and a half minutes. The title is also the name of Tuukki’s label, making the track feel like a founding statement concealed inside the first release. A sentinel stands at a boundary, watching for movement between territories. “New Old” places that guardian between technological modernity and archaic memory, between contemporary electronics and older concepts of ritual, haunting and landscape. The phrase suggests that the newest machinery may merely provide another means of encountering very old fears.

The composition gathers drone, blackened ambience, electroacoustic activity and disembodied voices without establishing one dominant center. Sounds arrive from several apparent distances. Some hover close to the surface, while others seem to occur behind walls or across an open landscape. The voices are especially important because they never become narrators. Speech normally organizes experience by naming what is happening. Here the human voice has been deprived of that authority. It becomes another spectral texture, carrying emotional implication while withholding usable information.

This is one of the album’s defining reversals. Machines often serve as extensions of human intention, but Cloama makes the humans sound like disturbances inside the machines. Voices emerge from an existing electronic environment rather than commanding it. They resemble transmissions caught by accident, residues stored in circuitry or messages whose intended recipients have vanished. The listener occupies the sentinel’s position, remaining alert without knowing what event is expected.

The track also demonstrates how carefully Tuukki handles internal movement. The piece can initially seem like a continuous dark field, but closer attention reveals structures forming and dissolving inside it. A drone accumulates enough density to resemble architecture, then loses its edges. A voice briefly creates narrative expectation before being swallowed. Higher frequencies produce a sense of exposure, while lower layers suggest hidden mass. The composition repeatedly builds possible worlds and then removes the evidence needed to stabilize them.

This process distinguishes Cloama from ambient music designed primarily to sustain one mood. Tuukki does not simply establish darkness and remain there. His environments mutate. Structures are assembled, entered, partially explored and demolished before their function becomes clear. The listener is continually required to revise the imagined space. What sounded like a cavern becomes a laboratory; what resembled wind becomes electrical leakage; what appeared distant suddenly presses close to the ear. The music’s apparent slowness conceals an active process of perceptual sabotage.

“Light Frequency Overdose” sharpens the album’s concern with invisible forces. Light and sound occupy different ranges of electromagnetic and mechanical activity, yet both depend upon frequency and both become perceptible only within limited human thresholds. The title imagines illumination not as safety or knowledge but as toxicity. Too much light does not reveal more. It destroys the ability to see. An overdose of frequency similarly collapses information into sensation.

The track feels less like a bright interruption than an examination of brightness from inside the dark. Electronic layers seep into one another, and comparatively delicate sounds acquire an abrasive edge through repetition and placement. The piece suggests exposure without offering a clearly identifiable source. One might imagine flickering lamps, damaged monitors, radiation counters or sunlight passing through contaminated water, but no single image remains sufficient. The music generates visual associations while refusing to become a soundtrack for any particular scene.

This refusal is important. Cloama’s titles are evocative, but the compositions do not obediently illustrate them. “Light Frequency Overdose” does not deliver an obvious burst of high-pitched noise equivalent to blinding light. It works through subtler sensory confusion. The listener becomes conscious of thresholds, of signals hovering between audibility and disappearance, and of the way sustained attention can turn a faint detail into an overwhelming presence. The overdose occurs partly through listening itself.

Ambient and industrial music often depend upon scale. A low drone can imply enormous machinery or geological movement even when produced by modest equipment in a small room. Cloama is particularly skilled at manipulating this discrepancy. The sound source may be compact, but processing removes the everyday visual references that would reveal its size. Once detached from origin, a small electrical oscillation can become a weather front. A scraped object can become tectonic pressure. A breath can occupy the dimensions of a tunnel.

“Voltaic Planet,” the album’s longest composition, extends this transformation across fourteen minutes. The title imagines an entire world governed by electrical potential. A voltaic cell produces current through chemical reaction; a voltaic planet would turn landscape, atmosphere and matter into parts of one vast battery. Mountains might function as electrodes, water as electrolyte, weather as discharge. Life would take place inside a circuit too large for its inhabitants to perceive completely.

The track’s duration allows this imagined system to become self-sustaining. Instead of traveling toward a conventional climax, it develops through gradual changes in density, vibration and depth. The composition feels planetary because no single gesture can be treated as its center. Events occur within the field, but the field seems to precede and survive them. Human-scaled incidents become weather inside a larger electrical body.

Low sounds establish mass without settling into a clean, stable bass drone. Their surfaces fluctuate, suggesting machinery operating under strain or ground carrying distant vibration. Higher signals pass across that mass like atmospheric disturbances. Voice-like traces and processed details appear briefly, then lose individuality within the surrounding current. The result is not empty cosmic ambience. It is crowded with activity, but much of that activity remains below the threshold of clear identification.

“Voltaic Planet” also reveals the patience required by this music. The listener cannot wait only for dramatic events. Attention must spread across the whole texture, noticing how a tone alters the sounds beside it and how an apparently stationary layer changes character after several minutes. Cloama’s compositions reward wandering attention as much as concentration. Heard closely, they reveal constant internal labor. Heard from another room, they can merge with the building, making household electricity and distant traffic seem like uncredited participants.

This porousness is one of the album’s enduring strengths. It does not seal itself away from the listener’s environment. Its drones can absorb radiators, plumbing, wind, appliances and street noise. The boundary between recording and room begins to dissolve, which extends Tuukki’s compositional method beyond the disc. An accidental external sound may seem perfectly placed because Cloama has already prepared a world in which every vibration appears connected.

The brief closing piece, “Anoidi,” changes the proportions after the enormous central expanse of “Voltaic Planet.” Its title sits close to anodi, the Finnish word for anode, although the alteration prevents a completely secure interpretation. An anode is defined relationally within a circuit. Its role depends upon the movement of current and the type of system containing it. That makes it an appropriate final image for an album where identity is repeatedly determined by transmission rather than isolated essence.

At just under four minutes, “Anoidi” does not attempt another monumental environment. Its compactness creates concentration. Details that might have dissolved into one of the longer tracks become more immediate, and the piece introduces a comparatively direct sense of movement. It resembles the discharge after the preceding accumulation, a final circuit closing before the apparatus is switched off. Yet the album does not conclude with complete resolution. The energy has changed form, not vanished.

The sequencing is remarkably effective. “Radiation Amplifier” detects the hidden field. “The New Old Sentinel” establishes a watcher inside it. “Light Frequency Overdose” destabilizes perception. “Voltaic Planet” enlarges the system until it becomes a world. “Anoidi” returns that world to a component within a circuit. The album moves outward and inward simultaneously, magnifying microscopic electrical behavior into landscape before compressing planetary scale back into circuitry.

The use of Joensuu Laboratory as the recording and mastering location reinforces this sense of controlled investigation. “Laboratory” may simply have been the chosen name for Tuukki’s working space, but it describes the music accurately. These tracks feel like experiments in exposing relationships among sound sources rather than performances designed to showcase virtuosity. The laboratory does not guarantee sterile control. It is where controlled circumstances are used to encounter unpredictable behavior.

Tuukki’s background in STROM.ec is audible less through direct stylistic resemblance than through discipline. Power electronics teaches an artist to understand saturation, pressure and the psychological effect of frequency. Cloama applies that knowledge without requiring the recognizable outward vocabulary of power electronics. The aggression has been distilled. Instead of a voice dominating a wall of noise, there is atmosphere behaving with quiet hostility. Instead of confrontation as event, there is confrontation as habitat.

This makes the record accessible without making it benign. Contemporary descriptions sometimes emphasized that its experimentalism remained inviting and structurally coherent. That is true, but “accessible” should not be confused with comfortable. The album guides the listener into its spaces carefully, perhaps more carefully than its harsher companion recordings, yet the destination remains uncertain. Tuukki’s restraint gives the darkness credibility. He does not need to declare that something terrible is present. He manipulates sound until the possibility begins to feel physically plausible.

The record also avoids the problem of excessive cinematic signaling. Dark ambient can easily become a collection of familiar gestures suggesting ruins, occult ceremonies, underground chambers or post-apocalyptic landscapes. Cloama occasionally touches those associations but does not depend upon them. Its strongest images emerge from acoustic relationships rather than decorative samples. Space is produced through resonance. Threat is produced through frequency. Haunting is produced through a voice’s inability to arrive fully.

The natural and industrial elements remain similarly unresolved. The cover’s water is neither pristine wilderness nor a spectacular toxic disaster. It is an ordinary damaged place where branches, stone, liquid and human material coexist. The music finds its richest territory in this overlap. It does not present technology as the absolute opposite of nature. Electricity, vibration, decay and water all become processes moving through matter. The distinction between organic and artificial may matter less than the question of what each medium carries.

That view gives the album an unusual emotional depth. Beneath its darkness is curiosity. Tuukki seems genuinely interested in what happens when sounds are allowed to retain ambiguity, when a recording does not immediately announce its source or function. The music’s atmosphere is not merely imposed from above. It is discovered through listening to materials closely enough that their hidden strangeness becomes audible.

The self-titled album therefore feels less like a definitive statement than a successful act of opening. It established New Old Sentinel not merely as a label name but as a way of approaching underground sound: looking backward toward industrial, ritual and electroacoustic traditions while remaining attentive to new combinations; preserving old technologies while forcing them into unfamiliar behavior; standing watch at the threshold without pretending to know what will cross it.

Its edition of 500 copies and oversized photographic packaging belong to a particular moment when physical underground releases could remain mysterious even to the people who owned them. Information was limited, equipment was not itemized, and the artist did not provide a convenient conceptual key. The listener received forty-three minutes of sound, five suggestive titles and one contaminated pool of water. The absence of explanation did not weaken the object. It created room for a relationship to develop through repeated exposure.

Two decades later, Cloama retains that opacity. It has not become a quaint artifact of early-2000s dark ambience because its strongest qualities are not tied to period fashion. The record is built from fundamental uncertainties: whether a sound is near or far, human or mechanical, intentional or discovered, natural or processed, ancient or technological. Those questions do not expire with equipment changes.

The album begins by amplifying radiation and ends at something resembling an electrical terminal. Between them stands a sentinel watching an overexposed planet. Yet the deepest current may be the one passing between listener and recording. Cloama supplies the initial voltage, but attention completes the circuit. The longer one remains inside these five pieces, the less they resemble depictions of an alien environment. The room itself begins producing evidence. Water moves through pipes. Current passes behind walls. Appliances breathe in standby. A distant voice loses its words. The album has ended, but the laboratory remains active.

Dead Body Love - 2009 - Candles CDr

 

Impulsy Stetoskopu – 018  278.48MB FLAC

A candle is a modest object until the room around it becomes completely dark. Then every movement of its flame alters the visible world. Walls expand and contract, shadows acquire bodies, and ordinary objects seem to move without changing position. Dead Body Love’s Candles works through a comparable distortion of scale. It is one continuous thirty-minute noise composition, but its force does not come from maintaining one immovable block. Gabriele Giuliani keeps the surface in constant agitation, allowing pressure, grain, depth and frequency to change inside an attack that never truly releases its hold. The piece is severe, yet its severity is animated. This is not a frozen wall placed in front of the listener. It is combustion.

Dead Body Love emerged from the first major generation of Italian harsh noise, when cassette editions, mail-order labels and private correspondence allowed artists to construct complete worlds from rudimentary equipment. Giuliani’s recordings helped establish an approach in which low fidelity was not a technical embarrassment but an active source of physical character. Overload, damaged signals, saturated tape and crude amplification could give sound a density that cleaner recording might remove. Candles arrives much later than the project’s foundational mid-1990s work, but it retains that older understanding of noise as handmade pressure rather than anonymous digital excess. Its violence feels worked upon, shaped and repeatedly tested.

The opening establishes intensity quickly, but the recording does not simply switch on at maximum capacity and remain there. Several layers appear to be moving at different speeds. A broad lower-frequency mass provides weight, while sharper feedback and tearing electronic textures travel across it. The relationship resembles flame consuming uneven material: one portion burns steadily, another spits, cracks or collapses. Giuliani keeps introducing minor changes that prevent the ear from settling into passive acceptance. Frequencies surface, become momentarily identifiable, then dissolve back into the larger body.

This internal motion separates Candles from harsh noise that mistakes accumulation for composition. Volume alone can flatten differences, turning every gesture into the same generalized aggression. Dead Body Love instead uses density to make distinctions more important. A small thinning of the signal becomes dramatic because so much pressure surrounds it. A sudden high frequency feels like a cut across an already injured surface. A rougher bass layer changes the apparent size of the entire sound field. The piece continually demonstrates that control does not require neatness. Giuliani controls disorder by deciding how long it remains recognizable before another force deforms it.

The title initially seems almost gentle beside the name Dead Body Love. Candles suggest domestic warmth, contemplation, prayer, memorial observance or intimacy. Yet candles also involve gradual destruction. Their light exists only because the object consumes itself. Wax liquefies, the wick blackens, oxygen is transformed, and the body producing illumination becomes smaller with every second. That contradiction gives the title unusual weight. The recording can be heard as a process of self-consumption in which an immense sound is created by continually sacrificing its own stability.

This is not the triumphant fire of explosions or burning buildings. A candle’s violence is concentrated and patient. Its flame occupies a tiny space, but within that space matter undergoes irreversible change. Dead Body Love magnifies that hidden process until the listener seems placed inside it. The crackling upper frequencies become microscopic fractures. The rolling low end suggests molten material shifting below the visible surface. Feedback bends like a flame responding to movements in air. What looks calm from across the room becomes catastrophic when enlarged.

The artwork reinforces this reading beautifully. Rather than using the medical horror, damaged bodies or confrontational photography often associated with extreme noise, the release presents itself as an aged piece of correspondence. A burning candle appears on one side, surrounded by deep red and black, while the project name and title occupy the address area. The Impulsy Stetoskopu stamp and postmark make the object resemble a message sent from somewhere beyond ordinary communication. Its envelope packaging completes the idea. Candles is not simply an album placed inside a cover; it is a transmission that has passed through hands, postal systems and private rooms.

That correspondence aesthetic matters because underground noise has always depended upon sending intensely personal objects toward unknown listeners. A handmade edition of 120 copies is almost the opposite of mass broadcasting. It does not attempt to occupy public space everywhere at once. Each copy travels toward one person, enters one collection and waits to be activated. The envelope holds a dormant event. Once opened and played, the small physical object releases a sound radically larger than itself.

There is something almost devotional in that transformation. Candles are lit before sacred images, at graves, during vigils and in private acts of remembrance. They establish a temporary area of attention. The flame does not explain what should be believed or remembered; it simply marks that this moment and place have been separated from ordinary time. Giuliani’s long composition performs a harsher version of the same operation. For half an hour, it seals the listener inside sustained concentration. There are no track changes to divide the experience into manageable sections and no melody to provide a route back toward familiarity.

The uninterrupted format makes duration one of the recording’s principal materials. Thirty minutes is long enough for the initial shock of the sound to lose novelty. Once that happens, the listener must either withdraw or begin hearing more deeply. The noise stops functioning only as an attack and becomes an environment containing countless local events. This transition is one of the great possibilities of sustained harsh noise. What first appears brutally simple becomes increasingly complex as the ear adjusts to its scale.

Giuliani does not reward that adjustment by revealing a hidden song. The piece remains noise throughout, but the listener’s relationship to it changes. Dense distortion begins to resemble weather. Feedback behaves like an unstable voice. Low frequencies produce an almost architectural depth, while higher currents scrape across the imagined walls. The composition creates the sensation of entering a large structure whose interior is being continuously demolished and rebuilt.

The absence of conventional rhythm does not mean the piece lacks momentum. Its rhythm emerges from pressure cycles, changing density and the recurrence of particular textures. Some passages feel driven forward by rapidly colliding signals; others appear to rotate around a more stable core. These shifts produce an irregular pulse that is felt before it can be counted. The body recognizes acceleration and suspension even when there is no beat to follow.

Candles also occupies an interesting position between harsh noise wall and more active cut-up noise. Its overall mass can feel wall-like, but the surface is too mobile to become absolute stasis. Giuliani allows the sound to maintain continuity without pretending that continuity means immobility. A flame remains recognizably one flame even though none of its visible matter stays in the same place. The recording follows that principle. Its identity is stable, but its contents are perpetually replaced.

This mobility gives Candles a different emotional character from pure annihilation. The recording is aggressive, but it is not deadened. Something inside it continues struggling, shifting and producing new forms. Even its harshest passages contain a strange vitality. Noise often receives descriptions involving death, emptiness or erasure, yet this piece sounds intensely alive because it cannot stop reacting to itself. Every layer creates conditions that alter the next.

The name Dead Body Love becomes particularly suggestive in this context. It joins physical termination with attachment, intimacy or preservation. A recording performs a related operation by fixing an event after the event itself has disappeared. The original electrical actions are gone, yet their shape can be revived whenever the disc is played. Sound becomes a body that is simultaneously dead and active, preserved but capable of entering new rooms. The candle on the cover offers another version of this paradox: matter disappears so that light may remain visible.

Nothing about Candles requires elaborate conceptual explanation to be effective. Its primary argument is made through sound, through the control Giuliani exercises over a long and extremely dense electronic assault. The title and packaging deepen the experience, but they do not rescue weak material or impose meaning upon an empty gesture. The recording can stand entirely as harsh noise: forceful, detailed, physically involving and carefully sustained.

Its restraint is found not in reduced volume but in Giuliani’s refusal to clutter the piece with unnecessary theatrical signals. There are no obvious spoken declarations, sensational samples or narrative devices instructing the listener how to interpret the aggression. The sound is permitted to carry its own ambiguity. It may suggest burning, machinery, weather, damaged transmission or the microscopic violence of matter changing state, but none of these images is compulsory.

Candles ultimately succeeds because it turns one apparently simple idea into a continuously unstable experience. One track, one title, one flame and one extended field of noise become enough to create a complete environment. Giuliani does not treat duration as empty space to be filled. He treats it as fuel. Each minute is consumed by the next, leaving residue, altered perception and an increasing awareness of tiny events inside overwhelming force.

By the conclusion, the listener has not traveled through a sequence of destinations so much as remained beside one object while it changed beyond recognition. The candle burns lower. The wax gathers around it. Shadows move across the room. The flame may look nearly identical to the one first lit, but everything supporting it has been transformed. Candles applies that logic to harsh noise with remarkable discipline. Its surface rages, its internal structures flicker, and beneath the apparent excess is a slow, exact process of disappearance.

VA - 2009 - Tension State Of Collapsing 2xCD

 

Industrial Recollections – IR-TSC1/2  762.73MB FLAC

Tension State Of Collapsing is less a conventional various-artists compilation than a city being forced through a damaged recording system. The two discs gather twenty-seven pieces from the Houston noise underground of the mid-1990s, but the collection does not establish a clean regional style or offer a polite introduction to its participants. It preserves disagreement, uneven fidelity, ugly humor, erotic provocation, live-room debris, private electronics and projects that may have existed only long enough to place one track on a cassette. The title describes both the music and the social structure surrounding it. Everything is held together under pressure, apparently one additional vibration away from coming apart.
Richard Ramirez originally compiled the two volumes for Chaotic Noise Productions in 1995 and 1996, when documenting an underground scene required actual construction. There was no searchable platform automatically gathering artists by location or style. Someone had to contact participants, request recordings, assemble masters, make covers, duplicate tapes and place the finished object into circulation. The first Tension State Of Collapsing was explicitly subtitled a “Houstonoise Compilation,” transforming a collection of isolated projects into evidence that a scene existed. Its edition of fifty copies was minuscule even by cassette-underground standards, yet the act of gathering these sounds gave Houston noise a temporary border and a collective memory.
The city is present here less through literal field recordings than through proximity. Artists who might have sounded unrelated become part of the same environment because their work occupied adjoining rooms, postal routes, record collections and performance spaces. Black Leather Jesus, Rotten Piece and Ramirez’s solo work provide recognizable anchors, but the real historical value lies in the surrounding names: Slave Labor, Kaibutsu, Electro Anal Kink, Limacon, Operant Eye, Trifle, White Wall, Infant Erection, Threshold Of Sleep, Fetus Furs, Scrotal Termites and Thee Know. Some developed wider discographies while others remain nearly spectral, represented by a title, a few minutes of sound and whatever memories the original participants still carry.
The first disc announces its atmosphere immediately through Slave Labor’s “Transvestite #1,” followed by Kaibutsu’s “Okurimono” and the live “White Whip” by Electro Anal Kink. These titles place gender, sexuality, submission and performance near the entrance rather than leaving them as hidden subtext. That matters within the history surrounding Ramirez and Black Leather Jesus. American noise and power electronics often presented transgression through militarism, heterosexual pornography or anonymous criminal violence. Ramirez’s curation admitted leather culture, gender disruption and openly gay erotic imagery into that vocabulary, creating friction within a scene that did not always welcome it. The resulting work could still be confrontational, exploitative or deliberately crude, but it complicated the fantasy that extreme noise belonged naturally to one form of masculinity.
Black Leather Jesus’ “Human Cruelty” stands near the center of the first disc, but it does not dominate the compilation as the obvious historical name. It is surrounded by Limacon’s “Maecenas,” Operant Eye’s “No. 2,” Trifle’s untitled piece and White Wall’s excerpt from “Them And Us.” The sequencing makes these projects feel less like supporting acts than separate chambers inside the same unstable structure. One track may reduce itself to a narrow electronic condition; another introduces blunt live action, tape damage or industrial movement. Abrupt changes in recording quality become part of the composition. The compilation does not smooth the differences because the differences reveal how broad the word “noise” remained before online genre categories began hardening every method into its own substyle.
Rotten Piece becomes one of the collection’s connective tissues. “Dog’s Teeth (Pt. 1)” appears on the first disc, followed on the second by “Bladder Of The Swine” and “Residual Refrain.” The recurrence gives the double set a distorted sense of continuity. Rather than progressing through a stable artistic statement, Rotten Piece returns in altered conditions, almost as though fragments of one larger recording have become lodged throughout the archive. Ramirez’s “Solvent” and later “Presidential S/M March” perform a similar function, joining the two original tapes while demonstrating the distance between corrosive abstraction and theatrical social imagery.
Several project names and titles preserve the period’s appetite for grotesque adolescent excess. Infant Erection, Fetus Furs, Scrotal Termites and “Shittin’ Electric Flesh” were designed to offend before the cassette even entered a machine. Time has not necessarily made this language more sophisticated. Some of it remains funny, some exhausting, some indefensible, and some revealing precisely because it refuses the curatorial cleanup normally applied to historical scenes. The compilation documents an underground in which choosing an unacceptable name could function as a declaration of separation from respectable culture. That gesture did not guarantee meaningful art, but it created an environment where meaning was not required to arrive in socially approved clothing.
The strongest compilations are shaped as much by contrast as consistency. Threshold Of Sleep’s “Hazel,” Zahava’s “Inside Whispers” and the more ambient or withdrawn passages scattered across the discs prevent the collection from becoming a continuous contest of distortion. Their presence enlarges the darker tracks around them. Silence, low-level activity and partially concealed sound can create more anxiety than an immediate blast because they force the listener to imagine what remains outside the recording. The title’s “tension state” exists in these intervals, where sound has not collapsed completely but can no longer maintain a stable form.
The second volume behaves like an aftershock rather than a straightforward sequel. Manplug’s “Sickness Under Control,” Mass Murder Media’s “Broadcast Quality (#2),” Test Edit Franchise’s excerpt from “Forced I.V. Feeding” and the Carbomb Sideshow/Controlled Filter collaboration “Signal” introduce a vocabulary of medical restraint, communication systems and enforced transmission. Powdered Beatles’ “Filth” then turns a familiar pop-cultural reference into something contaminated and disposable. These pieces suggest machines designed to distribute information while becoming progressively less capable of distinguishing message from interference.
Trifle’s “Live At Commerce St. Art Warehouse ’95” is especially important because its title opens a door from the cassette network into an actual room. It confirms that at least part of this culture existed through gathering, physical volume and shared architecture rather than solely through mailed recordings. A live noise document captures more than the performer’s equipment. It contains the space, the sound system, the audience’s absorbed presence and the instability produced when private electronics are enlarged into a public event. The warehouse becomes briefly audible as an instrument, then disappears again, leaving only a recorded trace and an address within a track title.
The second disc closes through Alfa Jerk’s “C-4,” Rotten Piece’s “Residual Refrain,” Ramirez’s “Presidential S/M March” and Stab Range’s “Well Kept Secrets.” These titles form an accidental final sequence of explosive potential, returning memory, political theater and concealment. “Presidential S/M March” is particularly characteristic of Ramirez’s ability to collapse public authority and private fetish into the same image. The presidential march normally presents disciplined state power through ceremonial rhythm. Adding sadomasochism makes domination explicit, exposing the erotic structure that can hide inside uniforms, commands, obedience and spectacle.
Industrial Recollections’ 2009 double-CD edition performs a different kind of power operation: it removes the original music from the near-invisibility imposed by fifty-copy cassette editions. The label was created to recover rare and out-of-print industrial, noise and power-electronics material, including releases that might interest only a small body of committed listeners. That modest archival philosophy is crucial. History does not consist only of universally acknowledged masterpieces. Scenes are built from minor compilations, one-off projects, incomplete discographies and recordings that seemed disposable until their original context disappeared.
Transferring these tapes to CD could not reproduce the experience of receiving one through the mail in 1995. It does, however, preserve their sequencing, contradictory methods and cumulative social meaning. The change of format allows the listener to recognize the two volumes as a substantial historical object rather than separate rumors in a discography. Tape hiss, abrupt edits and variations in fidelity remain evidence of the original conditions instead of flaws awaiting correction. The compilation’s roughness identifies the tools and limitations through which the scene learned to hear itself.
The cover’s damaged black-and-white industrial image reinforces this identity without offering a recognizable Houston landmark. Chain-link mesh and heavy structural forms cross the foreground, while machinery or architecture dissolves into overexposed light behind them. The human figure, if one is present at all, has become shadow. It resembles a city photographed at the point where useful structure becomes abstract pattern. The title is printed across the bottom with the force of a warning attached after the collapse has already begun.
What makes Tension State Of Collapsing valuable is not that every contribution is equally accomplished. Its unevenness is historical information. The collection captures artists testing equipment, identities, imagery and thresholds without knowing which fragments would remain visible three decades later. The obscure pieces matter beside Black Leather Jesus and Richard Ramirez because they reveal that major underground figures do not emerge alone. They arise from correspondence, competition, friendship, shared venues, borrowed machines and compilations dense with names later omitted from simplified histories.
This double set preserves that surrounding tissue. It is a portrait of Houston noise before history had decided which artists counted, assembled by someone working inside the activity rather than observing it afterward. Anyone who participated, attended the Commerce Street performance, traded the original tapes or can identify the people behind the more obscure project names is invited to add what the surviving documentation cannot supply. The structure is still collapsing, but every remembered detail may keep another piece from disappearing.

VA - 2009 - Forbidden Planets - Music from the Pioneers of Electronic Sound 2xCD

 

Chrome Dreams – CDCD5033  917.19MB FLAC

 

Forbidden Planets does not present electronic music as a genre that appeared fully formed when synthesizers entered record shops. It documents a much stranger prehistory, assembled from railway recordings, theremins, oscillators, laboratory equipment, cut tape, filtered noise, radio experiments, film scores and sounds whose makers were not always certain whether they had composed music or engineered a new species of acoustic event. Across two discs, the collection moves from 1945 to the closing years of the 1950s, when electricity was steadily changing from an invisible aid to musical performance into an audible creative material. The future heard here was not sleek. It was spliced with scissors, threaded through machines, measured in laboratories and occasionally discovered by accident.

The compilation begins with Miklós Rózsa’s prelude from Spellbound, an apparently conservative opening for an anthology of electronic pioneers. Most of the music remains orchestral, but the theremin enters as an unstable psychological presence, its gliding voice associated with amnesia, anxiety and the hidden activity of the mind. This establishes one of the collection’s central histories: electronic sound first reached many listeners not through an avant-garde concert, but through cinema. It arrived attached to hypnosis, madness, outer space and forces invisible to ordinary perception. The electronic tone was valuable because it seemed to come from nowhere recognizable. It had no bow, breath or struck surface clearly explaining its existence.

Pierre Schaeffer’s “Étude aux chemins de fer” immediately overturns the orchestral frame. Trains become percussion, rhythm, phrasing and architecture. Whistles, couplings, engines and wheels are removed from their practical setting and reorganized through recording. This was the foundational insight of musique concrète: sound did not need to begin as a written note or obedient instrumental performance. A recorded object could be cut from the world, repeated, reversed and placed beside another object until both acquired new identities. Schaeffer does not imitate the railway. He discovers music already concealed inside its machinery and then rearranges its behavior.

Bernard Herrmann’s selections from The Day the Earth Stood Still return the listener to science-fiction cinema, but his electronic instruments are woven into an extraordinary hybrid ensemble. Theremins, organs, electric strings and unusual percussion create an atmosphere in which alien technology feels both majestic and physically threatening. Herrmann understood that an unfamiliar sound could alter the emotional meaning of an entire orchestra. The theremin does not merely announce that something comes from outer space. Its continuous, ungrounded pitch seems to weaken the normal laws governing the room around it. Even listeners who have never seen the film will recognize a vocabulary that became inseparable from flying saucers, radar screens and approaching machines.

From there the first disc travels deeper into the European electronic studios. Herbert Eimert and Robert Beyer’s “Klang im unbegrenzten Raum” and “Klangstudie II” abandon most of the visible world. Their tones seem suspended in an unlimited space, appearing and disappearing without the physical gestures associated with instrumental music. Early elektronische Musik often sought to create sound from electronically generated material rather than recorded everyday objects. This distinction from musique concrète could become almost ideological, yet heard decades later, the border is less important than the shared sense of discovery. Both schools were learning that tape could make time and timbre compositional materials rather than passive containers.

John Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape” introduces another route through the new technology. Cage treated recorded sound, chance procedures and electronic media as ways of loosening the composer’s control rather than perfecting it. A machine did not need to obey an ideal design. It could introduce unpredictable relationships and allow existing sounds to meet without being forced into traditional hierarchy. This attitude remains crucial to everything from tape collage and turntablism to experimental radio, sampling and noise. The electronic studio could be a laboratory of precision, but it could also become a place where precision was deliberately interrupted.

Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Studie I” sounds severe even within this company. The piece is built from electronically generated sine tones, organized with almost architectural concentration. There is little attempt to comfort the listener through recognizable references. Yet its austerity has a strange purity. Each tone seems placed beneath intense light, stripped of instrumental personality and examined according to frequency, duration and relationship. Paul Gredinger and Henri Pousseur continue this investigation, creating structures that can sound like signals exchanged by machines that have developed an unfamiliar syntax.

The first disc culminates with Stockhausen’s “Gesang der Jünglinge,” one of the anthology’s most profound works. A boy’s voice is separated into syllables, tones and particles, then distributed among electronic sounds until human and synthetic material begin crossing into one another. At some moments the voice remains clearly devotional; elsewhere it is fragmented into sparks of phonetic energy. The piece does not simply place singing over electronics. It asks where a human voice ends once it has been recorded, filtered, cut and spatially rearranged. The sacred text passes through technological transformation without entirely losing its spiritual charge. Instead, the studio becomes a vast imaginary cathedral built from tape.

The second disc opens with Louis and Bebe Barron’s music for Forbidden Planet, the work that supplies the compilation’s title and central image. Their “electronic tonalities” do not behave like conventional background scoring. The circuits squeal, pulse, shudder and appear to possess temperaments of their own. The Barrons built circuits influenced by ideas from cybernetics, recorded their responses and manipulated the results through tape. These sounds make the fictional technology of the Krell civilization convincing because they do not merely decorate the screen. They suggest autonomous systems communicating, malfunctioning and perhaps dreaming beyond human comprehension.

The anthology then becomes a rapid tour through several international laboratories. Hermann Heiss works with pure electronic form; Henri Pousseur’s “Scambi” transforms filtered noise into modular sections capable of being assembled in multiple orders; Iannis Xenakis makes “Diamorphoses” feel like weather, machinery and geological force compressed into magnetic tape. Xenakis’s recorded engines and environmental sounds do not retain the playful recognizability of Schaeffer’s trains. They become masses with gravitational weight, suggesting that concrete sound could be treated almost as architecture.

The Dutch pieces by Kid Baltan and Tom Dissevelt provide an important change of emotional temperature. “Song of the Second Moon,” “Syncopation” and “Whirling” are playful, rhythmic and startlingly accessible. Their bouncing tones, miniature percussion and sharply edited movements anticipate space-age pop, library music, early sequencer patterns and entire branches of later electronic entertainment. This is where the laboratory begins smiling. The equipment is no longer only producing abstraction, anxiety or cosmic awe. It can swing, joke and create imaginary dance music for planets that do not exist.

The short BBC Radiophonic Workshop selection demonstrates another practical route into electronic invention. Daphne Oram, Desmond Briscoe and their colleagues used tape manipulation to create sounds for radio and television when synthesizers as we now understand them were not available. Natural sounds could be recorded, slowed, accelerated, reversed, looped and layered until their sources became unrecognizable. This work occupied a peculiar cultural position. It was experimental music created inside a broadcasting institution, often designed to serve a few seconds of drama, comedy or science fiction. Millions of people consequently encountered radical tape techniques without being told they were listening to the avant-garde.

Edgard Varèse’s “Poème électronique” enlarges the studio into physical architecture. Originally created for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, it was intended to move through a building equipped with hundreds of loudspeakers while images and light surrounded the audience. On an ordinary stereo recording, only part of that spatial design survives, but the piece still feels immense. Bells, voices, machinery, percussion and electronic tones appear as fragments of civilization drifting through a technological cavern. Varèse had long imagined music as “organized sound,” and here recording technology finally allowed him to compose beyond the physical limitations of an orchestra.

György Ligeti’s “Artikulation” follows with something lighter, quicker and almost conversational. Electronic bursts interrupt one another like invented phonemes spoken by tiny creatures. Questions, responses, whispers, arguments and jokes seem to occur without any actual language. Ligeti turns the studio into a theater of artificial speech. Henk Badings’s extended ballet music then shows how electronic sound could support movement and dramatic form rather than existing only as an isolated experiment, while Tom Dissevelt’s brief “Whirling” returns with another flash of Dutch rhythmic invention.

Cage’s “Fontana Mix” closes the compilation not with a conclusion but with an opening. Its shifting tape materials and chance-derived organization leave the listener inside a field of possibilities rather than at the end of a historical lesson. That is appropriate because Forbidden Planets is not a clean evolutionary chart leading inevitably toward modern synthesizers, techno or digital production. The tracks represent competing ideas about what electronic music could be. Some composers sought total control over sound. Others welcomed accident. Some built tones electronically, while others recorded trains, voices or environmental debris. Some worked in state radio studios, some in corporate laboratories, and some entered popular consciousness through film.

The set’s greatest strength is precisely this looseness. It places orchestral theremin music beside musique concrète, pure electronic composition, soundtrack work, radiophonic effects and experimental tape collage. Strict definitions blur, but the listener gains a broader sense of electricity entering twentieth-century imagination from several directions at once. The anthology is a gateway rather than a final scholarly map, and its occasional misspellings and simplified chronology reinforce that status. It invites exploration, giving each name enough space to become a door into a much larger body of work.

The cover captures this approach perfectly. A clean waveform travels across a black scientific grid, while the opposite panel forms a collage of laboratories, tape machines, film imagery, robots, engineers and early electronic apparatus. One side offers the abstract signal; the other reveals the crowded human and mechanical world that produced it. The waveform appears simple only because the labor has been hidden behind the graph.

Listening now, many of these sounds feel strangely familiar. Their descendants inhabit horror films, video games, industrial music, ambient records, hip-hop samples, techno, noise, science documentaries and the notification sounds of ordinary devices. Yet the original recordings retain their alien character because the equipment did not offer easy presets or familiar templates. Each sound had to be generated, captured, edited and physically assembled. The pioneers were not choosing from an established electronic vocabulary. They were discovering that such a vocabulary might exist.

Forbidden Planets preserves the moment when recorded sound stopped functioning only as a copy of musical performance and became raw material with its own creative life. Trains could become rhythm. Voices could dissolve into particles. White noise could be sculpted. Circuits could behave like animals. A building could become part of a composition. The two discs are filled with worlds that later technology made easier to visit, but ease has not diminished their mystery. These pioneers were not merely predicting the future. Armed with tape, filters, oscillators and immense patience, they were manufacturing pieces of it by hand.

Christian Clozier - 1992 - Quasars / Markarian 205

 

Le Chant Du Monde – LDC 2781090  350.78MB FLAC

Space-themed electronic music often invites the listener to imagine a journey away from Earth. Christian Clozier’s Quasars / Markarian 205 reverses that familiar movement. It does not climb aboard a spacecraft, look through a window and provide a soundtrack for distant planets. The two suites seem to place the listener inside immense systems of radiation, rotation and unstable energy, removing the secure human viewpoint from which the universe can be admired at a comfortable distance. This is not decorative cosmic ambience. It is electroacoustic music in which matter itself appears electrically charged, continually changing shape before it can be named.

The album was issued on CD in 1992, but its two compositions belong to 1980 and 1981, a particularly rich period for the Groupe de Musique Expérimentale de Bourges. Clozier had co-founded the GMEB with Françoise Barrière in 1970 and helped turn Bourges into one of the world’s essential centers for electroacoustic creation, performance, education and international exchange. His role extended beyond composing individual works. He developed studios, instruments and systems for projecting sound through space, treating diffusion as an interpretive act rather than simple amplification. That history is audible throughout these pieces. Sounds do not merely occur in succession. They seem to approach, withdraw, widen, divide and pass through one another in an imagined architecture.

Quasars unfolds across six movements lasting approximately forty-six minutes. Its title refers to objects that can appear almost star-like from Earth while releasing extraordinary quantities of energy from the centers of remote galaxies. That contradiction between tiny visible point and unimaginable force becomes the suite’s governing idea. Clozier repeatedly constructs sounds that seem compact at first, then expand into turbulent fields. A small pulse acquires a halo of vibration. A narrow electronic tone splits into several layers. A low current begins as background pressure and gradually changes the scale of everything above it.

The music was realized through the analog resources of the Bourges studio Charybde, whose interconnected equipment allowed Clozier to build evolving electronic processes rather than merely record a series of isolated gestures. Analog modulation is central to the suite’s personality. Tones bend, beat against one another and generate secondary movements that feel partly composed and partly released from the behavior of the machinery. The voltage never appears entirely domesticated. Clozier establishes conditions, opens pathways and directs the resulting energy, but he also permits the electronic material to retain its own instability.

This gives Quasars a physical vitality missing from much electronic music built around perfectly sustained tones. Its signals have surfaces. They rasp, shimmer, buckle, flare and produce interference. Even the more spacious passages remain active at the edges, where faint movements suggest that the apparent silence is densely inhabited. Clozier’s cosmos is not an empty black background dotted with picturesque stars. It is crowded with radiation and overlapping fields whose activity exceeds the listener’s ability to observe everything at once.

The first movement establishes the album’s language through accumulating layers and sudden alterations of scale. Broad tones create a sense of open distance, but sharper signals repeatedly puncture that distance, making the space feel electrical rather than peaceful. Events do not form a conventional melody, yet they possess direction. One sound presses against another until their combined tension produces a change, after which a new arrangement begins to gather. The movement behaves less like a sequence of objects than a chain reaction.

The shorter second movement concentrates that energy. Pulsation becomes more pronounced, but it never settles into a dependable mechanical rhythm. Clozier uses repetition as a source of instability. Each recurrence arrives inside a slightly changed environment, making the listener aware that the apparent pattern is being continuously altered. The movement suggests rotation without presenting a fixed orbit. Its cycles wobble, accelerate or dissolve into surrounding frequencies.

By the third and fourth movements, the suite has become increasingly theatrical. Dense eruptions are answered by wider areas of suspended sound, and the contrast creates the impression of enormous distances opening inside the composition. Clozier does not rely upon sampled rockets, astronomical narration or familiar science-fiction effects. His imagery arises from changes in sonic mass. A concentrated burst can seem like an object because it has weight and boundaries; when those boundaries disintegrate, the same material becomes atmosphere.

The fifth movement is especially revealing of Clozier’s ability to balance raw electronic power with precision. Its gestures can be abrupt, but they are never randomly placed. Each interruption changes the meaning of the texture surrounding it. A bright sound may make the lower field appear suddenly deeper; a low impact can pull a previously weightless sequence toward the ground. The composition is constantly recalibrating the listener’s imaginary sense of size.

The final movement does not resolve the suite through a comforting return or grand concluding chord. Instead, it carries the accumulated vocabulary into another region of activity, allowing sequences, flashes and deep currents to coexist before the structure closes. The ending feels less like arriving at the edge of the universe than losing contact with a transmission that continues beyond the recording. Quasars does not present a completed astronomical picture. It allows a vast process to become temporarily audible.

This relationship between sound and real space was fundamental to the composition’s public life. Quasars was presented in a major outdoor concert at the Nançay radio telescope in 1981. The setting could hardly have been more appropriate. A radio telescope receives forms of activity that human senses cannot perceive directly, translating distant radiation into information. Clozier’s studio performs a related operation, though artistically rather than scientifically. It produces an audible universe from voltages, modulation and electronic relationships, while the concert system enlarges that universe across an actual landscape.

Markarian 205 follows as a more compact three-movement suite lasting slightly over twenty-three minutes. Its title identifies a specific quasar appearing near the spiral galaxy NGC 4319 when viewed from Earth. The two objects look like neighbors in a flat astronomical image, yet they are separated by an enormous distance. Their apparent relationship is created by perspective. This phenomenon supplies a powerful model for electroacoustic composition, where sounds recorded or generated at unrelated times can be placed beside one another and perceived as inhabiting one coherent space.

The first movement of Markarian 205 feels more concentrated and purposeful than the opening of Quasars. Rather than gradually revealing a broad cosmos, it establishes a field whose elements already seem caught in a gravitational relationship. Sounds circle, overlap and briefly align before separating. Clozier’s electronic tones frequently possess a vocal or animal-like animation without becoming obvious imitations. The equipment seems to breathe, call and react, turning the studio into an ecology of artificial organisms.

The second movement deepens the work’s sense of perspective. Foreground events appear sharply defined against more distant electronic layers, but the hierarchy refuses to remain stable. A sound initially perceived as background may expand until it dominates the field, while a prominent signal can retreat into a faint residue. This continual reversal recalls the visual puzzle of Markarian 205 and NGC 4319. Apparent closeness does not establish actual relationship, and apparent distance can conceal enormous power.

The dedication to Françoise Barrière adds a more intimate current beneath the astronomical imagery. Barrière was Clozier’s creative and institutional partner throughout the life of the Bourges center, a composer whose own work developed a distinct electroacoustic language. Markarian 205 can consequently be heard as both cosmic construction and private address. The quasar is a distant source whose energy survives the journey toward another observer. A dedication operates similarly. Something created within one consciousness is projected outward in the hope that another person will receive it.

The final movement draws these scales together. Its electronic figures can feel microscopic, like electrical particles or nervous impulses, while the surrounding resonance makes them seem to inhabit an astronomical expanse. Clozier does not choose between the cellular and the cosmic because electronic sound can imply both simultaneously. A waveform has no fixed visible size. Through frequency, volume and spatial placement, the smallest circuit can produce the impression of planetary motion.

The cover art belongs to a wonderfully direct tradition of early electronic and progressive records imagining outer space. Clozier’s name is printed in monumental white lettering above a lunar landscape, a large greenish planet and one intensely shining star. A solitary figure stands near an instrument or antenna, dwarfed by the scene. The image may initially appear more literal than the music, yet it expresses the same displacement of human scale. The observer is present, but the universe occupies nearly everything.

The phrase “Chrysopée Électronique-Bourges” appears beneath the landscape. Chrysopée refers to the alchemical production of gold, an apt name for a series devoted to works made in the Bourges studios. Electroacoustic composition transforms ordinary electrical activity, recorded matter and technical procedure into another order of experience. Clozier’s alchemy does not conceal the machinery. The grain of analog synthesis, modulation and tape remains audible, just as the physical reactions of an alchemical laboratory would leave heat, residue and altered material behind.

The CD also represents an important act of preservation. Quasars had originally appeared as an LP in 1981, but the 1992 edition joined it with Markarian 205 and allowed both suites to occupy an uninterrupted seventy-minute arc. The combination reveals how quickly Clozier could reconsider the same general territory. Quasars is expansive, episodic and outward-facing, designed to radiate across a large imagined or physical space. Markarian 205 is tighter and more relational, concerned with bodies that appear connected because of the observer’s position.

Neither composition has aged into a museum display of obsolete technology. Their analog identity remains obvious, but the equipment’s limitations contribute to the music’s emotional force. The signals are not infinitely clean or effortlessly reproducible. They carry fluctuations, friction and the sense that physical circuitry is being pushed into unusually expressive behavior. The works remind us that electronic music did not begin as the selection of finished sounds from a menu. Each timbre had to be created, connected, transformed, tested and placed into motion.

Quasars / Markarian 205 is therefore not simply an album about space. It is about the ability of sound to manufacture space where none physically exists. Two loudspeakers become a field of enormous depth. A pulse becomes a moving object. Modulation becomes weather. Distance becomes a compositional instrument. Clozier takes invisible electrical relationships and gives them apparent dimension without forcing them to resemble conventional music.

The greatest pleasure of the album lies in hearing those dimensions continually rearrange themselves. Its universe is never reduced to one sustained drone or one fashionable image of cosmic serenity. It flashes, convulses, rotates and reorganizes. The listener is not asked to admire a static model from outside. We are placed within a system whose full scale remains inaccessible, receiving only the portions our temporary position allows us to hear.

Elliott Sharp, Fred Chalenor, Henry Franzoni - 1995 - Boodlers

Cavity Search – CSR 18  255.96MB FLAC

 Boodlers begins with three musicians entering a room, but it does not remain a document of what happened there. The basic performances were recorded live to DAT at Baby Monster in New York, after which Elliott Sharp digitally edited and remixed the material at his Studio zOaR. That combination is central to the album’s identity. Fred Chalenor’s bass and Henry Franzoni’s drums supply the unstable physical chemistry of musicians responding in real time, while Sharp’s guitar, tenor saxophone and computer work allow the performances to be cut open, rearranged and occasionally returned in altered shapes. Improvisation becomes raw material without losing the friction of the original encounter.

The trio’s name supplies the first clue to its humor. A “boodler” is an old American term for a political grafter, someone participating in bribery, patronage or the distribution of illicit money. Nearly every track title continues the language of politics, commerce or corrupt exchange: “Acid-Jazz Payback,” “Green Party,” “Buckshot,” “Boodlerama” and “Cache Cow.” The album never develops this into a literal political program, but the titles make its playful distrust of fashionable categories and respectable institutions clear. Even the music seems to operate through unauthorized transactions. Rhythms are borrowed and damaged, jazz gestures are passed through rock amplification, and live playing is fed into digital machinery that returns it carrying a different identity.
Sharp was an ideal musician to bring into Fred Chalenor and Henry Franzoni’s long-running partnership. Chalenor and Franzoni had played together in various forms since the 1970s, most notably in Face Ditch and later Caveman Shoestore. Their connection was not simply the conventional relationship of bassist supporting drummer. They had developed a shared rhythmic language built from abrupt turns, crooked meters, heavy grooves and the ability to change direction without stopping to announce the new destination. Sharp enters that language as both provocateur and engineer. His guitar can lock into the rhythm section’s momentum, cut across it with hard angular figures or abandon rock articulation for metallic scraping and electronic grain. His tenor saxophone introduces another physical register, able to behave as melody, rhythmic punctuation or a rough-edged competing voice.
“Acid-Jazz Payback” immediately tests the fashionable language of its moment. By 1995, acid jazz had become a recognizable mixture of funk rhythm, jazz reference, dance-floor polish and cosmopolitan cool. Boodlers retain the promise of groove but remove the polish that would make it useful as lifestyle music. Chalenor and Franzoni establish movement without granting the listener a smooth, dependable pocket. Sharp’s lines repeatedly roughen the surface, turning the track into a revenge fantasy against jazz reduced to tasteful atmosphere. The title’s “payback” may be humorous, but the performance does sound as though improvisation has returned to collect a debt from a style that borrowed its vocabulary while sanding away much of its danger.
Chalenor is crucial to the piece because he does not treat bass as neutral flooring. His playing is thick, active and capable of redirecting the group through a small shift of emphasis. Franzoni answers with percussion that can suggest funk for a few seconds before opening into freer motion. Sharp does not float above them as a featured soloist. He enters the mechanism, sometimes reinforcing it and sometimes throwing irregular objects into its gears. The result is recognizably rhythmic but resistant to passive consumption.
“Green Party” lasts less than two minutes and behaves like a compressed interruption. The title may suggest environmental politics, money or simply the color of American currency, but the music is too brief to establish a stable platform. It demonstrates how effectively the trio can work in miniature after the extended opening. Ideas arrive, collide and disappear before any one of them can become the piece’s official policy. The abrupt scale change also prevents the album from settling into the expectation that every improvisation must become a long-form excursion.
“Buckshot” returns to a larger field. A contemporary review observed that the three musicians sometimes appear to be improvising independently, each operating within his own terrain, while the total performance somehow remains coherent. That description identifies one of the album’s greatest strengths. Unity does not require constant agreement. Sharp, Chalenor and Franzoni can pursue separate trajectories because they are listening not only for opportunities to imitate one another but for ways their differences might create a larger structure.
The title describes the piece accurately. Buckshot disperses rather than following a single line. Individual attacks spread across the stereo field, and the listener must decide whether to follow the bass, percussion or Sharp’s rapidly changing instrumental gestures. The performance remains cohesive because the musicians share an instinct for density. When one player occupies more space, another can reduce activity or move into a different register. What sounds initially like collision gradually reveals itself as traffic managed without signs.
“Cambionics” introduces the album’s most obvious transformation through computer processing. A cambion, in folklore, is a hybrid offspring joining human and demonic parentage; “Cambionics” sounds like an invented science devoted to producing such crossings. Whatever Sharp intended by the title, the music’s method is hybridization. The trio remains audible, but live instrumental identities are stretched, layered or altered until their origins become uncertain. Drums no longer behave exclusively as percussion, guitar loses the familiar outline of plucked strings, and ensemble interaction becomes something that can occur after the musicians have finished playing.
This use of computer editing does not replace improvisation with laboratory perfection. Sharp preserves the nervous movement of the trio while making the recording itself an additional performer. The computer remembers, repeats and mutates pieces of the session. Instead of documenting one irreversible passage through time, the track permits sounds to encounter distorted versions of their own past. The result belongs equally to free improvisation and electroacoustic composition, though it carries the dirt, humor and bodily force that those terms can sometimes leave out.
The twenty-minute “Boodlerama” forms the album’s sprawling center of gravity. Its title suggests a panoramic exhibition of the group’s methods, and the performance moves through multiple territories without attempting to disguise the transitions as conventional composition. Groove, psychedelic drift, abstract texture, free-jazz agitation and computer-treated sound appear as temporary districts inside one unstable city. The length allows small ideas to become environments, but it also gives the trio room to abandon them before they harden into routines.
“Boodlerama” is where the history between Chalenor and Franzoni becomes especially valuable. Long improvisations often reveal whether a rhythm section merely accompanies adventurous playing or possesses an independent imagination. These two can support Sharp without waiting for instructions, but they can also initiate changes and force him to respond. Chalenor’s bass may provide a distorted central mass, then suddenly become wiry and mobile. Franzoni can move from propulsion toward scattered percussion without making the music sound emptied out. Sharp alternates between being the trio’s sharpest edge and another fragment inside its collective machinery.
The piece also explains why descriptions of Boodlers vary so widely. The group can be called avant-jazz, experimental rock, free improvisation, psychedelic music or computer-processed noise, and each description will be temporarily correct. The problem begins when any one label is expected to govern the entire performance. Boodlers do not fuse genres into a polished new product. They allow incompatible methods to remain visible while discovering how quickly the musicians can travel among them.
“Cache Cow” closes the album with another compressed joke. The title replaces the “cash” in cash cow with the computer memory term “cache,” joining commerce to data storage. It is an appropriate conclusion for music that began as a live event and was then stored, edited and reconfigured digitally. The spontaneous performance has become information that can be retrieved and transformed, yet the short track refuses to inflate that process into technological solemnity. The album leaves with a grin, carrying its accumulated noise away before the listener can decide whether a final grand statement is coming.
Boodlers appeared at a fertile midpoint in 1990s experimental music. Alternative rock had created a larger audience for dissonance and unconventional instrumental sound, acid jazz and electronic dance culture were reorganizing older grooves, and increasingly accessible digital tools were changing what could happen after a studio performance. Sharp, Chalenor and Franzoni occupy all of these developments without submitting fully to any of them. They can sound like a particularly damaged power trio, a free-jazz unit, a mutant funk band or a computer-composition workshop, sometimes within the same passage.
The album’s production preserves this ambiguity. Recording live to DAT captures the clarity and immediacy of the players’ reactions, while Sharp’s later intervention rejects the idea that a live improvisation must be protected as a sacred, untouched event. Editing becomes another form of improvisation performed at a different speed. In the studio, Sharp can answer a gesture days or weeks after Chalenor and Franzoni originally made it, constructing new relationships that were unavailable in the room.
There is an important generosity inside this method. Although Sharp was the most internationally recognizable name and controlled the later computer work, the album never reduces Chalenor and Franzoni to anonymous source material. Their rhythmic personalities survive every transformation. The computer does not erase the human encounter; it reveals further possibilities concealed within it. This is why the record feels less like an Elliott Sharp solo project with accompaniment than the beginning of an actual group. Boodlers would continue and release Counter Fit two years later, expanding the concept rather than treating this meeting as a disposable session.
The record’s humor should not be underestimated either. Experimental music is frequently presented as though seriousness requires solemnity, but Boodlers understand that complexity can laugh at itself. The titles puncture intellectual grandeur, while the playing repeatedly turns apparent disorder into a sudden groove or dismantles a successful pattern just when it begins sounding impressive. The musicians do not trivialize their abilities. They refuse to treat virtuosity as a formal ceremony.
Boodlers ultimately documents three different relationships to instability. Sharp approaches it through fractured instrumental language, systems, processing and the pleasure of transforming known sounds. Chalenor approaches it through bass lines that can anchor a passage while quietly moving its foundations. Franzoni approaches it through percussion that recognizes rhythm as a field of possibilities rather than a fixed grid. Their methods overlap without becoming identical.
The album is therefore not chaotic in the sense of lacking order. It contains several kinds of order competing, cooperating and occasionally bribing one another. Every track proposes a different temporary government, from the corrupted dance floor of “Acid-Jazz Payback” to the dispersed negotiations of “Buckshot,” the digital hybrid of “Cambionics” and the unruly twenty-minute municipality of “Boodlerama.” Nothing remains in power for long. That may be the boodlers’ real platform: every structure is provisional, every rhythm open to revision, and every apparently stable system already contains the material of its next mutation.

Lap Dancer - 2005 - Night Rituals Of The Gaping Secretion CDr

Troniks – TRO-196  264.36MB FLAC

Night Rituals Of The Gaping Secretion arrives wrapped in the imagery of erotic entertainment, but its atmosphere has little of the smooth choreography, controlled fantasy or reassuring distance normally associated with the strip-club transaction. Lap Dancer takes a setting built around looking and turns it into a hostile acoustic enclosure. The cover photograph offers exposed flesh, bent posture and the presence of another woman watching from behind, yet its grainy reproduction prevents the scene from becoming polished pornography. The image feels overheated, cramped and almost documentary, as though the glamour promised by the project name has already begun to decay. Jamie Grefe’s sound performs a similar operation. The fantasy remains visible, but its machinery has been dragged into the foreground.

Lap Dancer was one of those briefly prolific mid-2000s noise projects whose discography appeared across tiny labels, limited CDrs, files, cassettes and collaborations before becoming difficult to reconstruct. Grefe worked with microphones, pedals, laptop processing, shortwave radio, field recordings and ordinary objects, a flexible collection of tools that allowed harsh noise to remain attached to physical environments. Night Rituals does not feel like an exercise in generating maximum distortion from an anonymous electronic box. Its surfaces seem crowded with contact, movement and objects being pushed beyond their intended functions. Sounds scrape, smear and buckle. Feedback is not merely sustained but manipulated like resistant material.

The album’s title joins ceremony to anatomy. A ritual normally gives repetition an agreed meaning: gestures occur in a particular order, objects receive designated functions, and participants understand that the performance temporarily separates sacred time from everyday life. “Night rituals” might suggest nightlife itself, the repeated routines of dressing, entering the club, paying, watching and returning home. The addition of “gaping secretion” destroys any possibility of elegance. The human body is reduced to an opening and the fluids it involuntarily produces. Fantasy is punctured by biology. What was presented as a controlled surface becomes porous, leaking and impossible to contain.

Grefe’s noise occupies that rupture between presentation and physical reality. Dense electronic pressure can initially resemble a single continuous mass, but the surface is constantly being interrupted by smaller abrasions, high-frequency squeals, muffled impact and unstable low-end movement. The recording seems less interested in building one perfect wall than in worrying at the wall’s weak points. Layers rub against one another until they generate new textures. A signal becomes overloaded, splits apart and exposes another current beneath it. The sound feels bodily not because it clearly imitates organs or fluids, but because it behaves like matter under stress.

The name Lap Dancer adds an important tension. A lap dance is a performance of intimacy governed by rules, money and a fixed duration. Physical closeness is offered while emotional and contractual distance remain in force. Noise creates a comparable contradiction. It can feel invasive and intensely intimate, entering the ear and vibrating through the body, yet the source remains remote and impersonal. The listener receives physical sensation without reciprocal contact. Night Rituals magnifies this imbalance. Its sound presses close, sometimes almost obliterating the space between recording and listener, but it never offers the reassurance of human communication.

This makes the erotic imagery more complicated than simple provocation. The cover invites looking, while the music makes passive observation difficult. One cannot remain a detached customer comfortably consuming the scene. Harsh noise redirects attention from the photographed bodies toward the conditions of looking itself: repetition, fixation, concealment, payment, fantasy and the conversion of another person into a surface carrying private desire. Yet the recording does not provide a moral lecture about that process. It is implicated in the same fascination it disturbs. The project name and title deliberately seek the charge of sexual imagery, even as the sound corrodes its glamour.

That unresolved position belongs to much of the noise underground surrounding Troniks during this period. Sexual extremity, horror-film imagery, medical language and damaged bodies circulated as a visual vocabulary capable of signaling that a release existed beyond respectable cultural limits. Sometimes this produced little more than adolescent shock tactics. At its best, however, it created a conflict between attraction and disgust that the sound could deepen rather than merely illustrate. Night Rituals succeeds because its imagery and audio share the same unstable texture. Neither offers a clean fantasy. Everything appears worn, processed and slightly contaminated.

The album also benefits from Grefe’s sense of movement. Even at its most saturated, the noise does not become entirely motionless. Frequencies lean into one another, recede and return at altered angles. Microphone handling and object-based sound give the impression that something is physically occurring behind the electronic treatment. The source may no longer be identifiable, but effort remains audible. This is crucial. Without that sensation of action, the record’s bodily language would become empty decoration. Instead, the electronics feel touched, pressured and repeatedly forced through narrow openings.

There are moments when the density almost acquires rhythm, not through a conventional beat but through recurring surges and contractions. Pressure accumulates, briefly loosens and then closes again. This gives the music a respiratory quality, although it resembles compromised breathing more than calm inhalation. The title’s fixation upon openings and secretions returns here in abstract form. Sound enters, exits, clogs and spills. The recording becomes an imaginary body whose internal processes have been amplified until they fill the entire room.

The low fidelity of the presentation strengthens this effect. Cleaner production might separate every layer and turn the album into a display of technical control. Here the dirt joins the sounds together. Edges blur, saturation conceals origins and the recording medium becomes another layer of abrasion. This is not carelessness. The obscurity forces attention toward texture rather than equipment identification. The listener hears friction before hearing a specific device.

Night Rituals Of The Gaping Secretion belongs to a moment when CDr noise could appear quickly, travel through mail-order networks and vanish before a stable public history formed around it. Its physical modesty is part of the appeal. A cheaply reproduced disc and a grainy photograph contain an environment far larger and more oppressive than the object suggests. The release does not require elaborate packaging or a manifesto because its title, image and sound immediately establish a sealed internal logic.

What remains most compelling is the album’s refusal to choose between seduction and repulsion. It uses erotic display but makes the experience physically abrasive. It promises ritual but delivers instability. It invokes the body while dissolving recognizable bodily identity into electrical pressure. The dancer remains visible on the cover, yet inside the recording there is no stable performer to watch, only movement, friction and transformed matter.

Lap Dancer does not provide nightlife music, pornography in sound or a simple exercise in harshness. Night Rituals is closer to the noise left after fantasy has been dismantled: overheated circuitry, bodily residue, damaged surfaces and the uncomfortable awareness that desire is never as clean as the images created to sell it. The performance ends, the room empties and the lighting comes up, revealing every stain the darkness had temporarily made beautiful.