Dissecting Table / Vasilisk - 2011 - Saddharma /Tibetan Liberation

Steinklang Industries – SK​-​IN18  410.88MB FLAC

 Saddharma / Tibetan Liberation places two veteran Japanese industrial projects beside one another without forcing them into a conventional collaboration. Dissecting Table occupies the first half with one thirty-two-minute composition, while Vasilisk answers through four shorter movements. Their sounds are distinct, yet both approach industrial music as a vehicle for spiritual pressure rather than merely urban alienation, mechanical aggression, or shock. Ichiro Tsuji constructs an overwhelming system of rhythm, noise, electronics, and dark vocal force; Tomo Kuwahara and his collaborators create a ritual environment shaped by percussion, loops, strings, drones, grief, invocation, and suppressed conflict. The disc consequently behaves like a passage between two temples built from different materials. One is filled with unstable machinery attempting to formulate a doctrine. The other opens onto ceremonial space where spiritual liberation remains inseparable from violence, mourning, and historical struggle.

“Saddharma” can be translated broadly as the true, good, or authentic Dharma: the teaching capable of revealing reality and guiding beings away from suffering. The term also resonates with the Sanskrit title of the Lotus Sutra, the Saddharma Puṇḍarīka Sūtra, enormously influential throughout East Asian Buddhism. Tsuji does not turn that tradition into gentle meditative decoration. His composition is severe, crowded, and bodily. Rhythmic elements associated with Dissecting Table’s earlier industrial work collide with abrasive electronic masses, vocal darkness, distorted movement, and passages whose apparent organization repeatedly approaches collapse. The true teaching, if one is present, does not arrive as a calm voice floating above worldly confusion. It must be sought inside noise, repetition, resistance, and the unstable machinery of perception.
This gives the piece an especially productive relationship with Tsuji’s preceding work. Non-Euclidean Geometry questioned whether familiar rules could describe the space we inhabit. El Dorado of Asvabhava examined the desire for permanent essence and final spiritual destinations. Chaos Attractor located hidden organization within unpredictable electronic behavior. “Saddharma” draws these concerns toward the possibility of truth itself. If perception is unstable, identity dependent upon conditions, and every system capable of generating illusion, what would a true teaching sound like? Tsuji wisely refuses to answer through musical serenity. The composition instead makes the listener experience the difficulty of separating signal from interference.
The old-school rhythmic elements are crucial because they prevent “Saddharma” from drifting into abstract electronic philosophy. The body remains involved. Repetition enters through muscles before its conceptual significance becomes clear. A rhythm may establish temporary orientation, only for surrounding noise and vocal pressure to change its apparent function. What initially feels like propulsion can become confinement; what resembles mechanical discipline may develop ritual intensity. Tsuji has always understood that industrial rhythm can represent both oppression and resistance. The same repeated force that subordinates the body can also gather concentration, endurance, and collective energy.
His voice deepens this ambiguity. It does not resemble the tranquil transmission of a teacher explaining a doctrine to receptive students. It emerges from within the mechanism, strained by the same pressure affecting every other sound. Language becomes difficult to separate from breath, distortion, and physical effort. This matters because Dharma is not merely information to be understood intellectually. A teaching must be heard, remembered, practiced, embodied, and tested against suffering. Tsuji’s vocal presence makes communication itself sound endangered. The true teaching may exist, but the human body attempting to transmit or receive it remains temporary, frightened, angry, and vulnerable to interference.
The piece’s long duration permits these contradictions to become environmental. Rather than organizing itself around a single climb toward revelation, “Saddharma” moves through changing concentrations of rhythm, noise, atmosphere, and voice. Certain states recur without returning identically. The listener develops expectations, loses them, and begins constructing another model. This is close to the process explored on Chaos Attractor, but the spiritual title changes the emotional stakes. Pattern recognition becomes a search for doctrine. Every returning pulse seems capable of revealing an underlying order, while each disruption exposes how quickly the mind converts repetition into certainty.
At the thirty-two-minute point, the disc changes civilizations. Vasilisk enters with “Buddha’s Warriors,” and the difference is immediate. Where Dissecting Table compresses spiritual inquiry into a dense electronic system, Vasilisk opens it into ritual movement. Tomo Kuwahara’s synthesis, loops, and percussion meet Yukio Nagoshi’s guitar and six-string bass, while Jun Konagaya’s voice reconnects the music with White Hospital, the early-1980s project from which both Vasilisk and Konagaya’s Grim emerged. This reunion does not sound like nostalgic reconstruction. Konagaya’s voice becomes an ancestral force inside a new ceremonial environment, carrying the raw physical authority of early Japanese industrial music into Vasilisk’s more spacious and psychedelic world.
The title “Buddha’s Warriors” contains another apparent contradiction. Buddhist teaching is commonly associated with compassion and nonviolence, yet spiritual traditions repeatedly employ the imagery of combat. The enemy may be ignorance, attachment, fear, ego, cruelty, or the internal conditions that perpetuate suffering. A warrior in this sense is not necessarily someone conquering another population, but someone prepared to confront the forces governing his own consciousness. Vasilisk’s percussion gives this struggle bodily momentum while Konagaya’s voice prevents it from becoming a decorative fantasy of Eastern wisdom. The ritual carries dirt, danger, historical weight, and the possibility that spiritual language can itself become militarized.
“Grief” withdraws from that public force into a more exposed emotional landscape. The additional percussion does not simply increase rhythmic activity. It surrounds the piece with small physical events, making grief feel like something distributed through the body rather than expressed through one central melody. Guitar, bass, electronics, and percussion create a space where sorrow can circulate without being resolved into catharsis. Vasilisk’s music has often understood ritual as a method of remaining with difficult states rather than escaping them. Grief is given form, repetition, and communal space, but it is not transformed into victory.
The title of the larger Vasilisk work inevitably raises Tibet as both a spiritual symbol and a real historical territory subjected to political conflict, occupation, cultural suppression, exile, and competing international projections. Western experimental music has often used Tibetan imagery as shorthand for mystery, transcendence, or exotic ritual, stripping it from living people and political conditions. Vasilisk’s four titles resist complete retreat into that fantasy. Warriors, grief, invocation, and silent war establish liberation as something contested. Spiritual practice exists beside force, sorrow, collective memory, and forms of struggle that may remain invisible to outsiders.
“Invocation” marks the point where grief becomes deliberate address. To invoke is to call something into presence: a deity, protector, memory, ancestor, force, or state of consciousness. Yet invocation cannot guarantee an answer. The caller performs an action whose success may remain unknowable. Vasilisk builds the track around that uncertain threshold. Percussion establishes a ceremonial body, while electronics and strings create a surrounding atmosphere whose source and dimensions remain difficult to define. The music does not illustrate a ritual from outside. It creates the conditions in which listening itself begins to feel ritualized.
The distinction between ritual and performance is important. Performance ordinarily assumes an audience and directs gestures outward toward interpretation. Ritual may contain performance, but its actions are also intended to alter the participants, location, or relationship between visible and invisible realities. Vasilisk’s repetition works in this transformative manner. Sounds are not repeated because the musicians lack further ideas. They return until their meaning changes, until ordinary measurement loosens and the listener becomes aware of anticipation, breath, bodily stillness, and the emotional charge gathered around small variations.
“Silent War” closes the disc with conflict stripped of spectacle. A silent war may occur inside consciousness, within an occupied culture, between competing memories, or through systems whose violence remains hidden beneath ordinary appearance. Silence does not imply peace. It may indicate fear, censorship, endurance, secrecy, disappearance, or a conflict so deeply internalized that it no longer requires visible weapons. Vasilisk’s reflective closing movement refuses the easy release of a triumphant liberation anthem. The struggle continues below audibility.
This ending changes how the entire split can be understood. Dissecting Table begins by searching for true teaching inside overwhelming information and mechanized pressure. Vasilisk then presents liberation as a four-stage process involving courage, mourning, invocation, and unresolved struggle. Neither project offers enlightenment as a clean escape from material conditions. Spirit remains entangled with bodies, machines, history, grief, and human aggression. The sacred is not discovered by removing contamination from the world. It appears within the attempt to remain attentive while contamination continues.
The split format is therefore more meaningful than a simple division of running time. Tsuji and Kuwahara offer two models of spiritual industrial music. Dissecting Table creates an enclosed analytical furnace where systems are subjected to pressure until their hidden structures emerge. Vasilisk creates a ritual field in which sounds, performers, memories, and cultural symbols circulate through repetition. One dissects; the other invokes. Both distrust the idea that transformation can occur without danger.
The release also marks Vasilisk’s return after more than two decades of relative silence following the project’s intensely sought-after late-1980s records and the 1990 collection Musick for Liberation and Ecstasy. That title already joined spiritual freedom with altered bodily intensity, and Tibetan Liberation extends the same search without pretending that time has stood still. Kuwahara’s ritual vocabulary now contains the accumulated silence of the intervening years. The music does not imitate the 1980s recordings so much as resume a ceremony whose participants, historical surroundings, and understanding of the ritual have changed.
Saddharma / Tibetan Liberation ultimately asks what liberation might mean when no participant can stand outside history, technology, desire, or suffering. Tsuji searches within unstable systems for a teaching that cannot be reduced to one fixed pattern. Vasilisk answers through warriors, grief, invocation, and silent conflict, suggesting that liberation is not a destination reached once and permanently possessed. It is an activity repeated under changing conditions.
The CD’s two halves remain separate, but they speak across the division. Dissecting Table makes truth difficult to hear; Vasilisk makes freedom difficult to complete. Between them lies nearly an hour of industrial music refusing both nihilism and easy transcendence. The machinery becomes a testing ground, ritual becomes a form of endurance, and sound becomes one temporary method for carrying spiritual questions through a material world that will never stop resisting them.

Gravetemple - 2007 - The Holy Down

Southern Lord – SUNN72  323.89MB FLAC

 The Holy Down sounds less like a concert preserved on disc than an hour-long disturbance in the atmosphere. Stephen O’Malley, Oren Ambarchi, and Attila Csihar do not present a sequence of compositions, recognizable riffs, or carefully separated improvisations. They enter one continuous field and remain inside it until guitars, percussion, bells, voice, feedback, room acoustics, and bodily endurance have become parts of the same changing organism. The recording begins at such a low level of definition that the listener may initially wonder whether the central event has started. A thin electrical vibration gathers weight, distant tones begin acquiring edges, and Csihar’s voice appears less as a singer entering the foreground than as another presence already wandering somewhere inside the structure. The music does not announce itself. It materializes gradually, like a building becoming visible as smoke passes across it.

The title contains several possible directions. “The Holy” immediately places the performance within a landscape burdened by sacred history, competing claims, pilgrimage, conflict, archaeology, prophecy, and centuries of projected meaning. “Down” can describe descent, lowered tuning, grief, collapse, underground depth, or the physical direction in which O’Malley and Ambarchi’s guitar frequencies seem to pull the room. Together, the words produce a spiritual movement without promising elevation. This is holiness experienced downward, through pressure, darkness, damaged sound, and the body’s response to vibration. Gravetemple does not attempt to represent any specific religion or translate sacred tradition into metal theatre. The trio constructs a space in which the sacred becomes indistinguishable from dread, physical force, and the inability to determine whether one is witnessing invocation, warning, possession, or exhaustion.
The performance was recorded while war was occurring between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, a historical fact that inevitably alters the atmosphere surrounding the document. It would be careless, however, to claim that the recording explains that conflict or converts real violence into an aesthetic backdrop. The music offers no political analysis, documentary testimony, or clear statement about the events taking place beyond the venue. What survives is a performance made inside a period when danger, distance, borders, military action, and uncertainty possessed immediate reality for people in the region. The knowledge does not decode the sound, but it prevents the sound from floating inside a completely imaginary darkness. The drones were created in a real city during a real historical emergency, before an audience whose experience cannot be reconstructed from the recording alone.
Gravetemple had grown from the more abstract possibilities surrounding Sunn O))), but the trio immediately developed a different chemistry. O’Malley’s guitar provides immense gravitational force, yet Oren Ambarchi’s presence destabilizes the expectation that two amplified guitars will simply create a larger wall. Ambarchi has long approached the guitar as an electronic and percussive device rather than a machine designed primarily for riffs. His sustained tones, textural interference, drums, and bells introduce movement inside O’Malley’s heavy foundations. One guitarist appears to make the ground denser while the other tests whether that ground can be folded, perforated, or made to vibrate against itself. Their sounds frequently merge, but they do not become identical. The resulting drone contains multiple directions of pressure.
Csihar occupies an equally unusual position. His voice is associated with some of black metal’s most recognizable recordings, yet here he is freed from verses, lyrics, and the responsibility to stand above a band. He mutters, breathes, chants, rasps, whispers, and releases more extreme sounds without establishing a stable vocal identity. At times he resembles a priest conducting a ritual whose language has been forgotten. Elsewhere he sounds like someone trapped behind the amplifiers, sending partial signals through several meters of vibrating air. His performance is powerful because it refuses the simple heroic role of the demonic frontman. The voice can seem ancient and authoritative one moment, then frightened, sickened, or barely human the next.
This instability makes the recording far stranger than conventional drone metal. A familiar heavy record often establishes its power through identifiable riffs and repeated impact. The Holy Down produces force through suspended expectation. Long passages appear to be gathering toward a decisive eruption, but the anticipated event may arrive only as a modest change in density. The listener begins measuring movement differently. A slight thickening of feedback becomes structural. A distant bell alters the perceived dimensions of the room. A vocal sound appearing after several minutes of instrumental pressure feels enormous despite occupying little actual space. Gravetemple uses duration to enlarge events that ordinary rock pacing would treat as nearly empty.
Silence is never fully present, but absence plays a major role. The guitars leave gaps in their harmonic mass, and those gaps become chambers where the listener imagines additional activity. Csihar’s voice disappears long enough to become expected, then returns from a position that seems altered by the intervening sound. The percussion does not establish a dependable rhythm at the beginning. When drums gradually become more distinct, they feel less like a beat arriving than a physical body finally revealing itself inside the drone. Ambarchi’s strikes create movement without reducing the music to meter. Each impact briefly gives the surrounding mass another shape.
The bells add a ceremonial association while refusing to identify the ceremony. Bells can summon worshippers, announce death, warn of danger, mark time, celebrate union, or attempt communication across distance. Their meaning depends upon the social structure surrounding them. Inside Gravetemple’s sound, those structures have been removed. A bell rings, but no congregation appears and no doctrine explains what the listener has been called to witness. The metallic tone simply enters the amplified field and begins generating overtones, attaching ritual memory to a performance that remains fundamentally unknowable.
The Holy Down becomes progressively more physical, but it does not follow a clean ascent from quietness into maximum volume. Its changes are irregular, sometimes appearing to recede just when the music seems ready to break open. This unevenness preserves the character of live improvisation. The performers are not reproducing a completed studio design. They are listening, testing duration, discovering temporary alliances, and deciding whether to reinforce or damage whatever has begun forming. The hour contains patience, risk, and occasional awkwardness, all of which are necessary to its power. A perfectly controlled version would lose the sensation that the structure could fail, collapse, or mutate into something none of the three anticipated.
As the percussion intensifies and the guitars acquire greater definition, the recording begins approaching metal without becoming a conventional metal performance. Rhythm appears, but it seems excavated from inside the drone rather than imposed upon it. The sound becomes more violent, yet the earlier restraint remains audible as accumulated pressure. This is why the final, heavier sections feel earned. They are not exciting simply because the volume has increased. The listener has spent enough time learning the music’s smallest movements that a stronger drum pattern or more concentrated guitar attack now feels like a major geological event.
The recording’s live origin also means that the room is an uncredited participant. Levontin 7 is not merely the address where microphones happened to be switched on. Its walls, floor, ceiling, stage, electrical system, and audience bodies influenced which frequencies accumulated and which disappeared. Drone music exposes architecture because sustained low tones search for resonant weaknesses. A room answers the amplifiers according to its own dimensions. The recording captures part of that exchange, but never all of it. Listeners hearing the CD receive a translated room, reconstructed through microphones, mastering, speakers, and another interior space.
This distance between event and document is especially appropriate for music concerned with the sacred. Sacred experiences are repeatedly preserved through texts, objects, buildings, relics, recordings, and testimony, but none of those forms can reproduce the original encounter completely. They offer evidence and invite reconstruction. The Holy Down functions similarly. The CD cannot restore the volume, heat, tension, political atmosphere, or physical concentration of the people present in Tel Aviv. It provides enough vibration for another listener to construct a private version of the ritual while remaining aware that something essential has escaped.
Justin Bartlett’s imagery contributes to the sense of a discovered or forbidden document. His densely worked black-and-white drawings resemble occult diagrams, diseased anatomy, devotional illustration, and underground print culture compressed into one contaminated surface. The visual detail mirrors the recording’s structure. From a distance, both music and artwork may appear as undifferentiated darkness. Closer attention reveals organisms, marks, gestures, symbols, layers, and small figures struggling inside the larger mass. The packaging does not explain the sound. It demonstrates another way of entering the same density.
The Holy Down is ultimately music of unstable transformation. Guitar becomes architecture, voice becomes atmosphere, drums become weather, and a live room becomes a temporary sacred machine. The trio never settles into one identity long enough to become predictable. Gravetemple may share personnel and methods with Sunn O))), Mayhem, and Ambarchi’s experimental work, but the recording does not feel like the average of those histories. It is rougher, less monumental, and more uncertain, powered by three musicians discovering the project while the tape is already running.
Its deepest effect comes from the refusal to decide whether the descent is destructive or devotional. Moving downward might mean burial, damnation, humility, altered consciousness, or entry into foundations normally hidden beneath the visible world. Gravetemple keeps all of those possibilities active. The holy is not placed above human life in a spotless region of transcendence. It is dragged through amplifiers, breath, metal, sweat, historical tension, and the physical limits of an hour-long performance. The result is not a prayer in any conventional language, but it understands what prayer often begins with: sustained attention directed toward something that may never answer.

Henry Flynt - 2001 - You Are My Everlovin' / Celestial Power 2xCD

 

Recorded – Recorded 003  324.34MB APE

You Are My Everlovin’ / Celestial Power contains nearly ninety minutes of music, yet it feels less like two extended compositions than the discovery of a road that may continue forever. Henry Flynt places his electric violin inside sustained fields of tambura, guitar, resonance, and accumulated harmonic color, then begins travelling without submitting to the usual musical traffic system. There are no chord changes directing him to stop, turn, or prove that another section has begun. The ground remains constant enough for every slight alteration in bow pressure, pitch, rhythm, and emotional temperature to become meaningful. Flynt is not floating passively over a drone. He is testing how much lived experience one tonal center can contain before it needs to become something else.
“You Are My Everlovin’” begins with a title of almost disarming tenderness. It sounds like a phrase from a country song, private endearment, roadside jukebox, or declaration made without embarrassment after cleverer language has failed. Flynt brings that plain emotional directness into a musical environment often categorized through minimalism, raga, and the avant-garde, but the title refuses to let those classifications sterilize the experience. This is not an abstract study in sustained tone. It is a love statement stretched until affection becomes landscape. The “ever” inside “everlovin’” is supplied by the drone, while the violin provides the living, changing person attempting to remain inside that eternity.
The prerecorded tambura establishes an uninterrupted horizon, but Flynt’s violin refuses the solemn posture frequently associated with drone music. His playing contains slides, cries, rustic dance impulses, blues inflections, quick ornaments, long glissandi, and phrases that occasionally seem ready to kick open the door of an Appalachian gathering. These elements are not quoted as cultural souvenirs and placed politely beside one another. Flynt pushes them through the amplified violin until their borders buckle. Country fiddle, Delta blues, modal jazz, North Indian melodic development, early rock and roll, and sustained experimental sound become different energies travelling through one electrified body.
This was central to what Flynt called New American Ethnic Music. He objected to the assumption that European concert composition represented the sophisticated center of music while regional American traditions existed as raw material waiting to be elevated by formally educated composers. His alternative moved in the opposite direction. Hill music, blues, rhythm and blues, and vernacular dance forms did not need authorization from the conservatory. They already contained complete emotional languages, histories, techniques, and systems of value. Flynt wanted to intensify those languages from within, giving them the expansive duration and improvisational freedom often reserved for supposedly more advanced forms.
The electric violin is crucial because it destroys the polite distinction between old-time instrument and modern technology. Flynt’s tone can be rough, radiant, nasal, piercing, sweet, or partially consumed by amplification. The violin does not stand in front of electronics as an untouched folk artifact. Electricity enters its body and changes what every inherited gesture can do. A fiddle slide acquires the length of a raga phrase; a blues cry stretches into sustained harmonic weather; a dance impulse repeats until it becomes a form of minimalism without losing the dirt beneath its shoes.
Flynt’s rhythmic freedom gives “You Are My Everlovin’” much of its peculiar joy. The music has momentum, but the momentum is not divided into dependable bars. Phrases roll forward, hesitate, gather energy, and sweep into one another according to an internal bodily timing. The effect is looser than a march and more grounded than weightless ambience. One can hear the memory of dancing even when no regular beat is present. The music does not hover above the earth. It crosses an open plain with its boots still dusty.
Over forty-two minutes, Flynt’s playing changes the listener’s sense of repetition. A figure may return several times, but it never feels copied mechanically. Each recurrence carries another degree of urgency, relaxation, humor, or tenderness. The tambura remains stable enough to make these emotional differences visible. It acts like a constant light beneath which the violinist can age, recover, remember, and begin again. The drone does not eliminate narrative. It permits narrative to occur through microscopic changes in character rather than through a sequence of externally imposed events.
“Celestial Power” approaches eternity through a different mechanism. Flynt created its foundation from two tracks of volume-pedal guitar, producing a looping, oscillating accompaniment that feels both cosmic and handmade. The guitars rise and withdraw in rounded waves, their attacks softened until they seem to breathe rather than strike. Above them, the violin enters a more overtly psychedelic state, moving through long slides, harmonics, unstable contact with the strings, and techniques that make the instrument flicker between flute, voice, electronic signal, and damaged folk fiddle.
Flynt recorded the violin in one uninterrupted take during an intense psychedelic episode. That circumstance can easily become mythology, but the recording itself remains more interesting than any legend attached to it. His playing does not sound incapacitated or randomly disordered. It is remarkably alert. The altered state appears as unusual confidence in duration, a willingness to follow a sound far beyond the point where ordinary self-consciousness might demand correction or change. The violin searches without appearing anxious about whether each discovery belongs inside an established style.
Where “You Are My Everlovin’” feels like open land, “Celestial Power” resembles an enormous rotating object viewed from within. The guitar loops continually return, but their overlapping motion prevents them from becoming a flat background. They create a slow wheel of light and shadow, with the violin entering its moving spaces. Flynt sometimes follows the accompaniment’s curve and sometimes cuts across it with sharper melodic action. The relationship is not soloist over backing track. It is one person encountering an earlier version of his own playing and discovering how another instrumental voice can inhabit it.
The word “celestial” might suggest escape from earthly culture, but Flynt’s heaven remains connected to vernacular musical experience. His violin does not abandon blues, fiddle music, or popular rhythm when it enters psychedelic space. Those traditions become the vehicle capable of reaching it. The celestial is not located in an elite region above ordinary people. It can be reached through amplification, repetition, a bent note, a familiar melodic turn, or the bodily satisfaction of a phrase landing exactly where feeling requires it.
This position makes Flynt difficult to absorb into conventional histories of experimental music. He participated in the early New York avant-garde, knew many of its central figures, and helped formulate conceptual practices before the term became culturally profitable. Yet he became fiercely hostile toward institutions and ideologies that treated European high culture as humanity’s universal measure. His music does not politely combine “low” American forms with “high” compositional techniques. It challenges the ranking that made such a combination appear unusual in the first place.
The irony is that Flynt’s anti-art arguments coexist with music of extraordinary beauty and emotional generosity. He may reject the official machinery through which art claims authority, but he does not reject intensity, skill, pleasure, devotion, or the need to make experience communicable. You Are My Everlovin’ / Celestial Power is not a philosophical demonstration with violin attached. It is sensuous music. The tones glow, scrape, sway, and open. The player’s concentration becomes a hospitable environment rather than a demand that the listener admire intellectual difficulty.
The release history gives the music an additional temporal strangeness. These performances occurred in 1980 and 1981, reached only a small audience through a 1986 cassette, and did not receive substantial circulation until the 2001 double-CD edition. By then, drone, psychedelic minimalism, experimental Americana, and cross-cultural improvisation had developed audiences better prepared to hear what Flynt had made. The music consequently seemed ancient and newly invented at once. It did not fit comfortably into the year of recording or the year of reissue because its central proposition had never depended upon fashion: vernacular tradition could become infinitely expansive without surrendering its emotional identity.
The two pieces also demonstrate why archival releases can alter musical history without repairing it completely. Recognition decades later does not recreate the performances, conversations, opportunities, or communities that might have developed had the work circulated widely when it was made. The CD cannot return those missing possibilities. It can only make the sound available in another time, where it begins producing consequences nobody involved could have predicted. Flynt’s open plain acquires new travellers.
You Are My Everlovin’ / Celestial Power finally offers two models of endlessness. The first is social and emotional: a love phrase grounded in country language, carried forward by tambura and ecstatic fiddle. The second is psychedelic and electrical: guitar waves rotating beneath a violin whose techniques seem to be invented as they occur. Both reject the idea that extended duration must become emotionally neutral. Flynt’s eternity is full of sentiment, friction, humor, regional memory, and physical pleasure.
Anyone who encountered the original Hundertmark cassette, attended the Inroads performance, or heard these recordings before the 2001 reissue could add precious details to their unusual journey. The music itself remains magnificently open. It does not ask listeners to choose between the front porch and the infinite, the fiddle tune and the drone, the human beloved and celestial power. Flynt discovers that they were never as far apart as the official maps claimed.

Helen of Troy Tim Hecker Martin Tétreault - 2002 - VOLT-AA (03) Appropriation

Oral – Oral CDr 03  284.33MB FLAC

 VOLT-AA (03) Appropriation documents three musicians confronting the same basic question from sharply different directions: when does borrowed sound stop belonging to its source and begin living another life? Helen of Troy, Tim Hecker, and Martin Tétreault each work with material that has already happened. A violin phrase is captured and returned through delay. A recognizable piece of popular culture is degraded until celebrity narrative becomes emotional debris. A vinyl record is removed from its intended sequence and treated as a physical surface. The resulting CDr is not simply a compilation of three electronic performances. It is a small public laboratory devoted to memory, ownership, reproduction, and the strange authority acquired by sound once it has been separated from the event that created it.

The word “appropriation” can suggest theft, quotation, tribute, exploitation, recycling, transformation, or the practical fact that no artist begins with completely untouched material. Musical instruments arrive with histories. Recording software contains assumptions built by other people. Genres carry inherited gestures, and even the most private emotional expression depends upon a language learned from elsewhere. This VOLT-AA event does not attempt to solve the moral and philosophical complications of borrowing. It makes them audible. Each participant takes something that exists already and changes the conditions under which it can be recognized. The listener is repeatedly placed between familiarity and estrangement, hearing traces of sources without always being able to reconstruct their original identities.
Léon Lo’s Helen of Troy project provides the most intimate form of appropriation because the material being borrowed can be his own immediate past. A violin note is played, captured, delayed, and returned to the performer as something newly external. Lo can then respond to a previous version of himself, building sustained layers in which live action and recorded residue become difficult to distinguish. This is appropriation without historical distance. The borrowed material may be only seconds old, yet reproduction has already changed its status. The performer who produced the sound is no longer completely in control of it. The loop continues, occupies space, and begins influencing whatever is played next.
That method creates a beautiful confusion between memory and presence. A sustained violin tone may seem to continue naturally, although the hand that produced it has moved elsewhere. Another layer enters, and the recording becomes populated by several versions of one performer existing at different points in time. The electronics do not merely decorate the acoustic instrument. They expose a hidden condition within all recorded music: sound can survive its original gesture and confront its maker as an independent object. Helen of Troy turns that survival into harmony, friction, sleepiness, weakness, and gradually accumulating emotional weight.
The project name adds an appropriate ambiguity. Helen of Troy is one of Western culture’s most repeatedly appropriated figures, reconstructed through poetry, theatre, painting, opera, cinema, and political metaphor until the historical or mythic person has almost disappeared beneath representations. Lo’s music operates similarly on a smaller scale. The original violin gesture remains somewhere inside the layered sound, but each repetition places another image over it. Eventually we hear not one pure source but a mythology produced through copying. The beauty lies precisely in the distance between the first action and the atmosphere it generates.
Tim Hecker’s section approaches appropriation through cultural wreckage. Around this period he was moving away from the cleaner rhythmic language of his Jetone work and deeper into the damaged ambience introduced on Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do It Again. He had begun treating digital sound less as immaculate information than as material capable of being worn down, overloaded, blurred, and passed through effects until melody appeared to have survived an accident. In the context of an event devoted to appropriation, this method turns sampling into something closer to erosion.
Hecker’s contemporaneous My Love Is Rotten to the Core grew from an Éric Mattson commission based on sampling aesthetics, using material connected with Van Halen, David Lee Roth, radio talk, celebrity conflict, and the collapsing mythology of arena rock. The brilliance of that approach lies in how far it moves from parody or recognizable remix. The borrowed voices and cultural fragments do not remain stable enough to provide nostalgic pleasure. They are submerged in haze, distortion, repetition, and emotional ambiguity until the ridiculous public drama surrounding a rock band begins producing an unexpected sadness.
Popular culture is filled with abandoned emotional energy. Interviews, advertisements, radio chatter, promotional language, and celebrity feuds are created for immediate consumption, then discarded when the news cycle moves elsewhere. Hecker recognizes that these fragments can retain feeling after their original informational purpose has expired. A boast can become loneliness. Masculine spectacle can reveal vulnerability. A cheap media voice can acquire ghostly dignity when removed from the commercial machinery that once explained how it should be heard. Appropriation becomes a form of excavation, not because it restores the source faithfully, but because it releases emotions trapped beneath its public meaning.
Hecker’s presence on this tiny 2002 document is especially fascinating in retrospect. The enormous, organ-like environments of his later work are not yet the only lens through which the sound must be interpreted. He is still close to Montréal’s experimental electronic community, sampling culture, minimal techno, CDr production, local commissions, and performances where the boundaries among sound art, ambient music, noise, and club electronics remained fluid. The music captures a route being chosen rather than a famous style being displayed fully formed. Digital material is becoming less clean, rhythm is losing its authority, and damaged harmonic atmosphere is beginning to occupy the center.
Martin Tétreault makes appropriation physical. A turntable is designed to reproduce a record, but Tétreault treats reproduction as only one of its possible behaviors. Vinyl can be interrupted, scratched, blocked, touched, layered, cut, or combined with objects that alter the relationship among motor, platter, needle, and groove. The record ceases to be a transparent carrier delivering someone else’s completed music. It becomes matter: plastic, printed label, rotating disc, damaged surface, resistance beneath a stylus, and a source of sounds its original producers never intended.
This method exposes the hidden labor normally suppressed by playback technology. Conventional listening encourages us to forget the turntable and imagine direct access to the recorded performance. Tétreault returns attention to the apparatus. The needle is dragging through a groove. The motor is regulating rotation. Dust, scratches, pressure, and hand movement affect what reaches the speakers. Mechanical noises normally classified as defects become primary events. Reproduction is revealed as another performance rather than a neutral delivery system.
Tétreault’s work also complicates the idea of ownership. A commercially manufactured record may be purchased as property, but the music encoded within it remains associated with composers, performers, publishers, and copyright systems. By cutting into playback, Tétreault does not simply claim the original music as his own composition. He turns the object into a participant whose physical behavior exceeds the intentions of everyone involved. The record answers back through skips, fragments, friction, and damaged repetitions. Appropriation becomes less a matter of taking a song than of discovering that every cultural object contains possibilities excluded by its approved use.
The three approaches form an elegant progression. Helen of Troy appropriates the performer’s own newly created sound, folding the immediate past into the present. Hecker draws upon circulating popular media and transforms cultural memory into unstable emotional weather. Tétreault attacks the physical carrier through which recorded history is reproduced. Together, they move from gesture to culture to object. Each artist demonstrates that sound changes identity whenever it is repeated under different conditions.
The live setting is essential because appropriation is often imagined as private studio work: selecting, editing, layering, and arranging borrowed material in isolation. At O Patro Vys, these transformations occurred before witnesses. Decisions had duration and risk. A loop could accumulate unexpectedly, a sample could enter with the wrong weight, and a turntable gesture could produce consequences that could not simply be erased and attempted again. The audience heard not only finished results but the act of material becoming available for another use.
Éric Mattson’s VOLT-AA series created a valuable space for this kind of concentrated listening. The phrase “deep listening” can sometimes suggest calm immersion, but depth does not require gentleness. It means allowing enough attention for the apparent surface of a sound to divide into histories, technologies, accidents, and relationships. A distorted sample contains a source, a method of capture, a chain of processing, a playback system, and the listener’s uncertain recognition. These performances reward ears willing to follow that entire chain.
The CDr format extends the concept beyond the event. Fifty numbered copies converted one evening into objects capable of leaving the venue and entering private collections. The performance was appropriated by microphones, recording equipment, editing, duplication, and eventually digital ripping. Every stage changed what survived. The room’s physical pressure became recorded information; the rare disc became files; the files entered another archive and could now reach vastly more listeners than the original edition ever permitted.
This does not make the CDr or rip equivalent to being present in Montréal on January 16, 2002. The recording cannot restore the room, volume, audience concentration, equipment arrangement, or small visual actions that explained how certain sounds were created. What it preserves is a transformed remainder. That incompleteness is entirely appropriate. VOLT-AA (03) Appropriation is about the productive distance between an event and its reuse. The surviving document does not return us to the original night. It takes possession of a portion of that night and allows it to become something else.
More than two decades later, the release also preserves a particular Montréal ecology. Leon Lo’s largely obscure Helen of Troy project, Hecker at a transitional stage of his development, Tétreault’s mature turntable practice, Mattson’s curatorial work, Oral’s tiny editions, and a venue willing to host deep electronic listening all meet inside one object. None of these elements needs to be declared the center. The record’s value lies in their temporary intersection.
Appropriation ends up sounding less like theft than a law of recorded existence. Once a sound enters the world, it may be remembered incorrectly, sampled, delayed, damaged, quoted, replayed, archived, misunderstood, or discovered by someone for whom its original context no longer exists. The artists gathered here do not resist that instability. They compose with it. A violin meets its own echo, rock mythology becomes vapor, and a record reveals the noise hidden beneath its assigned music. Fifty CDrs carried the transformation outward, and this surviving rip continues the process. The material has changed hands again.

Gunner Møller Pedersen - 2001 - A Sound Year • Et Lydår 6xCD

 

Dacapo – 8.224174-79  1.54GB FLAC

A Sound Year is a calendar large enough to enter. Across six discs, twelve movements, and slightly more than six hours, Gunner Møller Pedersen transforms the familiar sequence from January through December into an immense electronic architecture. Each month receives approximately thirty minutes, but the work does not attempt to imitate weather through obvious illustrations. January is not simply wind, June is not a collection of birds, and December does not arrive carrying musical snowflakes. Pedersen is interested in the deeper psychological and physical proportions through which a year is experienced: contraction and expansion, darkness and illumination, dormancy and growth, repetition and irreversible change. The months become rooms arranged around one enormous circular building, each connected to the next while retaining its own temperature, density, and apparent distance from the listener.
The project began during the daily electronic-music matinées held in the Winter Garden of Copenhagen’s Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. This origin is essential because A Sound Year was never conceived merely as six hours of private headphone music. It was designed to occupy public architecture, surrounding visitors who might have entered deliberately for a concert or simply encountered the sounds while moving among plants, sculpture, glass, stone, and other people. Pedersen’s electronic composition became part of the atmosphere of an existing place. It could receive full concentration, partial attention, or almost none at all. Someone might listen for an entire monthly movement, while another person crossed the room during five minutes and carried only one strange electronic color away.
Pedersen began composing the cycle in 1977, intending to complete each movement during its corresponding month. Reality disrupted the elegant plan. Financial pressures, technical demands, and other work stretched the project across five ordinary years before the complete Sound Year existed in 1982. That delay gives the concept an unexpected richness. The album represents one ideal annual cycle, but it was assembled from several actual years. “January” and “February” do not necessarily belong to the same winter of the composer’s life. The finished sequence creates an imaginary calendar from moments recorded under different historical and personal conditions. Time is reorganized rather than merely documented.
The title contains another playful enlargement. Pedersen imagined a “sound year” as the distance sound would travel during one terrestrial year, approximately 10.7 million kilometres. Light covers that same distance in well under a minute, but sound remains bound to matter, atmosphere, bodies, and the relatively slow transmission of vibration. This difference places humanity between intimate physical sensation and astronomical imagination. Sound cannot travel through empty space in the manner of light, yet music allows us to imagine universal rhythms through vibrations occurring in a room. A speaker cone moves a tiny distance, air pressure changes, the ear receives it, and thought suddenly extends toward planets, seasons, mortality, and the turning of Earth.
“January” opens the cycle without behaving like a conventional beginning. The listener seems to enter a world whose forces were already active before the disc started. Electronic tones advance and recede, hard-edged events briefly narrowing the apparent room while diffuse sounds open it again. This changing spatial depth is one of the work’s fundamental materials. Pedersen composes not only pitch, rhythm, and timbre, but proximity. A sound may appear to move toward the body, pass around it, or withdraw behind an imaginary horizon. Even through ordinary stereo playback, the movement remains perceptible as a continual alteration of scale.
As the months proceed, recognizable associations appear without becoming fixed representations. Some passages suggest thawing, birds, machinery, insects, flowing water, wind, or distant ceremonial activity, but Pedersen carefully keeps most sources below complete identification. The sounds hover between natural and synthetic. A texture may evoke wings without reproducing an actual bird; another may suggest rain while behaving according to a completely electronic logic. This uncertainty prevents the music from becoming a collection of sound effects arranged beneath calendar illustrations. We are not hearing nature copied. We are hearing electronic spaces capable of awakening memories of nature.
Spring brings greater activity, though the transition is gradual rather than theatrical. Energy seems to circulate more freely, and the sound fields develop busier internal populations. Tiny events flicker around larger sustained forms. Rhythms appear and dissolve before becoming regular enough to dominate. Pedersen understands that seasonal change is recognized through accumulating evidence. One warmer afternoon does not complete spring, just as one cold morning does not restore winter. The music changes by shifting the frequency and character of events until the listener realizes that the surrounding world has quietly become another month.
The summer movements possess brightness and openness without reducing the season to uncomplicated pleasure. Longer days can produce exhilaration, exposure, fatigue, overstimulation, and the strange suspension of ordinary schedules. Pedersen’s spaces sometimes widen until sounds appear to occupy enormous open-air distances; elsewhere, concentrated activity becomes almost oppressive. July and August feel full not because they contain constant loudness, but because their environments seem densely inhabited. Sounds cross several depths at once, giving the impression of life operating above, below, behind, and immediately beside the listener.
Autumn does not simply darken the same materials. It introduces another awareness of time. Events begin feeling like remnants, migrations, withdrawals, and changes in the availability of light. Repetition acquires memory because the listener has already travelled through several hours of related electronic climates. A tone resembling something heard on an earlier disc may now seem altered by everything accumulated between its appearances. The yearly form allows recurrence to become emotional. Nature repeats its cycles, but the person hearing them does not return unchanged.
By “November,” the cycle has gathered enough history that quietness can feel immense. Pedersen does not treat reduced activity as emptiness. Sparse regions reveal the dimensions of the acoustic space more clearly, just as a landscape may become easier to see after leaves have fallen. Individual events stand exposed, their decays stretching into the surrounding field. The year appears to be approaching closure, yet the work avoids the sentimental idea that December will provide a definitive conclusion.
“December” carries darkness, suspension, and the possibility of renewal without resolving the previous six hours into a grand final statement. A calendar ends only because another January is waiting beyond it. Pedersen’s circular conception makes completion inseparable from recurrence. The final sounds do not seal the work shut. They return the listener to the threshold, where “January” may begin again under different conditions. The same recording can produce another year because the listener’s room, attention, mood, and surrounding life have changed.
The six-hour scale is demanding only when approached through the expectations of a conventional album. A Sound Year was built for repeated public presentation, daily use, and partial entry. It can be heard sequentially in one long passage, divided into seasons, or entered through whichever month corresponds with the present calendar. None of these methods is necessarily superior. Pedersen explicitly allowed for attentive and inattentive listening. The music can become a principal object of concentration or an environment with which ordinary activity temporarily shares space.
This openness does not mean the composition is interchangeable background ambience. Its spatial movements, abrupt events, shifting densities, and occasionally unsettling electronic colors continually resist complete domestication. A room containing A Sound Year does not remain acoustically neutral. The music changes how distance is perceived, makes silence seem charged, and causes ordinary sounds to enter unexpected relationships with the recording. Footsteps, plumbing, traffic, voices outside, and the hum of household electricity may become temporary additions to Pedersen’s imaginary calendar.
The 2001 edition restored another dimension partially compromised by the original six-LP release. Pedersen had composed the work in quadraphonic sound, placing four speakers around the audience so that movement and location became equal in importance to melody or harmony. Transferring such dynamic spatial music to vinyl created technical difficulties, while the later digital remix allowed more of its range and surround design to return. The six CDs are therefore not merely a convenient reissue of a historical object. They present a revised spatial realization created with later technology while preserving music born from the analogue electronic world of the 1970s.
A Sound Year ultimately treats the calendar not as twelve labelled boxes but as one breathing system. Each month modifies the meaning of those surrounding it. Winter contains the memory of autumn and the possibility of spring; summer already carries the knowledge that its light will shorten. Pedersen does not narrate these relationships through characters or words. He creates environments in which scale, movement, color, and duration allow the listener to experience time almost physically.
The work’s greatest achievement may be its ability to make six hours feel both monumental and hospitable. It is a major construction in Danish electroacoustic music, yet it was designed to coexist with people entering and leaving a public winter garden. It can surround serious listeners, accidental visitors, plants, sculptures, and daily life without requiring that everything stop in reverence. Pedersen built an electronic year not to replace the real one, but to place another slowly turning planet inside it. Anyone who remembers hearing these monthly movements at the Glyptotek, encountered the original six-LP box, or experienced the proper four-channel presentation could add an invaluable dimension to the surviving history. The CDs preserve the music beautifully, but the complete work also belongs to the rooms and bodies through which its year has travelled.

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

 

Bowindo – Bowindo08  146.88MB FLAC

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

James Blackshaw & Lubomyr Melnyk - 2013 - The Watchers

 

Important Records – IMPREC375  243.46MB FLAC

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

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

 

For 4 Ears – CD 1759  191.69MB FLAC

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

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

 

Crouton – crouton no. 23  225.92MB FLAC

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

Fragile - 2013 - Canzoni Da Etichette Morte - Raccolta CDr

Toxic Industries – Xi034  390.43MB FLAC

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

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