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Saturday 6 July 2019

Michael Cashmore - The Doctrine of Transformation through Love 1.


Album: The Doctrine of Transformation through Love 1
Artist: Michael Cashmore
Label: Klanggalerie
Catalogue  no: GG284

Tracklist:

    1.      The Gateway to all Understanding
    2.      Perception Should not Influence Perspectives
    3.      Before the Crown there Lies Thorns
    4.      Do not be Consumed by the Concept of Death
    5.      There is a Way out of the Dark Forest
    6.      We are all Responsible
    7.      Physical Life only Happens Once, Transform Now!
    8.      Healing Sonic Medication
    9.      The Sacred Revolving Formula of Opposites
   10.     The Swallow Flies Free and Formless
   11.     Conscious Transformational Mantra
   12.     The Doctrine of Love and Opposites
   13.     Lean Upon the Light


Unless you’ve been living in a cave high up in the Himalayas in an attempt to ‘find’ yourself or just to avoid shallow pursuits of today’s civilisation then the name of Michael Cashmore should be familiar to just about everyone reading this blog. Back in the day he released music under the name of Nature & Organisation, and written music for musicians of the likes of Nick Cave, Marc Almond (Soft Cell, Marc & the Mambas), and Anohni (Anthony and the Johnsons). His most fruitful collaboration, spanning 25 years, has been with Current 93 and David Tibet, helping to create their trademark sparse yet lush post-industrial apocalyptic folk sound. With that in mind I approached this set with certain expectations – and what I got was something that completely confounded them.

Michael Cashmore has been undergoing a personal transformation and in response his music has itself undergone a similar metamorphosis. The Doctrine of Transformation through Love 1 is the first in a series documenting that transfiguration. That in itself isn’t new, of course: many artists have used the media of musical expression, art, or the written word as a way of recording how their inner lives have shifted. But if, like me, your only encounter with the work of Mr. Cashmore has been the music of Current 93 (although I have listened to some of his Nature & Organisation work but that was decades ago), the dark techno, electronic, melodic, and beat-driven tracks contained on this release might surprise you.

Personally, what a wonderful a refreshing surprise I found it. Artists constantly evolve (look at David Bowie in the mainstream – nobody seemed to complain and it was even praised as his strong point). Psychic TV dabbled in acid house way back when. Coil veered between goodness knows how many styles. What Cashmore documents here and the way in which he expresses it, is in no way any different to what the abovementioned did.

Each of these pieces channels an aspect of his journey from darkness into light, and a careful listen will indeed reveal the nature of the path he’s taken. Also the track titles themselves are a clue to the landmarks visited along the way. Much of the first half of the album is coloured with shades of darkness, heavy on the bass rhythms and beats, wherein we’re all cocooned in a self-realised state of ignorance, blissfully unaware of our potential. Gradually, however, the light emerges a crack at a time, and melody piles upon melody, signalling the transformation itself and its accumulative effects.

Make no mistake – all the compositions on this album are carefully crafted, as is only to be expected from this particular musician. Above all, in spite of this being a highly intimate chapter in Cashmore’s autobiography (with vocal contributions from Shaltmira and Bill Fay), the music transcends any personal relevance meaning it can be experienced by any one of us. Furthermore, by the end of the album, one can feel the joy of the transformation. This curmudgeon even found himself subconsciously moving to several tracks and smiling. A recommendation indeed.

Don’t just take my word about how good this album is – head to the link at Klanggalerie at https://klanggalerie.bandcamp.com/album/the-doctrine-of-transformation-through-love-1, and experience it for yourself. There’s a great deal to take from these 13 wonderful tracks, and you too will travel along the path from disturbance to bliss.

Psymon Marshall 2019

Vampyres, Nacht Und Nebel and Occulting Light.


Rammel Club – 05/07/2019. Chameleon Arts Café, Occult and Light, Nacht Und Nebel and Vampyres. Chameleon, Nottingham.



The Chameleon Arts Cafe.

For tonight’s event there were some last-minute changes, Lucy Adlington was replaced by Occulting Light. This was what I’d call a Nocturnal Beats project, built from arching Keyboard drones, beats and noise that made a slowly building sound, the work intensified as the set progressed. The beats seemed to become more tightly repetitive, as the moody sound built up to a hypnotic climax. I liked this and got into the performance, Beat driven, noise related things like Tetsuo, Abysse, Salford Electronics and Daphnellc have really been on my listening list lately. This really fit in with that for sure. I do believe this was the project’s third outing - good work, good show.


Occulting Light.

For Nacht Und Nebel’s performance there were no stage lights, just the glow of the small light included in the artists set up; it was all about the noise made and made for an effective sound delivery. When the sounds started they were stuttered and choppy, interrupted by silence. It morphed to a bigger sound that was distorted, pulsating, throbbing and very controlled to make one of the most sonically tense and abrasive sets that I have seen from the project. There seemed to be a lot of individual sonic aspects put together in different segments of the show, it was very varied in sound language as various cutups built and interlinked to make a whole.



Nacht und Nebel.

I was keen to hear Vampyres as I’d bought ‘Voyeurs at the gates of hell’ when Culver played here a few months back, it’s the project of Lee Stokoe of Culver and Martyn Reid. This is a more aggressive project in sound, there are massive drones combined with an army of noises. Their performance moved from being suspenseful, guttural, infected and pulsating throughout their set. Like their recordings the drones that underlie the music combine with the chaotic noise that batters away at the foreground and sound huge. Each artist’s sound grew tonight, but this went elsewhere. Vampyre’s set was simultaneously controlled and chaotic, I feel both members bring different things to the project, as a result I was very impressed by what I saw and bought their ‘Bloodstream’ tape plus a bunch of other Culver stuff.




Vampyres.

Great night.
Choppy Noodles 2019.

Miracle of Love - You Will Be Free.


Album: You Will be Free
Artist: Miracle of Love
Catalogue  no: N/A


Tracklist:

   1.      We Believe What we Say – Tied
   2.      Exhale XV
   3.      We Came from the Sky
   4.      Exhale IV
   5.      Exhale VII – Tied
   6.      For Many are Called (Devis G. Version)
   7.      Exhale XIII
   8.      From Going To and Fro on the Earth
   9.      Exhale XII – Terror Unit Over – Tied
   10.  Through a Million of Deserts
   11.  We Believe What we Say (Rubber Nurse Version)


Miracle of Love is Lorenzo Corsetti, an Italian musician, producer, and sound designer as well as being the founder of White Forest Records. He’s also created music under the pseudonyms of 12 Inch Plastic Toys, Santa Emoraggia, and Hetkonen.

Imagine yourself fogbound and lost somewhere unfamiliar, unable to move forward or backward, and out of the obscuring fog emerge mysterious bangs, crashes, scrapings, and howlings. You might think that you have somehow barged into a machine-shop located in one of the nine levels of Hell, or some still-active but decaying post-apocalyptic industrial park here on earth. All eleven pieces careen between distant, unsettling and haunting keening chords and swellings eerily emerging from behind the curtain of mist, obscuring the origins and creators of those sounds (are they men or monsters?), and barrages of harsh metallic ringings, collapsing steel, and power-tool whinings, or granulated, crackling blankets of heavily oppressive noise. And you’re left wondering just what is it that these Hadean blacksmiths are creating? Are they building diabolical contraptions for the end of the world or just devices for torturing hapless souls?

The mood evoked is one of mechanical nightmares and, worse still, horrific self-perpetuating phantasms made real. It’s obviously that nothing natural could survive here for long, or if it does then it’s ultimately subverted by perversion and artificial mutation. Dripping subterranean atmospherics, rebounding endlessly from wet cavern walls, pervade every second of this album. Simultaneously the heat and the cold are unbearable, at turns boiling and freezing. This is not a place for sensitive souls.

You Will be Free is a curious mix of the soft- and hard-edged, of swathes of almost comforting chords expanding and enveloping which are dashed and shattered against brittle obsidian darkness. But that aspect, I think, is where its appeal resides: it’s neither completely dark ambient nor solely tethered to harsh noise/power electronics, but lies in the spaces in between. Moreover Corsetti has blended all the elements together seamlessly – in spite of the potential for it to have sounded jarring and disconnected, the two opposites have joined to paint a vivid picture of a hypnogogic dream wherein normally incompatible states produce a coherent whole.  I’ll be listening to this one again.

Psymon Marshall 2019