Asmus Tietchens & Frans de Waard - Ordeel

Album: Ordeel

Artist: Asmus Tietchens & Frans de Waard

Label: Aufabwegen

Catalogue no: A117

Tracklist:

     1.      Ordeel I

     2.      Ordeel II

     3.      Ordeel III

     4.      Ordeel IV

     5.      Ordeel V

     6.      Ordeel VI

     7.      Ordeel VII

     8.      Ordeel VIII

     9.      Ordeel IX

    10.  Ordeel X

    11.  Ordeel XI

The names of both Asmus Tietchens and Frans de Waard should be familiar to anyone who follows the streams of electronic, avant-garde, and experimental music – Tietchens as a musician who’s been releasing material since 1975 with his first solo album coming out in 1980, and who is still adventuring into diffuse and abstract realms up to the present. Frans de Waard is the driving force behind the Korm Plastics label, has worked for Staalplaat, and since 2003 has run the Vital Weekly online magazine. Ordeel is the first album they’ve worked on together, born out of a mutual respect for each other’s work. On paper then, this sounds like a match made in avant-garde paradise, so what have they have managed to concoct together?

This is an album that one doesn’t listen to lightly – Tietchens in particular crafts complex explorations in sound that span genres, creating pieces that incorporate the familiar given twists to make them appear alien. This offering is no exception, incorporating as it does everything from soft breathings and whispers to glitchy spasms and groans, from the fragile and insubstantial to the hard and diamond-like. Every one of these compositions feels like a signal from some long-lost civilisation received via some old equipment in the small hours of the morning, or messages from out of the spaces between dimensions or even from the angles between the divisions of time. The music is wrapped in an unsolvable mystery, the individual pieces pointing to some greater inscrutability that will resist any attempt at decoding.

These alien signals sometimes harmonise naturally, others cross paths and cross-pollinate to create hybrids, while others stand strong on their own. It can be seen as a kind of virtual bestiary of exotic phantasmal creatures, entities whose forms and morphologies turn our conceptions upside down – some cocking a snoot at our understanding of logic, some inventing ephemeral chimera that diverge from accepted wisdom, while others produce hybrids that dazzle and enchant. All the while Tietchens and de Waard are mapping out potentialities and possibilities, delineating the phantastique and super-real, in the process of which they’re presenting us with a completely new zoology and geography. It is at once startling, beguiling, amusing, bewildering, confusing, delightful, and alarming. These unknown worlds and beasts (for such they are) are drawn in a spectrum of hues as wide as the universe, depicted in colours for which we have no names yet. Contained within this album is the whole panoply of alternative Creations, propagated from Big Bangs that could have been, may have been, have been, and might still be.

The inventiveness on display here is testament to the enduring vision of the two artists concerned, with that unique vision inhabiting a liminality that we mere mortals aren’t privy to. In other words, Tietchens and de Waard are interpreters and translators, taking alien signals and decoding their genetics, recombining the data into comprehensible formats. Ordeel is not for cursory listening: it demands you get involved and participate, demands you imbibe and savour deeply, and furthermore, asks that you absorb and understand. To put it another way, it enjoins you to comprehend the meaning and immensity of the worlds they’re exploring and mapping for us armchair travellers. Listen, and understand.

Psymon Marshall 2019. 

Anemone Tube, Jarl & Monocube - The Hunters in the Snow – A Contemplation on Pieter Breugel’s Series of the Seasons.

Album: The Hunters in the Snow – A Contemplation onPieter Breugel’s Series of the Seasons

Artist: Anemone Tube, Jarl & Monocube

Label: Aufabwegen

Catalogue no: aatp65

Tracklist:

     1.      Anemone Tube & Jarl – The Gloomy Day

     2.      Jarl & Anemone Tube – The Hay Harvest

     3.      Anemone Tube & Monocube – The Harvesters

     4.      Anemone Tube – The Return of the Herd

     5.      Jarl & Monocube & Anemone Tube – The Hunters in the Snow

Let’s be honest – it’s quite a brave move to base a work around a very famous set of paintings, but then Pieter Breugel the Elder (c. 1525-1530 – 9^th September 1569) was a very singular artist in his day. His work often depicted the everyday lives of ordinary people and his series documenting the seasons from early spring to winter in five (originally six) canvases show peasants going about their daily lives, in a way that we’ve lost touch with in our post-mechanisation world. Over the course of more than five years Anemone Tube, Jarl, and Monocube crafted a distinct set of pieces, each reflecting the gradual progress of the seasons.

Spring is a time of renewal, a harbinger of better things to come, of brighter, warmer, and longer days. However, in early spring, winter is still dragging its heels, unwilling to let go completely until it has no choice, and in our first track (and painting), ‘The Gloomy Day’ (Anemone Tube & Jarl) (early spring), the coldest season loiters around still, a dark promise that it will return. Scintillating droplets of tinkling bells gently fall like miniature stars from a cloud-laden sky, coming to an ephemeral rest on ground that is already bursting with potential and new life, signalling that spring will not be denied its allotted time. It’s also a message to everything and everyone, quickening pulses and gladdening hearts.

Life wakes and scrabbles for light in the next in the series, Jarl & Anemone Tube’s ‘The Hay Harvest’ (early summer). Soft burbling bubbles up from below to break the crusty surface, its echoes reaching far and wide like a propagating wave, alerting other dormant life, including that of humans, to shake off winter’s grip, and to ride upon the warmer rays of the sun and to rejoice in the first signs of the new green shoots. It’s a shimmering hallelujah, a surge of renewed energy, and a dance of joy.

Anemone Tube & Monocube bring us the report from late summer, ‘The Harvesters’: summer is nearly reaching its apotheosis, and its bounties will soon be ready to drop or be reaped. This is the time when Mother Earth is at her finest, in spite of nurturing the next generation, but there’s a hint that this stage will be brief – autumn is approaching, the winds get colder and sharper. A wave lapping upon a shore and an inhaling and exhaling buzzing wafts upon drones and whispering winds, a prompt reminding us that already the transformation has begun. Cold whistles and whines swirl and roil, bringing with them the aromas of the new season just around the corner. And then, before one knows it, autumn has arrived, and ‘The Return of the Herd’ (a solo effort by Anemone Tube) announces its ascendance in crashing waves, keening fanfares, and mournful washes. The world changes quickly now, heading towards the time of the Great Sleep, and the pulse of life slows and nature sheds her fineries.

‘The Hunters in the Snow’, a collaborative work between all three artists, crashes in with a sense of urgency thrilling through its densely droning pulsations. It’s the leanest of the four seasons, when resources are scarce and nature can be harsh and unyielding. It’s a confrontation between nature’s reticence, and necessity and survival. This isn’t a season suited for the weak, but it’s also a season where its lack of abundance pushes the instincts of the individual and the community alike. In spite of the bleak prognosis, passages of string-like chords hint that it’s possible to not only survive but flourish despite inclemency. And it’s in the second half of the track (the longest one on the album) that there’s the promise of renewal, when the life-giving warmth of the sun will come once again, and Mother Nature will wake up and bestow her plenitude upon us once more.

This is a collection of compositions inviting us to meditate on the vitality of each of the seasons, to feel the changes as one morphs into the one following, and to perhaps match the beats of the earth’s pulse as we live through each one. In some ways it’s asking us to return to a time when the seasons ruled our daily lives, when we noticed their rhythms much more keenly and thereby appreciated them more. The Hunters in the Snow is a finely tuned album which, oddly, I think should be played on a cold winter’s evening in front of a roaring fire.

Available as a limited edition CD of 333 copies in 8-panel digifile with embossed cover printed on high quality natural paper, accompanied by a booklet which includes an essay on Pieter Breugel’s landscapes by Sven Schlijper-Karassenberg and Kim Dohlich, as well as a poem by Jean Gebser. 

Purchase at the link below:

https://aufabwegen.bandcamp.com/album/the-hunters-in-the-snow

Psymon Marshall 2019. 

øjeRum - Without Blood the Sun Darkens.

Album: Without Blood the Sun Darkens

Artist: øjeRum

Label: Cyclic Law

Catalogue no: 135^th Cycle

Tracklist:

1.      Without Blood the Sun Darkens

øjeRum is Danish musician and collage artist Paw Grabowski, and on this release we’re presented with an hour-long track of sweeping cinematic ambient that’s highly melancholic, brooding, and inward-looking. It’s a soundtrack to loss and longing, a hymn to trying to capture something, a feeling or an emotion, that was experienced but fleetingly and has now faded into memory. It almost feels like the deep regrets held by someone dying, an immense sadness about a life wasted or a momentary decision that had life-long consequences: tears run down a face, eyes lifted to the shimmering stars, and a silent plea to perhaps turn back time.

There is no other phrase for this but hauntingly beautiful: a tad trite and unsatisfactory perhaps, but there are times when words are inadequate and fall short of a mark. Despite the deep wells of sadness evident on here, it is simultaneously uplifting and soaring. Think of a stunning landscape, seen under the blue, purple, and red sky of dusk, where day hasn’t yet succumbed to the blanket of night but stars are beginning to shyly peek out of the veil of blue, streetlights and lighted windows pinprick the last remaining silhouettes of earthbound geography, and everything takes on an air of mystery. Upon a hill somewhere, a lone and unknown musician plays a lament to how time takes all away from us in the end, how it is that only the living possess memory, and also that we shape and distort our remembrances of people and events.

In the end, no matter who we are, whether we were important or otherwise, we leave all behind, and the shape of our lives dissolves – and the further away in time the finer the particles of what we were become until they too disappear. øjeRum’s musical tapestry weaves all the emotions and feelings associated with things we wish we’d done or not done, and the resulting narrative drifts into the wide open spaces of the celestial aether. Perhaps it is only there that our memories exist, forever travelling between the stars, and becoming a part of the panoply of Creation.

Simply stunning.

Psymon Marshall, 2019. 

Monocube - Substratum

Album: Substratum

Artist: Monocube

Label: Malignant Records/Cyclic Law

Catalogue no: TumorCD120/137^th Cycle

Tracklist:

     1.      Sehnsucht

     2.      Prima Materia

     3.      Luft

     4.      Visiones V

     5.      The Opposite of Nadir (feat. Antti Litmanen)

     6.      Opaque

     7.      Actio in Distans

     8.      Limen (feat. Visions)

Yes, you read that correctly – this album is a co-release between Malignant Records and Cyclic Law, two very fine purveyors of dark and industrial ambient. Monocube broadcast their brand of darkness from the Ukraine and on this outing are assisted by contributions from Antti Litmanen of Arktau Eos and Frederic Arbour’s Visions (he also manages Cyclic Law).

Shake the bones, inhale the sulphurous vapours, blow the bone trumpets, stare into the sacred black flame dancing on the altar. The eight darkly ambient/occult tracks here have emerged from deep underground, from the shadowed spaces where celebrants enact ancient forbidden rites in the deepest and most secret of primordial caverns: places where the gods were worshipped before mankind had even come into existence. The sounds and textures here are truly subterrestrial, the exhalations of entities far beyond our abilities to comprehend. Washes of whispering winds and voices surface from even deeper regions, emanating from times and dimensions separated from us by vast temporal distances. As lazy as it may be for a reviewer to borrow a[n overused] label but the term Lovecraftian is perhaps the nearest I can get to encapsulating the aura this music stifles us with.

Even if it can be labelled thusly, perhaps it’s not the nightmare visions of the creatures themselves that are being conjured up – it’s the terror inherent in the idea that there are those humans who are willing to manifest them into material existence in the first place. These are the agitated harbingers announcing their imminent arrival. The poisonous, suffocating vapours seeping from the fissures beneath our feet are highly disturbed, their effects distorting and twisting. The weight of the imminent catastrophe to be visited on our reality crushes sanity, and heavy black atmospheres build up into gargantuan waves ready to break and submerge all. The world will drown, and the light will be extinguished.

Monocube are either issuing a warning or an invitation. Either way, it speaks of a bleak, dismal future, where the only light available is from a dim, cold, and dying sun. Even the stars will flee from the sight of a devastated earth, and a starless night will be our only companion. Warmth will abandon us, and in its place will be an imperative for survival. The prognosis, however, remains grim.

Essential listening for those times when you suffer the nihilist blues – this will set you straight back along the path of blissful doom and gloom. 

Psymon Marshall 2019.

Visions - Temples.

Album: Temples

Artist: Visions

Label: Cyclic Law

Catalogue no: 119^th Cycle

Tracklist:

     1.      Traces

     2.      Murmur

     3.      Lamentation

     4.      Ultima

     5.      Temples

     6.      Aura

     7.      Continuum

After an extremely deceptively quiet start, this album opens out into a glorious essay on sustained dark atmospherics and esoteric visions, taking the listener on a mind-expanding journey through the inner recesses of our own thoughts and dreams. Of all the music I’ve heard and reviewed recently Temples is my standout album – deeply meditative, inviting us to look inwards rather than outwards, speculating perhaps on the idea that the spaces inside our minds are as infinite and beautiful as the vastness of the universe around us. After all, didn’t Carl Sagan say “We are made of star stuff, we are a way for the cosmos to know itself”? The reflection of the macro contained within the micro – in effect, ‘as above, so below’.

Deeply resonant chords ebb and flow in continuous cycles, the very breath of the cosmos itself. Perhaps, too, these are the thoughts of the macrocosm made material and intelligible, so that we can be a part of the myriad cycles and evolutions it undergoes. And, contained within each piece, are hints of boundless and illimitable spaces, hints enough for our finite brains to comprehend without breaking apart. The vistas alluded to here are both staggeringly exquisite and devastatingly terrifying. They are simultaneously savage and edifying. We are witness to both the dance of colour and light, and the stately encroachment of darkness and gravity.

Beyond that, however, is that this set has shades of what I term the Deepsoul – a resonant frequency that jibes with everything contained within the definition of divine kinship with the universe at large. It is spine-tinglingly simple in construction yet deeply affecting in effect. There is complexity here but it is simply delineated and expounded. It goes beyond incense and paraphernalia, fire, chant, and ritual, and on into true communion. Try the title track for starters, ‘Temples’ – a ringing, siren-like invitation to divest oneself of material notions, to leave the fleshly body behind, and to become united with the very star stuff that is both inside and outside us and to make those essential – no, urgent - connections.

I can honestly say that I actually had shivers running up and down my spine whilst listening to this album. Every one of these seven tracks is consciousness elevating and soul-enriching, cutting through the dross of the everyday to reveal the dangerous beauty that lies within our grasp if only we’re brave enough to reach out despite the perils.

Ratings are meaningless, but if I were to assign it one it would be 10/10. 

Psymon Marshall 2019.