Diastolic Murmurs / Furt – Hospital of the Soul

 

Diastolic Murmurs / Furt – Hospital of the Soul – 2019 – CD & bonus CDr– Psych.KG 501- London version.

https://limitierte-schallplatten-1.jimdosite.com/

https://psychkg.bandcamp.com/

https://richardcrow.bandcamp.com/music

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Diastolic-Murmurs/536614813142247

https://www.discogs.com/Diastolic-Murmurs-Furt-Hospital-Of-The-Soul-1/release/13985561

https://www.furtlogic.com/

https://furtlogic.bandcamp.com/

I am often happy to oblige when artists get in touch with me offering releases for review on here. One such artist, Richard Crow emailed me, so - we got chatting about his work. The conversation was going nicely until he mentioned words that strike fear into my reviewing soul – “I have a release out on the PSYCH KG label.” If you think you like Experimental sounds, listen to some of their releases and you will then know for sure how experimental you are – the link to their site is above; go there, I dare you. Psych KG releases tend to be as difficult and challenging as the word experimental gets. As a reviewer this is the third time I am going there - I never forget each Psych KG review day - ever. My first two cassettes by the label were passed on to me via another review blog that found them too difficult to review.

Hospital of the Soul documents a live performance on 14^th February 1993 at the London Film Maker’s C0-OP, it was originally released on a boxed cassette around that time. This has been transferred from the original DAT master and remastered. Diastolic Murmurs are Adam Bohman and Richard Crow. Furt are Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer.

The performance slowly creaks to life, it functions with communications between small sounds. It has a haunted, explorative feel as it plays out, it feels older than its 28 years – Crow’s Monomania had this too. There are pauses as drills take over the sound as if it is repairing or remaking itself for the next movement. The drill seems to speak its own language in conversation with other noises that arrive. I believe there was heavy use of contact microphones throughout the performance.

Hauntology was a term that cropped up in Wire magazine a few years ago: this is as haunted as noise can get. As the sound rises and urgent clangs and drones burst through the quietness it feels like the moment in any psychological thriller that makes the viewer jump after a long build-up. The visuals and texts add further mystery to the recording. There is additional text by Tape archivist Mors Mia and some info from Furt that was handed out on the night with some visuals from the performance. The packaging celebrates the night with consideration and generosity, I would like to have seen this. What were the other acts like, were they as strong as this?

The bonus cdr is Diastolic Murmurs on their own, it is called ‘Irrigation of the Bladder’ and it is an incredibly challenging listen. Compared to the live document Irrigation of the Bladder it strays into challenging medical soundscapes that make the live performance seem like easy listening – it has an impressive ‘infected quality as it progresses.

The sound of Hospital of the Soul is a strong display creepy atmospherics; it is incredibly dark with an ability to time travel within itself. Both artists stretch back to the 1980s making this a conceptually solid recording that displays experience, maturity and precision.  All the work on both CDs really stands on the far edges of experimentation. Hospital of the Soul is a unique recording that is truly challenging, even by Psych KG standards.

Army of One 2021.

Don Mandarin - NARRATTI OF TRIBUNE

Album: NARRATTI OF TRIBUNE

Artist: Don Mandarin

Label: Nailed Nazarene Industries

Catalogue no: Unknown

Tracklist:

     1.      MAY THINGS IN THE PAST CEASE TO EXIST

     2.      MAY THINGS IN THE FUTURE NEVER BE BORN

     3.      MAY THINGS IN THE PRESENT CEASE TO HARM US

Describing and contextualising Don Mandarin’s work must surely qualify as one of the six impossible things to do before breakfast. I’ve listened to a few of his recordings and I found that trying to pin down such abstruse and slippery abstractions is like attempting to climb a greased pole. It is at once complex, unreal, as malleable as wet clay, as solid as concrete, and yet is as subject to interpretation as anything elusive and ephemeral usually is. In this instance, his first recording issued by Brazil’s Nailed Nazarene Industries label, this is possibly as close to a ‘concept’ album, or at least a thematically linked work, as he’s ever released. (Also, I apologise now for any philosophical musings on my part in the following – combining a Monday morning with a lack of caffeine brings on altered states of consciousness…)

Track 1, ‘MAY THINGS IN THE PAST CEASE TO EXIST’, poses something of a philosophical question – does the past (and by extension, I suppose, the future too) actually exist in any real sense? Once a moment has passed on, does it cease to be, or is it stored in some great universal ‘memory bank’, to be retrieved at some point once the key to open it has been discovered? And if we do, does that mean that any bad or uncomfortable memories can be erased or altered? Judging by the maelstrom of hellish overloaded howl on this opening number, there would be some who would only be too happy to see some aspects of their past selves atomised and pulverised into non-existence. It’s as if some ravenous beast with a black hole for a maw sits ever-ready to ingest the concept of the past (and the collective memories of all) and consign it to oblivion. And, given its 20-minute running time, some have a lot of regretful actions to sort through…

In some respects the future is the most malleable of the time streams, and track 2, ‘MAY THINGS IN THE FUTURE NEVER BE BORN’ is the one thing that all of us have wished for at one time or another. A sustained fuzzed guitar chord roars, building and collapsing, suggesting that the concept of the future is flexible, and only subject to change before it’s actually happened (ie. it’s not predestined or set in stone). At only just under two minutes, there’s a possibility that it’s also suggesting that one quick moment of action is all that’s needed to change outcomes.

Noise ambient is the most appropriate nomenclature for the final offering, ‘MAY THINGS IN THE PRESENT CEASE TO HARM US’, with its washes and planes of sweetened noise and drones that to my ears appear as harbingers of hope and promise, tempered perhaps with the knowledge that we must be ever vigilant. A wordless voice drifts along with the currents which directs it where they will, darting through white clouds which nevertheless roil and churn through endless layers of atmosphere. It is for the most part positive but veined through with a seam of the negative, as if saying that we should grab the good but be acutely aware of the bad that might tag along with it.

An intriguing suite of pieces, tied together through the idea of time and its elusive qualities, which together tell a complex story without layering on the aural convolutions in order to do so. We each relate to time in different ways, and experience it uniquely. I suppose what I am trying to say here is that my reaction to NARRATTI OF TRIBUNE is filtered through my own entanglement with time, and that if you read between the lines there’s much that you can glean from this. My own preference is for works that make me think, not just inwardly but outwardly as well, and of all the Don Mandarin I’ve heard this has been the most thought-provoking by far. As far as I am concerned, that’s what I want from music – and this has it in droves.

Available as a download from Nailed Nazarene Industries’ Bandcamp page:

https://nailednazareneindustries.bandcamp.com/album/narratti-of-tribune

Psymon Marshall 2019.

Car Made of Glass - Every Song is a Good Song.

Album: Every Song is a Good Song

Artist: Car Made of Glass

Label: Montgomery Street Records

Catalogue no: lola021

Tracklist:

     1.      Running on a Discontinuous Circuit

     2.      The Road

     3.      Infant Mind

     4.      Experiments in Bluetooth Technology

     5.      Wind Brushes C

Judging by this, Fortuna, California five-piece Car Made of Glass have a very simple philosophy: if an object, process, or action can make a sound, it can be used to make music with. That idea is evidenced on this latest recording, listing as it does things like amplified glass, raw meat in scalding pan, light-switches, and straw and water, amongst other inventive uses of unusual instrumentation. And yes, this is another one of those exploratory journeys I sometimes make to the margins of the margins of the musical non-mainstream, as I believe everyone needs to stray outside their comfort zones on occasions.

You’ve probably guessed that this is a highly experimental suite of compositions, and you’d be right. Right from the off randomly bouncing beads of glass tinkle in scattershot fashion, crackling and reverberating like tiny little explosions, minute fireworks detonating into multitudinous colours and hues in a weeping, mournful sky. ‘The Road’ starts off sparklingly with individually-strummed acoustic guitar chords against a backdrop of dustiness, a quiet hot summer day on some long, lonely desert road, heat shimmer rising off the black-top, and the radio struggling to find a station. Static and voices, slide guitar, and the slow, ticking crackling of heat expansion underscore the vast empty spaces of this landscape, sweltering under a merciless sun. Then, finally, the colours leech out, and everything burns away into a blanket of white.

‘Infant Mind’ is a strange concoction, a splattering noisiness backing up a solo saxophone (I normally hate this instrument, but here it adds a wonderfully ghostly presence to the track) accompanied by piano tinkling and jazz drums. A late summer evening, the heat of the day cooling off, drinks under the stars, and flirtatious strangers. This has minute echoes of The Caretaker about it: perhaps a fractured memory of an evening long ago, when life was sweet and easy, things were perhaps simpler, and new possibilities seemed endless.

The next track, ‘Experiments in Bluetooth Technology’, is the loosest and most freeform of all the pieces on here, and does exactly what it says on the tin (to coin a phrase). Staccato blasts of random snippets of electronics, noise, music, and voices splash, crash, and dash, garnished with slabs of white noise, bleeps, squeaks, bells, rattlings, and all manner bits and bobs. It’s that radio still struggling to find a station with a clear and strong enough signal. It’s also alien in some inexplicable way, a glimpse of a world or environment that’s unfamiliar to most of us.

Distant creakings and scratchings open ‘Wind Brushes C’, sounds heard while one is half-asleep and still dreaming, a disorientating, confusing hypnogogic vision inspired by the real world. It’s infused with high summer heat and dust, and the skittering and chattering of chitin-shelled creatures scuttling around unseen in subterranean tunnels, their business unfathomable and secretive. More than that, the space is unending from horizon to horizon, with little to break up the monotony. The colours here are muted and sandy, with only the blue bowl above providing any distraction for the eye.

What this collection does particularly well is spark off images, painting vistas and panoramas with minute detail and their associated atmospheres. It focuses on the small within the large: we experience it on the human level, and yet it still tells us that we’re standing in an inhumanly flat and endless prospect, reducing us to nothing more than an insignificant mote. It’s humbling and terrifying: when faced with seemingly limitless horizons we retreat into ourselves, defocusing and magnifying what’s directly in front of us or on the ground.

It’s a distinctly accessible album – it’s not out and out avant-garde thrashings and bashings, or difficult for difficulty’s sake. While it’s not musical in the sense of having recognisable tunes or melody either, it is very musical in that it elicits moods and feelings, and inspires the imagination. I will definitely be listening to this one again – there’s just something sparkling winding its way through the veins of invention here, allied to a truthfulness and clarity, all facets that appeal to me.

Available as a limited (50 copies) CDr from either of these links:

https://carmadeofglass.bandcamp.com/

https://montgomerystreetrecords.bandcamp.com/album/every-song-is-a-good-song

Psymon Marshall 2019.

More Thomas LaRoche Insanity - Creep of Paris and House Dust #1!

Thomas LaRoche. House Dust #1. 2018 Edition of 25. Research Laboratories.

https://researchlaboratories.tumblr.com/

      a.       House Dust #1

      b.       House Dust #1

Thomas LaRoche is one half of Active Denial who produced two amazing cassettes in 2018 and 2019. House Dust is one of his many other projects on Research Laboratories. This short tape is in a limited edition of 25. It’s described as Musique Concrète; wavering tonal frequency continues in a steady line whilst metal scrapings drag out around, through and over it. Energy build as the scrapings and clattering grow. The scraping is relentless and becomes intensified as its’ sharpness rises, this is raw. I assumed the programme was repeated on the other side, but the tonal frequency seems to dominate the clatter. The tonal noise eventually takes over and it’s done.

I like this, another obscure gem from Research Laboratories.

C.O.P. Gavia Immer. Cassette. Research Laboratories.  https://researchlaboratories.tumblr.com/

a. Untitled.

b. Untitled.

Whereas House Dust was a new tape with hand painted cassette case and artwork inside, Creep of Paris – Gavia Immer is way rawer. It’s a recycled cassette that is spray painted black, the cassette case is covered in packing tape with the name written on in pen and some details printed off and stuck on the back. Also, Gavia Immer is another name for a Common Loon or A Great Northern Diver bird.

Old instrumental Jazz music plays, it has some amazing drumming, this plays out until some recorded dialogue appears over a microphone. A man and a woman converse. A woman then talks, it seems to shift through different passages of dialogue with different characters. How old this is I don’t know, how it was obtained is a mystery. Old music takes over, the crackle of the old vinyl very prevalent as it dies off.

The B Side, contains old film music spliced up between passages of Field Recordings of inaudible dialogue amongst crowds, the two are cutup and play for periods of time with each taking over for a duration. This just continues, but it works and is the most effective side of the release, the relentless repetition of the two sources is good. It continues until a piano recordings and jazz play out. I found I was able to get into this more that the first side, I engaged more..

All in All it’s been an enjoyable morning of experiments from the Laboratories.

Choppy Noodles 2019.