Jürgen Schneider / Kommissar Hjuler / Emil Siemeister ‎– Fluxus Often Reminds Me Of Deutsches Fernsehen

Jürgen Schneider  / Kommissar Hjuler / Emil Siemeister ‎– Fluxus Often Reminds Me Of Deutsches Fernsehen – Cassette – PSYCH.KG – 2018 - 

A1           –JürgenSchneider (5)    Lesung Aus Jürgen Schneiders Roman RMX, Guesthouse, Cork, Ireland, 24.07.17

A2           – Kommisar Hjuler          JoBeuysseph     

B1           –EmilSiemeister             Corpus Organum 2017 (Trockenefrah) - I/II    

     

B2           –Kommissar Hjuler         Ur-Gamelan-Szechuan

I believe Lesung Aus Jürgen Schneiders is a live recording in a guesthouse in Cork, Ireland. Dialogue plays. The voice is Schneider boldly reading text aloud, I believe the voice is doubled or treated with effects slightly, it is then joined by a female voice ‘Irene Murphy’, both voices dance around each other. Murphy’s voice is soft and clear, Schneider’s is urgent the contrast is obvious.  Because I can’t understand the German dialogue, this makes it exciting and as the sounds and tinkering become more frequent, it’s avant-garde qualities shine through. As they dominate later in the work, it becomes uncomfortable through the tension it builds, the voice raises prominence again and is more warped – the tension continues to grow. I like this, it seems old world.  Sounds come from Soft Day and the Quiet Club, they are random and comedic, building tension and disrupting like a naughty child at random intervals. The voices are pushed to the background and the noises and sounds take over the atmosphere becomes intense; the sound poetry really becomes prominent. The female voice then leads, and the work becomes darker.  

Kommissar Hjuler cuts up a Joseph Beuys speech to make ‘JoBeuysseph’, it’s a good kick of humour after the lengthy first performance. The first side of this tape is insane.

Emil Siemeister’s distant clanging begins, scraping and plucking sounds accompany this. The work is of a slower pace and more distant than the Fluxus Reminds Me… tape. The aggression and prominence of the metal work grows as the piece develops. An odd voice sounds take lead, making a warped yet mournful melody – this has changed into a vocal piece, with the odd clatter existing in the background.

Delicate tinkering begins, bells and metal tinker repeatedly, sometimes gaining rhythm until other metal clanks join in. this is quieter and chattier as a work, the sonics shift around as different sounds communicate with each other. Kommissar Hjuler’s ‘Ur-Gamelan-Szechuan’ parallels yet simultaneously contrasts Emil Siemeister’s work.

Experimental work at it’s most challenging.

Choppy Noodles 2019

Notum - Nihil Est in Intellectu

Album: Nihil Est in Intellectu

Artist: Notum

Label: Zhelozobeton

Catalogue  no: ZHB-LXXIX

Tracklist:

     1.      Overreaction of the Mind (feat. Kryptogen Rundfunk)

     2.      Queen of Space

     3.      Orchidstore Trip

     4.      Metamorphosis

     5.      Relocate the Bear Safely

     6.      Lysogen

     7.      Focus

     8.      Threads

     9.      Ktaj

How best to encapsulate the music of Berlin-based project Notum? Labels are at best an inconvenience and an obstruction, as well as being pretty much useless in cases like this. The artist him/herself describes it as ‘experimental/freeform’ but it’s so much more than that. Certainly there are elements of experimentation and freeform meanderings but we also have drone, noise, ambient, and shades of both the early German experimentation of bands like Popul Vuh, Cluster, and Harmonia, and the minimalist creations of the likes of LaMonte Young, Philip Glass, Terry Riley and Steve Reich. It would be too lazy of me to say something as trite as ‘it’s difficult to pin down’ but conversely the music here stubbornly refuses to stay within the lines of conventional categorisation. Just take a look at the cover to this album – a visual description if ever there was one of what we’re confronted with.

This is Notum’s debut full-length opus and it’s about as expansive and all-embracing a calling card as you can imagine. Notum est in Intellectu (Nothing is in the Mind) brings us nine tracks, all of which play around with sound and genre freely, but all threaded through with the artist’s philosophy of not adhering to one particular philosophical outlook. More than that, and very apparent, is Notum’s playfulness and abstraction: here the musician is using sounds as if he were playing with clay, moulding, pushing, pulling, stretching, and compressing. Sometimes he creates patterns and rhythms (‘Focus’, ‘Threads’), or surprises us with a sparse ambience (‘Queen of Space’), and at others erases any notions of the orderly and accessible by the use of cut-ups and noisy chaos (‘Overreaction of the Mind’), while at yet other points a mischievous humour shines through (‘Relocate the Bear Safely’), almost as if he’s saying “I’m enjoying this and so should you!”.

The album, when seen in the round, is a mix of the phantastique, phantasmagorical, the absurd, the comical, the chaotic, and the cosmic. There’s so much to glean from these nine pieces. As an introduction to the colourful world of Notum, it’s as good as any travelogue and gazetteer you’re likely to want or need. Thoroughly recommended.

Psymon Marshall 2019

Merzbow - Dead Lotus.

Album: Dead Lotus

Artist: Merzbow

Label: No Funeral Records

Catalogue  no: nf-009

Tracklist:

       1.      Dead Lotus pt 1

       2.      Dead Lotus pt 2

       3.      Dead Lotus pt 3

       4.      Spirulina Blue

I have pondered, many times in fact, how long it would take for someone to listen to the entirety of Merzbow’s recorded output – his productivity would surely make that a lifetime’s work. You’d get to the end of the last one you bought only to find that in the meantime he’s released 600 further albums.

Before I go any further, I am not denigrating either the man or the music – I find his work endlessly fascinating and texturally multi-layered. I have more than a few of his releases and each one has something new to offer, and something new to say. On top of that, even at his fiercest and rawest, his collages of blasting jet engine noise and swirling chaos more often than not send me into blissful states of reverie.

This strictly limited edition cassette release for the tiny No Funeral Records label out of Cambridge, Canada is no exception – three shortish slabs of lush carpets of chaotic static and pure noise, interspersed with recognisable almost rhythmic bass ‘beats’ and shrieking high-pitched whines, feedback, squeaks, and machine noises on side one (which form a themed whole) and a longer, layered, and shimmering assemblage that is, dare I say it, almost tuneful. ‘Spirulina Blue’ is what I would call ‘classic’ industrial music, the kind I particularly gravitated to in the late eighties/early nineties. This one still has the Merzbow trademark nuclear granulation but also includes a keening ‘melody’ weaving its way through the noise. I’m even tempted to categorise this as dark noise ambient – labels are mostly useless when it comes to this Japanese artist but in this case it fits nicely.

This, as I said above, is a strictly limited release on cassette so if my description tickles your earbuds then you can purchase from either:

https://nofuneralsound.bandcamp.com/album/dead-lotus?fbclid=IwAR2BHpLtj_cHAdXcJw116BK0vnRN9Q5XDUKKCZh31Q3HZ-K6Q5Dkav6Xpxk

or

https://nofuneral.storenvy.com/products/27085800-merzbow-dead-lotus-tape

Psymon Marshall 2019

Viviankrist - Morgenrode

Album: Morgenrøde

Artist: Viviankrist

Label: Cold Spring

Catalogue  no: CSR268CD

Tracklist:

    1.      Silent Soul

    2.      Spring Storm

    3.      Spite Spits

    4.      Morgenrøde

    5.      Black Out

    6.      Cactus

    7.      Higher Minded

    8.      Pleasure of Confusion

Viviankrist might be more familiar to some of you as Vivian Slaughter, bassist/vocalist of doom/black metal band Gallhammer. On this release from the UK’s Cold Spring label, we get to hear a ‘lighter’ expression of brutality and dissonance from her (lighter is used here in a relative sense, compared to her work with Gallhammer that is). Having described it thusly, do not for one millisecond think that this is any less challenging and in your face than her usual oeuvre; indeed I would go so far as to say that it’s a necessary counterpoint to the all-out attack of Gallhammer. This certainly isn’t a walk in the park on a nice sunny day. Whereas Gallhammer is all blackened crustiness Morgenrøde (the Norwegian for ‘dawn’) is painted in technicolour brightness but its obtuseness signifies the collapse of everything held dear, as the sun melts and the sky and earth bleed.

Album opener ‘Silent Soul’ is a blast of industrial noise, groans, and sirens, pinning Viviankrist’s manifesto to the tumbledown wall of some decayed manufacturing complex. Not as dense and lightless as you might expect given Viviankrist’s pedigree, it’s nevertheless the soundtrack to disintegration and annihilation. However, this is where it gets interesting: the following tracks diverge from here on in, cutting back on the nuclear nightmare of attenuated blasts and granular distortions and instead presents us with overtly analogue electronics, bleeps, rumblings, and twisted mutant disco beats. This approach does nothing to dilute the vein of utter despair and darkness running through every aspect of Morgenrøde.

Listening to the album I was reminded of early, pioneering electronic musical exploration, computer-driven rather than through the agency of a musician. This is not an affectation – it emphasises the ungraspable something beyond that lies behind the disruption of order and structure. It’s cold and impersonal music, and inhuman. Every piece has a steel edge, bright stabs of danger, and dissipating energy. Furthermore, despite some of its funkier, syncopated moments don’t let yourself be beguiled or deceived: this is a canvas painted with dust, rust, and waste, the hues subdued and darkened, and its atmosphere claustrophobic.

In other words it’s excellent and perfect for a Sunday afternoon.

Psymon Marshall 2019

Emil Siemeister / Z'EV & Kommissar Hjuler Und Frau

Emil Siemeister / Z'EV & Kommissar Hjuler Und Frau ‎– Fluxus Often Reminds Me Of Biathlon. Psych.KG – Cassette – 2018 - https://psychkg.bandcamp.com/

A1           –Emil Siemeister            Corpus Organum (Trockenefrah) pt.1     

A2           –Emil Siemeister              Corpus Organum (Trockenefrah) pt.2     

B             –Z'EV & Kommissar Hjuler Und Frau         Der Muter Objekt

I confess to being in the grey about most of the artists on this tape, I’ve read quite a lot of Zev interviews and only have one album by Kommissar Hjuler Und Frau, but I enjoyed all those things mentioned if that’s any consolation. Emil Siemeister is a visual artist who does some good artwork, I looked at the work and I liked, he does some really good drawings. But in truth I’m going in here blind.

Things scrape, twang, clang and clatter, a steady abstract percussion builds, it’s purposely challenging to hear – but the communication is clear throughout the work. It reminds me in part of some of the early Smegma live experiences that I have seen. The first Corpus becomes stronger and stronger as it unfolds. The second Corpus is way more aggressive and confrontational in how it is played out. I know it isn’t ‘Industrial’ but the raw nature of this work and serious metal abuse is as Industrial as it gets, perhaps too Industrial for some listeners. But as each work builds and finds its momentum, things become exciting. On a raw level this is great.

The Der Muter Object piece is really slow and dark. I feel it could be slowed down voices overlaid; the only clear voice is the opening voice. It functions as a slow, dreamlike – nightmare piece of work, Der Muter Objekt rolls, shifts and descends on itself continuously in slow motion. Advanced is a word that comes to mind, this is very effective, brilliantly executed work.

All the artists on here have made challenging, strong work. This tape - all I can say is wow!

Choppy Noodles 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.

http://www.rammelclub.org/

https://www.facebook.com/TheChameleonArtsCafe/

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.

https://occultinglight.bandcamp.com/

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.

https://nachtundnebel.bandcamp.com/

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.

https://soundcloud.com/vampyresgroup

https://soundcloud.com/depletion-1

https://awwfn.bandcamp.com/album/astral-sacrifice

Vampyres.

Great night.

Choppy Noodles 2019.

Miracle of Love - You Will Be Free.

Album: You Will be Free

Artist: Miracle of Love

Label: Overture Militia Inc.

Catalogue  no: N/A

https://overturemilitia.bandcamp.com/album/you-will-be-free

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

Ritual Chair - Post Stacy.

Ritual Chair – Post Stacy. Cassette. Uninvited Records. UNR25. 2017.

https://ritualchair.bandcamp.com/

https://uninvitedrecords.bandcamp.com/album/post-stacy

  Side A.

   1.  I Hear Themis Calling.

   2.  Zeta Prayer.

   3.  I Have 5 Instagram Accounts.

   4.  The Creed.

  Side B.

   1.  Top House Sorority.

   2.  We Should Have Been Hazed.

   3.  How to Build A Personality.

Me: What’s a Sorority?

Friend: It’s Similar to Masonic Lodges with Freemasons.

In the last Ritual Chair review, I moaned, saying I wanted more, so I was lucky that another tape arrived this week (Post – Stacy) - I’d had some Facebook and Discogs luck, Ritual Chair and Skeleton Dust Records came through for me this month. So straight to work.

I talked of the Esoteric aspect of Ritual Chair on the Lacrimae Arma Feminae Sunt cassette. This release is even more so, it is based around Ritual Chairs time in a Sorority. The warping of the dialogue is extreme to the point where you know it is there, yet it is inaudible due to the distortion and warping. The dialogue which I believe is the author and field recordings of time spent there is sometimes played out, then played back in reverse. It is as if she is trying to show the basic horror of that time and its events and then unearth it’s under currents until there is nothing left but what it is – a stripping away of the layers of time if you like.

The use of noise is subtle, it functions on a similar yet more discreet way to Brock Turner, the noise teases around the dialogue as if to be the point of view of the maker. The psychedelic through repetition and minimal use of different elements creates a dream-like state. Like Ashamed there are dialogues explaining what happened, it isn’t as clear, it’s warped and distorted. The esoteric aspect is how it is made to feel like a bad dream, your mood is shifted throughout the release, the past is unearthed, but it is made present by being mocked and dissected. Post Stacey is someone taking the peer pressure of the past and framing it as a picture. I am led to ask who is Stacey, is she a nickname, is she a bullying peer, a deceased peer? The feel of this tape is distressing, traumatic and haunted – it is a bad memory made into a C17. It is real, yet doesn’t feel other worldly, like a different dimension. The artwork seems to be the Sorority Crest in the hairs of a target.

The more I am pulled into this project, the more I am punished, the surprise of where it goes each time is a massive reward each time. Excellent work.

Choppy Noodles, 2019.

Tunnels of Āh - Charnel Transmissions.

Album: Charnel Transmissions

Artist: Tunnels of Āh

Label: Cold Spring

Catalogue  no: CSR256CD

Tracklist:

  1        Homage to the Landfill Dogs

  2.      Stations of the Skin-Bag

  3.      Kosmiglot

  4.      Here is the Heap

  5.      Fissuring-Genesis-Great-Power

You know, I am utterly convinced that some musicians, Stephen Burroughs being one of them, must have access to some device that allows them to travel through the streams of time. Listening to this, the fourth album from this British project on Cold Spring Records, I got the feeling that it was a recording of our future from our future, or what’s left after our extinction. It’s desolate, wind-riven, cold, choked with dust and debris, and barren. These are the sounds that only a dead civilisation makes, where our only legacy are the eyeless chasms of what were once the windows and doors of high-rise skyscrapers, their rusting steel skeletons reaching up to a silent sky with rotting and rusted concrete skin still clinging on, and where the suffocating blanket of radiation we’ve laid over the world’s surface has bequeathed a semblance of distorted life to machines.

The world is dead and lifeless, but not silent. Here be the ghosts of a society that lost touch with what gave it life, and as a reward for sustaining us we gave it death. Hurricane winds barrelling through empty caverns, both artificial and natural, banshee howls (or lamentations, perhaps), the seismic rumblings of an enraged world, the grind of mechanical behemoths lording it over a decayed landscape, recordings of the spectral voices of the long dead talking from the past: disturbing enough elements in their own right when heard singly, but when combined paint a terrifying picture of what’s in store. There’s no optimism here, and any room for hope has shrunk to an infinitesimal singularity. There’s no light, no colour.

‘Stations of the Skin-Bag’ will serve as a prime example – a high-pitched howling, electronic yet somehow human, set against a grainy, glitchy, sawing backdrop, builds up steadily until it breaks into crackles and even more graininess. A male voice, distorted as if coming from underwater, emerges out of the darkness only to be replaced by that overarching howl and broken background noise. It’s a grief-stricken plea from a history that no one will ever know, and it can only sing its pain to the void.

A pessimistic, nihilist album: to be seen perhaps as a hymn to a future that hasn’t yet happened, but is almost inevitable. Maybe play this whilst wearing sackcloth and ashes, and indulging in a little bit of self-flagellation using your favourite studded cat-o-nine-tails.

Psymon Marshall 2019.