blog.Crónica

Nowhere marries brutalism to beautalism. Smolders knows the tools of his trade, inside and out. Movements are trained, skilled and well honed. The performance and the product it delivers open up to the moments of making and of reproduction. The controls handed over to aesthetics, again: moving swiftly. Gently also, like an inked brush gliding across the surface of prepared rice paper.

A brutal mark made, ever so softly, creating a work of fragile beauty. Smolders’s brutalism can be found in his daring approach to let the story tell itself. Let the lines flow. Contemplate only the now. Be the created instance. With or without what goes on around, switching on and shutting off. Hearing is thus turned into probing, into hard won, intense listening. Smolders delivers the concrète béton for our time and age, this very instance.

Nowhere does away with rigid structures. The album accepts whatever aurally happens as a musical given, at all times, against all odds. Smolders therewith presents us with a Cageian narrative ‘holos’; a Gesamtkunstwerk of the human and the mechanical, of the found and constructed, of art, artifice and the natural. That’s just as brutal as it is beautiful – here and now.

Sven Schlijper

Those who have seriously attempted to operate a synthesizer know from experience how easy getting lost in the meanders of programming is. In a plurality of parameters and wave shapes, finding a way to produce a decent result – let alone a beautiful one – is not exactly a walk in the park when the necessary practicality is missing. Moreover, in order to achieve that goal a whole life of intense listening and, in turn, a thorough understanding of the constitutional particles of sound are required. Unsurprisingly, the large part of synth-based contemporary wallpaper exploits presets, either in “as is” mode or with the slightest modification. It’s an ever-expanding blob of mediocre homogeneity with a risible percentage of artistic meaningfulness.

The decision of leaving intuition primarily in charge of a process of creation – thus putting the mind temporarily out of business – can be problematic. The border between dignity and irrelevance is a dangerous place: chaos is acceptable if a regulating entity is ready to break in. In the work of Jos Smolders, the awareness of the so-called “inside structure” defining every intelligent human being represents a decisive factor. His music is “free” in the widest acceptation of the adjective, but still characterized by a high degree of compatibility: not only with a hypothetical audience, but also with surrounding environments that may range from utterly silent to heavily vociferous. Smolders’s choice of combining synthetic emanations with vague apparitions of reality certifies a truth: what we really hear – be it from an instrument, a recording, or the outside world – is often determined by our interior extensions rather than the actual source.

In that regard, Nowhere straightens up the wrong tendencies of the psyche which, given man’s self-damaging nature, would reject anything not organized according to individual preferences. Some of these textures bring instant comfort, captivating as they are in their glowing warmth. Elsewhere, a quantity of unconscious analysis is needed to capture the vibrational impact of the intrinsic pulses; rarely intricacy and naturalness look so entwined. Smolders extracts luminousness from blackness; delineates cosmic implausibility with considerate gestures; reinforces with radiant tones what was born inconsistent. After silence falls, what remains is an almost tactile integrity: something that can neither be taught, nor described in mere words.

Massimo Ricci

The first track from Jos Smolders’s Nowhere is a good example of music generating images of somewhere, even if it is an unstable, ungraspable locale.

Smolders’s modular synthesis works are surprisingly cinematic for music of a kind that is often labeled clinical, academic or heavy. The work has a ‘materiality’ that is nimble and strong, like a kind of sonic carbon-fibre.

Incident is not without traces of life in the most literal sense either; clicks and pops that may be as loose and dry as fragments of old bones cluster together to reanimate in unpredictable phases of excitation. Geigercounter sonics seem to infer that a radioactive anomaly has passed some time ago, and has left a strong audible signature as we speculate what the incident of the title was.

What results is something taut, tense and controlled. Images of post-meltdown Fukushima or Chernobyl come to mind, as we pick over the bones of these sites and survey the ecosystem. Maybe my language here is a little dramatic, but I’m going with a Zen-like ‘first thought, best thought’ instinct, inspired by the front cover calligraphy on the CD.

The work develops into more expansive terrain; plate reverbs imply a kind of tubular, metallic container, aluminum perhaps, maybe the inside of a large empty petrol tanker or a modern agricultural grain silo. Here the piece changes significantly; granular particles coalesce into phantasms of human voices before unpredictable tectonic drones permeate the soundscape.

The work takes on the direction of a radiophonic experience, one where the swells of unstable transmissions pass through thin walls. The tic of the Geigercounter remains but it is now picking up more than radioactivity.

There is an urgent orchestration at play, and the drone work is focused and fragile – you get the sense that something could pop or snap at any moment and the movement dies away into the terrain it began with – a vertebrae of attraction that passes.

Chris Dooks

A few years ago, Jos Smolders sold all his records, switched off his laptop and invested in the purchase of modular synthesizer parts; a whole lot of them. Simply because it was time to do something new. Before that he worked extensively with tape-machines, found sound and later on with laptop technology to create his own version of musique concrete, his own take on what Pierre Henry, one of his heroes, started to do in the fifties. Perhaps he’s now doing the same thing, but with different means and a different attitude. Since some time Smolders is practicing Zen meditation and that he translates to the modular synth. Setting up his system, very much like a Zen painting, to do one piece in a few swift strokes, Smolders plays his modules, recording the whole lot and then starts a bit of editing them into a final composition. Unlike so many others, his work is not ‘let’s see what this button does’, ‘let’s stick another cable in here’, the end result is not some snap shot or pastiche of sounds, but what he releases on a disc (or download, which seems to be his preferred format, because you can present files that sound even better than is possible on CD) passes for the best he produces. Also if we consider the Zen aspect of his work, we could easily think that Smolders produces some hippy-dippy new age music, light the incense and space out. That’s far from what’s happening on this disc. In some of these pieces, at various times, the music is very sparse, such as in ‘NoWhere’, but even then some of the frequencies used by Smolders are hardly friendly. But that piece is all what the new Smolders about; an excellent build up in tension, throughout the piece, adding more tones, subtracting frequencies and maybe some contact microphone manipulation. In other pieces the field recordings play a bigger role, but I would think that there are very rarely used in an untreated way (except maybe the voices in ‘Incident At Ras Oumlil (Revised 2016)’ but more as a trigger to set the system of modules in motion. An oddball in this selection of pieces is ‘For Rudy Carrera (Revised 2016) in which Smolders also uses some of heavy noise sounds, as well as some beats from a bass synth. I didn’t like the pitch shifted sounds of ‘Up. Up And Back To 1982’, which sounded too easy for my taste, but otherwise I was very pleased with this release. It shows that modular synthesizers not necessarily have to pave the way to another version of Tangerine Dream, or the umpteen version of Eno-esq ambient doodle, but that it can also result in some great set of experimental electronic music pieces, which are simply a delight to hear. (FdW)

via Vital

Scheduled for release on January 10th, 2k17 via the Portuguese imprint Cronica is Jos Smolders newest album effort named “Nowhere: Exercises In Modular Synthesis And Field Recording” in which we see the artist stepping away from his usual approach of detailed, thought out composition and exploring a method of letting his electronic devices of mostly modular nature doing what they do, evolving sounds without much interference from the artist himself. In the opening tune “Incident At Ras Oumlil (Revised 2016)” this new way of working leads to a sequence of highly digital clicks reminiscent of a Geiger counter indicating the presence of radioactivity before descending into a cold, scientific drone which is shortly interrupted by distorted Field Recordings and certain athmospheric tweeks evoking memories of Scanner’s most experimental work. Next up is the title track “NowHere”, bringing in more tense, science-orientated modulation alongside bewildering scraping sounds and what seem to be sounds of a motor running in some distance and “For Rudy Carrera (Revised For 2016)” introduces smacking, low frequency signatures from the deepest depths of the subaquatic abyss, pairing these with indecipherable, bleeping transmissions of a sequential nature and uneven, metallic rhythms before coming to an abrupt halt that takes us into an alien laboratory / factory of sorts where robotic machines move and soldering processes are happening on a large scale. Going into a twelve minutes run with the “Song For Maya Deren” we’re taken into a world of metallic growling and haunting, obviously timestretched vocal recordings, a combination that truly introduces a terrifying tension to a well minimalist composition living by these components and a few additional drones and crystalline tonalities whilst “Up. Up And Back To 1982” gives us a calm start by bringing up a relaxed, slowly moving atmosphere and more crystalline trickles before digital distortions start to infiltrate the sonic system and a series of melodic, off kilter tones build up in a way that makes us think of an ancient folk dance. After abruptly breaking down into near silence around mid-track the 17 minutes track leaves us alone with a few, sparse crackling surface noises and more additional Drone-resembling textures. Finally “NoWhere” get’s down into more digital sounds whilst providing an amalgamation of Clicks’N’Cuts and ultraminimalist Ambient seemingly built from signal tones and sparse piano notes which are assembled in a hypnotic and sureless time dissolving way. Good stuff, this is. BAZE.DJUNKIII

via nitestylez.de