blog.Crónica

Pure I believe was this electronic extremist who did stuff for Mego and attained notoriety for sampling the run-out grooves of vinyl records to create his very austere digital music. He’s still milking the “end of vinyl” concept apparently, since on No End Of Vinyl (CRÓNICA 079-2013) he’s enlisted ten prominent electronica creators to contribute tracks (some of them remixes) based on the theme. Even the sleeve itself is cleverly overprinted with concentric circles on black card, so that it looks like an idealised vision of microgrooves. Hereon, @c – slow and increasingly menacing fragments of gurgly broken sounds; Christoph de Bablon – remix of the original ‘The End Of Vinyl’ to produce a boring and pompous synth tune; JSX with his ‘Biological Agents’ and a decent piece of techno-stealth dredged from the sewers of Paris; cindytalk hurling buckets of digital water over a cliff in slow motion; Goner’s remake of a Pure track, using too many effects and gimmicks until incoherence dominates; and Opcion – an effective object lesson in “less is more”, with chilling desolate tones. We also have the very interesting Arturas Bumšteinas, whose ingenious ‘Opera Povera’ was probably constructed from classical music on vinyl, and exhibits a painstaking craft that is notably absent from the other auto-piloted submissions. But Rashad Becker is also memorable with his strangely rotating and colliding elements, spinning in layers like a wall-sculpture made of 100 bicycle wheels; and Pita, whose solo work I don’t seem to have heard for a long time now, and whose ‘This & That Edit’ has the kind of purity of form that Terry Riley would adore, plus a clarity of tone that’s like spring water on an otherwise rather sludgy-sounding comp. All of these contributions show us possibilities, ways of opening out an idea through remaking and refitting. Yet very few of them really reflect the vinyl-ness of records, apart from a few audible samples of crackles and clicks which surface in some of the contributions, and the digital “identity” is very much up front – processed, artificial, impossibly “perfect”. There’s a double-edged irony to all of this, since (as the label webpage indicates) the original release of fourteen years ago was full of millennial uncertainty about the future of media carriers, and recorded music in general; it was asking the question “will vinyl die?” and weeping a solitary tear as if every CD being pressed were another nail in the coffin. Now of course, the way the tide is turning in favour of vinyl and analogue media again, it seems the question is whether the digital has a future. Ed Pinsent

via The Sound Projector

DJ Pure greift sein erstes, komplett digital produziertes und 1999 auf Mego veröffentlichtes Album »the.end.of.vinyl« wieder auf. Dazu hat er zehn KünstlerInnen eingeladen, die Stücke von damals neu zu interpretieren. Entstanden ist – abgesehen von der erfrischend ironischen Auseinandersetzung mit der eigenen Arbeit – ein überraschend zugängliches Album, das auch trotz der Vielzahl an ProtagonistInnen über die gesamte Spielzeit den Spannungsbogen aufrecht erhält. Was die Stücke zusammenklebt, ist vor allem der bedrohliche Sound im Hintergrund, der wie eine dunkle Gewitterwolke über allem hängt und uns zu verstehen gibt: das kann jederzeit über uns hereinbrechen. Auf solidem Niveau – wenngleich auch nicht unerwartet – legt es Pita streng an, rashad becker verspielt und Christoph de Babalon pflegt wie eh und je den Breakbeat. Opcion hingegen überrascht bei »“end“end“« mit einer durchaus charmanten Endlosrille, und Cindytalk’s »Miyamizu« gelingt es, sich durch Intensität und ganz ohne Beat von den umliegenden Stücken abzuheben. Mit »Never Ending Vinyl« setzen Current 909 vs. Pure einen würdigen Schlusspunkt für dieses Release – gegen »diese« Clap und »diese« digitalen Gewitterwolken ist noch immer kein Kraut gewachsen. Chris Sperl

via Skug