Wie abstrakt und digital zermahlen auch immer, Slavin macht hörbar, dass Israel auch ein orientalisches Land ist. Wesentlich für den Eindruck sind Samples der Bulbultarangspielerin Ahuva Ozeri, einer Oud und von ‘arabeskem’ Radiopopgedudel. Ozeri ist etwas besonderes, eine Virtuosin der indischen Brettzither, eine populäre Singer-Songwriterin der Musiqah Mizrahit, von ihrem Debut Hechan Hachayal 1975 bis zu Behibak & A Golden Key 2005, eine Frau, die sich in einer Männerdomäne durchsetzte. Aufgewachsen im Kerem Hateimanin-Viertel im Süden von Tel Aviv, pflegt sie den ‘souligen’, aber meist Männern vorbehaltenen traditionellen Klagegesang, der in Israel im Gegensatz steht zu Shirei eretz Israel und zum ‘Mediterranen’ Stil. Ein fundamentaler Ost-West-Gegensatz von Ashkenzi einerseits und yemenitischen, griechischen, arabischen, persischen und türkischen Wurzeln andererseits, der mit Zündstoff reich bestückt ist. Gerade Ozeris Instrumentalsound zu zermörsen, um seine ‘westliche’ und laptopelitäre Hightech-Muszak orientalisch zu würzen, zeugt für Slavins Sinn für Paradoxes. Er scheint aber solche Vexationen zu mögen. Luftaufnahmen von Haifa und der Judäischen Wüste als Illustrationen spielen nämlich ebenfalls mit einem Kippeffekt, dem von Blicken aus der Lufthansatouristenklasse und von den Satellitenphotos, die Raketenziele kartografieren. Wenn der Strand von Tel Aviv verlassen daliegt, dann nur wegen dem schlechen Wetter ? Slavins Klangbänder sind zithrig, zittrig, stottrig mäandernde, perkussiv vertrackte Projektionsfolien für gemischte Gefühle und gleichzeitig ein Postulat, mehr zu mischen – etwa zu einer Oriental Abstract Spiritual Music.
“The Wayward Regional Transmissions†reviewed by ei magazine
The Wayward Regional Transmissions, though of a fascinating genesis, might be taken as an act of cultural appropriation. Conceived as a function of its unwaning reproduction, another element—Oriental Middle Eastern Music —is exhumed and takes a whirl around the Mobieus strip. There is a certain pleasure in all this promiscuous play, though. And, as it happens, Ran Slavin does not simply embrace a soggy eclecticism, but often crafts a vibrant gestural language from these disparate musical surfaces. The medium may be the message, then, but at this point, the content still manipulates it so as to relay some subtle effects. Opener “Village†erects a malleable, unpredictable surface, stimulated by a kaleidoscope of shifting instrumental colors and the raucous yet restrained ebullience of Slavin’s digital clicks and stutters. A welter of other tracks favor slowly morphing repetitions and a faint rhythmic sensibility; others opt to juxtapose shimmering textures with the crisp virtuosic attacks of Ahuva Ozeri, who lends the voice of her three-steel string indian instrument, the Bulbul Tarang, to many of Slavin’s compositions. On “Shelters And Peace,†if only for brief moments, the Bulbul Tarang peeks through the processing and exudes a ritualistic aura, yet even then, carefully placed against the queasy loops, slowly extended harmonic explorations and placid tones, it dwells on another plane, one devoid of oxygen, where its many copies serve to render them all artificial and which open the door to numerous reconfigurations. On the other hand, these elements from Oriental Middle Eastern undeniably gives Slavin much to play with—and that he does, having them snake and swirl through the seismic force of his programming, adding many shades and creating a rhapsodic aura. Slavin isn’t exactly showing disrespect to these traditions, but, much the way most everything is now commutable into computer terms, he is trying to sow them into the fabric of his own musical language. Over the course of the album, these elements enter the eternity of artificial memory—a utopia where Oriental Middle Eastern music and abstract electronica exist amiably—and they look strangely at home there.
Max Schaefer
“Hidden Name†reviewed by Boomkat
‘Two heads are better than one’, I think that’s how the saying goes, and it’s never been more appropriate than here on this devastating collaborative effort from two of the most respected ‘heads’ in experimental music. Stephan Mathieu has been chiselling out a name for himself on the ‘laptop experimental’ scene for a good few years now, giving some warmth and heart to an icy-cold genre, and Janek Schaefer has been equally as caring with the world of turntable-based drone, but it’s here where they finally come up with their finest and most perfect moment. ‘Hidden Name’ was recorded in the summer of 2005 at their friend John Tavener’s house in the rural south of England, and if ever a collection of music could represent a time and a place this is it. Although the sounds might be processed beyond all recognition for the most part, the dewy atmosphere of grassy Blighty permeates through every note; you can smell the buttercups and the apple trees, hear the rustle of a dog playing in the bushes and hear birds flying overhead squawking at each other angrily. Mostly made up of processed drones, using Taveners selection of instruments as source material along with a box of old records found in the attic, it is hard for me to believe how much emotion is compressed into such a traditionally avant-garde form. Maybe it might be down to the first time I heard the album – half asleep on a couch in Portugal having been deprived of rest for a good few days I was slipping in and out of reality with ‘Hidden Name’ as my spirit guide. The album became almost fused with my experience, and when the dense soup of drones broke in the middle to allow for peaceful environmental recordings before jumping into the final act it was like the heavens themselves had opened. This is an incredible record and easily one of the best of its kind – drone fans don’t sleep, you might not have seen this hyped all over the internet but my my it’s something truly special indeed. Essential purchase!
“The Wayward Regional Transmissions†reviewed by Indietronica
Les débats politiques aidant, ces dernières semaines ont vu apparaître une nouvelle tendance que l’on pensait appartenir à un temps révolu : celle du nationalisme, du repli sur soi et du conformisme. Fort heureusement pour nous (amateurs avertis de musique que nous sommes), ces notions nous semblent abstraites et désuètes car l’une des grandes qualités de la musique est son métissage, sa capacité à se confronter à de multiples courants et à se recycler sans cesse pour créer de nouveaux espaces sonores. C’est dans cet état d’esprit que s’inscrit la dernière oeuvre de Ran Slavin.
Originaire de Tel Aviv, Ran Slavin est artiste protéiforme tout à la fois artiste vidéaste, cinéaste et musicien. Avec son dernier projet The Wayward Regional Transmissions, il explore une nouvelle voie : celle de la confrontation entre musiques traditionnelles orientales et électronique par le biais d’accidents numériques ou d’ajouts de gimmicks aléatoires. Uniques et sensorielles, les structures du compositeur israélien s’apparentent à d’immenses paysages souvent désertiques où les collaborations croisées de Ahura Ozerri (Bulbultarang – instrument à cordes venant d’Indes) et de Moshe Eliaha (Oud) servent de trames de fonds, sur lesquelles viennent s’ajouter par couches ou par ruptures des éléments électroniques disparates. Le tout forme un mélange foisonnant et méditatif, une musique en aucune autre pareille, un musique du futur toute emprunte de passé, une musique sans frontière, une musique libre de tout carcan où l’auditeur surpris puis émerveillé se laisse porter vers ses paysages sonores abstraits. L’une des meilleures découvertes du moment.
Dr Bou
“Hidden Name†reviewed by textura.org
The seeming incongruity between the child-like drawings adorning Leise and its abstract contents is reconciled when one learns that all of the release’s raw sound material was produced by Frans de Waard’s daughter Elise (her name an anagram of the recording title) when she was three years old. “Knippers†initiates the disc, de Waard’s third Freiband full-length, with high-pitched squeals that might just as easily have originated from Elise’s cats as from the metal sheets, paper, sticks, and plastic her father uses for Kapotte Muziek.
After recording the sounds in Boston in 2003, de Waard transformed the recordings via computer processing, obscuring the original sounds’ identities without losing their warmth in the process (though faint hints do surface every now and then, like the morphing pulses in “Paarden†that suggest hammering and the rattle sounds one hears during “Rammelâ€; the album even closes with a few seconds of Elise’s untreated vocalizing). Tracks bleed into another like a gently flowing river of electro-acoustic minutiae: “Bij†stretches sound into a glacial crawl, the firefly clicks of “Vuur†are so lulling they could induce sleepiness, “Daisee†gently sways like a drifting vessel, and, though its title suggests otherwise, “Storm†is never more than a microsound tempest. Freiband’s ‘personal’ approach brings a humanizing dimension to a musical style that can often be somewhat clinical and severe.
Having issued joint projects with Ekkehard Ehlers (Heroin) and Douglas Benford (Reciprocess +/vs. vol. 2), Stephan Mathieu is no stranger when it comes to collaborative undertakings. That textural sound sculptor Janek Schaefer is an equally natural partner for Mathieu is indubitably borne out by the quietly magnificent Hidden Name. Having met in Montreal at MUTEK 2002, the two convened a year later to spend a week at Maryanna and John Tavener’s home, specifically Manor Farm House located in Child Okeford in the South of England. Drawing from a wealth of sounds produced from instruments (piano, clarinet, cello, flute, trumpet, accordion, sitar, singing bowls, bells, voices), records, and on-site field recordings, the two recorded material which they then reconfigured at the York Music Research Center during the winter of 2005 into the 11 settings on Hidden Name.
Like Leise, originating sounds are sometimes rendered unidentifiable but, unlike the Freiband disc, Hidden Name’s settings are full-bodied and dense with detail. Often swathed in layers of surface noise, the myriad sound sources coalesce into gently flowing washes of vinyl crackle and hypnotic ripples pierced by bells, tones, and pizzicato strings. One of the album’s most distinguishing features is the contrast that emerges from one piece to the next: “Cosmos†resembles an aviary tour, with the sounds of pigeons cooing, birds chirping, crows cawing, and roosters calling dominating; “Quartet For Flute, Piano And Cello†suggests an ancient vinyl recording discovered in an attic, dusted off, and played on an equally archaic turntable; and the entrancing weave of female voices in “Maori Love Song†recalls Akira Rabelais’s mesmerizing Spellewauerynsherde. Equally uncharacteristic, all of the album’s pieces are generally short (two to seven minutes) except for the closer, a 20-minute dreamscape entitled “The Planets.†Though the resultant recording camouflages the differences in the artists’ individual working methodologies, Hidden Name also unites their strengths into a single set. In this particular case, the pastoral setting clearly worked some powerful magic.
“Hidden Name†reviewed by De-Bug
Aufgenommen wurde diese Zusammenarbeit in dem Landhaus eines englischen Komponisten, der den beiden Musikern auch eine große Sammlung an klassischen und exotischen Musikinstrumenten und Schallplatten zur Verfügung stellte. Zusätzlich machten die beiden Aufnahmen von Soundscapes in der Umgebung. Das Ergebnis ist ein äußerst entspanntes elegisches Album geworden, das mit Drones und Ambiences arbeitet, Klavierminiaturen, konkreten Klängen aber auch mit Loops verkratzter Schellacks, Bearbeitungen von “Maori Love Songs” und puren Naturaufnahmen.
“The Wayward Regional Transmissions†reviewed by Skug
Ran Slavin präsentiert hier eine Fusion orientaler Musik mit abstraktem Glitch, die äußerst ansprechend ist. Ahuva Orezi spielt auf manchen Tracks das indiesche Saiteninstrument Bulbul Tarang. Orezi war der erste weibliche Star der Mizrahit-Musik und ist nun die führende Songschreiberin Israels. Der aus Tel Aviv stammende Multimedia-Künstler Ran Slavin ist bekannt für seine Videos, Installationen und weitreichende Kollaborationen zwischen Kunst und Musikszene. Akustische Sounds, digitale Crashes und allerlei Verformungen machen seine Audio-Arbeiten aus. Slavin veröffentlichte bereits auf Sub Rosa und Mille Plateaux. Fazit: Dieses Album vermittelt auf jeden Fall ein sehr utopisches Bild nahöstlicher Kultur.
“The Wayward Regional Transmissions†reviewed by Music-scan
Die Fusion und Kreuzung verschiedener Musikstile und Genres ist ja nichts Neues, sondern vielmehr an der Tagesordnung im musikalischen Werken dieser Tage. Kaum noch jemand kommt ohne eine Genre- und Grenzüberschreitung aus und oft genug reicht dies schon als Legitimierung einer Veröffentlichung beziehungsweise eines musikalischen Entwurfs. Dass dies natürlich einer gewissen Lächerlichkeit aufsitzt, haben scheinbar bisher nur wenige bemerkt. Auch Ran Slavin versucht sich an einer Zusammenführung von eigentlich disparaten musikalischen Strömungen und gewinnt. Auf seinem neuen Album „The Wayward Regional Transmissions“ verbindet er auf sehr originelle und durchweg unpeinliche Art und Weise typisch abstrakten Glitch mit traditionellen Musikfragmente des Nahen Ostens. Insbesondere die Zusammenarbeit mit der Mizrahit Musikerin Ahuva Orezi hat kreative Früchte getragen, die die Highlights dieses Albums ausmachen. Der Waschzettel spricht hier von „Oriental Abstract Spiritual Music“ und könnte damit sogar ausnahmsweise mal Recht haben, denn Slavins Soundentwürfe bleiben stets distanziert und abstrakt und lassen sich niemals in eine kulturelle oder geographische Verortung festschreiben. Es scheint, als ob Slavin die Dinge von einer gewissen Entfernung beobachtet und sie dann in einer neuen Dimension wieder aufgreift beziehungsweise rekontextualisiert. Die Veränderung die damit unweigerlich einhergehen, sind ungemein spannend und wer Glitchsounds insgesamt nicht abgeneigt ist, sollte hier definitiv ein Ohr riskieren.
Matthias
“Flow†reviewed by Jazz e Arredores
A mais recente edição da editora lusa Crónica Electrónica é dedicada ao trabalho do artista português da expressão sonora e da improvisação electrónica, VÃtor Joaquim. Depois de “La Strada is on Fire (and We Are All Naked)” – Crónica Electrónica 03, de 2003 – VÃtor Joaquim apresenta uma bem conseguida sequência de deambulações e confrontos de sons produzidos e trabalhados através de máquinaria electrónica, parcialmente gravados ao vivo no festival “Ó da Guarda”, em Julho de 2005. Reforçado com os contributos pós-produção de EmÃdio Buchinho (guitarra no tema Thinking Moments), de João Hora (guitarra em Moments of Emptiness) e dos murmúrios vocalizados de Filipa Hora, ao fluxo dominante de “Flow” somam-se ainda sons aleatórios de televisão, tudo processado e montado numa bem articulada combinação organo-digital. Feixes de vibrações mÃnimas nascem, crescem e amplificam-se resolutamente até se desvanecerem e darem lugar a novas e interessantes figuras que convergem para o silêncio fecundo e inicial. Micro-electrónica, ruÃdo modulado e glitch digital convivem no interior de paisagens surreais, que, sem seguirem um único figurino estilÃstico, apelam a um imaginário melancólico de lÃquidos borbulhantes que se misturam e fundem numa narrativa porventura mais concisa e refinada que em anteriores trabalhos. “Flow” (Crónica Electrónica 25) possui uma acentuada caracterÃstica cinemática em que som e drama evoluem a par e passo, traduzindo-se em luxuriante prazer audiovisual. Excelente.
Eduardo Chagas
“The Wayward Regional Transmissions†reviewed by Rockerilla
Dopo una prova esaltante come “Product 02” era difficile aspettarsi una rigenerazione così veloce e coerente; ed invece Ran Slavin, probabilmente la migliore sperimentatrice da Tel Aviv, torna con un progetto di assoluto valore. “The Wayward Regional Transmissions” riesce ad intersecare le strade – apparentemente inconciliabili – della musica elettronica e della tradizione mediorientale. Il risultato è a dir poco esaltante, poiché le alterazioni, il glitch e le astrazioni digitali agiscono sulla materia sonora di questa terra con enorme rispetto ma anche con incontenibile senso di rinnovamento. La collaborazione con Ahuva Ozeri, la grande star della musica Mizrahit in oriente, completa un disco di eccezionale valore artistico e di indiscutibile fascino.
Michele Casella