Buenos Aires’s native Guido Flichman has been involved in experimental music for a decade and a half, collaborating in the duo Termotank and the electronic pop band Programa besides working solo under his own name or as Depuratumba. Since 2006 he has also been running the website Latinoise a platform for information and promotion of noise and experimental musicians in Latin America.
Clorofila Voyeur is composed by three tracks composed in 2017 and 2018 from manipulated loops, field recordings, analog and digital synthesis, elements developed over a span of several years and now collated in this work. Flichman’s work incorporates chance and serendipity. His music is created from happy accidents, from the sculpting of individual sounds to the track titles, which in this case were discovered by scanning old science magazines.
Sam Auinger scored quite a hit with this writer in 2001, when he made Box 30/70 with Bruce Odland (appearing as O+A). I seem to recall they created a fascinating twist on the field recording genre with their innovative “boxâ€, which sits by a roadside and does unusual things to the sound of cars rushing past. This may not have any bearing on Rheingold (CRÓNICA 143-2018), a cassette release credited to TamTam and created by Sam Auinger with Hannes Strobl, playing the upright string bass while Auinger plays his samples and field recordings. Yet I do seem to hear the sound of that roadside traffic as one component in this layered, drifty and air-like drone piece. I must be imagining things though, because Rheingold was mostly made using a hydrophone (a microphone that works underwater), sited on the banks of the Rhine.
This is all Tamtam’s way of paying tribute to the Nibelung saga, and the Ring Cycle composed by Richard Wagner; I never made much of a study of this landmark piece of classical music, but apparently part of the story involves a treasure buried in the river. To tie us back into that classical music aspect, we have a gong player (quite fitting for a group called TamTam), Robyn Schulkowsky, who is credited here with playing his “self-made gongâ€. The project represents an effort made by these German musicians to come to grips with one of the “big myths†of their homeland, and presumably to try and encompass something of the musical history too (you can’t get much of a bigger landmark than Wagner, I suppose). The resulting 27+ minutes of ‘Rheingold’ are an utterly compelling abstract drone, one of great natural beauty, and with only a small ratio of conventional “musical†elements to sweeten the deal. Grand it be.
On the flip we have guest spots from Eosin, Malle Colbert, and @c, all bringing their contributions to the riverside picnic. Eosin: cloudy tones (generated by a gong?) with a foreboding drumbeat; Colbert: tuning the gong to create queasy unsettling atmospheres; @c turning in routine electronica minimalist moves. These are all OK cuts, but for me it’s the A side that’s found the buried treasure. Ed Pinsent
Trondheim Electroacoustic Music Performance (EMP) is an ensemble performing improvised electroacoustic music. The project started in 2011 with the involvement of many different musicians over the years. It originated from “the performance explorations around music technology at Department of Music, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), investigating how technology makes us play differently, how it enables new modes of communication within the ensemble, and new creative improvisation methods inspired by the sonic sculpting enabled by custom made audio processing software and instruments.“ To introduce their latest work I take another quote from the liner notes: “This project explores cross-adaptive processing as a radical intervention in the communication between performing musicians. Digital audio analysis and processing techniques are used to enable features of one sound to inform the processing of another. This allows the actions of one performer to directly influence another performer’s sound and doing so by means of the acoustic signal produced on the instrument. This may be reciprocated, too: the sound of the second performer may in turn influence the sound processing of the first.†Øyvind Brandtsegg is the mastermind beyond all this. He started as a rock musician, educated in vibraphone as well as in creating software. He is very much interested in research into the role of technology in the process of creating music. Listening to this work I asked myself what motivates him most of all. Did it start from a technical interest in creating new procedures and techniques? Or from a musical idea that led to new procedures in order to realize it? I guess we are dealing here with the first option as the dominant one. I can’t make any judgment how inventive and promising this cross adaptive processing may be. But if results count, I didn’t found this one musically very satisfying or surprising. The release is made up of two CDs, both carrying their own name, representing different phases of their research. The first cd (‘Poke It With a Stick’) reflects the exploration phase, the second one (‘Joining the Bots’) the phase of knitting together, etc. Most tracks on the first cd have one or two musicians or vocalists improvising, with Øyvind Brandtsegg doing cross-adaptive processing. For sure interesting parts passed by, but overall I missed clear focus and urgency. One can easily identify the instruments and follow the dynamic of the acoustic improvisation. This is also the case for the second cd that has the impressive vocals By Ratkje and Tone Ase in a prominent role. But it is difficult to put a finger on how the acoustic improvising and the academic electronics interact. No doubt interesting technology is introduced here by the inventive Brandtsegg, but musically it didn’t convince me. An ambitious and daring release by Cronica, a media label in Porto, Portugal. (DM)
Understated voice and drone thing from SÃria on her Cuspo (CRÓNICA 142-2018) cassette, which has been executed quite simply by recycling field recordings and old LP records, creating sounds on which SÃria intones and chants her vocal additions. Despite the slow pace, near-whispered method, and unvarying tone, there’s still power to it; she manages to instil every moment with a certain amount of menace, as if she’s some implacable supernatural force, a revenant come to exact justice against the world. Diana Combo is the real name of this murmuring agency; she also performs as Eosin, and has appeared with the David Maranha Ensemble, a troupe of Portuguese superstars. The work may have its origins in an attempt at playwriting, or at least to create incidental songs to be used on stage; but it took a different turn, and much spontaneity was used in the creation of these barely-existing songs. The droning effects were added in the studio at the last stage of production; John Grzinich recorded some of this, and avant-garde heavyweights Joe Colley and Antoine Chessex are among those credited with the musical dimensions. A shady spookster for modern times. Ed Pinsent
The three tracks each span around fifteen minutes, and the first, ‘Something’s Missing (Utopian) begins with elongated, scraping drones… and continues onwards with ominous hums that swirl and eddy around a barely-audible hissing buzz. A rolling organ while emerges from a clamour of shuffling intangibility to provide a vague semblance of form and instrumental musicality, but the it’s sad and sinister in equal parts, conveying a sense of loss while reminding us that the past is dark. The muttering voices, inextricable individually: are those the voices of the dead?
It seems entirely fitting that the pieces should melt into one another: time always transitions seamlessly, and in terms of life lived, it’s difficult to appreciate the fact that every passing second is stacking up the record of time past as the present slips away instantaneously. It’s also fitting that the present, as represented by ‘The Pulsating Waves (Reality)’ flattens into an indistinguishable mid-range hum that groans and sighs and whispers. Metallic sparks hiss way off on the horizon, forever out of reach. There’s a sense of emptiness and despondency about this inhospitably bleak sonic wasteland, even as it swells into an altogether smoother, denser, broader droning hum. It’s the sound of absence, a dulled absence that lacks dynamism or detail. So much positive, pro-mindful life-coaching material and contemporary self-help verbiage tells us that we should live in the moment; but the fact of the matter is that the moment is invariably empty, bleak, depressing.
‘Don’t Look Back, Run (Trauma)’ is solid advice: it’s impossible to retreat to the past, or to recreate it, despite the booming nostalgia industry’s suggestion otherwise. To commit too much time to reflection is to lose oneself to the past and deny the possibility of progress; but, to run to the future without due attention to history is to be doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. There is a balance to be found. The album’s final track suggests a certain degree of balance: it’s slow, its form emerging from dragging pulsations drawn out in bowed strings – or ersatz assimilations thereof – which gradually diminish into a rumbling gust of wind, blowing grey, blurred particles into a formless mass. The future is, and will forever be indistinct, unclear, as unpredictable as the weather, fashion, and our fragile emotions. And in the dying minutes, it crumbles to a cloud of grey obscurity, lacking shape, form, and tonality, a vaporous viscosity of… what? Uncertainty. Murky, messy, abstraction. What the future holds, we know not: the present is unsettled, dangerous, turbulent. The present is well out of hand, and the future yet more so. Christopher Nosnibor
As Don’t Look Back, Run (Trauma) opens somewhere in the darkened orchestral corners, the setting sort of falls to the depths of the soundstage as if falling away into space. The bare bones percussion is uniquely minimal and the waveform is set back, drifting moderately. About one-third through you hear what sounds like strings calling out, wavering a bit as if sending an encoded distress signal. López has taken this amalgamated tale to a secret place while upending the tension with the harmonics of Haarvöl. While a rotor seems to be at play the bereft refrain continues through until nearly the end, and after fading from earshot the listener is left with something pressurized that seems to be sinking away into some sort of watery depths. You can easily imagine bodies (dancers) undulating into darkness. TJ Norris
Haarvöl develops cinematic soundscapes, with analogue or digital sound sources weaved in complex and detailed compositions. They have been active since 2012 and have thus far released albums at PAD and Moving Furniture Records, presenting now their first release in Crónica, Unwritten Rules for a Ceaseless Journey.
Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch discussed the problem of utopia as a possibility in a heated debate they produced in 1964 and later published in the book The Utopian Function of Art and Literature. It is in this context that Bloch launches the notion of “something’s missingâ€, to seek to configure the utopian possibility. It is also from this notion of Bloch that the possibility of thinking and forming forms the whole utopian revolutionary essence that presides over emancipatory developments. This “before” is decisive for the understanding of the idea of revolution. It is here that the necessary possibilities are produced and, above all, the utopian aspirations of fracture and change. The Blochian “something’s missing†leads to the emancipatory idea from that place without place that is utopia. Or, putting it another way, it powers the immensity of thought without limitations. The revolutionary effervescence of the before is, perhaps, the most essential condition in the approach to the idea of revolution. Exactly because it does not come across any limit, because it is located in this place without place. But it is from this realisation that we can deal with the power of free thought, with the immense intentionality of this missing something which, being above all a naturally porous and cloudy thing, offers itself to the immense beauty of total openness. It will be there, in the dematerialised embodiment of free thought, that the whole process develops and is also in the possibility of art as a place of freedom (another place with no place that exists only between the artist and his work in a utopian dimension) it has its approximate representation.
Second moment: Pulsating Waves (Reality)
Pulse tone waves are frequencies embodied in a pulsar that is at the same time decisive for all humans and, metaphorically, for the revolution. Feeling the pulse of events, of agitation, of breaking, is essential for the revolutionary moment. It is this kind of continuous auscultation that determines success or, rather, the inversion of the whole emancipatory movement in the process of pragmatic transfiguration which, by obvious ineffectiveness, becomes implosive. The pulsations of events thus assert themselves as a decisive engine, and yet, in the face of the weakening of the utopian drive in its inevitable collision with reality, everything changes. The passage from one moment to the other brings with it the presence of the now and the consequent structural modifications that the utopian impossibility needs to maintain itself as an emancipatory impulse. It will then be in the programmatic transfiguration of the revolutionary event that its pulsation is played, more or less strong, but never absent. The decisive clash also affirms the reality, stripped of all the romantic drive that forms the revolutionary utopia. The fracture induces realism, and this is never the dreamed face of emancipation. We are told in the last book of the Invisible Committee that “All the reasons for making a revolution are there. There is none missing. The wreck of politics, the arrogance of the powerful, the reign of the false, the vulgarity of the rich, the cataclysms of industry, rampant misery, naked exploitation, the ecological apocalypse … do not deprive us of anything, not even being informed of this. ‘Climate: 2016 beats record of heat’ says Le Monde in its main title, now already like almost every year. All the reasons are met, but not the reasons that make revolutions; are the bodies. And the bodies are in front of the screens.†Right.
Third moment: Don’t Look Back, Run (Trauma)
Says Hal Foster in his seminal book The Return of the Real: “An event is only recorded through another that recodes it; we become what we are only as deferred action (Nachträglichkeit). This is the analogy that I want to emphasize for the modernist studies of this end of the century: historical and neo-vanguard vanguards are similarly constituted as a continuous process of protension and retention, a complex retransmission of anticipated and reconstructed futures-that is, in a deferred action that abandons any simplified scheme of a before and after, cause and effect, origin and repetition.†The same scheme of thought can be used to analyse the revolutionary event in its complex structuring and temporality. An emancipatory event can only be constituted if it recodes traumatically past past events which will obviously mean a learning that will bring you the possibility of introducing the necessary changes to be made. That is to say, still according to Foster, that the emancipatory events are, therefore, less new and more deferred. Suppressed in part, they will return and continue to return, and yet they will return from the future, such is the paradoxical temporality of utopia.
Note: At a certain point in Giorgio Agamben’s book The State of Exception, he refers to a determinant question: the point of view that, in this context, is determined by a legal order that requires recognition by another that opposes it. Quoting Italian jurist Santi Romano, he says: “… after having recognized the anti-legal nature of the revolutionary forces, he adds that this only works in this way in relation to the positive law of the State against which it is directed, but this does not it means that, from a very different point of view, from which they define themselves, it is not a movement ordered and regulated by its own right. This also means that it is an order that must be classified in the category of originating legal systems, in the sense that is attributed to this expression. In this sense and within the limits that have been indicated one can therefore speak of a right of revolution.” That is to say, still in Agamben’s view, that the idea of state legal ordering is the only one, by effectively opposing what is usually called chaos, is first and foremost reductive and fallacious. One thing, however, is correct: all the mental structuring concerning the duality exclusion vs. inclusion simply depends on the point of view. And this is perhaps the most important point to make clear the relationship that is intrinsic and impossible to conceal, first of all, because it is also the source of the essentiality of the politician, that is, the necessary verification of antagonism. It is, therefore, the place where we want to be.
Composed and performed by Haarvöl and Xoán-Xil López.
It is entirely indicative of the calibre of those involved, that Trondheim EMP manage to do something that is so often done terribly, so remarkably well. Regardless of a listeners’ particular fondness for the types of sound they produce, there is no denying that the group is comprised of an extremely proficient membership, a fact that, more so than perhaps the confines of the research project upon which they are working, underscores the album as a whole.
There are several strings to Trondheim EMP’s bow. On the one hand, it is an album of semi-improvised, ultra-collaborative free-jazz and contemporary composition, with an almost ritualistic take on its subject. On the other, it is the sonic output of an academic research project exploring ‘cross-adaptive processing as a radical intervention in the communication between performing musicians’. Cronica have put together a pretty in depth press release, which impresses by virtue of both the interesting concept, and the aforementioned calibre of those involved – a quick scan of the personnel reveals luminous figures such as Øyvind Brandtsegg, Miller Puckette and Simon Emerson attached to the project.
Musically, the group harness a range of influences and styles, invoking both the more esoteric composers of the Darmstudt school – in particular the likes of Kagel / Stockhausen – and the slightly saccharine, cheesy end of free jazz. Whilst we are not dealing with anything resembling ‘traditional’ or even ‘popular’ music, there is no small amount of bass licks and saxophone squeaks such as has become synonymous with a certain genre. To temper this, Trondheim EMP toy with a darker, murkier edge, pushing their collective machination in to the arena of doom-jazz – indeed, certain moments of certain tracks wouldn’t feel entirely out of place on a Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble record.Â
For all the focus on group dynamics that the system presumably promotes, it is the quieter, sparser moments in which the album shines. Subtle, bubbling textures and a more considered approach to extended vocal techniques are revealed whenever the collective pull back enough to allow it, and, it is then that I hear, or at least think I can hear, the nuance of the performance system they are exploring. Tracks such as ‘Heavy Meta’ utilise droning, ambient tones played alongside sporadic drums, demonstrating an intriguing synergy between its players in the process. Likewise, the genuinely bonkers ‘Synchronise your Dogmas’ is part vocal drone, part post-punk, weaving potentially desperate elements together to form an intense and unusual experience.
Whilst there is a great deal of interesting music on offer, the project is perhaps slightly hampered by the sheer volume of its output. Consisting of two albums – the first more abstract, the latter more structured – the whole affair clocks in at over 2 hours, and it would be reasonable to suggest the quality fluctuates. Whilst there is a great deal of innovative and exciting music therein, it does occasionally veer into areas that are a little tired, perhaps even incongruous. Extended vocal warbles, and some borderline offensive bass-lines, whilst they may assist the exploration of the system as a whole, dampen the overall experience, reducing the power of some of the more refined, amorphous elements. Ultimately, it feels there is a sublime 50 minute album here, buried amongst another hour or so of stuff that, though largely very good, sometimes repeats the ideas on display and feels somewhat less urgent.
The strength of the academic system upon which the album is based is perhaps most evident when the music is at its least associative. The interplay between often quite diverse elements seems more explicit, more fully realised, and presents wonderful changes of dynamic and timbre that seems to somehow transpose across the instrumentation. Such an approach tends to tame some of the more… outlandish (read: potentially irritating) elements. In a track like ‘Within Reason’, the range of the human voice, rather than demonstrating extended capacity for its own sake, instead determines or feeds off the increasingly caustic and arrhythmic composition that frames it. If the wealth of material on offer is perhaps excessive, there is an audible logic to its presentation. Whilst the second half sheds the vitality of the first, it replaces it with a certain precision that, ultimately, benefits the project as a whole. And whilst I might wish for an abridged version of the album, some trimming of its metaphorical fat, the project, from its conception to its realisation is of an undeniably high standard. Daniel Alexander Hignell-Tully
