Sounds Reviewed #13/2016: Deathstench & Phurpa - Evoking Shadows of Death (2016)

Deathstench, Phurpa - Evoking Shadows of Death (2015)

(LP Black Plagve 2016, lim. 150 copies)

I am really and deeply impressed by this 12 inch Deathstench and Phurpa collaboration (limited to 150 copies). I have listened to this 26 minutes highly adventurous aural abyss already several times and I am totally bassthrilled or basstatic. This is definitely the best "ultrasounds"-recording in ages. It feels like being scanned or skinned alive in some dark ritual desperately trying to find or carve out a soul under skin and bones, but finding only shadows of death. It is some kind of deeply twisting ultra-dark psychedelia without psyche at work here. Especially when listening in bright sunlight: a truly contrasting mourning music or re-birthing chant.

Deathstench and Phurpa are some fiery-cinder-masters: courageous dead matter (re)visitors and death-matter survivors – melting sounds into an ultra-esoteric chant – morphing ashes into fire and fire into ashes – it's some kind of spooky funeral - living is dying and dying is living - death-becoming-lifedeath or deathlife --- or some Tibetan evocations or dark-buddhist-cave-meditations:"As long as you're enthralled by a lifeless form, you are not free"(Bodhidharma).

Bodhidharma can't close his eyes because his eyelids are cut off (that's a real story!). He perceives only darkness and harpooned sounds in his cave. I really and truly admire this, because it's a non-genre-music rather again a truthful articulation of the life-death-tension or deadly suspension. This is the bomb with (doommaster) Billy Anderson on OM-matic boards ! How will this sound live !! Watch out for more Phurpa and Deathstench (click on the respective tags below) !

(10/10 Admiration points)

[SKG]

Sounds Reviewed #12/2016: The Quash Wagon Reclusion - Eschewal (2016)

"Eschewal" (bandcamp VI/2016) is the fifth and again absolutely outstanding release by The Quash Wagon Reclusion. And it documents again their incomparable and indispensable mantratronic approach to music. It is an eschewal in any case, it is a total avoidance of origins and onto-archèo-logics. It is a "stratégie finalement sans finalité, on pourrait appeler cela tactique aveugle, errance empirique, (...) l'unité du hasard et de la necessité dans un calcul sans fin"(Derrida). The music starts on Unexonerated as if it has never ever started in a subversively almost Mizutanian robotic drum locked groove - slaves to the rhythm. In a way this recording is and is not spinning. It is following the record groove virtual a never ending spirale or möbius band. In this it has a selfdestructive, selfabsorbing or tempophagic groove. It is like an abyssal Dialektik im Stillstand or to put it differently: it plays or spells out Hölderlin's line Schwer verlässt / ​Was nahe dem Ursprung wohnet, den Ort. 

Hear or here, suddenly mortified, locked up, petrified, suddenly un-chained to the groove:"les automates s'arrêtent et laissent monter la masse inorganisée qu'ils articulent" like an infant covered in dream-language and baptized with dream-water "le corps plein sans organes est l'improductif, le stérile, l'inegendré, l'inconsommable. Antonin Artaud l'a découvert, là où il était, sans forme et sans figure. Instinct de mort, tel est son nom, et la mort. Car le désir désire aussi cela, la mort, parce que le corps plein de la mort est son moteur immobile, comme il désire la vie". Picking up all these counter productive or counter spinning energies of the locked groove dissecting the standstill even further and further trancelating it into an even more extreme desire to interrupt the forces of inner-musical necessities to begin and end somewhere. As if played backwards or inverse or reverse it avoids developments at any cost in a spectral catatonic soundscape activating strong traditions of musical standstill from Stuart Dempster, Tristan Mural to Luigi Nono meeting a dark Derek Bailey in music never-ever-more-then-zero-land. Guitars cannot hide in camouflage forever.

Guitars are eager to destroy their masks now in an even more desperate final move, yes - yes "l'improductif, il existe là où il est produit. Il est perpétuellement réinjecté dans la production, Le corps catatonique est produit dans l'eau du bain. Le corps sans organes est de l'anti-production". Uninculpated catatonia retrancelated itself back into the anti-productive energies of the non-origin or non-source or non-beginning. Placing the needle in locked groove again. A möbius strip, striving again back to zero which is of course still impossible. A​ metamorphosis made impossible through an infinite filo relecto: "la génèse de la machine a lieu sur place, dans l'opposition du procès de production des machines désirantes at de la station improductive du corps sans organes".

(10/10 Admiration points)

[SKG]

Sounds Reviewed #11/2016: Cave Bacchus - Destroyer of Naivetés (2016)

Cave Bacchus’ Destroyer of Naivetés mesmereyesed me on all mantratronic levels, conseequently eye treyed meye best to enter this maddening of the erectile while carrying headphones. Id contains or uncontains three folded, funny trinitarian sound worlds ur-deranged like borromean (k)not/ds, desiring machines or radiooscillating lacanian earrings (and yes, my lacanian ear still rings in a deep orgasmatronic tinnitus after listening to this again and again forced into a filo relecto (peregrinus ubique !) to fantaseyeze again and again). Anything circles around the three (pour rire, of course) in this try-an-gulation hear. Outfolding itself three folded circling around the three in a deeply diving threeabolic perichoresis immaterializing in Joseph Nechvatal (words), Rhys Chatham (sounds), and Black Sifichi (voice) - "semi-circular configuration eyes dance strewn with irises (...) in one cathartic expenditure (...) less ego more art” (Nechvatal).

At once, once and for all three folded - written, spoken, set to music, ohr: it is simply a verbivocovisual inout-folding of Joseph Nechvatal's amazing erecticlectic, obseen, ink squirting 2015 book poem bearing the same title (Ah, logos spermatikos, neyes to hear from you again after all these years). I even pulled these three folded lacanian formula-gloves - also an anagram of ears, if you like trance-lingual forcings - R(hys)-S(ifichi)-I(osef) or I(osef)-R(hys)-S(ifichi) over my writing hand. Words gave birth to sounds, sounds became gloves handing over words to the ears and deeper towards the belly button (hey, omphalos !)- “genitals in hand (...) atmosphere dark and slumberous” (Nechvatal) - open for further re:joyce-ments: Lord help you, Maria, full of grease, the load is with me.

Id is in any case an ultra-interesting subtle escalation or coalescence of sounds, words, timbres and voices - “infinite transformative possibilities clothed only in the sound”(Nechvatal). To use John Barth’s words:“escalation of echoing cycles into ascending spirals = estellation: the apotheosis of storys into stars”. And ohr Deleuze Guattari's "les forces d'un Cosmos énergétique, informel et immatériel". And Black Sifichi’s voice treyes to mirror or nail down all verbal microshiftings of Nechvatal’s proême from whispering, nervous babellings up to final orgiastic verbal f(l)ickerings and micro-stutterers:"disarray, disarray" (Nechvatal), la schize entre l’œil et le regard.

Accompaneared by the swirling, swelling, effulgent, haptophilic, hesitating, interstellar or retro-future-tronic, blanks-leaving and sometimes heavily uplifting, erecting or erected dionyseean sounds of Donnergott Rhys Chatham (Rise Chatham, rise !) de(ep)livering some kind of a much Younger Third Dream of the High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer circling cycling around - “waves of electronic energy and immaterial signals” (Nechvatal) - or tuba-trumpet-coloured-harmon-mutes sounds like in Nono’s late masterpiece Post-Prae-Ludium Per Donau (1987) trance-forming seamlessly into guitar-lyre-tronics and flute-like-twitters back and forth and vice versa letting “eyes dance to music of pipes and horns throngs of satyrs dance (...) into orbit around itself ecstatic in the generosity of self-loss (...) blackness begins to snicker with delight art as a vehicle for self-transcendence (...) spontaneously inventive vision a moment of  annihilation independently of time space” (Nechvatal).

(10/10 Admiration points)

[SKG]

(released on Entr'acte, August 2016) All quotes in orange font with (Nechvatal) are taken from: Joseph Nechvatal, Destroyer of Naivetés (New York: Punctum books 2015). Poem written by Joseph Nechvatal nechvatal.net. Poem performed by Black Sifichi blacksifichi.com. Music by Rhys Chatham rhyschatham.net  Edition of 300 copies

Order it here and now !

Sounds Reviewed #10/2016: The Julia Sound - Post-Creation (2015)

This is the impressive third release by The Julia Sound called "Post-Creation". The Julia Sound is always acting out surprisingly out of a foggy clair-obscur. This project is always at the edge of existing using secrecy and seclusion to generate a unique soudworld as if fallen out of time and space. In this sense The Julia Sound generates out-side sounds in the most friendly sense of the word. The Julia Sound has a deep and intense friendship with exteriority: he works simply outside of himself and out of his self. Reworking, recombining or deconstructing the obscure sounds of the 1980's in a feverish aural re-invention. Delivering haunted head(phones) music subversively replaying desperate and disenchanted desires and zentimental robotic psychocandy solitudes back into our own time-zone, hear and now !

In my first review in 2013 I described the soundworlds of The Julia Sound as intense scuba-diver-travelings through the thoughtful realms, undiscovered galaxies and reverb-pluriverses of minimal and obscure electronic music. And again The Julia Sound is reinventing himself here as a huge 1980's reading-writing-deleting machine or as a retro-futuristic signal repeater par excellence. He echoes and reinvents the dark outsider feedback laden electronics from the late 1970's to the early 1980's (say: The Jesus and the Mary Chain (the record uses Jim Reid's voice as an epigram), and eg. Dok-U-Ment, the japanese act Tolerance, Coum Transmissions, Bourbonese Qualk, Ptôse, James Chance and the Contortions, Glenn Branca, MFH) in a unique, refined and inventive manner as if trying to break the necks of possible dancers. It's re-fusion music or de-fusion music in all senses of the words ! The Julia Sound is a real master of musical re- and de-contextualizations .

In any case Post-Creation contains an anarchic cyborg chronotropic-stutterer, or an odd sonic cyberpunk clockwork. (De)humanized or exhumated buried voices (what a unique way to sing, again !) want to enter through piles of foggy feedback spheres (hey, Mizutani !) trying to avoid stalking guitar sounds to escape clubby nighttime drum-machine-time-space-grids. I remember relating his earlier works to Chris Carter and this is true here too and this project hovers or levitates over the BLACKEST EVER BLACK - entre autres - continent without ever landing of course. It would have belonged under the most hidden treasures of Tape Culture.

The Julia Sound places all of his re-invented pasts and futures in an immense post-creational acid-bath giving re-birth to an atmosphere of diabolic counter-creations or counter-cultures. Opening an unheard of nocturnal life of electronics, pain-coated sounds, saxophonic and other corrosions of conformities. It folds back in into sound what is so desperately missing in the globale Kulturindustrie: an act of resistance and subversive counter-culture.This is music for your headphones. Use your head and pump up the volume. Please support this outstandingly gifted project ! Please order some of these beautifully designed and hand numbered boxes (edition of 77, cf. my photos below). By the way, a new track is online on his bandcamp(links below).

(10/10 Admiration points)

[SKG]

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