REVOLUTION MOON (groundbreaking musick)

OVAL

94 DISCONT

Original Issue: 1995 Mille Plateux (MP CD 13)

Reissue: 1996 Thrill Jockey (thrill 036) Buy it here!!!

Margot-meter: 5 moons / 5

1 Do While
2 Store Check
3 Line Extension
4 Cross Selling
5 Do While [Cmd]X

from Amazon:

94 Diskont arguably did for music what Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon did for art: contributed to artist evolution using the established traditions of the medium and smashing it all to pieces. In an era when most musicians reach decades back to rummage through the classics vaults for inspiration, 94 Diskont comes off as a refreshingly forward-thinking album that doesn't quite abandon the electronic music of yesteryear, but rather turns it on its head in previously unimaginable ways. Oval's method of making music involves manually marring compact discs (with paint, magic marker, nails...) and piecing the damaged sounds together so that the resultant outcome is a dizzying sonic stew of clicks, scratches, and fragmented melodies. His previous album, Systemisch, was a fine work of electronic minimalism, but on 94 Diskont those shards have coalesced into actual songs with increased depth and complexity.

What's so remarkable about 94 Diskont is that pure technical and theoretical innovation is here used to create something that's both intriguing and beautiful (as opposed to the pop culture-driven skipping frenzies of John Oswald). "Do While" is the album's centerpiece track: a thick, meditative piece that doesn't grow weary over its ambitious 24 minutes. Shimmering bells crackle over a hazy, four-note organ drone-the musical equivalent of sleepless exhaustion or swimming through tranquil water. Other standout tracks include the bottom-heavy, menacing "Commerce Server" and "Shop in Store," whose manic, stuttering wails bring to mind a warped superhero theme.

Uncompromising though it may be, 94 Diskont reveals itself to be more accessible with subsequent listens; the warm, gooey textures of "Do While" and "Cross Selling" effortlessly pull the listener in, and even the colder songs are stunningly provocative. If the album is difficult in its scope and methodology, it's also one that reveals no influences and takes many risks, augmented by a keen sense of melody and songcraft. If ever a case had to be made that an odd musical approach can be aesthetically enjoyable, or that an album can transform into something far greater than the sum of its parts, 94 Diskont may be all the proof you need.

Mike Newmark

BLUE MOON (musick by request)

FENNESZ
LIVE IN JAPAN

Original Issue: 2003 Headz ( HEADZ 10)


Margot-meter: 4 moons / 5

1. Live in Japan

from Drowned In Sound:

Christian Fennesz has been ploughing a lonely furrow for quite some time now. I say lonely only because of the stunning uniqueness of his work; while laptop musicians are now a dime a dozen, Fennesz' music transcends the usual pitfalls of such a genre, eschewing technical gimmickry in favor of a distinctly human approach to digital sound.

When Fennesz uses a laptop, he does so not to show off his no doubt impressive collection of hardware, nor to create sounds that are deliberately, self-consciously, difficult or abrasive. Instead, he uses the micro-editing possibilities of his technology to expand the emotional palette afforded him by more traditional instruments.

On Fennesz' last original solo release, 2001's Endless Summer, he combined dense, manipulated digital static with calm washes of broken guitar and the occasional stab of warm, breathy organ; it's a fantastic record, certainly one of the best of the recent slew of laptop-based releases, and it achieves its greatness with nary a regular rhythm in sight.

Live in Japan, however, goes some way to exceeding the emotionally sharp Endless Summer, protracting that records oscillations to a single, 45 minute ocean of sound. It's impossible to convey just how dense, how thick, this tangle of living, breathing sonic threads really is; in the space of a mere 20 seconds, Fennesz seems to reference Ambient, the radio music of John Cage, his contemporaries, while simultaneously creating a deep sense of space within the fizzes and the crackles. More than anything, Fennesz seems interested in the fallability of technology; his music explodes the innocuous digital sheen that micro-processing is often prone to, allowing error, disassembly, and the odd aural double take to permeate his set.

It's quite easy, of course, to forget that this was all conjured during the space of one 45 minute live set in Toyko at the beginning of this year; not one electronic shudder has been tampered with since. It's an incredible achievement, a genuine plethora of sound, fury and fragility, by turns haunting and exultant. Fennesz seems determined to show us the ghost in the machine, and in the process he may well alter our perception of what "experimental" and "popular" music can be.