BELTANE (01 May 2010)

The musick dedicated to this Sabbat is:

MNORTHAM & JGRZINICH

THE STOMACH OF THE SKY


Original Issue: 1997 Staalplaat (STCD 115)

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Margot-meter: 5 moons / 5

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1 Eluvium - Separate Material Accumulations, Or At Least Only Shifted By The Wind
2 Remanent Magnetism - The Memory Of C. Kelvin Physically Manifested In The Structure Of A Leaf
3 Geochronologic Formation - This Eye Can Only Be Seen By A Change Of Perception

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from Aquarius Records:

MNortham (who has previously been sighted on the fantastic Ora album Anagram and in recent collaboration with Francisco Lopez) and JGrzinich are sound artists investigating the properties of various organic acoustic forms, making use of long wire devices, found materials, assembled devices, aeolian wind harps, and a field recordings. Culled from years of collaborative recordings, The Stomach Of The Sky begins with extended rumble of densely layered sounds -- very much like the latest Lopez field recording work. Then the duo introduces a delicate metallic drones / scrapes / gurgles which could come from the Organum / Andrew Chalk school of bowed cymbals and gongs or from a processed field recording of water running through copper pipes. Either way, it's a beautiful magnetic tone.

STARLESS MOON (nacht musick)

GÜNTER BERNHARD

REDSHIFT/ABSCHIED

Original Issue: 2002 Trente Oiseaux (toc 021) Buy it here!

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Margot-meter: 4,5 moons / 5

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1 Redshift (31:47)
2 Abschied (20:50)

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from Bernard Günter homepage�:

The constant growth of Bernhard Günter keeps going. "Redshift" is based on sounds he found on his DAT collections, dating from almost 10 years ago; they have been processed and reworked with the usual care for the micro-details, creating a canvas on which nuances and shadows propagate in hypnotic, repetitive fashion - classical Günter style. But the best track is "Abschied": a requiem for the kind soul of a deceased person (in this case, Bernhard's wife's aunt) it's worked from treated orchestral samplings which become a faraway, melancholic delicacy of tenuous rarefaction and faint breathing, pointed with the glowing of drying tears. Again, one of the most intense compositions I came across recently, a music that will make you think for long moments after it's over. [Massimo Ricci, TOUCHING EXTREMES]

This release combines two pieces, 'Redshift' (30 minutes) and 'Abschied'} (20 minutes), realized in 2001. Although they both fit Bernhard Günter's esthetic, they share no common conceptual bond, which prompted the artist to include two interchangeable covers. 'Redshift' was put together from old samples dating back to Günter's beginnings (circa 1993). The music mainly consists of three separate layers: a faint humming background, almost inaudible, and two tracks of rattling sounds (could be contact microphones) placed far away in the left and right stereo channels.
In headphones it produces a schizophrenic effect; on loudspeakers it transforms the room into a wide sound field you can loose yourself in.
Settings change in the course of the first three movements, but the basic idea remains the same. The last seven minutes leave a lone horn calling long notes in the distance. This mournful finale turns out to be the perfect introduction for 'Abschied' composed in memory of the deceased aunt of the composer's wife. Sustained tones, calm and discreet, weave an ever-changing pattern inducing a state of meditation. Are they strings or horns? At one point, through a short transformational process reminiscent of Trevor Wishart's 'Red Bird' or Bernhard Gal's works on 'Relisten', appear the sounds of a city street at rush hour. Instead of casting some light on the piece it makes it more puzzling and beautiful.

(Note by bg: I do not own a contact microphone, and the 'street noise' part is not a field recording, but also consists of instrumental sounds.) [François Couture, ALL MUSIC GUIDE]

Redshift is the latest release from sound artist Bernhard Günter. The title piece was composed using noise sounds from Günter's DAT archive, from his early sampling days in 1993. This long piece begins with faint crackling, soft fluctuations giving the impression of movement, of a gently changing sonic space. Beneath the crackling sounds is the quiet roar of a fan, a motor, a distant drone, but it too rests gently on the listening space. Sharper textures rise and fall throughout the piece, of varying frequencies and timbres, all of which create hypnotizing movements of fluctuating sounds perfectly suited for playback at medium volume. The disc also contains a second piece, "Abschied," which otherwise has no connection with the first. It was composed in memory of Erika Kedziora, an aunt of Günter's wife who had recently passed away. Slow moving, dissonant harmonics, sounding as if they were made using a combination of bowed instruments (stringed, metallic or otherwise), create a beautiful soundscape mourning the loss and celebrating the memory of a relative who is obviously very close to Günter's heart. The piece might not have any thematic or compositional connection with "Redshift", and yet these two pieces compliment each other well. The uneven crackling and subtle noises of the first piece are answered by the sustained notes of the second. A stunning new release, one that won't want to leave your CD player for days on end. [Richard di Santo, INCURSION MUSIC REVIEW]

CRAZY MOON (incredibly strange musick)

CONET PROJECT (THE)

RECORDINGS OF SHORTWAVE NUMBERS STATIONS

Original Issue: 1997 Irdial (59 ird tcp 1) (Be notified when the reissue is available)

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Margot-meter: ??? moons / 5

For sure, one of the most chilling and frightening aural artifact ever released!

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Tracklisting here

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from Hauntedink:

Static. Faint voices. Seven slow, monotonous tones. A pause. Suddenly, you hear music--one of those wind-up songs played by a child's toy. The melody repeats three times. A pause. Suddenly, you hear a female voice counting off the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0 in German. A pause. She repeats the numbers. A pause. The children's toy melody returns.

So begins The Conet Project, perhaps the greatest collection of found art ever produced. This is not only a monumental work; it is also a monument, a testament to 50 years of Cold War espionage, a living document of the world's most secret agencies. That most of these agencies are still around today merely enhances the importance of this work.

To explain this collection, I have to explain the concept of numbers stations.

Numbers stations transmit coded messages through shortwave radio. These messages are transmitted from places all over the world, yet the basic numbers station message is remarkably uniform. It usually consists of a voice (most often female) reading off a series of numbers. On many occasions, this reading of numbers will be preceded by a song--usually familiar (like the English folk song, "The Lincolnshire Poacher") or distinct (the weird children's toy music I mentioned earlier, which is called "The Swedish Rhapsody"), though there are signals without music and signals that simply transmit Morse code messages. Above all else, one thing remains constant: nearly every transmission begins on the hour, lasts between ten and fifty minutes, and is almost invariably repeated several times over a 24-hour period.

What are these messages? Well, no one has ever come forward to prove that these stations are linked to spy networks, but almost everyone who has ever studied the signals believes that they are. But why would a spy network like the CIA or the KGB or Israel's Mossad or Osama BinLaden's Al-Qaeda--with all their money and resources--bother transmitting messages through something like shortwave radio, a cheap technology that would allow anyone in the world to listen in? There are two reasons. First, shortwave is not only cheap but also common, meaning a spy can easily carry around a good shortwave radio without attracting any attention whatsoever. Second, the messages use what is called a one-time pad, which is generally considered the most secure cipher ever created--provided that the sender and the receiver are the only ones in possession of the key to unlock the message.

Knowing that the tracks on The Conet Project are actual messages sent from a government or group to a spy, and knowing that those messages might contain orders that, at one time, probably instructed that spy to go kill someone or dig up dirt on a politician or just stay where they are, makes for a rather enticing listen, to say the least. But the meaning behind these messages will remain a mystery because there is just no way to ever come across a one-time pad key (they are destroyed after use), and though it is fun to speculate about these sounds, that speculation gets tiring after a while for all but the most die-hard listeners.

However, this historical context--the secret agent messages--is not really the point of this work. This is, first and foremost, a work of art, a work founded on challenging our conceptions of history and documentation. The artists at Irdial who selected the tracks and compiled the work did everything they could to choose tracks that were interesting to listen to; the listening experience, then, was more important than the clarity of the signals. As a result, many of the tracks here are filled with static and other noises floating in and around the sounds of voices and music, obscuring the messages to such an extent that it often takes several listens before you can discern which language the voice is speaking. They did not choose these tracks because they were the only ones available--I've heard plenty of clear recordings of numbers stations on other compilations. No, there was a reason to make the music muddled here. They wanted to recreate the experience, the thrill that must have come to those lonely souls who, over the past few decades, discovered these signals and recorded them.

Shortwave radio has never received the credit it deserves for shaping electronic music. Most early electronic musicians--especially those in Europe, where shortwave radio is more common than in the US--will tell you that their early musical education came from trying to sift through shortwave bands to pick up pirate stations all over the Atlantic. No doubt the act of sifting through walls of static to pick up a faint but hip signal can be seen as the inspiration for at least some of electronic music's obsession with distortion, aberration, and noise. A lot of electronic music, in fact, can be read as an elaborate attempt to give shape and purpose to random noise: to turn static into a signal.

If you think about it, number stations are doubly encased in interference. Not only are the signals themselves hard to pick up, but the messages are impenetrable. The artists behind The Conet Project understood both of these mysteries. By creating a work that is not only historically important (being, really, the primary introduction of numbers stations to the world at large) but also musically relevant, Irdial has created a powerful, evocative work that has, in recent years, inspired artists as varied as Cameron Crowe (Vanilla Sky) and Wilco (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) to tap into some of its power. This is a classic in every single sense of that word.

STARLESS MOON (nacht musick)

IKEDA RYOJI/KÖNER THOMAS/LAMB ALAN/LUSTMORD/GÜNTER BERNHARD
NIGHT PASSAGE (DEMIXED)

Original Issue: 1996 Dorobo (DOROBO 011)

Margot-meter: 5 moons / 5

1 #13 (Ryoji Ikeda Remix) (8:02)
2 Kyros (Thomas Köner Remix) (9:53)
3 Fragmented (Lustmord Remix) (19:12)
4 Untitled 1/96 (Bernhard Günter Remix) (20:19)

from Interface Version:

For his 1995 Primal Image disc, Alan Lamb recorded the violent rhythms of periodic waves rippling and undulating through telephone wires in the desert wind.

On Night Passage demixed, the latest release from Dorobo, Lamb traveled back to western Australia for the same type of pulsating source material. However, this sonic starting point was given to other artists, including Lustmord and Thomas Koner, to remix.

These musicians stripped the wire resonance of its original, wasteland birth and plunged the embryonic sound into foreign locations.

For instance, Ryoji Ikeda's "#13" extends the communicative reach of the wires beyond the ionosphere and into outer space. The main components of the track are dark, shivering drones that hang like icicles in front of your stereo speakers. Eventually, these icy stalactites become reflectors of alien transmissions; soft beeps can be heard throbbing gently in the background like a secret code unwilling to be deciphered.

The most enigmatic selection on the disc is 'Untitled 1/96' by Bernhard Günter. The twenty-minute track is composed of pregnant silences and barely audible clicks and hums. If Lamb's interest was the sound of reverberating wires, then Gunter's focus is the tones wrapped within the wire's insulation. … 'Untitled 1/96' is the musical equivalent of listening to electrical currents course through each individual copper fiber and the microcosmic decay that the strands experience as heat is released through thermoelectric interaction.

This track, along with the other three cuts, give vision and credence to Lamb's closing statement from the Primal Image liner notes, that "it is probably not too far fetched to suggest that wire music is an aural embodiment of some of the most fundamental dynamic laws of the universe.

Michael Woodring

REVOLUTION MOON (groundbreaking musick)

Ø

METRI

Original Issue: 1994 Sähkö Recordings (SÄHKÖ-006) Buy it here!!!

Margot-meter: 4,5 moons / 5

1. Part 1: Sisään
2. Hornitus
3. Kuvio
4. JL-CSG 1
5. Muuntaja
6. Hion
7. Twin Bleebs
8. Erit-samat
9. Lasi
10. Part 2: JL-CSG 2
11.Radio
12.Asuntola
13. Kenttä
14. Halli
15. Dayak

from Aquarius Records:

Fortunately kept back in circulation with a little more regularity, this is the first (and perhaps best) album from Mika Vainio. As with his work in Pan Sonic, Vainio's techno minimalism holds a crystalline purity due to the use of several hand built random noise generators.
Vainio situates these seemingly delicate high-end pulses within Steve Reich-esque phase shifting and then sets down rigid techno structure similar to early Plastikman or even the Profan sound of Wolfgang Voigt.

Hypnotic techno achieving the drone supreme.

from Boomkat:

If you don’t know, the very first few Sähkö releases stand out as being prime examples of some of the most warped, weird, head scrambling awesome abstract electronic music ever made. Hitting on electro flavoured downtempo, acid techno minimalism and bass heavy speaker breakers.

From 1994 “Metri” was the first album (then CD only, amazingly this is the first time these tracks have been put on vinyl) for Sähkö from Mika Vainio after those (now hellishly rare) hand drilled 12"s with silver foil rapped sleeves (visually a massive influence on Fat Cat's Split series). “Sisään” is just like early Autechre, fusing massive 808 beats with dope beat programming and an isolationist feel deep. “Twin Bleeps” is truly deranged -if Steve Reich ever dropped a pure acid house track then we could only ever dream it would sound this good-. “Kuvio” is sick bleep techno with an outrageous bassline and lowdown cold drone harmonics. “Lasi” drop's sub acid chords in a major classic detroit techno vain. “Hornitus” is another sick minimal cold dark nights techno mix weapon and “Muumtaja” pounds away relentlessly with electro thud's and thunderous hard dub basslines. Finally “Hion” repeats the technique's of “Sisään” and “Radio” win's the major prize as a growling heavy bassdrone piece ala Parmentier (if you follow that link then major respect) kicking off with half heard radio static and then progressively getting heavier and heavier (sparks metaphorically flying from the stylus as it wrestles with the bass vibrations) as this album rolls towards it's conclusion.

They don’t make records like this anymore and thankfully so as we'd need hospital treatment on permanent rotation to keep our heart rate down... In addition to the already essential vinyl edition the CD takes you further into the beatless ambience of “Radio” with “Asuntola”, “Kentta”, “Halli” and “Dayak”. Minimal evolving echoic tone patterns (like a modern Morton Feldman), ghostlike thunderous static/ambience to snap your speaker cones (spookier than when you first watched 'The Evil Dead' or 'Dr.Who' :), what sounds like water droplets in dub and “Dayak” a killer soundtrack piece.

An outright classic.