LITHA (21 June 2010)

The musick dedicated to this Sabbat is:

VARIOUS ARTISTS

VOR DER FLUT (Hommage An Einen Wasserspeicher)


Original Issue: 1985 Eigelstein Musikproduktion (ES 2025/26CD) Buy it here!

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Margot-meter: 5 moons / 5

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1 Christian Bollmann , Doris Zeman , Gerd Kappelhoff , Helmut Scherner , Jochen Vetter , Roberto Laneri , Stephanie Wolf - Invocationes 2:59
2 Dario Domingues - Pacha Siku 3:40
3 Pauline Oliveros - Watertank Software 4:41
4 Büdi Siebert , Joe Koinzer - Trüffeltanz 4:14
5 Jochen Vetter , Doris Zeman , Gerd Kappelhoff , Helmut Scherner , Jochen Vetter - Praevocationes 5:25
6 Dario Domingues - The Spirit Of The Wind 3:44
7 Pauline Oliveros - The Gentle-Short Version 5:42
8 Büdi Siebert - Wal-Hall-A 4:47
9 Saxophon Mafia - Kellerdschungel 4:50
10 Conrad Bauer - Bötz 10:05
11 Butz Dähn , Michael Höhler , Wolfgang Hamm - Unter Der Stadt 6:52
12 Heiner Goebbels - Die Sintflut - Ein Vorfilm Für Herbert Achternbusch 6:29

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from liner notes :

In December 1984 musicians from different countries and the 'Tanzforum der Oper/Köln' met in the almost 100 years old drinking water tank SEVERIN, located on the southside of Cologne, for an exceptional music and dance project.
The recordings of this compact disc testify for the unique acoustics of this subterranean colonnade. All takes have only been recorded with microphones distributed throughout the tank, without using any additional studio effect equipment."

The water reservoir was empty for 2 years for construction works. The longest audible reverb recorded at the empty tank lasts approximately 45 seconds. After the project the water tank was flooded again with about 20 million litres of drinking water.

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.

FULL PINK MOON (28 April 2010)

The musick dedicated to this Esbat is:

EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN

TABULA RASA


Original Issue: 1993 Mute (BETON 106 CD) Buy it here!!!

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Margot-meter: 4,5 moons / 5

"Blume" and "Wüste" still resonating and haunting me from 1993!

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1 Die Interimsliebenden
2 Zebulon
3 Blume
4 12305(te Nacht)
5 Sie
6 Wüste

Headcleaner
7.I Zentrifuge / Stabs / Rotlichtachse Propaganda / Aufmarsch
7.II Einhorn
7.III Marschlied /
8 Das Gleissen / Schlacht
8.IV Lyrischer Rückzug

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from http://www.sputnikmusic.com/:

Latin for clean slate, its an apt title it would be the last album with Mark Chung and Muffi. The album opens with Die Interimsliebenden, with a funky bass by Alexander Hacke. Immediately you are struck by the lack of metallic noise and how melody is beginning to move to the fore.

Zebulon is spare and gentle melody and vocal harmonies devoid of any percussion until it explodes in the last minute or so. Still the release is lacks the abrasion of previous works.
Fans may at this point begin to feel that neubauten have softened and they may be right but then they are missing the point.

Neubauten have began to expand their sound, use noise more sparingly and effective. Blume is a haunting melody, lead by female vocals with Bargelds whispers under pinning it, at times dreamy and other times filled with sadness.

12305 (Te Nacht) is electronic beeps and metal scrapings and droning, not the strongest track but by no means filler.

Sie sees the band swap metal pipes for plastic tubing, a technique that they will reuse throughout later albums, at least until the end of the track where it comes in sparingly. While not as harsh as their more metallic songs, it still has the same intensity.

Wuste is a stand out track, using strings for the first time in a Neubauten album, as well as sand and burning oil. It starts off largely instrumental sounding like a Philip Glass composition, before
Blixa's whispered vocals creep in, at times they are barely audible over weird sounds and strings. Then the song abruptly ends.

Headcleaner builds from a low to hum over 1.03 mins punctuated by metallic percussion then dies down only start up again, and does this over its 15 mins.
Every time explodes the band throw themselves full long into sound smashing metal against metal recalling the glorious collapse of their debut kollapse.

Hearing it now the tension of the track it sounds like percussionist Muffi trying to drown out Bargeld and the rest of the band, it becomes easy to use the song as a metaphor for the inner tensions of the band and how they would never record another song as chaotic or tense as this track.

tomwaits4noman

EOSTRE (21 March 2010)

The musick dedicated to this Sabbat is:

13TH TRIBE (THE)

PING PONG ANTHROPOLOGY


Original Issue: 1992 Review (rere 174 cd)

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Margot-meter: 4 moons / 5

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1 Dream Hunters 10:02
2 Hawaiian Office 1 4:32
3 Khazar 4:43
4 Can-nibals I 5:28
5 Lofoten Part II 6:18
6 Can-nibals II 5:43
7 Ping Pong Anthropology 4:33
8 Hawaiian Office II 2:45
9 Exhausted Pipes 13:55

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from All Music Guide:

Ping-Pong Anthropology defies categorizations. Two members of the 13th Tribe, German Werner Durand and Norwegian Erik Balke, perform on invented instruments, mostly wind instruments without finger holes, which are actually assemblages of PVC tubes of various lengths. The third musician, Brazilian Silvia Ocougne, provides cyclic rhythmical structures on prepared guitar. Percussionist Pierre Berthet appears as a guest on three tracks. Durand and Balke play games of "call and response" (reproduced in stereo, they do sound like a ping-pong game) over Ocougne's cycles, each one moving at his/her own pace, periodically losing the others and catching up on them.

This process creates soft, unreal, slow-evolving textures belonging to both meditative and avant-garde music. Because of its ritualistic patterns and similarities between the Tribe's devices and such autochthonous instruments as the didjeridoo, the Alp horn, or even the pan flute, this music has a distinctive exotic quality. Somewhere between the Andes and Australia probably lies an island where the 13th Tribe's music may be used for the religious ceremonies of a postmodern civilization.

François Couture

FAREWELL MOON (epitaph musick)

This post is dedicated to Terry Fox (10 May 1943 - 14 October 2008)

FOX TERRY

ATARAXIA (WORKS WITH SOUND)

Original Issue: 1998 Edition S Press / Plate Lunch (ISBN 3-922689-91-3 / PL 06)

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Margot-meter: 4,5 moons / 5

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1 Suono Interno (2:50)
2 Rallentando (2:50)
3 Lunar Rambles (9:24)
4 Culvert (9:24)
5 Berlin Attic Wire, Beating (24:44)
6 Berlin Attic Wire, Bowing (15:07)

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from The Wire:

The American ex-pat Terry Fox (resident in Europe for several decades) is probably unfamiliar to even ardent searchers after Minimalist obscurity. He's far better known in the art world, thanks to his involvement in cathartic performance art alongside Joseph Beuys, and a longterm interest in site-specific installations. Much of his work deals with the specificity of space, drawing extensively on the geometry of the labyrinth in Chartres cathedral. A "sculpture" in Paris saw him open fire hydrants, letting water run through the streets to augment the cobblestone textures. His very occasional recordings document a marked preference for sound art (the organisation of sound in space) over music (sound in time).

The excellent but out of print LP "Berlino/Rallentando" includes the very site-specific sounds of an army helicopter patrolling the Berlin Wall (near Fox's Berlin studio in 1980) and the bowing of a single steel piano wire stretched ten metres across his studio. To Fox, the wire is a sculpture rather than an instrument, and the sound it makes is that of the room (acting as a giant resonator) and not just the wire. He's far from alone in his enthusiasm for long strings, although other enthusiasts, Paul Panhuysen, Alvin Lucier and Ellen Fullman, are all better known in the music world. Hopefully, "Ataraxia" will gain recognition for Fox's sound outside the gallery circuit.

Four of the six recordings on this collection employ the piano wires. On "Suono Interno" two wires stretch 150 feet across an abandoned church (with a reverberation period that turns the building into a giant, pulsing heart) while "Rallentando" allows three cellists to improvise overtones and harmonics over the taut, single note drone. It often sounds electronic, but the only electrical device present is the microphone. "Berlin Attic Wire, Beating" has the same sort of bouncy, rumbling tonality as the music of Arnold Dreyblatt, while "Berlin Attic Wire, Bowing" could be the shimmering surface of a lake of mercury. The other two pieces feature bowed metal bowls, and an aluminium rowing boat moored inside a metal culvert, with "instruments" including a metal cheese cover and singing saw. "Culvert" is one of the most alien sounding recordings here, its high pitched warbling coming on like an extra-terrestrial choir. As with many similar acoustic explorations, the sheer strangeness of Fox's sounds transfigures their source enviroment completely, and the recordings make clear the rich, beautiful texture of his work.

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from Audion:

Apparently (reading between the lines of the cover notes) Terry Fox is of that breed of sound artist that refuses to get into technology, and instead seeks out other ways of making sound that feels electronic or unreal. As such, it is hard to believe that 'Ataraxia' is all totally acoustic, with no electronic manipulation. It sounds as though tape loops, echo and reverb devices are used on most numbers, but what he uses instead are long wires, pieces of metal, cans and the like, amounting to vividly amplified acoustic sound that often defies description.

Each of the six tracks explores a different sound environment. The opening 'Suono Interno' explores the sonic possibilities of two 150 foot long piano wires stretched the length of a church, and 'Rallentando' has a piano wire across a stage and three cellists. These are interesting at under 5 minutes each. Hereafter the duration increases: 'Lunar Rambles' using bowed metallic objects is nice in a dark ambient way, and 'Culvert' (an extract from a day-long sound experiment) extrapolated from objects placed in a flowing river sounds electroacustic... The two "Berlin Attic Wire" tracks that follow, however, exhaust (this listener at least) to the point of tedium, proving that just plucking or bowing a wire isn't enough, some sort of developed or structural approach is needed to make it interesting.

As 'a seminal figure in performance and installation art' Terry Fox's sonic creations don't really transfer to the album format that well. He's a performer not a composer, so this should really be judged as an archival example of his work, and not a proper album. Well, that's how I see it.

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from Blow Up:

In the field of the now quite famous "Wire Music", the name of Terry Fox is probably less celebrated that the ones of Ellen Fullman or Paul Panhuysen and his rare incisions on vinyl are really hard to find, and a cult object for collectors. But this Seattle artist is a veteran of the genre, and a seminal figure for the performance and sound installation world. For these reasons, this first edition on CD is almost an event!

As a true nomad, Fox has lived in various parts of the world, also in Italy (Rome, Bologna, Napoli, Firenze), realizing his installations in various strange places. "suono interno", the first excerpt of this cd, only 2'50'', is taken from three six-hours performances that the artist gave in the former Santa Lucia Church in Bologna, 1979. In the completely empty and abandoned church, two piano wires of the church's lenght were stretched from a point of the big wooden door. The audience was looking at the performance from a single hole in the door. The same door was also working as resonance projecting the sound outside. Also in the other tracks site-specificity is a key element. The almost 25 minutes of "Berlin attic Wire" are a great example of pure sound art, this time the piano wires exploring the resonances of the attic of the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin.

What seems incredible is the fantastic electronic character of the pieces, also if no electronic al all was used, except the microphone for recording! The exceptional side in the Terry Fox sculptures is all in the ability to transfigure sound sources and space, creating an art for the moment and the sound space, minimal, but with very strong emotions.

REVOLUTION MOON (groundbreaking musick)

LUCIER ALVIN

I AM SITTING IN A ROOM

Original Issue: 1981 Lovely (VR 1013)

Reissue: 1993 Lovely (LCD 1013) Buy it here!!!

Margot-meter: 5 moons / 5

1. I Am Sitting In A Room

from Rate Your Music:

Alvin Lucier steps into a room and sits down on a chair. He relaxes himself. And confidently he starts reading the following text. He even stutters a couple of times.

"I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice, and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear then are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity, not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have."

On the other side of the room is a tape recorder that records the text that Mr. Lucier has just read. After having recorded it. The tape recorder plays it back. On the other side of the room the process is repeated.

Overall there process is repeated 32 times. Alvin Lucier even leaves the room after some time.

Thus the explanation of the piece is the actual piece. Can’t think of any other work of art where that is the case.

But how does it sound?

Well at first the words are clearly heard. You can even make out every phrase without any difficulty. After a couple of repetitions the words begin to sound muffled. A bit odd because of the several layers. A slight echo is almost heard but not yet. A couple of repetitions later it starts to get hard to understand the actual words. They have become a bit deformed and stretched out. New sounds seem to be emerging out of nowhere. But nothing has been added to the original text.

A repeated hollow ringing drone becomes apparent. As the words become indistinguishable after about 15 minutes. This constant pulsating hollow, ringing drone comes more and more to the foreground. A constant slight gentle drone becomes apparent somewhere in the background. This sounds/drones become more and more distinct as time passes by. Almost a carefully constructed pulsating melody. But we know that there is no such things.

The natural resonating frequencies of the room have become apparent. The drones keep on pulsating. Slowly expanding and ringing in your ears. The words have dissolved long ago. There are only these drones. The sound of the room itself. And then it stops.

Recommended to fans of drone and experimental music.

77 Ships

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

RED MOON (musick & other arts)

BERTOIA HARRY
UNFOLDING

Original Issue: 1993 P.S.F. (PSFC-32) Buy it here!!!


Margot-meter: 5 moons / 5

01 - #1025 Unfolding
02 - #1025 Sounds Beyond
03 - #1032 Here And Now
04 - #1032 Here And Now Part II

from Volcanic Tongue

Harry Bertoia was an inventor, designer and musical instrument builder who assembled a series of visually-appealing sound sculptures that sang in gorgeous, otherworldly codes. Bertoia made a whole series of records featuring the sounds of his inventions on his own Sonambient label and this fantastic archival release from PSF makes a clutch of the recordings available once more. You could spend days inside this disc and anyone who ever enjoyed the slow nocturnal drones of Alan Lamb’s wire music, Dreyblatt’s strings or even Takehisa Kosugi’s drone work will have an idea of the essentially phantom nature of the topography. Highly recommended.

from Weirdo Records

Furniture designer who invented a really gorgeous diamond shaped metal chair. It sold so well that he retired to a barn in the Pennsylvania countryside & spent the rest of his life making sound sculptures instead. 360 different tapes of the sculptures are reported to exist. During the mid & late 70s, Bertoia issued some of his favorite cuts from these tapes on a private record label. This cd collects two of those records. Awesome metallic dronescapes and washes made by a jolly gentleman with a pipe.

RED MOON (musick & other arts)

RODEN STEVE / IN BE TWEEN NOISE
THE RADIO

Original Issue: 1999 Sonoris (SON-22)

Reissue: 2007 Sonoris ( SON-22) Buy it here!


Margot-meter: 4,5 moons / 5

1. The Radio

From Ampersand Etcetera

This short but dense work from Steve Roden was created in 1996 but has thankfully been given eventual release by Sonoris. The original brief (for the 1996 soundculture festival) was a piece for radio using the radio as a source, which Roden has captivatingly done.

There are essentially four movements to the 18 minute piece. The opening is a complex layering of loops of static, some clicking percussion and some choral singing (1 and 5 seconds). Each of these is only a few seconds long and interact smoothly - the static sounds like waves on a shore, and a call (birds or the radio) the gulls flying over. The static and choir fade, leaving the percussion to become more prominent, and its intricacy foregrounded. This is actually made from his grandfather's radio 'bowing the tiny battery cables…clicking the on/off switch, turning the tuning knob…plucking the battery holder spring [and] striking the radio speaker screen against the microphone': in this section the springs start being played. Against this background is a solo voice, which turns out to be Roden singing restructured word fragments, based on a poem of 1991 called ... 'the radio'. His voice is sweet and clear, after the drifting choral particles.

In the third part, the two 8 second fragments of talking under static are cutup and play over the radio-percussion creating a strange dialogue of spoken protowords which eventually echo over the static sea; the final few minutes are quite melancholic as the static waves crash on the shore, echoed and phased, then silence, a click and its over.

Roden indicated to me that he ‘totally loves this piece’ and I can understand why.
This is a beautiful sound work/piece of music (in that broader meaning of music that people like Roden explore). Its density, intricacy and beauty remind me of artists who work only in miniatures: as explored in the Roden ‘special issue’, he works in bounded musical forms, yet creates pieces in there which are expansive and could stretch infinitely despite their limits.

‘The radio’ is a prime example of this - each section could be left to continue further and further, delving into its focused world, and the whole disk could be left to repeat, the narrow passage of its composition gradually expanding to encompass the world.

Perhaps I exaggerate, but this is a magical, beautiful piece that should not be missed.