Monthly Archives: March 2020

Daniel Avery / Alessandro Cortini – Illusion Of Time

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The first evidence of Daniel Avery and Alessandro Cortini’s collaboration emerged last year with a white label 7-inch single credited to DA-AC called ‘Sun Draw Water’. Only available at the FYF Festival, Mount Analog in LA, the two tracks showcased a perfect, symbiotic pairing between the two.

With ‘Sun’, you could discern Cortini’s trademark, bold synth strokes edged with a dirty, fuzzy industrial quality. Haunting vocal textures and submerged melodies created a brooding, dark ambience, like an alternative soundtrack to Terminator and every bit as dystopian. ‘Water’ was the inverse, offering a richness and depth of colour, an elastic sound occupying the foreground carrying an unpredictability while the background stayed resolutely focussed on clusters of pads and spiralling tones. The effect was not dissimilar to some of Robert Fripp’s experiments with triggered sounds and textures, poised somewhere between a meditative, reflective mood and a restless hopefulness.

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Illusion Of Time was completed in 2018, and cements the vision that ‘Sun’ and ‘Water’ hinted at. Like many electronic projects, Illusion Of Time began as a distance collaboration, the pair shaping and sculpting tracks over the digital aether before finalising the pieces together while touring with Nine Inch Nails.

The album’s title track opens with delicate, mesmerising synth cycles overlaid on top of resonant blocks of sound and white noise panned across the stereo field. The track has a poignancy and sweetness, a sense of optimism in troubled times, whether illusory or not. That approach runs throughout the record, sometimes with a glimmer of uncertainty; ‘At First Sight’ is probably the best example of this, delivering gentle melodies sounding not unlike uilleann pipes drifting across a turbulent, pulsing, bass-heavy sequence of tones.

Elsewhere, we come across moments of intense beauty. ‘CC Pad’ contains sparse, haunting, overlapping pads, creating an effect like gazing across a beatific, frosty Spring morning landscape. In the background you hear a feint clicking sound, creating a suggestion of rhythm or the scratchy rotations of an ancient gramophone. Two brief interludes in ‘Space Channel’ and ‘Interrupted By the Cloud Of Light’ have an evocative, ethereal quality, nodding to an ambient tradition but laced with crackling white noise sounding like the release of intense radiation from a distant star.

Among all of these poignant, brilliant vignettes is the standout ‘Inside The Ruins’, advancing forward on growling synth sounds moving from ear to ear, wrapped in cavernous echo and a sense of imminent, unresolved threat. On this piece it’s hard not to imagine the environment suggested by its title. In my mind I see myself standing in a destroyed ancient temple in Syria while drones buzz and criss-cross overheard, emotionlessly surveying the devastation.

Illusion Of Time by Daniel Avery and Alessandro Cortini is released March 27 2020 by Phantasy Sound. Thanks to Ellie, Naomi and AC.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2020 Documentary Evidence

Burnt Friedman & João Pais / Burnt Friedman & Jaki Liebezeit – Eurydike

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Germany’s enigmatic Burnt Friedman is a serial collaborator, hitching his distinctive electronic palette to numerous other musicians over the course of his career, while also delivering with such a prolific level of output that it’s often hard to keep track of his movements.

One of his longest-running collaborations was with Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit, with whom he recorded several albums up to Liebezeit’s untimely death in 2017. Their Secret Rhythms concept gave prominence to the drummer’s signature, dizzying polyrhythmic kitwork, attaching that to Friedman’s delicate, unobtrusive electronics. Critical to Liebezeit’s playing was a sense of reductivism, paring his kit back to the most elemental of equipment and yet producing dexterous overlapping, highly detailed rhythms that were usually hard to follow; Friedman’s electronics were thus a sympathetic response, never once overwhelming the master drummer’s sound and weaving their way lightly through and around his playing.

Two unreleased collaborations between the two friends can be found on the B-side of a new EP on Friedman’s Nonplace label. Dating from 2016, ‘Eurydike’ and ‘Star Wars’ are immediately recognisable, bearing those Secret Rhythms trademarks – clusters of sounds, unswerving drum cycles, dubby bass, springy analogue sounds and discrete non-melodies. It would be glib and somewhat obvious to say that these pieces, like so many of Liebezeit’s, could induce a trance-like state, but they undoubtedly code. In these rhythms, and in their framing with washes of sound that drift in like they’re being carried across a field by a breeze, there is a resolution and purpose, a mesmerising momentum constantly bordering on the chaotic but never once going there.

On the A-side you find Friedman interacting with another drummer and occasional collaborator, Porto’s João Pais Filipe, and their two pieces (‘Out Of Ape’ and ‘Fibres Of P’) act like a sonic handshake between the two drummers. Pais’s work is comparatively more full, his rhythms more dense and varied yet carrying the same tension and energy as Liebezeit. On these pieces, in response to Filipe’s wall of sound, Friedman’s electronics are more obvious, less imperceptible, more there perhaps. In Filipe, Friedman may well have found the natural successor to Liebezeit’s legacy, the start of a new Secret Rhythm concept that nods reverently in the direction of what came before.

The split Eurydike EP by Burnt Friedman with João Pais and Jaki Liebezeit is released May 15 2020 by Nonplace. Pre-order link: here

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2020 Documentary Evidence