Category Archives: Album reviews

Tunnels Of Āh – The Smeared Cloth (2012 – 2018 Unearthed)

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The Smeared Cloth collates together previously unreleased material from Stephen Āh Burroughs’s Tunnels Of Āh. Burroughs was formerly a founding member of Blast First unit Head Of David, a group that grew out of the Comicide duo.

Like those other projects, Tunnels Of Āh is brooding and impenetrable. My first play of this was through earphones on a crowded Northern Line train on a busy Monday morning; its sinister, grainy textures and harsh, enveloping blanket of dirty, primal sound left me looking at the world around me in a manifestly different way. It was almost as if these pieces allowed me to see through the veil of cheerful optimism that my fellow commuters had shrouded themselves with, revealing instead a swirling mass of uncertainty, paranoia and fear.

With the possible exception of the final track, ‘White Distribution’, which has a sort of springy euphoria to its unpredictable clusters of electronic echoes, this is a uniformly dark collection. I was reluctant to draw comparisons with anything I’d heard before, but I was unintentionally reminded of Coil here, specifically their unused work for Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. Pieces like ‘Aceldama’ and ‘To The Paschal Victim’ share a similarly ritualistic edge to the unused Coil cues, brutally forcing you to stare deeply into an abyss of swirling, tempting, unending darkness. These pieces find Burroughs intoning mysterious, oblique verse over undulating drones, intense, head-cleaning bass, scratchy percussion and hissing, sibilant sounds that seem to gnaw away at you ceaselessly. One of the highlights, ‘Multi-Storey’, occupies an interstitial zone of high-pitched whining, gravelly distortion, slowly-fluttering metallic drones and muted, crashing sounds. Taken together, these interventions feel like the macroscopic, slowed-down exploration of a car crashing headlong into the concrete wall of an abandoned, dimly-lit inner city carpark.

Other pieces like ‘Amorphophallus’ and ‘Fountains Of Light’ might, at least nominally, fall into a dark ambient category, but it is an uneasy and uncomfortable association. Dark ambient is often characterised by a feeling of foreboding and tension, whereas these pieces feel like that tension has abruptly snapped, replaced by a sort of clawing, incessant acquiescence and surrender.

In case it wasn’t obvious, this is not an easy listen, and one that definitely isn’t for the feint-hearted. These tunnels that Burroughs has constructed bore deep into sinister, uncomfortable territory, pathways to a twisted, savage part of our collective psyches that we rarely choose to acknowledge. When the first passengers took to the nascent, smoke-clogged Tube in London, they felt like they were being confronted with a hellish inversion of Victorian progress. Perhaps Tunnels Of Āh’s music was always there in those tight, constrained pathways beneath the surface, waiting for the right moment to be drawn out from behind their blackened and grimy brick walls.

The Smeared Cloth (2012 – 2018 Unearthed) by Tunnels Of Āh was released 16 June 2023 by Cruel Nature and Zoharum. Thanks to Steve.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2023 Documentary Evidence

Kumo – Three Tigers

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Prescience weighs heavily on Jono Podmore’s latest Kumo release. The three track EP was inspired by the Chinese year of the tiger, which began in February, and a conversation that Podmore had with his students at a tai chi class he was teaching the same day. When asked what the new year would bring, he believed it would be characterised by conflict; how sadly true it was.

In a typically calculated manner, the three tracks on his new release were composed using ancient Chinese harmonies. Being no musicologist, I’ll take Podmore’s word for it, just like I had to with the mathematical theories that begat his 2020 Euclidean Patterns release. What is immediately evident, even if you don’t know Chinese musical theory, is his intention to highlight that the tiger does not immediately need to refer to conflict.

Each of the tracks here is named for a different tai chi form, but are highly evocative in their own right. ‘Tiger Lies Down’ shimmers with heat haze and gauzy optimism, a recurring two-note melody having a calming, soothing, centring quality while a delicate outline of a rhythm provides a sense of firmness and purpose. Here the tiger is our inner spirit, full of latent potential and awakening into the world with sharp focus.

‘(Retreat To) Ride Tiger’ is that store of energy suddenly released, a crisp and clattering beat relentlessly moving forward beneath clusters of twisted tones, springy sequences and euphoric bursts of almost orchestral grandeur. There is defiance here – not anger, not an adversarial quality, but a determination and resolution.

‘Carry Tiger To The Mountain’ is about transcendence. Riding a tiger is easier than carrying one. Metaphorically, this is about overcoming obstacles and limitations. This is delivered by sinewy sine tones, clouds of white noise and a metallic arpeggio that slices through any sense of calm that may have existed at the start of ‘Tiger Lies Down’. If ‘(Retreat To) Ride Tiger’ was a call to action, ‘Carry Tiger To The Mountain’ does something similar, despite being free of rhythmic guidance, through a constantly fluctuating structure of unsettling sonic flourishes.

With Three Tigers, Podmore has once again shown himself to be a masterful arranger of conceptual, deep-thinking electronic music.

Three Tigers by Kumo was released March 21 2022.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2022 Documentary Evidence

FM Einheit – Exhibition Of A Dream

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Exhibition Of A Dream by former Einstürzende Neubauten noisemaker FM Einheit was originally released as a triple vinyl set under its French title L’exposition D’un Rêve in 2018. The release was made through Lisbon’s esteemed Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian and coincided with Einheit’s exhibition at the gallery. 

Try as I might, though, I can’t fathom what the exhibition actually was. It may be the final record, and it may also have been the act of the record’s creation, its live performances in Lisbon and separate recordings at Einheit’s own Steinschlag studio. The exhibition may also have involved drawings of mandalas in the gallery’s empty spaces, but how these are connected to the playing of the music is somewhat beyond my two-dimensional artistic brain. You can read more about it at the website of Studio Bruyant, who facilitated the exhibition alongside Einheit, and if you can figure out what the mandalas have to do with anything, or you were there, please contact me. 

Instead, in an effort to stay on more certain ground, let us focus on the music. Except that here too, nothing is especially certain. The packaging of a new 2xCD remaster by Cold Spring says as much as it doesn’t. We know that the twelve tracks are Einheit’s interpretation of dreams offered by musicians Band Of Susans founder Susan Stenger, Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo and Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis Breyer P-Orridge; it includes dreams transcribed by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul and by artists Susie Green and David Link. Others were involved, but their dreams are strangely anonymised, creating a sort of amorphous impenetrability and mystery that leaves more questions than answers. 

In some cases, the ‘dreamer’ reads out their dream; in others, Einheit, another vocalist or the Gulbenkian’s choir does; in still others like the filmic, industrial western theme that is ‘FFW’ or the Can-esque ‘The Dungeon’, no one does. Like dreams themselves, the effect is disorientating and otherworldly: it reminds us that there are good reasons that dreams live in our subconscious. To expose them to the outside world places them into a sort of naked vulnerability, and what made sense in your deepest sleep makes zero sense during waking hours; disconnected from reality yet informed and made strange by it so as to become unreal. 

So here you can expect lewd imagery, strange interactions, odd stories that have no ending; vivid, emphatic stories as disturbing as ‘The Gift’ by The Velvet Underground or as filled with nonsensical non sequiturs as a Kafka novel cut up and reassembled by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin during a heavy night in their Parisian flophouse. In some cases – as with Lee Ranaldo’s ‘Alpine Traum’ or Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s ‘Creation Re/Created’ – their dream-stories are entirely in keeping with their usual aesthetic, and could have appeared on any of their various albums. For Ranaldo, this reunites him with the Beat-y spoken word style that dominated his contributions to early Sonic Youth albums, pre-dating finding his singing voice comparatively recently. In Gen’s case, his delivery is somewhere between lysergic work-out and a career in Open University lecturing that sadly never existed in the version of the omniverse we knew him in. 

The album’s musical accompaniment is, like all dreams, varied and unpredictable, fond of wandering off down oblique pathways. Performed by Einheit (stones, springs), Volker Kamp (bass, brass), Saskia von Klitzing (drums), Susan Stenger (flute, bass) and her Band Of Susan bandmate Robert Poss (guitar), each of the twelve tracks here is as different as the next, ranging from mutant jazz and funk to militaristic parade ground pomp to noisily contemplative post-rock to inchoate noisescapes. The players are adept at the masterful pivot, comfortable going off in whatever direction Einheit and the dreamers suggest they should go in. 

Cold Spring’s reissue of Exhibition Of A Dream arrives at a point where all of us perhaps feel like we’ve been living inside someone’s most impenetrable dream; where we find ourselves mutely looking back on the events of 2020 with the same weird feeling that you get when you wake up into that vague interzone between sleepy fantasy and the menacing horrors of the day. Truth be told, as strange and unsettling as some of these moments are, their intriguing mystique remains less terrifying than the world that we’ve endured over the past year. Lest us forget that dreams are the only places we have been able to dependably travel to, wrapped in the virus-free safety of our sleep. 

Exhibition Of A Dream by FM Einheit was released by Cold Spring on February 26 2021. Thanks to Gary. 

Words: Mat Smith 

(c) 2021 Documentary Evidence 

Echo Collective – The See Within

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I spoke to Margaret Hermant and Neil Leiter – the core of Belgium-based modern classical unit Echo Collective – in February 2018. At that point two albums featuring the Collective were about to be issued – World Beyond, a classical interpretation of Erasure’s World Be Gone that was the focus of my interview, and a classical reinterpretation of Radiohead’s complex, sonically challenging Amnesiac. Leiter had hinted at other projects, one of which was a collaboration with Maps, which surfaced as 2019’s outstanding Colours. Reflect. Time. Loss. 

The other project Leiter mentioned is what became The See Within, the first Echo Collective album to contain original material. At that point in February 2018, The See Within wasn’t even written; it merely existed as an idea, something he and Hermant were keen to do, but its execution seemed relatively remote. Their publisher, on the back of performances of Amnesiac and the reception to World Beyond, suggested that they should be prepared to “clone themselves” as classical interpreters for hire. It was clear when talking to Leiter that the idea, lucrative though it may well have been, had limited appeal: the goal was their own music, and what became The See Within thus became a driving focus. 

Neil Leiter & Margaret Hermant by Julien Bourgeois.

The See Within contains eight pieces for strings and magnetic resonator piano, an adapted piano that allows long, string-like tonalities to emerge. The album finds the core duo of Hermant (violin, harp) and Leiter (viola) collaborating with a third member of the collective, Gary De Cart, whose use of the MRP on standout pieces like ‘The Witching Hour’ or the lengthy ‘Respire’ gives the album its distinctive melodic character. Despite the emergence of strange, alien sounds and textures (for example, the opening moments of the evocatively-titled ‘Glitch’ or the gentle, evolving music box clusters of the beatific ‘Unknown Gates’), the Echo Collective mantra is to avoid studio effects other than subtle reverb. Theirs is an approach born of the concert hall, of live music, of being able to use instruments to their fullest potential, without resorting to the studio to achieve their idiosyncratic artistic vision. 

The result is an album that stands out in the crowded marketplace of modern classical music; an album that also stands apart from their previous interpretative or collaborative work yet feels inextricably linked through the way that Hermant, Leiter and De Cart interact with one another. Here you find moments of improvisatory freedom overlapping with rigid composition, of traditional playing effortlessly overlapping with instrument adaptations, giving each and every piece on The See Within an acoustic personality and sonic resonance unto itself.

A more engaging modern classical album you will not find. 

The See Within by Echo Collective is released October 30 2020 by 7K! Echo Collective are published by Mute Song.

Words: Mat Smith. With thanks to Gaia and George. 

(c) 2020 Documentary Evidence 

Kumo – Euclidean Patterns

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Kumo - Euclidean Patterns

I’m going to be completely honest here – I don’t get the maths and science behind this new EP from Jono Podmore’s longstanding Kumo alias. Here’s what Podmore has to say:

One of the many things that Euclid, the 4th century BC Greek mathematician and the Father of Geometry, left us is the first algorithm: a method to compute the greatest common divisor between 2 given integers. The algorithm is used in particle physics and computer science, but in 2005 Canadian mathematician Godfried Toussaint noticed something extraordinary when he applied it to musical rhythm. Using the algorithm to distribute beats and silences as evenly as possible in a bar generates almost all of the most important world music rhythms, from Sub-Saharan African music in particular. For example, if you have a bar with 8 pulses and you want to have 5 beats in that bar, the way the algorithm places the beats gives us the Cuban “Cinquillo” rhythm, which has its roots in West African music. 

The examples are endless: 13 into 24 gives us a whole series of rhythms used by the Aka Pygmies of the upper Sangha. Euclid lived his entire life in Alexandria in Egypt, and Herodotus said that the basis of Greek culture was African. Maybe there’s another strand to that relationship we’ve only just uncovered. 

The 3 tracks on this EP use all the Euclidean rhythms in bars of 9, 12, and 13, but going further, as the algorithm is used to generate the harmony too. Chords and modes can all be derived by spacing the notes across the octave, for example, 6 distributed evenly across 12 generates a whole tone scale. 

– Jono Podmore, notes to accompany Euclidean Patterns – https://sound-space.bandcamp.com/album/euclidean-patterns

See, it’s like I understand the words – individually – but when you put them all together into three paragraphs, that GCSE A in Maths from 1993 suddenly seems pretty useless. So I’ll do what I usually do and focus on what I can hear instead. 

‘South African Euclid’ begins with a wiry tendril of electrical current which provides the constantly-evolving thread weaving throughout the track, sometimes keeping itself quietly amused in the background and at others rising noisily to the surface; there it vies with a squelchy, acidic pattern, breathy vocal samples and a juddering African rhythm developed with the Euclidean method. The EP’s second track, the wittily-named ‘Euclid On The Block’, carries a latent urgency that could be a restrained form of drill and bass, all frantic percussion and murmuring synth sounds that threaten to coalesce into a club-friendly synchronicity but which instead prowl edgily around a menacing, omnipresent bass tone. 

The EP’s final track, ‘Thirteenth Euclid’, sits somewhere in between its two Euclidean siblings. Opening with overlapping organ tones, the piece opens out into what feels like a delicious electronic bossa nova, only with unpredictable synth interjections like alien transmissions issued from a distant galaxy where you might ordinarily expect to hear a Stan Getz solo. 

It should come as no surprise that Podmore has chosen to infuse this EP with this type of intellectual exploration of the science underpinning rhythms. He currently holds down a job as the Professor of Popular Music at Cologne’s Hochschule für Muzik, whose professorial alumni include Karlheinz Stockhausen; one imagines that Stockhausen would have approved of the deconstructivist approach to applying these mathematical concepts to musical theory and the exacting precision with which Podmore has developed the three tracks included on the EP, while also leaving room for sounds to float free of their grid-like shackles. 

Euclidean Patterns by Kumo was released August 14 2020 by Sound-Sense. 

(c) 2020 Documentary Evidence  

Isabella, Jasper And Simon Fisher Turner – Savage Songs Of Brutality And Food. By The Extreme Angels Of Parody

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Isabella, Jasper And Simon Fisher Turner - Savage Songs Of Brutality And Food. By The Extreme Angels Of Parody

Savage Songs Of Brutality And Food. By The Extreme Angels Of Parody is an album by Simon Fisher Turner and his two children, Isabella and Jasper. Its release was prompted by a conversation between SFT and Charles Powne from the Soleilmoon label about a specific album of children’s music, which in turn gave Fisher Turner pause to mention a project he’d been working on using the recorded voices of his children, which turned out to be this album.

It is a deliberately personal album, but one that is faithful to an aesthetic that Fisher Turner Sr. has been employing for the last few years under the banner of Guerrilla Audio; the concept also extends as far back as you care to look in his back catalogue, right back to when he first alighted upon a Revox tape machine. It involves making discrete, covert recordings that find their way into later sound works, adding a naturalistic, unpredictable quality alongside electronic structures; they sit somewhere between field recordings and the wiretapped conversations of vintage Scanner. 

In the case of Savage Songs…, the fifteen pieces included here represent the majority of the lifetimes of Fisher Turner’s two children, now deep into their teenage years. They are constructed from recordings that Fisher Turner made of them while they were growing up – little nonsense poems, overheard conversations, early attempts at French, the sounds of innocent young minds hard at work learning or playing or inventing fantastical worlds that they then inhabit, even if briefly. They are like tiny time capsules of Isabella and Jasper’s youth, otherwise lost to the mists of memory and age were it not for their father’s idea to recor them. The effect is both universally nostalgic for anyone who looks back with misty eyes on the all-too-rapid maturity of their children (and who wishes they’d preserved those memories better; more respectfully; more completely), yet also deeply personal for Fisher Turner who so attentively documented their growing up in this way. 

Nostalgia might abound in the mournfully-arranged pieces like ‘Cream and Latin Odor’, ‘The Sad Skipping Story’ and ‘The Mighty Dinosaurs’ (the latter with The Elysian Quartet), which have a sweetness and poignancy in the musical accompaniments, but a sense of inevitable playfulness can also be found here. ‘OH YEAH, forget about it, YEAH’ judders along on fragmented electronic patterns like sonic hopscotch, underpinned by a dismissive refrain from Isabella that, from a teenage mouth, would sound cutting and hurtful; ‘BlahXBlahXBlahX’ is noisy and rambunctious, nudged forward by retro computer game chip sounds and a processed “blah-blah-blah” refrain that suggests young Jasper was completely oblivious to his dad following him around with a microphone; ‘Squirrel Song’ is a stentorian waltz set to springy synths that commences with some gentle harmonising from the two young Turners; ‘JAZZ JAM corner’ sounds like a short offcut from The Residents’ Commercial Album. 

In his honest, truthful and tender press release Fisher Turner says that there will be no second volume, in spite of the hours of unused recordings that remain on his overflowing hard-drive. His children are now 17 and 15, and the idea of being trailed around by a doting father with sound intentions no longer seems as fun as it did when they were tiny. Savage Songs…, then, represents a loving gift; a one-off; a unique paean to unique childhoods and the unstoppable act of getting older. 

Savage Songs Of Brutality And Food. By The Extreme Angels Of Parody by Isabella, Jasper and Simon Fisher Turner is released September 4 2020 by Soleilmoon.

An email to Simon Fisher Turner, 6 August 2020. 

Dear Simon, 

Thank you for sending this across. 

I have to say, for all sorts of reasons, the press release moved me profoundly, and I confess to having shed a tear while reading it. Anyone with children who have suddenly grown up almost without you noticing – because it wasn’t sudden; never could be; you just didn’t see, or perhaps refused to accept, the signs – would recognise some of the sentiment in that. And that’s before I have even listened to it. My two daughters are 14 and 12. I don’t recognise them. I’m just some old fart whose music tastes they do not want to understand and who is boring because he tries to work hard to provide for them. 

I remember once, probably in 2008 or 2009, sending you a text from St Albans. I was waiting outside a uniform shop where my now-14-year-old was being fitted out for her first school uniform. I have no idea why I said this to you, nor what conversation we were in the middle of at the time. You told me you could relate. It felt like her future and her sister’s future were starting in earnest. Now they try to customise their uniforms, skirt length, hair length etc to the limits of what might get them a detention and I’m still waiting outside shops while they try on clothes. 

Strangely, too, something in your press release text made me nostalgic for my own childhood. It was the reference to Soleilmoon asking about an album of children’s songs. I had such an album as a kid. It was called All Aboard, a beautiful LP that had all sorts of classic songs on it, like Bernard Cribbins singing ‘Right Said Fred’. It also had ‘The Laughing Policeman’ on it, which got scratched on one of the policeman’s laughs, creating a locked groove that was utterly disturbing for this toddler playing nearby and might explain why the cut-ups of Burroughs and loops that I read about (before hearing them) fired up my imagination so much. I kept meaning to buy a second-hand copy while the girls were small, and now they’re not. And neither am I. 

I look forward to listening to this and writing about it before release. You can probably guess the thoughts and nostalgia with which I will approach it. Think of this as a preview. 

Thank you, 

Mat 

Words: Mat Smith 

(c) 2020 Documentary Evidence 

Klara Lewis – Ingrid

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EMEGO270_front.jpg

A couple of years ago, a cellist friend said to me, of his principal instrument, that “you have to be careful not to get too sad with it.” The inference was that it’s all too easy to make the cello sound mournful. Ever since he told me that I’ve become much more aware of that quality whenever a cello is involved; it may just be my general curmudgeonly outlook, but I often find it hard to identify something other than a nostalgic, wistful or maudlin dimension to music made with the instrument. It’s with that in mind that I approached the latest piece of music by Klara Lewis.

Ingrid is a single twenty-minute piece that uses a brief yet characteristically expressive cello segment as its foundation sound source. My cellist friend reliably informs me that it is “from the Sarabande movement of Bach’s fourth suite for unaccompanied cello”. Who plays the cello, whether this is a passage played specifically for Lewis or sampled from an existing performance are undisclosed details; neither is it apparent why the piece is so titled. Is Ingrid the person playing the cello? Is Ingrid the person this piece is dedicated to? Does it even matter?

These are the kind of questions you ask yourself as you listen to this piece. So focussed do you become on those questions that it isn’t immediately obvious that the cello loop is being subjected to – and placed under significant duress by – increasingly violent levels of distortion. It’s only after about ten minutes that the distinctive qualities of the cello get mangled fully out of shape, becoming growling, snarling, aggressive blocks of over-amplified noise: up to that point, it just sounds like the cello’s plaintive stylings augmented by hollow, distant electronic interventions.

By its denouement, the piece has morphed into loud, almost unbearably brutal sound, the original source passage unrecognisable; stretched, skewed and misshapen; reduced to elemental, metallic impulses on the most beautifully harrowing fringes of sonic entropy.

Ingrid by Klara Lewis is released May 1 2020 by Editions Mego – available here.

Words: Mat Smith. With thanks to Reed Hays.

(c) 2020 Documentary Evidence

Easy – Radical Innocence

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Easy - Radical Innocence (cover)

“Their debut album sold more than Sonic Youth’s ‘Sister’. Nobody noticed.” – MuteBank Statement #1, June 1996

I wonder to myself: how many times did I play 1990’s debut Easy album, Magic Seed, after I found it in a second-hand shop in Colchester in 1997? Between that LP, singles by Foil and Technique by New Order, I don’t recall listening to much else for the duration of that long, endless summer at the conclusion of my second year at university; it was a summer of warm days at the beach, cycling to work across town and youthful abandon, and Easy’s Magic Seed became the de facto soundtrack.

At that point, MuteBank’s Statement #1 was my Bible. I had no idea, in those early internet days, that by then the Swedish band had released a second album (1994’s Sun Years) after things didn’t quite work out for them at Blast First. I had wrongly assumed until about two weeks ago that they’d essentially called it quits after Magic Seed didn’t set the world of punky, jangly guitars on fire as it should have done in 1990.

Easy 2 - photo by Eyleen Kotyra

Radical Innocence  finds the six-piece band – Johan Holmlund (vocals), Tommy Ericson (guitar), Anders Petersson (guitar), Rikard Jormin (bass), Tommy Dannefjord (drums) and newbie Ingvar Larsson (keyboards) – showing that the world may have changed immeasurably, we may well be living through extraordinary days, but Easy’s music is dependably unchanged. Matured they may well be like the rest of us, giving songs like the string-laden ‘Golden Birds’ and lead single ‘Crystal Waves’ a wistful, mournful and subtly uplifting dimension, but aside from Holmlund’s voice becoming stronger and less tentative, more confident and more strident, this is still the band that I fell in love with far too late far too many years ago.

These eight songs are poised with a delicate precision, full of their trademark guitar sound but also a vibrancy and energy, best exemplified by the blisteringly good track ‘Memory Loss Revisionism And A Bright Future’. Elsewhere, we encounter the beautiful sensitivity of ‘Day For Night’ led by Dannefjord’s thunderous drumming and atmospheric textures, a savagely open tale of loss and regret bordered by a stirring quality that is utterly heartbreaking. Meanwhile, the title track shuffles along upon fuzzy guitars, grubby bass and vamping organ tones, its lyrics foretelling the one-way street that is the loss of youthful innocence.

Radical Innocence by Easy is released April 24 2020 by A Turntable Friend Records.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2020 Documentary Evidence

Leo Abrahams / Sølyst / Simon Fisher Turner – From Isolation 1

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From Isolation 1 art.jpg

This trio project represents the first in Trestle Records’ From Isolation series, wherein musicians are invited to collaborate with one another in the form of an exchange of sound files. The project is effectively a variation on their One Day Band programme, only with artists unable to meet and spontaneously develop a piece together for the foreseeable future, this is a virtual way of achieving similar results, quickly, efficiently and responsively. Arguably it’s way more productive than using the internet for Disney + and Netflix.

The first edition pitches together producer and ambient journeyman Leo Abrahams (guitar, FX, electronics), Kreidler co-founder Thomas Klein’s Sølyst alias (synths, sequencer) and Mute stalwart Simon Fisher Turner (field recordings, electronics). The three pieces here are built from sinewy synth sequences that pulse and shift with a purpose somewhere on the continuum between meditative and sinister, alternated with murky drones, impenetrable modular soundfields and vague ryhthmic passages.

Over each foundation pattern we hear Abraham’s processed guitar, occasionally formed as a meditative blues but more often presented as juddering, angular, discordant shapes that give the pieces an uncertainty and suggestion of imminent danger. Those highly textural guitar motifs are joined by Fisher Turner’s guerrilla field recordings, auditory ghosts of unknown provenance – traffic noise, maybe? Water washing onto a Cornish beach? Wind blowing through a bamboo screen? The hubbub of a station platform?

Perhaps unintentionally, those life sounds of real life give these atmospheric pieces a nostalgic quality, a sense of yearning for a time when we all had the freedom to experience all of life’s noisy treasures without restriction or fear.

From Isolation 1 by Leo Abrahams, Sølyst and Simon Fisher Turner can be streamed from the Trestle Records website from Friday April 3 2020 – trestlerec.com

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2020 Documentary Evidence

Daniel Avery / Alessandro Cortini – Illusion Of Time

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danielaveryalessandrocortini_illusionoftime

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.

daac_sundrawwater

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