Ghost Noise

Goh Lee Kwang, who runs the Herbal International label, contacted me earlier this year with an invitation to review Jason Kahn's recent CD Beautiful Ghost Wave. I have a few CDs with Kahn creating fairly static textural improvisations using percussion and electronics with like-minded musicians Jason Lescalleet and Toshimaru Nakamura. My only prior exposure to his solo work is the opus for sine waves and room overtones, Miramar, another slow moving piece. Two realizations of his graphic piece, Timelines, are posted at his site, chamber electronics exploring slow textural changes. So I was unprepared for the ever-changing stream of static and analogue electronic noise that forms the building blocks of this work.

Chaotic roaring sounds, squalls of feedback, short waves and short circuits populate an ever shifting soundscape, never settling on one sound for very long. After a fairly chaotic opening, most of the transitions in the first third of the piece are in layers, where textures separate into component parts that fade in and out. When sudden transitions occur, it's almost always to drop out most of the noise, leaving some kind of quiet pixellation or simply a single tone without any background. Even amidst the roar, I found a delicacy in the sounds that is absent from a lot of noise music I've heard, overtones and activity inside the sounds, harder-edged rustles, even semi-melodic feedback.

Periodically Kahn makes audible movement around the space, footsteps and other ambient room noise. Even the opening gesture, an immediate attention grabber, includes a clatter that sounds like Kahn manipulating some strange tabletop bed of electronics. So I followed the suggestion, combined with his experience in improv, that this was in large part a recording of a live event (some transitions are too sudden and dry to be live). For the duration of the 37-minute piece, the pacing seems spontaneous, as the transitions lead into sound fields where he settles for a while, making micro adjustments, simultaneously crisp and indistinct.

Kahn generously provides liner notes for the piece on one of the CD's inside panels and at Herbal International, a welcome change from so much content-free packaging. My review practice generally dictates that I set such text aside until after several listens, so I was very surprised to read that the basic material for the piece was recorded over a year and then composed from sound files on the computer. He also mentions his deliberate dramaturgical intent, creating a sense of expansion and contraction as well as a feeling of open systems, where the music doesn't resolve but could continue well past the end of this particular physical manifestation. Indeed, the Wire magazine has posted a live version of the piece recorded early in 2011. Whether this tendency toward narrative is an anomaly in Kahn's output, or a signal of a new direction, it's a refreshing, bracing, and impressive composition.

A Beautiful Ghost Wave is available on CD directly from Herbal International as well as Erstdist.

Ghostly Context

Compilation albums are intentionally a mixed bag, sometimes nothing more than a couple of big names strewn among introductory artists for a quick attraction to a new label. At their best, they contribute a complex and multivariant perspective on a pre-defined theme and become more than the aggregate of their individual tracks. Ghostly International, a "record label and art company" based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has been releasing compilations in its SMM series since 2004, and its latest installment is a double LP SMM: Context. Like its near namesake AMM, SMM has no published meaning, and Ghostly uses the series for "gentle, texture-focused instrumental music." And unlike most comps, the majority of SMM: Context's contributors are established artists that should attract the notice of contemporary post-classical ambienteers.

The first side of the LP set opens with a short track from Goldmund, delicate arpeggios played on harp and piano with quiet added resonance. Leyland Kirby peeks out from his current low profile with a lovely nylon-string guitar melody run through some echo patches and accompanied by his trademark warbling ambience. Svarte Greiner closes the side with a little sense of menace on Halves, melodic fragments in a high range combined with dark string ensemble pads in the bass. His backgrounds get a little noisy, like feedback or bowed metal, or a series of quick ripples, abrasive reflections with cinematic suggestions. The only new name in the collection is Christina Vantzou, whose track 11 Generations Of My Fathers opens side B. Vantzou has worked extensively in video and toured with Adam Wiltzie for the Dead Texan, but this is her first track released under her own name, a poignant song where piano and field recordings open up distant recollections. And I've written before about Michał Jacaszek, who contributes the beautiful track Elegia that starts with a simple piano melody and slowly layers field recordings, voices, strings and effects into a startlingly full sound. The side concludes with Cornelia Amygdaloid from The Fun Years, whose loops and muted, detuned power chords are buried under an avalanche of vinyl static, the closest track to glitch in the collection.

Side C has two layered drone pieces, the first one, the tranquil Three Parts by Danish producer Manual, shifts through extended breathy tones that merge into each other. Then Aidan Baker layers his processed electric guitar, building through a two-note oscillation in Substantiated, a track that spends its last half in dissipation as the melodic fragments fade into dust. Rafael Anton Irisarri opens side D with Moments Descend On My Windowpane, a cozy acoustic piano song accompanied by gentle drones and tiny crackles. The calm continues with Kyle Bobby Dunn's peaceful harmonies on Runge's Last Stand, whose long phrases take off from the same motif but unwind through several melodic and harmonic variations, like gusts of wind across a pond. The set closes with Peter Broderick's melancholy Pause, perhaps based on a steel-string acoustic guitar performance, with overdubs on electric, and very much in keeping with the rest of the side.

SMM: Context is available directly from Ghostly, either as a limited LP, CD or download at 320 kbps. It's also on iTunes with a different track order. Finally, a DJ named felte has created a mix podcast from the album, freely available.

Electroacoustics from Iceland

One of the joys of reviewing is the unexpected, the music that I never would have found, except for the promotional copy that arrives in my inbox. Such a case is a young Icelandic electroacoustician, Bjarni Gunnarsson, whose first solo album, Safn 2006-2009, was released last year on the Belgian microlabel Lamadameaveclechien (the lady with the dog, in French). Gunnarsson is a member of the duo Einóma, who has a parallel release on Lamadameaveclechien, a 12-inch EP beatfest, Tvenna. He comes to music from a strong academic background in computer science, with some time spent at CCMIX in Paris studying with Gerard Pape and Trevor Wishart. He is also a masters student at the Institute of Sonology studying "Connective Compositional Environments," a method of working on several structural levels simultaneously.

Here's how Gunnarsson describes his research:

The central question for my research is how to define musical processes as operational objects, how these objects can interact in a network of objects and how this can create a flexible and adaptable composition environment. Each object would respond to well defined high-level methods and general parameters making the non-linear transition between time scales possible. The composer is here an important component of the network and guiding its behavior.

I didn't find this description until after hearing the music several times, but it's completely apt for the album. It's almost like Pierre Schaeffer's sound objects woke up and started walking around. I found myself selecting certain sounds as characters in the drama that unfolds over the course of the album. In particular, several tracks feature a stick percussion sound, something like a tom-tom or a taiko drum. It signals sectional changes in Aftur; steps out for an expressive, virtuosic closing to Blindi; initiates various sound events in Udrun and Dried Up; drives Time Out forward with a ghostly drum'n'bass. The interaction between the drum and various electronics opening Dried Up would bring to mind a human interaction, except that the skittering electronics sound so alien that I could not imagine any kind of instrumental origin.

The artist's brief statement on the label web site says that "the sound material varies from voices, violins and percussive sounds," so perhaps voices take on a character role as well. They are most prominent on Blindi, where a wordless female choir provides some of the most ethereal drones on the album before they are buried under the effects and lost in white noise. But this is the only track where voices are identifiable as such (except for a brief whisper in Dried Up). But another character is almost a process more than a sound, the transition from pitch to pulses made famous in Stockhausen's Kontakte. Gunnarsson uses this sonic splintering to great effect on several pieces, peeling elements from the drone in layers, possessing them to melodic dissipation, as new sounds emerge to replace them.

If voices, violins and percussive sounds are the source for all of the sounds on the album, the timbral variation is even more astounding. I suspect that he uses original designed sounds as well. The music reminds me also of Parmegiani, specifically in the way both artists create percussive sound objects and exploring their resonance. In any event, the album has seven tracks, all in the six-eight minute range. The artist sent me a download, but the CD is available in two limited editions, by itself, or with a different cover packaged with the Einóma EP. As far as I can tell, it's available only from the label, which also has a couple of streaming clips. It deserves a wider distribution, and fans of new electroacoustic music should definitely check it out.

Sounds of Venice Continued

Enrico Coniglio first came to my attention in his collaboration with one of my favorite drone ambienteers, Oöphoi (whose work deserves a couple of articles here, but another time&hellip). He has been kind enough to keep me apprised of his work, and some time ago I received a couple of packages of CDs from him containing releases from different projects. Coniglio has deep roots in Venice, and he continues to project a strong sense of place through field recordings and album imagery. But through his work I have discovered a larger collection of ambienteers from Italy, a sense of place that comes from the community of musicians.

His release Sea Cathedrals on Silentes (an affiliate of the classic Italian ambient label Amplexus) is a collection of five drone works, ranging in duration from six minutes to twenty. His collaborators include his cover photographer Manuel P. Cecchinato playing crystals, singing bowls, and a custom-made analog synth with Paul Klee's Archangel drawing engraved on copper as its touchplate; Massimo Liverani on guitars, loops and treatments; and Manuela Bruschini singing wordlessly on the title track. The two tracks featuring Liverani's loops are the two shortest on the album, set in the middle between longer, more atmospheric works. On Till, a muffled phrase repeats with added resonance developing into little melodic fragments that gradually supplant the loop's original focus. Similarly, on The Lost Cargo, the resonance from a single crystal stroke slowly takes on a life of its own as overtone whistles trail into flute sounds. Coniglio's drones and field recordings provide a gauzy curtain around the loops and extend the album's continuity to the longer soundscapes.

The twenty-minute title track, which opens the album, combines isolated chords in a synth drone with single percussive strokes and processed (or perhaps electronic) seagulls. The drifting harmonies and languid pace that encircle monumental blocks of sound recall Debussy's sunken cathedral, a century-old parallel evocation of underwater temples. Sandbanks combines distant wavering microtonal clusters and processed crickets into a rich buzzing, propelled by arhythmic techno-style blips and a whistling reminiscent of the bird calls from the title track. Sylos, the album's closer, is another long stretch of murmuring drones punctuated with deep crashing events and layered with the album's most recognizable field recordings. Single bell strokes, like temple bells, introduce sections with cavernous voices, reverberating in a public space like a train station. Spacious and unassuming yet filled with tiny details, Sea Cathedrals is a release in the classic ambient framework, honoring varying levels of attention.

If Sea Cathedrals is Coniglio's pure ambient release, on the second volume of his Topofonie project, Salicornie, he indulges his romantic and melodic side. An extended paean to Venice released on the Irish label Psychonavigation, Salicornie is framed by the gorgeous title track, which begins with a gentle Debussy chords rocking back and forth, then features the breathy trumpet of Arve Henriksen, cello by Patrik Monticelli. The rhythm picks up, sounds familiar, and like a sudden parting of the curtain everything is accompanied by orchestral samples from Ravel's Bolero. This song could fit comfortably on softer mainstream instrumental radio. But the theme disintegrates back into hazy, languid echoes of Gershwin, which in turn become the background for a stroll around the Piazza San Marco, with tourists, strolling musicians, church bells. This in turn fades into "disintegration loops" from Nigel Samways, a blurry conclusion to the first four tracks. The theme from Salicornie later appears in an interlude led by Monticelli, and at the end with a full group calm and melancholic reprise.

The melodicism continues across the entire album, from the wistful chords on Alpen Tower pt. 2 (a continuation of a song from the first volume) as well as The Girl From Murania, a beautiful standalone piece which features Henriksen and Monticelli alongside of Coniglio's bent-note guitars and gentle percussive beats. This track, like the main theme, could easily be a strong candidate for radio play. But the field recordings aren't buried in the mix, as they are on Sea Cathedrals, they're prominently displayed. Fondamente Nova incl. 130 cm s.l.m. includes creaking wood and ropes from a sailing vessel that could fetch an unsuspecting, lulled listener back from the brink of slumber. Often the phonography is subordinate to the music, yet still communicating strongly a sense of place, as when the sustained, melodic synths of Bateon dei morti float on layers of water and sea birds. The combination of field recordings, ambient layers and romantic melodicism make Salicornie considerably more dramatic and conceptual than Sea Cathedrals, a more structured and post-classical side of Coniglio's music.

Besides performing and composing, Coniglio is also a curator of a collection of ambient tracks from various Italian musicians on the theme of Underwater Noises. Aside from Coniglio, most of the names are new to me, although I reviewed an album by Obsil for furthernoise.org a few months ago. There is a nice variety across the compilation, from Ennio Mazzon's dreamy rain-soaked drones to Cop Killin Beat's glitchy atmospherics and submerged loops. I liked Paolo Veneziani's Inside the Edge, where a thin melodic thread traverses a cavern of watery drips and rustling percussives. Obsil's sudden transitions between field recordings, squiggly electronics and poignant piano loops stands out from the sustained drones featured prominently on several tracks. Everyone's taste will determine which tracks will be the favorites, but I found the entire compilation very listenable throughout. Underwater Noises is a joint release between the Lost Children netlabel and Ephre Imprint, where it is available as a limited edition CD-R. My only complaint about the comp, a minor one, is that none of the web sites have links to the artists, which defeats one of the purposes of the collection.

To close this survey of Enrico Coniglio's recent work, let me also mention a composition of raw field recordings he recently made available on the Portuguese media label Crónica. Recorded with binaural microphones in one of Venice's Basilicas on a typical feast day, it combines random group noise, prayers and organ music as Coniglio wandered the crowd. The twenty-minute composition, in three parts, is available here as part of Crónica's podcast series. Check out some of the other pieces while you're there.

Sea Cathedrals is available directly from Silentes. Salicornie is more widely distributed as a CD and is also available as a download from all the usual suspects.

Piano and classical drones

When I set up this blog nearly four years ago, I envisaged the Classical and the Drone as twin poles between which I would concentrate my humble observations. The intersection of these two worlds certainly exists, for example La Monte Young and Alvin Lucier, but the last time the two came together around here was about a year ago with Sunn O)))'s drone metal combined with classical instruments. I have recently discovered Peter Adriaansz, a younger composer from Holland who's also the artistic director of The Hague Percussion, firmly in the classical world, whose work in the past couple of years combines piano and drones in a way that I find inspirational for my own music.

I originally encountered Adriaansz through Xavier Pestova's repertoire list of music for piano and live electronics. His score for Waves 1-4, for piano, ebows, sine waves, and live delay, was posted on his site, a fascinating and thought provoking excursion which led me to my local guitar shop for my first ebow. Since that time, I reviewed Richard Lainhart's recent CD Cranes Fly West, which uses a grand piano and nine ebows (Adriaansz, in this score, only calls for three), which increased my interest level. And earlier this year, the Dutch Ensemble Klang released a CD of seven of Adriaansz's Waves, including one of the solo piano works and six further excursions into drone piano in combination with reeds, trombone, percussion, violin, and electric guitar. As far as I can tell, it's the first CD release of any of his music, hopefully a harbinger of future installments.

Adriaansz's works page contains thirteen Waves, divided into four sets, and two of the four sets are performed here in their entirety, each movement recorded in a single take. Waves 5-7 open the album and were written for the Ensemble Klang during a period where Adriaansz had done some work with microtonality and was now furthering his investigations into vibration and resonance. Wave 5 divides the ensemble into generating and responding instruments. The piano and ebowed guitar generate tones that are further sustained and modified by the reeds, brass, and percussion. Wave 6 devolves around a single pitch, adding microtonal variations of specific proportions on either side, generating elusive beating harmonies, especially at a fairly good volume. Wave 7 sets up a quiet ebowed drone before it's interrupted by monumentally deep bass notes on the piano, trombone and low reeds. The low fundamentals elicit lots of overtones, making this one a very rich sound world. Higher partials are added explicitly as the piece progresses, with the piano articulating slow octave arpeggios that provide a faint rhythmic anchor in the harmonic blaze.

The second complete set is Waves 11-13, originally written for Peter van Bergen's Loos Ensemble, and played here by two reeds, percussion, guitar, ebowed piano, and violin. Adriaansz has put up a sample score for Waves 11-13, so it's a little easier to see what's going on, and Adriaansz has also posted article with a fair amount of detail about the pieces. Waves 11 is all sustained sounds, dreamlike with surges but no attacks. Waves 12 is highly punctuated with dissonant piano chords and resonant gongs, whose overtones are carried by the sine waves and other sustaining instruments. And in Waves 13 the piano chords are spread out into individual notes stretched across three octaves, spawning subtle moving harmonies.

Between the two sets of Waves, the ensemble programmed a set of three miniatures written in a more conventional style, Nu descendant un escalier. They reminded me strongly of the classic Hat recordings of the Maarten Altena Octet, so I was little surprised to see in Adriaansz's work list that three of his pieces were in fact commissioned by and written for Altena's ensemble (sadly unrecorded as far as I can determine). The album closes with one of the first set, Waves 3 for amplified piano, sine waves and live delay.

Work in microtonality often leads to electronic solutions, and Adriaansz has developed an unusual hybrid of live electronics with the Klang Ensemble. The album has a guest credit of Juan Parra on live electronics on these three sets, and it sounds like it includes a long digital delay to prolong the already stretched tones. Several of the Waves include a part for fixed and moving sines, which further color the harmonies. In practice, the sines draw out an emphasis in the overtones of the acoustic instruments and contribute a sheen to the harmonic overtones. In addition, the acoustic instruments are amplified, which provides another opportunity to place them into an overall context.

As a glance at his scores will demonstrate, Adriaansz has discovered new ways to communicate his microtonal works through an open notation that focuses on the essential chromaticism that he seeks, while deferring specific timbres and entrances to the performers. One of its ancestors is Cage's time bracket notation, where an event is simply given a range of time in which it occurs. Adriaansz uses the metaphor 'live sculpting,' which suggests a mobile, shifting perspectives over a fairly sparse sonic field, but provided a freedom to the musicians to create the complete sound in its own time.

In addition to the usual sources, Waves is available through the Ensemble Klang's web shop where, powered by Bandcamp, all the tracks are available for streaming in their entirety. The sales blurb says that the CD comes with a booklet, which encouraged me to purchase the CD rather than the download. However, the download that came after the CD purchase had a PDF of the booklet in the zip file, but I don't know whether it's present on the download alone purchases. The booklet is all in English and includes an article about Adriaansz written by Bob Gilmore, an interview between Adriaansz and the Ensemble Klang's Artistic Director and fellow composer Pete Harden, and short bios of the composer and the ensemble. Adriaansz writes about the Wave series in an article in English, How I Became A Convert, on his use of microtonality.

Canadian reminiscences

Back in the spring I reviewed a two-CD set by Brooklyn dronemeister Kyle Bobby Dunn purporting to be an introduction to his music, but if someone really wanted to approach Dunn's music from out of the blue, his more recent limited edition Rural Route No. 2 might be a better place to start. Dunn is originally from Canada, and this release is from an unusual source, a print shop and publishing house in Toronto called Standard Form operating on behalf of the Canadian art community, part of whose output is a series of three-inch CD-Rs in an ongoing Rural Route series.

Dunn places the two tracks on Rural Route No. 2 in spectral sightings from his Albertan childhood, and both pieces avoid his occasional noisy tendencies in favor of a dreamlike serenity. The first track, Dissonant Distances, is a fairly consonant and serene set of circulating drones, with nearly melodic frequencies moving in short fragments in the foreground. A quiet section has a ghostly echo, voices from the ether, maybe even distant pop radio, but disappearing in a rumbling resonance. The second track, Senium III, is oddly more dissonant, a series of alternating chords with strange and otherworldly overtones. It continues with regular changes every five to ten seconds, not really fast enough to be rhythmic, but a slow lullaby whose regularity is a sonic representation of the final period in our all-too-short lifespan. Both pieces have a soft focus, with wistful variations in brightness, memories that remain just out of reach.

Rural Route No. 2 is still available as a CD-R directly from Standard Form, or in digital formats from the usual suspects.

Languishing in the sun

Over the past year I have reviewed three albums on Glacial Movements, an label from Italy that furthers the exploration of isolationist music. The label's most recent release is The Art of Dying Alone from bvdub, who DJed in some of San Francisco's deep trance and techno raves in the 1990s before relocating to China, where he worked as a translator and recorded this album. The artist's moniker derives as a nickname from his initials (Brock van Wey) and not from any overt dub influences on his music, which in this case is a spacious ambient album of gentle loops and sustained crystalline strings and voices.

At first listen, and despite the rather bleak track titles, I found it difficult to place this album in an isolationist context. The six tracks, ranging from eight to twenty-one minutes, are all very thick and lush, languid sustained string pads often underpinned with gently moving beats. I felt that I was in the tropics rather than the glaciers. The album's instrumentation is unspecified, but wordless ethereal female vocals give tracks like No More Reasons Not To Fall a light and fluffy feeling, white clouds on a sunny day. Van Wey builds the tracks gradually from short loops on guitar, voice or piano, accumulating layer upon layer swirling into a hypnotic soup. Nothing From No One starts from gentle piano meanderings set against the background rustles of a late-night, nearly empty bar, before the last gesture loops to an infinite repeat, sustaining sounds gradually filling the spectrum, yet the original seed remains at some level of audibility. A guitar loop in No One Will Ever Find You Here shows its seams with a slight rhythmic hiccup, which propels the music forward with a sense of urgency, always slightly ahead of itself.

The title track, which closes the album, is especially poignant. The female voice is especially prominent, from the sustained choral voices in the opening to a sighing solo briefly separating herself from the crowd. Unlike the other tracks, which proceed by accumulation, the chorus here is an introduction to a harp and voice duet. The voice here almost sounds like lyrics, dancing a slow elegy with the harp and piano. This piece gets thick too, but at its height the voice is still prominent with disembodied syllables, female sibilants almost sounding like banshees above the quiet piano and sustained pads.

With all of its layered profusion, The Art Of Dying Alone is a maximal sort of isolationism. Perhaps the album's cover provides a clue. As with the other Glacial Movements releases, it's a gorgeous photo by Bjarne Riesto, but it's the first time that a Glacial Movements cover has featured any kind of human trace, a lonely fishing cabin on the edge of a snowy inlet where the artist comes to make his last work. Van Wey has captured the wistful culmination of an imagination, dying alone in a land of midnight sun.

A Quietly Dying Star

Celer is the musical offspring of Will Long and Danielle Baquet-Long, a husband and wife whose posthumous discography now runs into the dozens. Typically their ethereal drones are composed from highly processed recordings of environmental sound or acoustic instruments such as piano, violin and flute. Their recent album on Dragon's Eye, Dying Star, is both one of their most subdued sonically, and one of the sparsest in sonic origins, using only an analog synthesizer and a mixing board. Granted, analog synthesizers can produce a wide variety of sound, but the sound world here is remarkably consistent, a steady pitch with gently hovering overtones. Volume is generally low and events are few, a thinning or thickening of the harmonic texture and an occasional ringing emphasis in the overtones. The surface calm and relative homogeneity seems especially apt for an album entitled Dying Star.

Although the album is divided into eight tracks, there is only subtle audible differences to distinguish them in the listener's ear. Celer often uses track boundaries for purposes other than delineating musical divisions, and the track titles read like one of the poems that have graced other albums or Celer's blog. Track boundaries are an unusual playground for sound artists. The Hafler Trio, in its long search to challenge perception, released CDs where the track layout didn't correspond in the slightest to the sequence of individual pieces. But I don't think this is Celer's motivation, which almost seems more like an acknowledgment of the essential disordered quality of the spiritual and emotional states presented by their music.

Yet despite the seeming placidity of the Dying Star's trajectory, the album's most poignant moment comes at the beginning of the final track. Flickers (Goodnight) is the only track that doesn't begin in silence, but instead is crossfaded directly from its predecessor. Even more significant, its continuing drone is overlaid with the only two even mildly percussive events, aptly characterized by the flickers in the track title, coming at the very beginning of the track and echoed about forty seconds in. These two events, so quiet as to be barely suggested, and appearing only after forty minutes of quiet undulating drones, are Dying Star's hidden treasure. Is it the dying star finally imploding, creating a brief flash all too easily overlooked? Has the listener drifted into an oblivious somnolence and heard it only in his or her dreams? Celer makes a call to the listener's attention and imagination and thereby elevates this release to one of their best.

Dying Star is released on Dragon's Eye and is available in their shop or from various distributors worldwide.

Expression from Raw Objects

Musique concrète is enjoying a resurgence from phonographers, taking to the sonic environment with portable recorders and excellent microphones and using the results to create a variety of unique sound works. My previous exposure to Vancouver sound artist Mathieu Ruhlmann has been through works where field recordings were part of the texture, but where long unbroken threads were more prominent. His previous release, for example, Tsukubai on the Mystery Sea sister label Unfathomless, is nearly all composed from sustained sounds with barely audible small sounds as if in the distance. On his new album, as a leaf or a stone, the drone becomes one voice among many and is often completely absent, and the small sounds are sharp and crisp. But where Tsukubai started life as hydrophones and water, Leaf's sonic sources are a disparate collection of field recordings, obscure instruments like the ukelin and the shruti box, and household objects such as a turkey baster or a coffee grinder.

Since the drone's role in the sound world becomes supportive rather than assertive, the myriad other sounds can be heard. It also means that Ruhlmann is able to create more narrative structures, with the different layers participating with occasional silence as much as with their audible contributions and with changes in sonic scenery occurring more quickly than in drone or dark ambient works. The busy layers, short and sharp sounds, cluster into scrapes and rustles. Sustained layers can hover quietly in the background or rumble through like passing trucks. Voices drift through on a couple of pieces, drawing the listener further in. Some sounds recur in more than one piece, like a plot thread weaving through the album as a whole. Ruhlmann has done an excellent job at keeping all of the objects separate in the sound field, each crackle and rustle clear and distinct.

Musique concrète theorists debate whether a sound object should display the worldly baggage of its origins or should be sufficient unto itself. Ruhlmann lists the sound sources for each individual piece on the inside cover of the album, thus enabling the listener to grapple with the dilemma on his and her own. I find a curiosity about the sounds when I listen, satisfied by these credits, but being able to assign an origination label doesn't illuminate, merely permits the aural attention to refocus on other perspectives. Each of these six vignettes, ranging from four to seven and a half minutes, is a separate journey, sharing a microscopic level of amplified detail and a wonder at the hidden glories around us. Many field recording artists use processing to obscure the details, but there is so much detail here that I suspect that Leaf's sources are fairly raw, with judicious editing for each layer rather than processing the sounds beyond any recognition, an impression solidified with the epigraph from French poet Francis Ponge praising "expression on behalf of the raw object (with no a priori concern about the form of that expression)."

As a leaf or a stone is a limited edition available directly from Afe Records.

The ruined cathedral

Enrico Coniglio is based in Venice, Italy, where he trained as an urban planner, and his music has deep roots in his environment. I reviewed one of his collaborative works a while back, and this year he released Songs from Ruined Days digitally on the Touch sublabel Spire. At first glance it seems like an odd alliance, since Coniglio's only traditional instrument is the guitar and Spire is all about the pipe organ. But Coniglio is operating here as an aural observer, composing this 45-minute work from field recordings, some of which include a pipe organ. Songs from Ruined Days is a poignant indictment of commodification and the resulting dilution of cultural identity, where the pipe organ acts as a symbol of the paradise lost.

The origin of Songs From Ruined Days is a collection of field recordings from industrial sites and cathedrals, both of which Coniglio sees in a state of crisis. The industrial samples feed into deep, buzzing drones with a full sonic spectrum, an aural equivalent of a dense fog through which we occasionally hear incomprehensible voices and other traces of human activity. Sometimes sustained organ tones underpin this fog, materializing quietly, merging into slow melodies and hushed harmonies. Sometimes, it's just static, atmospheric crackles and the oscillation of distant traffic. But three times out of this haze emerges unadulterated liturgical music, startling in its clarity, beauty, sadness and tradition.

These interludes of sacred music bring a sense of holiness to the music, yet these songs are as ruined as the industrial wasteland that surrounds them, corrupted by human frailty and unable to offer any spiritual nourishment. The pipe organ plays a hymn in the first interlude, faintly accompanied by its congregation. The reverberant space around the organ informs us that we're in a cathedral, and we should have a massive choir celebrating in song. Instead, a few voices, out of tune and out of sync, struggle to carry the message. The second interlude is for a choir alone, but they emerge from street noise and transient conversations, a distant rehearsel punctuated by air brakes and other industrial noises. Choir and organ join in an offertory in the final interlude sequence, the organ setting up a beautiful, clear chorale to the Virgin Mary, Kyrie Eleison and a concluding organ postlude. Even here, the liturgical music is overlaid with conversations and street noises, the sound of nobody paying attention. Lord have mercy indeed.

Songs From Ruined Days isn't Coniglio's first piece dealing with the environmental state of the Venetian lagoon and its surrounding industrial park. Field recordings from the factories show up in Abibes, his podcast for Cronica, and the pollution in the lagoon a subtext in Sapientumsuperacquis, a podcast for Touch Radio. Listeners shouldn't be surprised that some of the drones in the earlier work bear more than a passing resemblance to this one, but the overt symbolism of the liturgical music moves Songs From Ruined Days away from a pure ambient work and into a class of its own.

Songs From Ruined Days is available as a 320 kbps mp3 download directly from Touch.

Drones for the young

Astute drone followers will have already noticed Kyle Bobby Dunn from his early limited-to-150 release Six Cognitive Works on the Swedish label Kning, or more likely from Sedimental album Fragments & Compositions, released in 2008 and favorably reviewed in big international music media. Although Six Cognitive Works has an occasional noisy edge (Dunn put it in the genre Rock and added Death Metal to its styles in its Discogs entry — a wry exaggeration but there it is), the six surreal Fragments are reportedly composed from sourced piano and classical strings. His newest release, a double CD on Nottingham's Low Point ironically titled A Young Person's Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn (Dunn was born in 1986, pretty young himself), further clarifies the harmonies behind the drones, setting up a serenity occasionally rippled with darker undercurrants. Like his Low Point labelmate Celer, Dunn's sources are typically acoustic and classical instruments, from which he composes extended slow drifts wrapped in lush harmonies.

The first four tracks in the YPG are a CD reissue of four (of five) tracks on his digital album Fervency, released in 2009 on Moodgadget. This collection of "aged guitar drones" locates its origins distant behind the processing, through the subdued rhythmic attacks that quietly drive There Is No End To Your Beauty and the strumming suggestions in Butel. The harmonies are largely diatonic and slow moving, but with extensive interplay in the overtones. Beauty's dual melodies seem like David Hykes' overtone singing, where two independent yet related melodic lines intertwine, while The Tributary (For Voices Lost) uses short melodic fragments, repeating and combining into islands of harmonic stability. Promenade shimmers with lots of high overtones as well before taking a weird turn into a watery swamp.

Like Fragments & Compositions, the remaining eight pieces on the YPG use real players on strings, horns, and piano for the sound sources, and these pieces divide between sustained drone works and two shorter pieces for piano and room ambience. On the drones, the sonic origins are never displayed so evidently as on the former album's Miranda Rights; perhaps violins are present on Empty Gazing: perhaps Bonaventure's Finest Hour contains horns. The border separating sounds from processing is more fluid here in Dunn's developing vision. The overtone counterpoint from the first disc is continued with revolving pillars of sound over a two-note oscillation in The Second Ponderosa and the warm, gorgeous and melodic horn calls in Bonaventure. The piano pieces, especially Sets of Four (Its Meaning Is Deeper Than Its Title Implies), have a similar structure to the drone pieces, and suggests how Dunn creates his music on stage in live performance.

Dunn's music has a serenity that comes from a languorous pace, melodic fragments over vaguely diatonic harmonies, and a bright shimmer over the whole sound, hiding some kinds of dissonance that never become threatening but peacefully coexist with the tranquillity. The solo piano recordings have an unsettling ambience from their low-fi recording quality, so foreign to the pristine goals of most classical artists. Pieces that start off in tranquillity veer into uncharted dreams. Empty Gazing's submerged voices and the dissonant low frequency feedback concluding The Tributary both demonstrate the presence of darker forces, calmly and from a measured distance. The album's darkest moment comes at the very end of the last track, The Nightjar. After nearly two hours of drifting bliss, Dunn plays a segment of dialogue from a film he made over a decade ago about a couple of hallucinating and unhinged private investigators. The dialogue will guarantee that nobody will use the second disc for sleep music more than once, and ties this collection to the more noisy Cognitive Works. Astute drone followers will pick up this Young Person's Guide (available directly from Low Point) and continue to seek out the fragmented compositions of Kyle Bobby Dunn.

Running with the wolf

Francisco López is one of the most prolific sound artists active today. Since his earliest releases, more than twenty years ago, he has released well over a hundred albums and has rejuvenated musique concrète through extensive use of field recordings and other types of found sounds. I wrote about Wind [Patagonia], one of his overt field recording albums, here a while back. For as many López works as have a recognizable and sometimes even fully credited provenance, there are albums where he provides no clue whatsoever on the sounds' origins, in notes or in the works themselves. In addition, many of his pieces are untitled and packaged in the most minimal way possible — clear jewel cases, plain white cardboard — obscuring any real-world referents as much as possible in packaging as with sound sources.

The line between abstract sound object and discernable documentary is continuous, and one of López's first releases in 2010, one of his most evocative sound works to date, takes an oblique tangent to both paths. Released on the isolationist label Glacial Movements, Amarok participates in similar visual imagery as the rest of the label, with the beautiful abstract Bjarne Riesto photograph Flight gracing the cover. There's also a suggestive Inuit connection with the album's name, Amarok being a gigantic wolf in Inuit mythology. López provides no additional clues, no indication of his sound sources in the rather sparse notes, and no obvious sonic referents in the music. With a single track over an hour long, Amarok has a narrative quality that is unusual in López's longer work.

Amarok is dominated by three loud, complex sections that are separated by interludes with varying degrees of tranquility. The first mountain is exactly the sort of great cavernous crescendo I have come to expect from López. Periodic subsonic booms and percussive noise bursts introduce an ominous, murky tension soon after the beginning. A second long section builds further, with breathing sounds and a low rattle suggesting the titular giant wolf growling deep from the back of his throat. While López's trademark resonances fill the background, muffled voices and watery gurgling drift into a soft hum like the arctic wind. There's movement even here, oscillations in space, volume and timbre becoming very quiet, audible only on headphones, and eventually, not even there. The last of the three loud sections starts with an accretion of overtone drones, with circling winds, a deep tumbling, and noises that conjure images of ghost sailors on phantom ships sometimes audible through the fog. This very complex and glorious set of sounds launches into a final quiet drone section.

Anyone with even a passing interest in contemporary drone will have heard some of López's music. His pieces overtly based on field recordings seem to keep their popularity, perhaps because of the high level of activity inside the sounds or the inevitable challenge of picking out small details for identification games. He's also created unsourcable works, nearly featureless expanses constructed from white and pink noise generators sensitively filtered. characterized by the juxtaposition of extended monolithic sound blocks, without any obvious connection between them. Amarok is neither of these. With complex, thick sound masses that draw us to López in the first place, it also has substantial continuity and development, unified perhaps with some of the same sound objects used in the different sections. It has the kind of organic development that I hear in López' naturalist works, sonic fields alive with possibilities. And it has a balance between onslaught and silence that's essential in a long form, all of which make Amarok one of López's most significant works to date.

A Brisk Five from Slow Six

There are a couple of ways I could introduce Tomorrow Becomes You, the third album by the Brooklyn-based quintet Slow Six. Christopher Tignor, who writes the music, is a software designer by training, and his instruments are both more and less than fancy GUIs, ways to transform live sound in a group context, instruments that require the same kind of practice as their acoustic counterparts. A video linked from their website shows Tignor transforming in realtime sounds from guitarist Stephen Griesgraber, performing a piece from Slow Six's previous album, Nor'easter. One could also point to Brooklyn's rich musical environment, where a loose-knit collective performs regularly in different configurations as Slow Six, Redhooker, Wires Under Tension, and hopefully many more interesting projects to come.

Alternatively, I could focus the genre-straddling aspects of the group. The musical press treated their earlier work as an unusual melding of classical and rock. John Diliberto, the host of the long-running Public Radio soundscape program Echoes, famously tagged them as "Arvo Pärt meeting King Crimson." I find this description a bit hyperbolical, and at best applicable to the group's first two albums of electronic chamber music. Listeners introduced to Slow Six through Tomorrow Becomes You may think that Pärt has been apprehended and exiled back to Siberia, primarily through the addition of percussionist Theo Metz, who completely changes the character of the music. While the earlier releases were predominantly atmospheric pieces for keyboards and strings, Metz's muscular beats propel this album full steam ahead into rock territory. As violinist, Tignor carries over the string leads from the previous incarnations, together with Ben Lively sharing violin performance and Stephen Griesgraber on guitar. Rob Collins plays Fender Rhodes, supplying harmonic underpinning and an additional lead voice as required.

The album's opening track, The Night You Left New York , starts with quiet repeated pizzicato notes on the violin, slowly bringing in a gentle accompaniment and a sketched countermelody on the guitar, rocking around a simple harmonic loop. This opening could have appeared on earlier Slow Six albums, but the distortion increases, and then the drums kick in for an instant upsurge of the energy levels. Twin violins and the electric guitar swirl around each other, melodic structures repeating, reminiscent of an imaginary minimalism, each note perfectly placed to create a whole larger than the sum of its parts, while the Rhodes provides the harmonic underpinning. The odd meter becomes more regular in the piece's final section, broadening out for an exhilarating conclusion.

The two-part Cloud Cover builds up by accretion as well, from a static melodic fragment over a hovering minor harmony, driven by Metz's solid rhythmic work. A twilight hush brings in the second part, a sustained drone with buried radio voices deepening into points of light from the Rhodes and slow, drifting melodies intertwining from the strings. The voices, harmonized by one of Tignor's software creations, carry over to Because Together We Resonate. Slowly the music settles into an antique hymn-like melody that conceals within itself odd metric accents, while the voices burble throughout.

Another two-part work, Sympathetic Response System, brings back Metz's driving pulse again, with skittering electronics forming the opening background. A repeated guitar lick drives the piece into a solid groove, the pizzicato violins pulsing like a vintage Tangerine Dream song updated with contemporary electronica. An occasional bridge played on guitar in part one becomes the foundation for part two, creating a joint figure with the Rhodes. Slowly the electronics give way to the twin violins, and eventually the full band, accelerating into another animated conclusion.

These Rivers Between Us closes the album with another piece like the opener, powerfully driven by looped melodic figures from the violins and guitar. After a strong opening section with full harmonies, the violins drop back to short pizzicato figures accompanied solely by the drums, a quiet rhythmic section full of tension for Griesgraber's eventual distorted guitar. The varied instrumental textures coalesce to a moving and exhilarating finale.

If the rhythmic drive and the violins recall the King Crimson of Larks' Tongues in Aspic, the interlocking instrumental textures have much more in common with post-rock groups like Explosions in the Sky or Mogwai. In the absence of a dedicated bass player, the low frequencies are handled by Collins' Rhodes as part of the harmonic resonance, which directs the listener's focus to the intertwining melodic lines. Griesgraber's guitar is more delicate, more blended and more collaborative than a typical rock lead. Nevertheless, this is high energy music with twisted interweaving melodies, irregular metric accents, and mysterious nocturnal atmospheres, a confident and strong album in a different and promising direction from their past triumphs.

Tomorrow Becomes You is released on Western Vinyl and is available on CD directly from them, as well as through most digital distributors. The album's superb final track, These Rivers Between Us, has a peculiar video on YouTube.

Suite Concrete

From the earliest examples of musique concrète, practitioners have started from instrumental rather than environmental sounds, taking samples from sympathetic performers as the origin for their electroacoustic works. Although environmental and field recordings become more prevalent in recent years, in the mid-1990s composers like John Wall re-initiated the use of instrumental fragments. Wall's earliest work originates almost entirely with short, nearly recognizable snippets of commercial recordings, as if his compositions sought a performance practice that the diverse set of sampled musicians could not produce together. Partially because his methods inadvertently lumped him with plunderphonics, his more recent releases have avoided pre-released material, or at least made it completely unrecognizable and unacknowledged, in favor of live recordings which he then manipulates in the studio.

Wall retained connections with the British free improvisation community, so his musician sources perform on piano, double bass, and trumpet. Adam Sonderberg (also a member of Haptic) and Salvatore Dellaria's project the Dropp Ensemble also works with musician sources, but the credits on their recent album Safety also include open circuits, oscillator, treatments — obscure and elliptical sounds from the outset. Their stable of fifteen contributors (plus six more musicians credited for "Research and Development") includes noted improvisers Jason Kahn, Tomas Korber and Christian Weber. For the various and sundry electronics and synthesizers, one is hard pressed to identify any individual contribution on the four tracks that comprise this set. But one of the unifying factors is how Sonderberg and Dellaria incorporate acoustic instruments, often leaving them identifiable, anchors that focus the listeners attention amidst the background noise. The authors are reticent about their methods as far as I can find, but the album notes that the contributions were recorded around the globe, and they confirmed to Richard Pinnell that the musical fragments were assembled in their studio, solely by the duo.

The four pieces pace themselves together extremely well, starting a trajectory from the amuse-bouche Inlet leading to the slow pace that begins Everywhere Present and Nowhere Visible. Levels of activity bubble up to the surface, each level with its own rhythm and frequency level, and each has its own story to tell. There are three fairly distinct sections, and it almost sounds like the same source with different treatments underpins each one. What sounded like fast drum beats gets progressively slower and drier, until the last silence leads to Vernacular Rooms. Here, the frequency spectrum is much wider, a clattering, rich sound with hidden layers of static. As Weber's bass was briefly identifiable on Inlet, so Jason Stein's bass clarinet becomes a focal point guiding the listener through the abstract rattling. The clarinet's long, sustained tones provide a slow moving harmony at the piece's core, but the outer layers are very active throughout. The noise and static suddenly become background, revealing the previously hidden gentle murmuring.

The suite's conclusion, Forget Collapse, starts with a thunderclap, a wide hissing environment like the rain, and high pitched sine waves from Everywhere Present circle the sound field. Individual percussion strokes on bells, sticks and drums, appear like beacons in the mist, adding an urgency mitigated by the occasional lingering gong or cymbal stroke. A transitional hihat stroke extends endlessly to an extended white noise with individual elements and frequencies gradually isolating themselves. Slowly evolving into a metallic and noisy drone, a brief window shows the quiet white noise and tape hiss that has been subliminally present all along, and to which the suite will slowly ebb.

Besides the integrating presence of acoustic instruments, I hear these pieces as a suite because of sound elements that recur across the set. As shimmering high sine waves in the finale recall the earlier suggestives ones in Vernacular Rooms, a few persistent sounds provide a foundation for the countless sonic variations and unique, abstract gestures. The relatively short length, just over a half hour, gives Safety an opportunity to be heard as a whole, more than a collection of four disparate pieces, a rare example of an electroacoustic suite that really hangs together. Safety is available directly from and/OAR as well as creative distributors worldwide.

Echoes of Syros and Derivative reviewed

I have two reviews in the latest issue of furthernoise.org: Echoes of Syros, a live concert recording by Deep Listening trombonist Stuart Dempster, ambient Tuba player Tom Heasley, and prepared Rhodes performer Eric Glick Rieman; and Derivative, a set of ambient guitar instrumentals by Remora based on short fragments from various rock, soul and pop inspirations. Sound samples are available along with the reviews.

A new isolationism

What makes ambient isolationist? In the early 1990s it was a reaction against the highly rhythmical, ornate, more-techno-than-ambient music that, oxymoronically, was often used for dancing. Stripped to the most minimal, artists like Thomas Köner created very quiet, slow moving music that seemed like the sound of absence. Polar regions seemed an apt metaphor, a featureless, flat, wind-swept landscape. And unlike the deserts, bleak landscapes that have inspired other musicians, polar regions are uninhabited, removing the vestiges of aboriginal civilizations that haunt Steve Roach and his desert ambient colleagues. In 1994, Virgin Records released a 2-CD compilation entitled Isolationism that tremendously expanded the acceptable range of music covered by the term. In particular, it opened the door to paranoia and despair, looking at isolation as a social term, and moving toward other environments, inner as well as outer, where an individual could be isolated. But one label which has retained the far, cold north as inspiration, ironically from Mediterranean Italy, is Glacial Movements, self described as "glacial and isolationist ambient." Their first album was a compilation, Cryosphere, released in July 2006, and their schedule has proceeded as slowly as the ice portrayed on their covers and alluded to in the label's very name.

In May 2008, the label's fourth release was Mick Harris' first full-length album as Lull in nearly a decade, Like a Slow River. Harris should need no introduction to long-time ambience enthusiasts from his work in the early 1990s with Bill Laswell, and perhaps from his various ambient metal (speaking of oxymorons) projects such as Napalm Death and Painkiller. But Like a Slow River is very much in keeping with Glacial Movements' stated aesthetic — long, slow textures, an absence of melody or rhythm, few points of reference. This is especially true of the opening track, Whiteout, where everything blurs into various shades of white noise, marked with high-pitched gusts of wind. But each track is distinct, from The Sheet's deep bass rumbles that come in surges, eventually permitting glimpses of soft melodic fills, to the gentle oscillating drones of Treeless Grounds, which has fewer landmarks than Whiteout, if that's possible. Lull's isolation is peaceful, meditative, a turning inward for our most private thoughts, faint glimmerings, and the remainder of the previous night's dreams.

The label's sixth album, Cloudlands, hit the streets this spring under the name Aquadorsa (or perhaps Aqua Dorsa, both spellings are on the web site). It's also unclear whether this is an ongoing project, but in any event the album pairs relative newcomer Enrico Coniglio with one of the most venerable names in deep ambient, Oöphoi. Unlike some of Oöphoi's other collaborations where both artists share an expertise in slow moving drones, Coniglio adds an unexpected layer of noise, borrowing liberally from 12k glitch and Raster-Noton crunchy rhythms. Pieces like The Pond Reflected Her Smile are still characterized by Oöphoi's languid harmonies, where Coniglio's slow click percussion adds an unusual grit. The scratches on Zero Gravity would sound completely at home on well-played vinyl, blending with the subaquatic melodic loops and continuous bell resonances. The music could be considered a departure from the glacial and isolationist rubric, considerably more active and melodic than Lull's subliminal soundscapes, perhaps the label's venture into the more social aspects of isolation. For an oblique perspective, Coniglio's solo work Glacial Lagoon, available on the Laverna netlabel, is a deliberate investigation of the loss of identity in the post-urban landscape colored by his residence in Venice. Where Glacial Lagoon is considerably more glitchy than Cloudlands, the collaboration with Oöphoi brings to the music a wistfulness, an emotional longing previously absent from the genre.

Glacial Movements releases are available digitally from all of the usual suspects, but the CDs are packaged in beautiful digipaks with artwork by the Norwegian photographer Bjarne Riesto that is considerably more than the single image CD cover that comes with downloads. Only half of Riesto's photo is visible on the Aqua Dorsa image above, as the rest is spread across the entire gatefold. Lull's cover is especially effective, an image of white ice that is displayed in context of gorgeous, lush, full color arctic sunset on the inside.

The Sound of Love

If music contains the power to evoke our emotions, what is the sound of love, the most fragile and most sincere of emotional states? Celer's brief but prolific musical trajectory circles this question, adopting a mystical perspective towards living and working through a fragile existence. Their recent CD Brittle was recorded last winter but released just a few weeks after Danielle Baquet-Long's untimely passing in July. Their source material is all acoustic instruments — piano, violin, cello, harpsichord, whistles — but connections between individual sounds and their origins are as fragile and tenuous as the emotions they seek to describe.

Western music is based on a model of tension and resolution, an establishment of expectations and the delayed gratification for the ultimate cadence. But Brittle is carefully constructed to remove all traces of conflict and difference. Even when their individual sounds combine into consonance or dissonance, nothing is ever established as a home base. Even when a pretty chord rolls around, there's no function, no direction, any more than when the elements of a mobile drift into a pleasing shape. Sounds are pure, without attacks, drifting and of long duration. The listener quickly turns off expectations, dismantles the entire cultural listening apparatus, and bathes in the music's warm glow.

The program notes for Brittle outline some of Celer's always interesting working methods. Their drifting ambient music is an outgrowth of using open forms, creating small pieces that combine in various ways to create a larger work. Nacreous Clouds, their 2008 release on and/OAR, was composed of 37 short tracks that encouraged shuffle mode, creating a different listening experience each time. Brittle shares the earlier album's sound world but is one long track that was originally comprised of many smaller fragments. One imagines that the resulting piece is one of several possibilities, that in a parallel universe the Brittle release would have been sequenced differently. But where Nacreous Clouds displayed its seams, little moments of silence between each track, Brittle is a continuous stream of music, and the nineteen separate tracks that lie at its origins are completely erased, blended into a complete unity.

The normal musical vocabulary is insufficient to describe Brittle, so a reviewer struggles to find appropriate metaphors. Perhaps like fire light, the music is always moving, always flickering, never settling into a constant sonic wash. Or like the water in a mountain stream, moving over rocks, a continuous variation of sound, light and shadow. By removing musical landmarks, Celer demonstrates the fragility of existence, and Brittle becomes an environment for meditation and prayer. The peaceful work completely merges with its environment with nearly three minutes of room ambience, subtly framing the delicate sounds that have preceded, leaving the remaining music solely in the listener's imagination.

The disc itself is adorned with a quotation from Rainer Maria Rilke's Book of Hours, and the gatefold wallet cover includes an brief, elegiac essay. It is available directly from Low Point, from Celer's shop Floor Sugar, and from a great source for Celer recordings, Infraction Recordings.

Classical drone metal

Although I don't usually write about major label releases, Sunn O)))'s Monoliths and Dimensions blends contemporary classical music with experimental metal with stunning results. Most of the press surrounding the group focuses on their loud and ritualistic concerts, with the group dressed in monk's cowls and the stage filled with fog. Concerts are fine if you live in London or New York, but here in the desert, their recordings are the only evidence one is likely to hear. Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson have been the core members since the group's first recording nearly ten years ago, and their albums have relied on an increasing number of guests drawn from other avant-metal groups, such as the Melvins, Earth and Boris. But on Monoliths and Dimensions, they enlist the services of a wide range of creative musicians playing acoustic instruments more commonly associated with the classical world.

Typically classified as drone or doom metal, Sunn O)))'s core is a very loud duet between detuned guitar and bass, playing more or less in unison. The sonic detritus resulting from extremely high volume and the guitar's extraneous noisy artifacts, such as the crunch on the attacks or the inadvertent vibrato resulting from reduced tension on the strings, produces long and deep resonances and interference tones that fill the space with ultra-physical waves of sound. And thus begins Monoliths and Dimensions as well, an instant assault with a deep monophonic riff, gradually accumulating subtle resonance until a brief window ushers the entrance of Attila Csihar's incantatory voice. Impossibly deep, Csihar's gutteral pronouncements seek their own cadence, deviating from normal rhythms until they sound like a new language, intoning the legend of Aghartha, the city at the center of the Earth. The "thunderous resonant clouds" that open Csihar's lyrics gradually are mirrored in the accompaniment even as his delivery remains static. Clusters from strings (violin, viola, two double basses), piano and winds (clarinet, English and French horns) swirl to a "spinning thunderous vortex", when the rock instruments drop out, leaving the music to become dissonant, watery and evanescent. Conch shells and a hydrophone replace the strings and winds, together with the amplified creaking of a rope straining under an unbearable tension.

Although Csihar continues with his intonations on the next two tracks, he is augmented by choirs, female on Big Church and male on Hunting & Gathering (Cydonia). Big Church is highly ritualized, the women wailing incomprehensible syllables while Csihar overdubs several layers of murmuring. Nothing here is intended to be understood, but the lyric sheet provides the single Hungarian compound word associated with deconsecration. Again, brass and strings back up the choir and multiple guitars. Hunting & Gathering uses only brass to supplement the male chorus and Csihar approaching as close to the blues as this album comes. Epic in scope, both of these choral pieces recall the elemental forces of Carmina Burana, adding the electronic feedback which only increases the raw power of the music.

After these two incantatory rituals, the last piece, Alice, is an instrumental affirmation that leads through chaos to an otherworldly calm and peace. Taking a cue here from the spectralist music of Iancu Dumitrescu, the guitar and bass gestures merge with a chamber orchestra comprised of brass (three trombones and French horn), strings (violin, viola, three double basses), winds (oboe, English horn, clarinet, bass clarinet, alto flute) and harp. At first, the chamber orchestra provides spectral overtones for the rock instruments, chords and gestures that start deep and electronic but swelling with the acoustic instruments into mid and upper ranges, reversing the typical resonance where the high notes fade the soonest. Eventually the trombones move to the foreground, providing their own harmony and counterpoint amidst the thickening textures while the rock instruments mark the beginnings of phrases. The final quarter of the piece is for the chamber orchestra alone (apart from Oren Ambarchi's motorized cymbal shimmering in the background), and the piece closes with a beautiful trombone solo from legendary jazz veteran Julian Priester. On its own, Alice is remarkable enough, but in its position on this album, it borders on ecstasy.

Although Monoliths and Dimensions is available as a download from the usual sources, the CD booklet has complete credits and lyrics, essential if you want to understand Csihar's vocalizations. The booklet cover is a translucent overlay on top of a Richard Serra painting, and there are some photos of the group at an Aztec temple and individual cyanotype portraits in primitive, gothic settings.

Outside the inside piano

My instrument, the piano, with its twelve equally tempered notes per octave, has a critical historical role in the foundation of the underlying harmony and melody of most music that we hear today. So I take special notice of artists who use the piano to undermine these lofty aims, a challenging task that generally relies on the performer moving away from the keyboard and exploring the inside of the piano. With the advent of electronics and amplification, it is possible to distort significantly the familiar piano sounds and attain non-pitched noise on the instrument. The exemplar here is David Tudor's 1967 recording of Cage's Variations II using the inside of the piano and contact microphones. Perhaps because tradition is so hard to break, or because the keyboard repertoire for piano has so many masterpieces, few musicians have deviated and truly rethought the instrument and its possibilities.

One such musician, who now works entirely inside the piano, is Andrea Neumann. Based in Berlin, Neumann has been working this unusual perspective for over a decade, devoting herself enough to commission a special instrument without keyboard, dampers or pedals, reducing the instrument to the frame, strings and soundboard. Unfortunately I can't find a picture of her modified piano, but on nearly every recording the mixing desk gets equal billing, so it probably has a fair amount of circuitry built in. She participated in a flurry of improvisational group outings at the beginning of the decade but has been largely absent from the EAI recordings in the past few years, despite numerous live appearances at festivals around Europe. Recently Absinth Records released her second solo effort, a numbered edition of a single piece, Pappelallee 5 (the name of her studio).

Pappelallee 5 is a natural extension of Neumann's only other solo, a mini-CD entitled Innenklavier released in 2002. Innenklavier (Inside Piano) has three pieces that explore the instrument's range, from single plucked notes with varying degrees of feedback to rolling scrapes that fill the audio spectrum with unpitched noise. The second piece in particular directs noisy rasps and crackles to different channels, alternating with stretches of digital silence. The silence/noise dichotomy of course goes back to Cage as well, but Pappelallee 5 extends Innenklavier 2 by using room ambience, ordinarily a flavor of silence, as a defining compositional element. Neumann's studio is in a house mostly occupied by musicians, so room ambience includes audible traces of her neighbors at practice. Room ambience changes independently of Neumann's inside piano, providing a secret depth best appreciated on headphones where one's own room ambience can be minimized.

The crux, however, is Neumann's gestures on the inside piano, which bring focus to multiple levels of background. Sometimes subtle and sometimes extending into wild, dramatic squalls in crystalline relief, they contrast sharply with the muffled appearance of the conventional instruments. Guitar, flute, trumpet and acoustic piano all pass through, a melodic counterpoint to Neumann's electronics that sets the piano's tonal and melodic history traditions outside and down the hall. Placement in the mix adds significant levels of complexity, audible splices adding richness and texture. Neumann plays with audio artifacts that most engineers try to discard, and in so doing has created a dazzling piece of contemporary musique concrète.

Pappelallee 5 comes in an oversize gatefold package and includes a statement from the artist. It is available from ErstDist or directly from absinthRecords, and is limited to 300 copies.

Recent orogenetic activity

If the genre "world music" wasn't already defined as pop music from different cultures, one might be tempted to use it for the ever traveling Michael Northam, whose sound composting methodology has created some deep and resonant drone pieces over the past decade. A look at his discography, approaching three dozen items from nearly twenty years, shows a blend of solo work with a changing group of collaborators, with barely two albums released on the same label. For a pop musician, this would indicate serious interpersonal difficulties, but in Northam's case, it signals an openness to situations and relationships from the most diverse possible origins. Three of his recent releases offer examples of this wide range.

Late last year, the Faria label in Russia released An Opening of the Earth: Recovered, a collaboration with Martin Franklin. Of all Northam's collaborators, Franklin is one of the furthest from Northam's usual environmental and electroacoustic methods. Franklin is a percussionist whose best known project is Tuu, a tribal new-age group with several releases on ambient boutique labels such as Waveform, Amplexus, and Fathom (a sublabel of the seminal new age radio show, Hearts of Space). Northam and Franklin's album predates all of this and is the earliest material that Northam has released. The original session was a three hour improvisation in September, 1991, and this material has been the source for three different versions of the album, all entitled An Opening of the Earth. For the Faria release, Franklin went back to the original source tapes and constructed what appears to be a brand-new release, reputedly incorporating some elements that have not been released in previous versions. In the liner notes, Northam seems to express some surprise at the difference between "the rawness and sustained states" of the original session, compared to shorter events and other (unspecified) characteristics.

Despite its undoubtedly primitive origins and rudimentary recording, the first impression of the recovered album is how contemporary, crisp and clear everything sounds. Although I haven't heard either of the two early versions of this material, I would have expected less than stellar original masters not necessarily preserved with the highest archival standards. While the album doesn't sound much like later work of either musician, in hindsight one can detect the directions that each performer would take. Franklin sets up sustained backgrounds and modal melodies with various synthesizers, a trope that became a staple with Tuu, and which provides an aura of prevailing calm. Northam punctuates the proceedings by tapping, scraping, brushing, and crunching various metal objects, creating intuitive and arhythmic metallic gestures that bring to mind his more recent improvisational work. One of Northam's credit is feedback loop, which perhaps accounts for the occasional squalls and the more noisy static and naked input jack episodes that echo repeatedly into the distance. Each of the eight excerpts (all with titles like Tape 1, Part 1) has its own moods and atmospheres, mysterious combinations of the raw and the cooked.

If Martin Franklin represents a new-age pole for Northam's musical partners, avant-noise percussionist Seijiro Murayama is at the opposite end of the musical spectrum. Murayama was the original drummer in Keiji Haino's seminal noise rock/free improv/psychedelic group Fushitsusha, and has since formed a long-term association with multi-instrumentalist K. K. Null in the group Absolut Null Punkt. Early in 2009, Murayama and Northam released Moriendo Renascor on Xing Wu, an experimental music label from Malaysia, based on recordings and meetings between 2003 and 2004. Moriendo Renascor is their second release together, although the exact chronology is somewhat conflicted. Northam's current web site says that they first met 2003, but the information from their first release together, a mini-CD and download entitled They Stood Around and Watched says it was recorded in 2001. In addition, the music on the earlier release is considerably less processed, exhibiting layers of percussion and flute that could have been the raw feed from a live improvisation. No such clarity is present on Moriendo Renascor, which steers much more towards Northam's composted sound, where layer upon layer is turned, seeded, and activated to become a set of murky, atmospheric electroacoustic pieces.

Compost is an apt metaphor for this collection, whose title means "In dying, one is reborn," a sentiment common to many religions as well as gardening, and here expressed in a nearly extinct French dialect. The album is full of complex ambient drones, barely audible voices and little murmurings occasionally audible, but mostly exhibiting gentle undulations of natural processes brought out through Northam's composting. These drones provide the backdrop for wooden rustlings, stone scrapings, high-pitched whistlings and swishing, occasional bells, and various small details extracted from field recordings. There are few traces of overtly electronic sounds; even these may dissolve into a more natural provenance. The pieces have their own internal cycles, not exactly a narration, but movement from loud roars to very quiet, with sharp internal transitions that belie the track separations (which are inconclusive anyway, with four tracks identified as I, IV, III and II, and ordered differently on the back cover and the inner sleeve). Murayama and Northam use these quiet ambient drones to focus the attention on mysterious foreground activities, whose origins defy elucidation even as they draw in the listener. Drones drift through the pieces like streams through a forest, creating a remarkable sonic environment that reflects the natural ones in Jura and rural France where Murayama and Northam created the work.

January 2009 also saw the release of a solo piece entitled Memory of A, a mini-CD on the Parisian label Taâlem. This is Northam's first solo release since Go in 2006, a tribute to his father, which was also his last release using the mnortham alias which graced nearly all of his previous work. Memory of A is based on recordings that Northam made on a "microtuned tubular zylophone" at the Adishakti Center in Pondicherry, India, in December, 2007. It feels like a new direction for Northam, where the original unaltered recordings intermingle the composted sounds. The dramatic opening, an intense buzzing vibration, is pure timbre, not clearly tied to a zylophone, but it evolves into a full, quietly evolving harmonic drone, with the first unprocessed tones showing up about five minutes into the piece, just as the buzzing is fading out. Northam comments on the unusual winter rain during the recordings, so doubtless this became part of the constant background drone. Crows and crickets show up, giving a sense of space to the music. The relatively constant zylophone tones, alternating the stereo field and hanging limpidly like a mobile, act as the background to a brief sections of unrecognizable origins, scrapes and a rush of tumbling white noise, eventually luxuriating in a series of low tones that seem to resonate forever. The harmonic spectrum widens in the last few minutes, including what sounds like some kind of primitive horn. The progression of the piece from the initial harsh tones through the drifting middle section to the annunciation of the horn provides a sense of narrative, rooted in Northam's own experience but open for the listener's personal illumination.

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An Opening in the Earth: Recovered is limited to 500 copies and comes in a full color wallet with three postcard inserts. Faria has somewhat limited distribution, but I got mine from and/OAR. Moriendo Renascor is available from many of the usual suspects (and/OAR, Erstdist, Mimaroglu, etc.) and comes in a gatefold sleeve made from recycled paper. Due to a printing problem, a handwritten poem by Lionel Marchetti on the inner sleeve is virtually invisible, but is available as a jpeg at Xing Wu, or in plain text at Northam's site. Neither of these releases is available as a download, but with their first releases of 2009, including Memory of A, Taâlem is making their releases available in lossless FLAC format, with full artwork.