From the blurred, skittering brilliance of his 1997 collaboration with Jim O'Rourke & Nicholas Collins to his enlightening, radical remixes of both the relatively obvious (Ryuichi Sakamoto, Squarepusher, Takako Minekawa) & somewhat less so (Jimanica, Pizzicato 5) & on to current live-only workouts, these ears are once again revelling in the fecund hinterland & endless textural trickery of Markus Popp's Oval - triggered this time by his 11-track 'countdown' of web-only bonuses ahead of last Friday's release of retrospective flush-out (& multi-media extravaganza) OvalDNA...
"Short excerpt from a seriously cool live collaboration thing I did in 1997 with Jim O'Rourke (Guitar, Electronics) and Nicolas Collins (Trombone-driven Electronics). All three of us were located in a different office in the (then) newly built "business center" around Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie, remixing each other's soundfiles which were transported back and forth between the three offices on CD-Rs (!) - by bike messenger, no less. Those were the days..."
"Alternate version (read: less unnecessary distortion) of a track I contributed in 2000 to the "Elysian Fields" exhibition/CD-compilation and was supposed to serve as a quasi-soundtrack for films by Antek Walczak and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster exhibited at the Pompidou Center in Paris, France. This fairly rare compilation features Sonic Youth, Tortoise, The Sea & Cake, David Grubbs, Tom Verlaine, Jim O'Rourke etc and was released with the 400-page "Elysian Fields" catalog designed by Dutch group "Experimental Jet Set."
These ears have been twitching in anticipation ever since Vladislav Delay disclosed his first album for Raster-Noton in a recent interview with LMYE. The first excerpts from Vantaa seem to redeem all that expectancy - Narri ('fool' if your Suomi needs work...) in particular is a beautiful, beguiling piece in which a lop-sided rhythm, something like a wind-up toy starting to spasm, meshes with a shifting bed of ratchet, scrape & jangle to freight a moving, blurred theme.
To name it our Track of the Day is the bathetic least we can do...
Blurb: "Even though complex electronic manipulations are used, Vantaa wants to sound like a piece of nature, resulting in a mixture of techno/dub and organic textures. The tracks oscillate between a decadent, greyish, post-industrial sound cloud and the intimate atmosphere of a vast and desolate Finnish landscape. Ripatti plays with tiny rhythmic bricks that drift and collapse, but nevertheless create spaces that radiate calmness and tranquility. Being an experienced producer, he uses his know-how to layer compact sound fabrics in unusual ways. In this case, these elements arouse associations with gushing water, crackling wood, or growing grass. The tracks on Vantaa merge into each other and their density escalates with „Lauma“ into an energetic climax, which is all at once the ecstatic, shamanic and truly moving peak of the album."
Kitsch? Quatsch...taking ironic noodling & trilling into boombastic outer space: a new Leyland Kirby7" &, "for those Clayderman moments we all experience from time to time as we struggle for balance", a tinkling exclusive (not to LMYE, ahem...) linked to his eager to tear apart the stars.
Stream all below. Not sure these ears aren't more comfortable with the less comfortable maulings/rollings of Intrigue & Stuff, though (also below, completistly...).
Probably no coincidence that at least two of these pieces were mastered by the great Taylor Deupree - Savy's & Wenngren/Bissonnette's: not sure about the Illuha, ironically, though it would hardly be a surprise if it were too...
A darkly diverting Benoit Pioulardswag bag to follow up yesterday's post on Calder from his new Play Thelma. Besides a preview of this plangent, resonant EP ("Recorded at home throughout spring and summer 2011 with guitar, harmonium, voice, magnetic tape, bowed bells, cello, warnophone, and music box"), below hear a rewarding trio of unreleased workouts - two (including the exceptional, knotty I hate that I have this friendly face) again madedomestically but in just three days back in January, & the third a stately, twangy tape loop "created on the first 60 degree day of the year"...
