Dots Review

http://www.vitalweekly.net/764.html

BEN GWILLIAM & JASON ZEH - DOTS (CD by Korm Plastics)
Z'EV / KK NULL - EXTRA SPACE, EXTRA TIME (CD by Korm Plastics)

The Brombron project itself is work a true work of art and a good reason to the fact that the Netherlands is one of the world's leading countries in field of sound art. The conceptual idea behind Brombron was originally established as a co-production between legendary Dutch label Staalplaat and the venue for experimental music, Extrapool. Two or more musicians become artists in the residence of Extrapool. Equipped with the recording studio of Extrapool, the artists can work on a collaborative project that will be released in the Brombron-series. Fifteen releases from year 2000 forward is the result of the Brombron project, and now the time has come for the 16th and 17th edition in the series.

16th release is the result of the joint venture between U.S artist Jason Zeh and U.K. artist Ben Gwilliam. Jason Zeh is a magnetic cassette tape specialist from Bowling Green Ohio, who creates music in a combination between drone, electro-accoustics and noise. Ben Gwilliam (b. 1980) is a sound artist active in the fields of sound installation and also working as a curator with a number of interesting art exhibitions around the U.K. During their days in at the Extrapool, the two artists developed the materials for present album titled "Dots". The materials are built of sounds derived from prepared tape, related machinery, and other magnetic sourcing including posting, heating, freezing, and puncturing tape. The expression is first of all subdued approaching the almost inaudible level. Subtle high frequency sound drones winds meanwhile discreet noise patterns buzzes from underneath. The result is quite elegant and very intense. Ambient music pushed to the extremes.

Next and 17th album in the Brombron-series is an interesting collaboration between two legends of the noise and industrial-scene. Z'EV (aka Stefan Joel Weisser) has been around in the experimental music scene for a long time already. His brand of scrap-metal and found object percussion originates back to the early seventies. Creating his own instruments from various metals and plastics, he has placed himself at the forefront of the movement that became known as "industrial". He was among others one of the described forefront industrial pioneers in the legendary "Industrial Culture Handbook" (1983). In the more recent years, he has returned to working with electro-acoustic manipulations. Fellow artist at the extrapool studios is one of the top composer's of Japanese noise scene. Starting his career in the early 80's by performing guitar improvisations in the clubs and streets of Tokyo, Kazuyuki Kishino a.k.a. K.K. Null continued by collaborating with among others Merzbow and others from the extreme noise scene of Tokyo. The two quite different noise artists has come out with a very interesting album as the result of their studio-days at the Extrapool. The expression on the album "Extra space, extra time" seems like a very nice combination of the style of both artists. Percussion patterns derived from metal materials and other sorts of acoustic banging circulates hand in hand with rumbling noises changing between full throttle and subtle. What makes this release certainly interesting is the way that the twosome manage to blend noisy textures with handmade percussive patterns. Hordes of noise drones and pulses moves alongside the intense tribal drum patterns of Z'EV. The main parts of the six works of the album carrying the title "Extra space, extra time", opens slowly with distant sounds that builds over time until powerful drum patterns set in to create a trancelike atmosphere. Thus despite the abrasive nature of the album, the works has a great appeal thanks to the excellent rhythm textures created by one of Industrial music most steady-going percussion artists, Z'EV. A masterful collaboration on this one! (Niels Mark)
Address: http://www.kormplastics.nl

Brombron 16: Dots

My collaborative Cd With Ben Gwilliam Just came out last month and I just got my copies last week. Here is the info about the release from Frans De Waard's Website.

Ben Gwilliam/Jason Zeh - Brombron 16: Dots
Korm Plastics kp 3036CD only

Korm Plastics is proud to present the sixteenth release in the Brombron series. Originally a co-production between Staalplaat and Extrapool, it is now hosted by co-curator Frans de Waard. In the year 2000 Frans de Waard and Extrapool started the Brombron project. Two or more musicians become artists in residence in Extrapool, an arts initiative in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, with a fully equipped sound recording studio. These artists can work in a certain amount of time on a collaborative project; a project they always wished to do, but didn't have the time or the equipment to realize.

Jason Zeh, a magnetic cassette tape composer and xerox artist from Bowling Green Ohio, creates music that successfully combines elements of drone, electro-accoustic and noise. Zeh’s work relies on the creation of intimate social encounters through the use of extreme quiet punctuated by steep inclines toward moments of extreme loudness. Live shows combine a mixing of previously recorded source sounds with real time manipulation of cassette tape through the use of modified tape decks and dismantled cassettes. The relationship Zeh has to the cassettes and tape decks used to record and manipulate the sounds is not unlike that of many laptop artists in terms of the meticulous sculpting of sound that is employed in order to create emotionally charged and aesthetically dynamic compositions without the stifled and overly technical feel of some electronic music produced by computers.

Ben Gwilliam (b. 1980) is a sound artist active in the fields of sound installation, curation, improvising new music and performance. He describes his practice as drawing attention to those sounds between things, be it objects, spaces or recordings. It is these sounds and their contexts that reveal visual and musical processes of listening and looking. It is from this curiosity about sound-making/recording/finding and how abstract/descriptive that sounds can be, that he makes parallels and similarities unpicking the relationship between those uncovered sounds and moments of primary experience. In 2004 he was awarded an AHRB Postgraduate Award. In 2007 he was nominated for the Jerwood Artist platform Prize. His work has been featured on Resonance FM, and has work in several CD and Publication Releases. His has performed with artists such as Claus van Bebber, Espen Jensen, Helmut Lemke, Lee Patterson, and Jez Riley French, Rhodri Davies, Phil Durrant, Matt Davis, Hainer Woermann, Chris Heenan, Michael Vorfeld, and Sascha Demand. Since 2004 he has curated several experimental music and sound exhibitions including ‘re:sound’ 2005, UK, ‘Sculpting with Air’ Liverpool Biennial 2006 (co-curated with Lee Patterson), ‘then the silence increased’, 2007 UK (co-curated with Helmut Lemke). In 2008 he was Artist in Residence at Artist Unlimited, Bielefeld, DE.

This CD contains music that was created using sounds 'derived from prepared tape, related machinery and othe magnetic sourcing including posting, freezing and puncturing tape'. Mastering by Jos Smolders.

http://www.kormplastics.nl/News.html

I rarely listen to things I have recorded. But right now I am trying to finish up a piece for this new record that should be out in January or February. Side B needs some edits. I was unsure about the composition, wondering if it was any good at all. Aaron Dilloway suggested that I merely edit the beginning. Really, It could be more accurately described as an introduction as it is a brief bit that leads into the main body of the piece. In any case, I listened to the track thinking that it might require significant revision. However, it seems that since I have forgotten what the track sounds like, it is actually much better than I remember. I still agree that the intro needs to be worked on, but I m quite pleased with the rest. I have been trying out a few ways to change the beginning and think I might be onto something. Perhaps I will be able to finish it tomorrow.

As I was saying, I rarely listen to things I have recorded. While trying to determine how to edit this piece, I listened through the track that will be side A of the same record. I wanted to remind myself of what that one sounded like for 2 reasons. The first is that I wanted to make sure that any of the changes I was thinking about making would actually fit: I needed to make sure that the tracks would still be thematically linked given the changes I was about to make. The second is that I wanted to make sure that the tracks would not be too similar in narrative structure.

The result of this new listen is that I have a renewed love of both tracks. It is nice to be away from these pieces long enough to be able to discover them fresh. In this case, it had been since the summer that I last listened to them. That seemed to be just enough time and distance for them to sound better than I had remembered.

After listening to these two tracks, my Itunes went to a track of mine from quite a while ago: "Heraclitus." I often remember liking the CD but am usually afraid to listen to it. I fear that if I listen to it, it will be no good. Probably the last time I listened to this CD was in 2009. Hearing it again just now, felt good. The record is good. It is really nice to be reminded sometimes that doing this work is not futile and sometimes it works out okay.

For your information, here is a link to Frans DeWaard's review of the cd from when it originally came out.

"JASON ZEH - HERACLITUS (CD by C.I.P.)
In the very first few minutes of Jason Zeh's debut CD (following several CDR releases including one on Gameboy Records) we hear a 'tabletop cassette recorder over a candle flame while recording'. This is the very basic thing that is used to create the rest of the composition - all melted into one piece, from start to finish. The processing stages this went through all deals with cassettes, in which literally everything from the cassette, the shells, guide rollers and pressure pads is used to alter the sound. All of these stages were recorded and from all these recordings the final composition was created. A dense work, which at times had some similarities to the work of Howard Stezler (especially his most recent work 'Bond Inlets') or Brutum Fullmen, of corroded sounds, rotten sounds and decay in general. Divided into several parts, with quite some dynamics (although things never get really loud), this is simply one of the most engaging things I heard recently. While on one hand connected to the world of microsound, mainly through the final composition, the techniques are more or less ancient, yet even by any old standard, this all sounds mysterious and not muffled, or hidden in a bath of hiss, like many of his ancestors did sound on tape. It owes in the technique department more to the old masters of musique concrete, yet with an entirely different outcome. As Heraclitus said you can never step into the same river twice (panta rhei), you can loop a tape, but it never sounds the same. Highlight, for me, of this week. (FdW)
Address: http://www.cipsite.net"

Also, on an unrelated note, here is a sound sample Frans recently posted. It is a clip of Brombron 16 that Ben Gwilliam and I recorded in Nijmegen Netherlands last October. The CD should be out now on Frans DeWaard's Korm Plastics.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is such a bizarre emotion.

It feels like an odd ache: an insatiable longing for something that you can't exactly place and that you can never be certain is real.

I remember the first time I became consciously aware of my tendency toward nostalgia. I was around 23. I was driving in a car, probably coming home from a show. I began to feel that I was becoming older and I feared that I was losing my grip on something.

Perhaps nostalgia is a kind of fear.

On one hand, that ache associated with nostalgia is rather painful and provokes a profound sense of terror. On the other, the fact that it has persisted, in very much the same form, for so many years, suggests to me that whatever it is that I fear losing my grasp on is not anything real. If it was real, I would think that the pain would go away as I fully lost whatever it is that I am trying to hold on to, or it would get more and more unbearable as the loss became more and more irreversible.

For now, I will just enjoy those moments like the perverse pleasure that can be gained from becoming absorbed by unrequited love.

Fliers for unrealized performances

A Natural History of Failure

Re-posted from http://sinksandsources.blogspot.com/

The third Human Quena Orchestra album, A Natural History of Failure, was released on Utech Records this past week. The recording lineup consisted of Brandon Nickell (AEMAE, isounderscore), Jason Zeh, David Graham (Requiem), Matthew H. Reis (Teeth Collection), Renata Castagna (Samothrace, Black Christmas), and Ryan Unks. It is available directly through utechrecords.com, and also from Aquarius Records, who had the following kind words to say about it:

"Part three in the Human Quena Orchestra's ever evolving sonic mission to create what could possibly be the darkest, and most intense post industrial metallic blacknoise EVER. Not like there's a lot of competition, and having worked our way now through all three records, even if there were any other outfits foolhardy to have a go at HQO, they'd most likely be dispatched in short order. As anyone who's heard either Means Without Ends or The Politics Of The Irredeemable can attest to. Easily, two of the bleakest, most abject and miserable collections of hellish hymns and burntblack dronescapes ever committed to tape. HQO's modus operandi is a combination of caustic black buzz, of pounding machine like percussion and howling anguished shrieked vokills, all wound tight into throbbing, churning, nightmarish chunks of jagged black filth, and crusty musical misanthropy. Think the usual suspects, Khanate, diSEMBOWELMENT, Winter, Skepticism, Esoteric, even Swans, and then tune it further down, slow it further down, pile on layer after layer of suffocating buzz, of oozing soul crushing low-end, and let it fester, and rot, and crumble and decay, and you'll begin to get close to the strange and sick soundworld of HQO.
A Natural History Of Failure finds HQO mastermind Ryan Unks, joined by a handful of likeminded volunteers, each adding their own secret ingredients to Unks' noxious brew, and weirdly enough, if anything, more players has not resulted in more sound, or more accurately, the sound itself does seem MORE, more dense, heavier, thicker, more filthy and fraught with emotional peril, but the songs, the structures, somehow seem even more minimal. The opening track is more a thick, pulsing drone, a dense layered funereal creep, the sounds burnt and blown out, a single riff slowed down to near static, and left to churn and chug in slow motion, while more and more buzz and thrum and hiss is piled on top, a sound so heavy and so dense, it seems constantly on the verge of collapse. The second track two is more drone than crush or pummel, beginning as a hushed distant throb, an impossibly deep low end that drifts beneath ethereal streaks of grey melody, processed voices, and textured whirs, the sound builds to a furious roil, only to settle back down into what sounds like a symphony of warped SUNNO))) records, being played simultaneously with the needle stuck in the runoff grooves. And so it continues, a warped tarpit drift, vocals only show up in track three, and even then, so low in the mix, they just sound like jagged shards of static, nearly suffocated by the heaving rumbles above.
The whole first half of the record is constant low end punishment, but part 5 is where it changes, a processed voice, stretched into a perpetual moan, a looped bit of human bred sonic texture, over a lumbering bit bit of low-end, soon subsumed by a dense cloud of corrosive hiss, of swirling white noise, which leads directly into the most minimal track on the record, a hushed minimal pulse, warm and languid, but still subtly menacing, laced with high end shimmer, and blurred tinkling melodies, leading you gently into a truly ominous and monstrous plod, a robotic pound, trudging along a series of deep buzzing swells, being slowly torn apart by some sort of static driven industrial grey noise demon, the sound rendered and recontextualized into a slowly stuttery field of deep whirs and jagged shards of crumbling static, before finally finishing off with a brief bit of muted beauty, again, the sound impossibly thick and heavy, but blurred into something almost shoegazey, but still grim and gorgeously hopeless."

Thoughts

I am thinking about getting my website going soon. Can I call it "On the Ruins of the Great Black Swamp?" or is that too long?