Reviews: experimental

Sometimes you are pointed to some projects and when reading the information you can’t really believe it. This happened to me when getting information about the compilation The noise and the city on the French netlabel Autres Directions…

I?ve always liked the 3? CD format a lot, they look nice, they ask for custom packaging, and the music is not too long. On this simple but nicely packed CDR by Punck, is one 20 minute piece of concrete ambient recordings and minimal composition. The recordings are very delicate and immediately remind of the works of Toy Bizarre, Steve Roden or Small Cruel Party…

Jason Kahn and Jon Mueller produced the music on this 18 minute Mini-CD entirely from different sorts of paper, from commercial to special handmade paper. The result is a dense and microscopic sound journey in which the artists zoom in and out of the sound of paper…

When I first got this CD, I thought it looked really unprofessional, and quite unappealing. A simple layout in a printed paper cover. For some strange reason these first impressions are usually reflected in the music presented. In this case I would like to admit that this is an exception…

Dead Raven Choir aka Smolken, I believe a Texan of Polish origin, is a curious act of which I reviewed work before. This time he has worked together with Never Presence Forever to create an album filled with strange soundscapes. Smolken’s rather sad traditional folk elements (cello) are combined with the distorted noise and drones of Never Presence Forever…

SQE is the project of J. Greco, an American musician who also works under the name ?The Fruitless Hand?. Greco already released three other works under the names SQE and SQI (smooth quality excrement/instrument) on which he collaborated with Ure Thrall (amongs others). The previous releases focussed entirely on — slightly psychedelic — dark ambient drones…

?Minimal Self? is a new project by John Everall, who is well known for his project ?Tactile? which has links to Coil and other famous projects such as Scorn and Pan Sonic. Everall, is also known as the label-manager of the Sentrax label. John Everall uses electronic instruments to create minimal and static soundscapes with bits of noise and lots of looping synthetic sounds…

The ?cult? group Ultra released some years ago on DOM America, and was now re-issued on Stateart?s Avant label. On this CD we can find 26 short tracks of ingraspable, unprocessable and unclassifiable weird music…

On this strange double CD by the Antifrost and Domizil record labels we can find live recordings and collaborations between artists of both labels. Artists include: Ilios, Coti, Jason Kahn and Steinbruchel…

The music on this CD is apparently based on a short story by David Toop about – you guessed it right – a doll creature. The story is a kind of bizarre tale of a sexless creature of which I do not know what to tell, except that it is kind of a sad freak. I never liked dolls very much, in fact they always used to scare me (just as clowns and old ladies with too much make-up did)…

o.blaat is apparently a female laptop performance artist from New York who does a lot of performances in the art scene all over the world. This kind of thing makes me somehow doubt the quality of the music presented. First of all I really dislike so called ?laptop-performances?…

And another compilation from the Bip Hop label, continuing their Bip_Hop generation series. This time the artists involved are Taylor Dupree, Emisor, Fonica, Fm3, Ghislain Poirier and Janek Schaefer. My experiences with the Bip Hop generation series haven’t always been happy ones. Even though often the artists on the compilations do appeal to me…

Sometimes you recieve a promo that says nothing to you, and then you hope the promo letter will give you some clues on the release you have in your cd player. With this CD that was certainly not the case. Except for naming the projects the contributors have played in, and names they have played with, the letter itself is as strange as the release…

Microtonal composers Heimir Bjorgulfsson, Helgi Thorsson (both of Stilluppsteypa) and Pimmon performed at the Melkfabriek in Den Bosch and recorded this CD, which is their live set. The sound got edited by Robert Hampson (Main). The CD contains a mix between microtonal noise, clicks and drones, and sporadic electronic beats…

This project with the strange name ?@c? delivers a moody soundtrack of experimental live-improvisation with guitar and other soundsources. Soft drones and an occasional chitter are used to create a sloooow soundscape. The effect of the typical use of minimal guitar is quite remniscent of the post-rock delivered by labels such as Kranky…

Cronica must be one of the most active Portugese labels in the underground of electro-acoustic and experimental music. Two new CD?s by Paolo Raposo & Marc Behrens, and by Ran Slavin further define the musical direction of this upcoming label. ?Further Consequences of Reinterpretation? is a collaboration between the well known experimentalist Marc Behrens, and the less known Paolo Raposo…

Shimmer is a CD full of highly abstract, and often high-pitched ambient drone based on the sounds of string instruments with elements of jazz-improvisation and hints of voices and other organic sources.

Lionel Marchetti is a French composer who has been very active lately. With releases on Metamkine and Staalplaat, he is one of the upcoming composers in the field of ambient-concrete-noise music. This Mini-CD contains material that reminds me most of a noisey and less subtle version of the works of Iannis Xenakis, the legendary Greek composer and one of the founders of ?Musique Concrete?…

Mego is a label that releases a lot of music that can be called experimental electronics. This can range from subtle and minimal electronic compositions to full-out (and unsubtle) noise and sound collages. This CD by Zeena Parkins and Ikue Mori therefore came as quite a surprise. First of all the music is not entirely electronic…

Lasse Marhaug is well know for his involvement in Norway?s experimental music scene (read: noise scene). He releases numerous releases of harsh and soft noise, performed everywhere and collaborated with artists such as Aube and Merzbow. This collaboration is with someone called ?Courtis?, whom, I must admit, I have never heard before…