Fun Stuff > BAND
Wink Wink 2011 - A bit of a change this year
KurtMcAllister:
Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words - Lost In Reflections (Fang Bomb, 2008)
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--- Quote from: Tiny Mix Tapes --- http://www.tinymixtapes.com/music-review/dead-letters-spell-out-dead-words-lost-reflections
Thomas Ekelund (the man behind Dead Letters...) writes of the album that it is, to a large extent, an outgrowth of his diagnosis and subsequent battle with borderline personality disorder, and the attendant feelings of alienation, isolation, and the perturbation of the sense of self. He describes his personal degeneration as having gotten to the point where his image of himself was of “An empty shell containing oozing, black bile and nothing else.” For all this marked doom and gloom, it's interesting that the most salient feature of the album is its approachability.
A listener going into this album would be right to expect a plunging, pit-of-despair excursion through black fields draped with mist, the moaning intestines of glacial caverns and abandoned, decaying toy factories, and at points, we do get those sorts of typical dark ambient tropes. However, much more often we are submerged in a more subtle, profound, and strangely comforting seclusion. Set adrift on a sturdy but pliable raft of electronic snaps, crackles, and pops, we are borne gently to and fro by layered currents of iridescent guitar melodies and rolling swells of delicate fuzz. There is no doubt a strain of loneliness and pain suffered in solitude that runs through each of these songs, but it's the kind of neurosis that you can bring home to mom. As hard as this album tries to be tortured and inaccessible, it can't shake the fact that it's actually a very beautiful and generally pleasant experience.
This is not to say that we've got an I'm From Barcelona album on our hands here. There are a couple tracks (“Lost and Losing,” “In Crowded Rooms, On Empty Streets”) that at least break ground on that pit of despair, alerting us to the darker side to Ekelund's project; but even these moments end up resolving themselves into graceful phantasms of melodies. I suppose that these subtle swayings of emotion are just another manifestation of the album's theme, but as illustrations of an ailment that Ekelund says “inevitably drapes every aspect of life in shadows that range from shades of gray to coal black,” I can't help but feel that some of that terror and despair has not been fully transcribed.
If this album is meant to be a declaration and relation of feelings of anguish, existential anxiety, and sequestration, I must say that it has failed. However, there is a type of invitation here, a form of calling into loneliness. We are not asked to empathize with this album, and we are not dragged screaming by its tendrils into the heart of darkness. Instead we are nudged, led quietly by our hands to a place where someone has found something of value, and then we are left there. A child's fortress inside a giant rotting stump deep in the forest, a dock with no boat or house on the shore of a lake long since turned to swamp — we are left alone, sure, but we are also left with the hope of coming to terms with that fact and of finding something worth being alone for.
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Ryoji Ikeda - Test Pattern (raster-noton, 2008)
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--- Quote from: Tiny Mix Tapes ---http://www.tinymixtapes.com/music-review/ryoji-ikeda-test-pattern
"Caution! This CD contains specific waveform, impulse and burst data that perform a response test for loudspeakers and headphones. High volume listening of the last track may cause damage to equipment and eardrums."
So reads the disclaimer on the sleeve of Ryoji Ikeda’s new batch of auditory hallucinations entitled Test Pattern. Seems while Tipper Gore was getting her panties up in a bunch slapping Parental Advisory stickers on the albums of any rapper who would utter such profanities as ‘bitch this’ or ‘hoe that,’ the real threat lay in the prospect of conceptual sound artists damaging valuable electronics and deafening our nation’s experimental music fans. A similar warning graced the cover of Dataplex, Ikeda's 2005 release, with the one notable exception being the promise that playing it wouldn’t result in the demise of your CD player and/or ears. Dataplex was the first readily available document of Ikeda’s Datamatics series, a multimedia project dealing with the artist’s ongoing obsession with the sheer overload of data in the modern world.
Test Pattern is the second release in the series, and its techniques are part continuation and part departure from the material on Dataplex. As a pure auditory experience, it may be a step down from Dataplex, but what it lacks in sonics it makes up for in conceptual gold. Moreso than its predecessor, Test Pattern showcases Ikeda’s ability to derive meaning out of the most stripped-down sounds. A veritable Morse code awaits the listener on Test Pattern, with every sound dissected to its subatomic particles. You’ll hear tones, frequencies, blips and bleeps, but never notes, never melodies. With such an amusically stacked deck, you’d think it would be impossible to create anything even marginally interesting; for Ikeda, however — who, like Satie or Feldman, thrives on the austere — it’s a snap.
The real beauty of Ikeda’s work lies in its ability to provoke some of the deepest thoughts you’ve had on the nature of sound and, even, reality. I still remember sitting in my friend’s college dorm on an early psilocybin-fueled journey, listening to Ikeda’s 2001 release, Matrix; the disc consisted of one long sine wave whose properties were such that, in an enclosed room, the sound would change depending on your ears’ relation to the speakers. Climbing on top of furniture and seeking new aural vantage points, all involved were dramatically moving their heads and bodies in an attempt to modulate the tone and thus control it, a truly novel moment in my progression of understanding/having my mind blown about sound. That is the essence of Ryoji Ikeda: he throws everything you knew about reality out the window and thrusts open those rusted doors of perception.
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TheFuriousWombat:
Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words are awesome! People should download that album
Gavin Bryars' "Sinking of the Titanic" (1969)
From my blog
"Sinking of the Titanic" was Gavin Bryars' first major piece and it remains one of his best, a rarely performed, beautiful and original minimalist multi-media piece for orchestra. The germ of the composition comes from the story that the band on the Titanic went down with the ship playing the Episcopal hymn "Autumn." With this piece, that hymn is performed by the strings and echoed gorgeously and hauntingly in drifting waves throughout the rest of the orchestra. The piece evolves slowly, taking us quietly down with the ship to the ocean floor and then, many years later bringing the ship back up again as it is discovered and explored. Woodblocks ping out sonar beams, a bass clarinet weaves a warm and whirling journey beneath the waves, a crackling recording of an old woman recalling the evacuation of the ship swims up out of crumbling static now and again. The piece ends serenely beneath the ocean, winding through the halls of the decaying ship, faint, melancholy reminiscences of when it was full of life and music whispering beneath a thrumming pulse and snarled static. The hymn remains thematically present throughout, reemerging in full near the end through a glowing pulse of sound. Wonderfully evocative, this recording is gorgeously forlorn and haunting. Not positive which orchestra is performing here but they do a fantastic job in any case. The link is for the full performance, 1:12:35 in length.
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SWOON! at My Gravitas:
--- Quote from: JD on 30 Jan 2011, 14:58 ---Burzum - Fallen[2011](320kb/s)
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I heart yoooooooou
Orcusmars:
--- Quote from: KurtMcAllister on 30 Jan 2011, 16:07 ---Ryoji Ikeda - Test Pattern (raster-noton, 2008)
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Wow, this stuff really starts messing with your head after awhile.
KurtMcAllister:
--- Quote from: Orcusmars on 30 Jan 2011, 20:49 ---
--- Quote from: KurtMcAllister on 30 Jan 2011, 16:07 ---Ryoji Ikeda - Test Pattern (raster-noton, 2008)
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Wow, this stuff really starts messing with your head after awhile.
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I listened to two of his albums back-to-back and my nose started to feel stuffed up. It was a very strange experience. Also, that warning is no joke. Don't play this album very loudly, it will fuck shit up.
E: I have literally all of Mr. Ikeda's discography. I could upload all of it if you guys want. Plus a little more Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words as soon as I rip it from the cassette.
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