Schwabinggrad Ballett: Schwabinggrad Ballett

This album consisting of seventeen pieces, lasting 45 minutes has some real brilliant tracks and some very good, but half of it is rather a mediocre and unfinished effort. Normally I would complain (as it is really irritating to hear unfinished songs from a group that is able to write brilliant ones), but now I definitely recommend this album, as it is so fresh that is really rare nowadays. It slaps the listener gently but still you can feel it is a slap.

We have here a lot of things: circus music, marching music, protest songs, Brechtian songs, wild folk, punk; and a little taste here and there from techno, electronics, free improv and the aggreable feeling of the early Industrial's "make noise with whatever is at hand"-attitude. Colourful and diverse, but unified with an overall anarchist attitude: what is important is not the results, but attacking everything, finding the subversive moment in pop(ular) music, or the moment that can be turned subversive. They do it easily, with no apparent effort, and don't seem to bother themselves with the rest - very healthy attitude, provided that the listener also can enjoy it: and as I said, most of the time I do enjoy it, sometimes very much.

The opener Under Control is totally awesome: the intro of the strings, the "dark gothic" bassline, the austere male vocals, the female choir that can convey the horror and the extasy of being "under control of a mighty force" (as the lyrics goes); plus how the drums enter after the second minute, and the spicy little screams of the strings... It could have been a perfect dark hymn, but it has a real nice twist that no goth who takes himself seriously could swallow. But indeed taking themselves seriously is not the business of Schwabinggrad Ballett.

Another fine song is ICE Bertolt Brecht with its melody in the mood of ironic spleen (yes, that seems to be a contradiction) and the rythms made with various objects, and some guitar and sax hidden in the background.

There are lots of instrumental songs with great stylistic variety, some of them are strong and/or funny; the weaker ones are in the second half of the album, but maybe I get tired a little bit by the time I get there.

Schwabinggrad Ballett seems to be curiously close to Laibach, even though seemingly nothing could be farther from the music that works only when played with a wooden face, than the wide but bitter smile of the anarchist clowns mocking everything. The base of similarity is the research for the political content of popular music, avoiding the easy and dangerous seduction of writing a parody.

The group's main interest doesn't seem to lie in making albums, but I hope they will do others and fulfill the promise of this debut release. I think we deserve it (in at least two senses).

(You can learn more about the group at their website, info in English can be downloaded from here. Schwabinggrad Ballett is published by Staubgold. This review is a translation from Hungarian published on Ultrahang.)

Anla Courtis, Pablo Reche: transistores de aire .ep

I'm tempted to write a blurb like "Now, that's what I call minimal drone music!", but that would wholly miss the point. Yes, this new release of CON-V by two Argentinean experimental artists is quite minimal (in the sense that you hear only a few sounds here) and nothing else than drone: long, low-pitched drones (presumably coming from a guitar) with occasional shifts in the pitch, moves in the stereo field, and some tiny quiet noises added here and there; there are also a few moments of overdrive, but I'm not quite sure whether they're in the music or caused by my headphones. Notwithstanding, calling it minimal drone would mask the main peculiarity of this 19 minutes piece of music.
Most music want something from the listener; they want you to have certain feelings at certain points, they have their tricks to grab and guide your attention, they flatter of frighten (and then most of the time soothe) you. This is true not only about pop music, though it is most visible there. (Laibach built the second half of their career on this assumption.)
There are only a few examples of music that does not want anything from the listener, and this EP is one of them. It is like the realisation of the dream of some avantgarde movements: to create a piece of art that exists on its own, not being the duplicate of anything in the "outside world" (nor the "inside world" of the psyche).
transistores de aire .ep doesn't contain any ornaments (or condiments, as the website's release note puts it); it doesn't have the usual structural points that tells you how to react to the music (intro, gradation, climax and the likes). It certainly has a structure, but it is a structure of a being totally independent of the listener, unaware of him or her. It also breathes and moves somewhere, but you don't know its aim - it is only known to this creature.
Calling it cold would implicate some intentional relation to the listener; but this music doesn't care whether you like it or not. Though I must tell I really like it.

kinoro shel rothschild - requiem dub

This album is the fourth full-length by kinoro shel rothschild, released by Miklatakiltim on CD-R and freely downloadable mp3 (the downloads section is here). It is beautiful and disturbing at the same time; works quite nice when listened in the background, but reveals its subtleties with close listening.
All the ten tracks are based on a repetitive, beautiful melody played on the piano, synths or guitar; around this core, some other melodies are arranged, blurred with dubby effects, which adds a certain ambientish quality to the record. And then come lots of everyday noises; sometimes they are distant soundscapes that withdraw to the backgroud, sometimes they are harscher and more "agressive", fighting for your attention. And the last ingredients are lots of speech-samples, sometimes looped or echoed, pitch-shifted, sometimes left untouched.
The whole record reminds me of the more ambient-styled Muslimgauze releases; except where the latter is blurred and hard to grasp, Rothschild's tracks have a more definite, focused character. Their emotional character shines through even the most chaotic moments: these are beautifully melancholic (almost-)songs.
My only problem is with the speech samples; though I really don't know anything about their political content (lacking all knowledge about "Israeli black panthers movement back at the 70's"), the musical "usage" of them is sometimes a bit to didactic to my ears; and pitch-shifting and other effects on the human voice are too easily fall to clichés, a trap Rothschild doesn't manage to avoid all the times.
But this is just a minor problem which doesn't prevent me from recommending this really nice release.

Larkian: Droxma_1

The first solo release of the young netlabel Adozen by the also young Larkian is really "beautifully crafted" as the label describes it; its strength lies more in its superb sense of timing, its structure than the sounds themselves.
"Based on guitar sound and feedback", it features mainly the not-so-thick flow of sounds that at the same time reminds you of drone and of psychedelic rock (certainly its more experimental side); for the most of the time of its 24 minutes duration, some tiny rhytmic noises (presumable also made with the guitar) are adding loose counterpoints.
What is the most exciting about this release that it manages to carve out its own place between the strategies of drone and of psychedelic music; which is quite a paradox, as drone mostly has a strong sense of stability (where changes often occur imperceptibly) while the kind of psychedelic music that is evoked here mainly uses the strategy of raising and raising and raising the tension - and then erupting at a cathartic culmination point.
For the first part of Droxma_1, the music (and the listener) is hesitating (perhaps lazily, an appropriate attribute used by Disquiet in a slighty different context) between the sense of stability and raising the tension; the you feel that things are getting thicker: you are waiting for the catharsis; but then in the last part, you get only the aftermath of the catharsis.
But it's not quite true: the catharsis is definitely there, except you can not show or hear its definite place (contrary to most psychedelic rock music). It is there everywhere and nowhere; one is tempted to say it comes afterwards, but certainly is not; neither consciously nor unconsciously, you hear it in retrospect. This is why this music certainly deserves repeated listening: you hope you will find it next time but you're sure you won't. And you know this is much better than the well-known worn-out catharsis you get most of the time.

Björgúlfsson / Pimmon / Thorsson: Still Important Somekind ...

Full length title being Still Important Somekind Not Normally Seen (Always Not Unfinished), this CD was publiched by Crónica, a Portugese label in 2004.
More often than not, collaborative live laptop improvisations like this one turn out to be bad, and especially when you hear them on disc. Maybe because though the computer allows unprecedented freedom in generating the sounds, on the other hand it destroys the frames within which musicians of (more) traditional instruments can improvise together.
Two main features I often miss from collaborative laptop improvs: a sense of real and delicate communication between the musicians; and a sense of overall structure or aim. Most of the time you can hear only the most basic elements of structuring: layering, raising the tension, counterpoints, radical switches (and perhaps that's all); but these work only on the small scale, and on the whole, most of the music seems to be a shapeless, aimless mass. I don't say it's out of intrinsic necessity; I guess it's only a lack of tradition; and I don't say that there are not exceptions, but I guess it's a common experience between lovers of experimental music that live collaborations of two (or more) artist you really like turn out to be boring and disappointing.
Well, the Björgúlfsson/Pimmon/Thorsson album is also formless and aimless, but its greatest merit is that it can turn this quality to be an advantage; maybe I could also say it reflects on its formlessness. They do it by introducing some subtle, hardly perceptible, even a little bit perverse kind of humour. Both the Islandic artist (one, Helgi Thorsson being a current member of Stilluppsteypa, other, Heimir Björgúlfsson is now an ex-member) and Pimmon from Australia are known for both of their sense of abstraction and humour; and these two, otherwise rarely combined features work here as well.
The sounds used are pretty much from the realm of "abstract" music: bleeps, drones, charming low and disorientating high frequencies, alienated and twisted rhythms, sometimes a bit of ambient textures. What is exciting is not the sounds themselves but the structure, how they are put together. Upon close listening, I find playfulness, even a little bit of teasing each other; instead of using the usual "well, I'll put these sounds besides yours as they sound good together"-method, I rather hear "I'll put these sounds in as they absolutely at odds with yours", and some playful "hey, here are these sounds - what can you do about them?"
And this is very funny and exciting - if you hear it, if you are "trained" enough to be able to listen to structures, not being distracted by the abstractness of the sounds themselves. And if you are not distracted by the parts which are not as good as others, as they inevitably exist here. And well, maybe this interpretation is also triggered by the cover images drawn by Thorsson: they're grotesque, charming and a bit frightening.
And maybe besides the three musicians, Robert Hampson bears a great responsibility for this result, as he edited the live recordings made at Earational Fest, 2002.
(This review is a translation of the one I wrote in Hungarian for Ultrahang.)