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...according to our Brian on Thu 10 Nov, 2011.
This is apparently going to be double-beard or uber-chin. We can't quite decide. Utilising everything from viola, cardboard, church organ, megaphone and erm....polystyrene, these two berzerkers revel in creating a strange, sinister sound-world that creeps you out as much as fascinates you. I once read a lovely picture book called The Tin Forest to my girlfriend's young boy and the first ten minutes of this comprise the “unreleased” soundtrack to that book in my mind. Trying to describe it in a non-academic manner is just as difficult as intellectually boring you to death, something which I'm not particularly adept at (well boring you to death maybe, yeah!) but the polystyrene sounds fantastic. There's lots of glitchy organic sounds, scrunching, creaking (oh that's Business Lady rocking on her chair, sorry!), metallic twattery, concrete atmospherics and hovering ambient auras occurring. Side two continues in this freeform improv vein, some right old gibbering electronic pooting and whirring happening here and there...the production is absolutely amazing though, even though it's all a bit of a challenging listen. There's no wall noise or horrid frequencies here, it's quite a playful record that utilises silence and space at interludes to dramatic affect. Business Lady has her ear plugs in which means emphatically this isn't for the party-poppers out there. Like we say here, ultimate chin, get yer twirly beards out!...
Its that we know that Bocian Records is from Poland, but if we would just look at the roster of artists they release, it could seem that they are from Australia. Here we have two more musicians from down under, James Rushford and Joe Talia, who have collaborated before with Jon Rose and Oren Ambarchi. Armed with a whole bunch of instruments they recorded their work in different places (Melbourne and Rotterdam, The Netherlands). These instruments include viola, piano, ARP 2600, polystrene, megaphone, cardboard, church organ, chamber organ, brake drums, steel drums, ocarinas, voice (all credited to Rushford), drumkit, spring reverb, Roland System 700, Revox B77, brake drums, steel drums, bass drum, tam tam and crotales (Talia) with Anthony Pateras on Doepfer A-100). I assume these recordings from four different places were all done in a sort of improvised way, which was later collated into the two pieces that are now on the record. I think this is an amazing record - right up thestreet where I like it most. It combines various things, such as improvisation, electro-acoustic music and composition. Massive blocks of sound are cut with sparse electronics, collage like but never chaotic or out of control. If anything, this reminded me of the old work of Mnemonist and Biota who worked from with similar ideas of improvisation and studio techniques, perhaps sometimes from a more rock context, whereas Rushford and Talia seem to have a more musique concrete like background. Two sides, perhaps only fifteen minutes per side, which is surely not enough. Bring on a CD with bonus material, please ! (FdW)
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