Arcane Candy

Do you remember that AMM album called Before Driving to the Chapel, We Took Coffee With Rick and Jennifer Reed? Of course you do. As it turns out, Rick and Jennifer Reed are actual human beings presently living on planet Earth, and one of them even plays in Frequency Curtain! I’ll let you guess which one. Joining the one Reed during this 2001 recording in their home base of Austin, Texas are Josh Ronsen, leader of an improv music + performance art outfit with the catchy name Brekekekexkoaxkoax and publisher of Monk Mink Pink Punk music magazine, and fellow media artist John Grzinich.
So, what kind of sound does Frequency Curtain offer to you, the discerning music listener? True to their name, they gargle up four long tracks of gritty electronic drones in which the vintage technology of sine wave generators and short wave radios are seamlessly layered with the infinitely itchy aural pixels of modern laptop computers. Painful, high-pitched tones and all kinds of brittle skittles meld with deep synth-like clouds and packs of percolating barbs, forming the perfect menacing backdrop for an all-night slumber party in a pitch black utility closet. And the black, abstract cover and psychedelic disc art–both of which are quite lovely and minimal–match the music perfectly. I highly recommended this CD for any and all drone fans who like it rough.

Label: Elevator Bath Catalog Number: eeaoa9 Format: CD Packaging: Digi-Pak Tracks: 4 Total Time: 54:52 Country: United States Released: 2002 More: Official

Text ©2009 Arcane Candy

Brandishing a bizarre band name that sounds like Popeye’s laugh followed by the throaty call of a tropical bird, Brekekekexkoaxkoax first appeared within the space-time continuum that we call home back in 1996 around Austin, Texas, where they secreted a great bog blob of improvised music, performance art and image projection into their immediate biosphere. Led by artist / musician Josh Ronsen, the outfit, featuring a large, rotating cast of characters, finally got up the gumption to release their first album a full decade into their existence. Emblazoned with the title We Used to be Such Good Friends, the homespun artifact presents four selections of spontaneous aural treats that span the years 2000 to 2005. Kicking off the proceedings with guitar, banjo, violin, flute, clarinet, oboe, organ, snare drum and electronics, “Haifa Hi-Fi” spreads out a nearly half-hour dollop of plinky-plonk prickly peanut clatter. After starting out extremely quiet and sparse, it starts to pick up a little steam after 20 minutes. Fans of AMM would have no problem with this piece.

Read the rest of this entry »

Once upon a time, there was a man with no neck. Due to the fact that he was neckless, this man was unable to swivel his head in any direction, which forced him to stare straight ahead at dull inanimate objects for lengthy periods of time. To make matters worse, he was also a blockhead. We’re talking a total organization man who played by the book, never wavering from the middle of the road. After seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and decades of living life as a total square, the Neckless One, as he came to be known, finally fixed his gaze upon the exact center of the universe, which is contained in a singularity ensconced deep within the forehead of a 1/24th scale marble / polystyrene laminated statue of the original all-seeing, all-knowing, all-creating consciousness. At that moment, the Neckless One’s bleak existence was shattered wide open by the appearance in his head of deep saurkraut-infused improvised space rock jams that were looser than water flowing down a craggy creakbed. The source of this wellspring was an entity with a similar name as the Neckless One; they were known around town (and throughout the Milky Way) as the No Neck Blues Band. Formed in 1992 in Harlem, New York, NNCK, as the seven-member ensemble is also known, originally took cues from such free-form improv outfits as AMM, Limbus 3 and A Handful of Dust, then went on to combine them with folk, psych and free jazz elements to spontaneously flow out the nine pieces on the CD in question (shown above), Intonomancy. Give it a whirl at your earliest convenience. Your head will be glad you did–even if it’s not supported by a neck.

Label: Sound@One Catalog Number: s@1#64 Format: CD Packaging: Jewel case Tracks: 9 Total Time: 67:43 Country: United States Released: 2002 More: De Stijl, Discogs, Forced Exposure

Text ©2014 Arcane Candy

For his third camping trip up on the peak of Mt. Innova, where he works as the operations manager, the young whipper snapper of a composer Chris Campbell dips his feet into the wading pools of two different musical worlds–avant-garde classical and indy almost-rock–and blends them stitchlessly. On this new CD, which is called Things You Already Know, Chris presents a loosely organized collection of sounds you never even knew belonged together…until now. Instrumentally, he achieves this by combining the unusual: propane tank drums, bowed psaltery and singing bowls, with the usual: guitar, cello, piano and drums. Opening with a brief overture called “Form = Emptiness,” Chris establishes an incredibly mellow mood with nothing more than a sparse, lyrical theme on piano accompanied by a bit of plaintive singing far off in the background. “Lord Byron” kicks it up a huge notch as it segues back and forth between oddly rhythmic woozy workouts on stringed instruments and percussion that coalesce into busy blurs, only to lapse into quiet, tinkling contemplation. Then, on a wooden nickel, some super lyrical violin sweeps you away into Swoonville for a while until–bam!–it’s off with your head as you’re sent packing back to that gray area of shambling oddities. This track perfectly encapsulates Chris’ aesthetic of “accumulation and punctuation,” which artistically reflects how the outside world gets inside each of us.

Read the rest of this entry »

Watch out for that sign up ahead! You know what I’m talking about: Men at Work. More specifically, it’s Road Works, the fourth album by the two men Christoph Gallio, a composer, and Beat Streuli, an artist. Written for sax, piano, synth, double bass and drums, Road Works, despite its plural name, is actually one long work divided up into 72 extremely short tracks that range from 13 blinks of an eye (13 seconds) up to almost a pop song (a whopping 2:07). The material seamlessly moves from pensive chamber jazz to field recordings of birds and dogs barking to upbeat jazz rock to melodic sax with synth drones to quiet stuttered electronics to cool melodic jazz to more field recordings combined with prickly improv to free jazz screams to drones with tinkles to melancholy piano ambience to free drum / fart synth workouts. My favorite part is the cool jazz with a gentle thunderstorm crackling in the background, which is an obvious yet perfect combo. Overall, Road Works is quite a quirky, fun little album chock-full of interesting aural nuggets suitable for fans of jazz and experimental music alike. Note: This package also contains a DVD, but unfortunately, it would not play in my laptop.

Label: Percaso Catalog Number: percaso 28 / 29 Format: CD / DVD Packaging: Mini-LP Gatefold Tracks: CD: 72 Total Time: CD: 48:54 Country: Switzerland Released: 2013 More: Official, Vimeo

Text ©2014 Arcane Candy

Laurie Spiegel (born 1945) is primarily a composer of electronic music best-known for the pieces she created in the 1970s at Bell Labs, which was also the home of James Tenney’s groundbreaking computer music of the ’60s. Originally released as a single LP in 1980, The Expanding Universe contains some of the work Laurie made in that time period, and has since been, uh, expanded into a double CD with a bunch of bonus tracks tacked on. Employing such archaic equipment as a room-sized Control Data Corporation DDP-224 computer console / keyboard, GROOVE (Generating Real-time Operations on Voltage-Controlled Equipment), a magnetic tape drive, a music keyboard, a 3-D joystick, a touch tone keypad, punch cards, three 1/4″ reel-to-reel two-track tape machines, analog synths, a washing machine-sized disk drive, sawtooth oscillators, voltage controlled amps, a plate reverb unit and a mixer, Laurie really had her work cut out for her. Yeah, I know you could do the same thing so easy on your iPhone now, but Laurie accomplished it all back in the days when it was a very labor intensive process. These pieces were composed then stitched together over a period of weeks or months in a situation that required Laurie to repeatedly walk up and down a long hallway and flights of stairs between the computer room and the analog equipment room to make the gear talk to each other. It’s safe to say the results paid off, as Laurie’s hard work birthed a music of such mesmerizing beauty,

Read the rest of this entry »

Founded way back in 1977 by composer Stephen Scott, The Bowed Piano Ensemble conjures up the myriad sounds of a chamber orchestra miraculously while employing only one instrument: the grand piano. On the back cover of their sixth album, Ice and Fire, the nine members of the ensemble look like a bunch of black-clad doctors hunched over the operating table performing surgery. And that’s precisely what they do: open up the wound (lid of the instrument) and tease out its guts to produce an array of aural pleasantries that nurse our sullied psyches back to health.

Read the rest of this entry »

The harsh environment of Alaska, where composer Matthew Burtner grew up, has exerted quite a big influence on some of his musical works. Take, for example, “Snowprints,” the second of three pieces on his new album of chamber music–featuring the ensemble NOISE on flute, violin, cello, guitar, piano, percussion, sax and computer–called NOISE Plays Burtner. Employing the sounds of recorded snow as a droning counterpoint to the acoustic instruments, this 15-minute centerpiece maintains a subtle web of minimal ambience that ranges from pastoral to squeaky to homely to ominous to outright intense. The ensemble maintains interesting playing throughout.

Read the rest of this entry »

Following up his excellent Target CD from 2011, the young avant-garde classical composer Keeril Makan (born 1972) returns with a smorgasbord of works spanning the years 2006-2010 that were at least partially derived from his dealings with depression. The meal begins with a Caesar’s salad known as “Mercury Songbirds,” a subtly wheezing, minimal / maximal time-stopper chock-full of droning alto flutes, cellos and violins peppered with occasional piping flutes and piano outbursts with lyrical Bacon Bits sprinkled on top courtesy of clarinet, plus some cool piano knocks. It’s quite strange the way this track combines dissonance and consonance in such an odd, unsettling way. The title was inspired by the increasing level of mercury found in Hudson Valley songbirds. You know that startled feeling you get when someone wearing a fright wig unexpectedly jumps out from behind a corner and screams at you? That’s what the beginning of “Husk” sounds like. And to think it was produced by a simple, dissonant harp strum and flute cry. Then, suddenly, amid a sustained web of tense oboe drones, the piece gets all Psycho shower scene on you as it continues to occasionally stab your ears with fabulous bursts of atonality.

Read the rest of this entry »

Who would ever imagine that electro-acoustic music could thrive in a place like Cuba? Not me! Alas, in the mid-20th century, Juan Blanco (1919-2008) became one of the earliest adopters of experimental music production in that small Caribbean island country, which surprisingly harbored quite a scene of avant garde painters, writers and composers who went on to put their stamp on the international stage. Not surprisingly, this scene coalesced into Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo, an actual group that was started and funded out of pocket by Blanco himself. After inventing the first sampling keyboard in 1942, a good two decades before that instrument came into popular use, Blanco got inspired by the musique concrete of Pierre Schaeffer and started composing electronic works in the early ’60s on some low-end tape decks that he ordered from Sears! As if that weren’t cool enough, Blanco then became the director of Instituto Cubana de Amistad con el Pueblo, where he staged concerts featuring artists ranging all the way from Luigi Nono to Pink Floyd! In the ’80s, after becoming “involved with multimedia performance, theater ballet, film and environmental sound pieces,” Blanco started the International Festival for Electroacoustic Music in Cuba, followed by the ’90s, when he began composing pieces on a NeXT computer. Collecting pieces from 1961-1993, the Nuestro Tiempo CD spans a full three decades, which formed just part of Blanco’s even longer and illustrious career. Collector scum may note that a few of these works previously appeared on LP on the Egrem label back in the ’70s and ’80s–very rare records which change hands for big bucks now.

Read the rest of this entry »