KILLED in CARS

D-Styles - Phantazmagorea (Beat Junkie Sound, 2002)

As I continue to move posts over from Blogger, I keep hitting on turntablism. I don’t really know if these posts resonate with the typical KiC reader. Feel free to chime in about that. I think one reason that these might not get as much RYM movement after posting is because the genre is one that is deceptively simple, at least from the sounds of it. In turntablism, the method is important, or at least an understanding of the techniques will enrich your listening.

Today hip-hop, and any music, really, can be assembled on a computer. It is quite possible that this record could be patched together from a series of WAV files in a software suite, and it would sound the same as it does. I would be lying if I could tell the difference between this and other records that I know are not vinyl-sourced and recorded while the player is working turntables by hand. In that sense, you have to take this music for how it sounds first. And it sounds really good. The rhythms and low end are very dense and heavy. I think the samples fit perfectly with one another, with a little more playfulness than is normal on a KiC post.

But as good as it sounds taken at face value, knowing that this is done by hand impresses me greatly. Searching for samples, matching them to each other by slowing them down/pitching them down, blending them ever so - all of these skills require years of dedication and a love for music that might not immediately be apparent. How many records did D-Styles have to listen to in order to find what he needed? The scratching, often the main attraction on these records, is outstanding. The dexterity, the lyricism, and the skills are all on display. For me, actually scratching well is nonnegotiable; it is what sets a DJ apart, and there is plenty here to like.

Morton Feldman - Crippled Symmetry (Col Legno, 1994)

Another from docperkins:

How can a crippled symmetry still deserve to be called symmetry? Isn’t symmetry a form that was cleansed up of all possible distortions, or the victory of form over content, celebrated in a show-off of mirror-image proportions?

For Morton Feldman the answer is no. But he decided to put this “no” to task, and the tools he chose to do so – lucky us – was music.

Differently from when we crop the borders of an image to comply with the uploading rules at RYM, Feldman noticed that in classical oriental carpet-making, the borders of apparently symmetrical patterns were never mechanically achieved; they were rather a matter of “idiom” and therefore concept. The carpet borders did not have to be perfect; they had to reproduce a principle, which inspired Feldman to propose the musical version of this “crippled symmetry”. Only then he would be able, as he wished, to do like Mondrian did in painting: instead of depicting bouquets, Feldman intended to paint “one single flower at a time”, adding the single flowers to one another along a conceptual symmetry, which would by-pass the geometrical symmetry, giving back to us the possibility of listening to symmetry as a conceptual pattern (or a an aural fabric) instead of only being able to measure the symmetry with a boring yardstick.

Was Morton successful in his complex endeavour? You bet your headphones – and your entire sound system if you will – he was. This is one of my favourite Feldman’s compositions, which builds up fantastically crippled symmetrical forms with a psychedelic twist, proving effortlessly that ideas – or concepts – will reveal much more than fixed geometrical figures. But then again, what if one can only perceive symmetry as geometrical proportion? It’ll be the time to press the “repeat” key…

The release is unflawed. The three musicians display an impressive level of interaction with each other vis a vis such a difficult piece, and the sound engineering – that, could never be crippled — is perfectly calibrated. Highly recommended.

Katt Hernandez - The Long Awaited Etcetera… (Recorded, 2001)

Here is an enjoyable free improv record with a bunch of people I had never heard play before, and a couple I had (Helena Espvall and Jack Wright). Katt Hernandez, the main attraction for the disc, does a great job working with each of these individuals, giving me ever more to check out. Indeed, the laundry list on her MySpace indicates clearly that she has been very busy, and not only with the number of people that she records/plays with, but also in what she is playing.

That is, Katt is comfortable in a free improv environment, which constitutes the majority of this disc, as well as exploring microtonal aspects of her instrument. Now, the violin is a much more common instrument in free jazz and free improv, with Ornette Coleman and Leroy Jenkins being the first that come to mind. That said, the list starts to thin out from there, at least compared to the sax, trumpet, and even guitar. As Hayward does (below) on the tuba, so does Hernandez: she works to fit her instrument into a chosen tradition, and she does so by both using its natural sound properties while also conjuring sounds analogous to more traditional improv instruments.

Not only does she try, but she succeeds admirably in this effort. While this is less of a revolutionary recording than an enjoyable genre exercise, it is quite often the case that with free jazz and improv you can expect what you’ll hear, but you also have no idea what will happen from moment to moment, and this is what happens here. There is a big picture appreciation and understanding of this record, but that might be an illusion, because while the big picture seems clear, the moment to moment progression is often odd and befuddling. In short, this is adventurous and aggressive, just like I think you’d like.

Oval - Oh (Thrill Jockey, 2010)

Oh is the latest release from Oval, a project founded by Markus Popp, Sebastian Oschatz, and Frank Metzger in 1991. Markus has sustained Oval as a solo project since 1995 and this is his first release since 2001. This new EP is a concise and crystalline configuration of micro-tracks, a tangle of erudite complexity that deserves careful unraveling through attentive listening.

Oval are already in the history books as the creators of ‘glitch’, that musical exploration of the fallibility inherent in the core of our digital lives. The early works stemmed from a use of “prepared CD’s”, the surface of the medium violated with markers and gashes, physically changing the surface of the disc to inject failure into the mix. Before Oh is judged against Popp’s early work and the genre he helped shape, it is worth remembering that Oval’s investigation and aestheticisation of musical failure was never something entirely new. As Kim Cascone has noted; what is new is that ideas now travel at the speed of light and can spawn entire musical genres in a relatively short period of time. The Oval project was a fulcrum around which many musical trends successfully consolidated to become a genre. What sustained Ovals appeal was that they produced an array of distinct, erudite and engaging works that held interest independent of genre. Oh continues this genealogy; it is in itself singular and captivating.

Here we find the percussive hitting of strings nestled among fuzzy ambiance, a drum kit that hints at jazz, sounding stretched and realigned. The sounds of guitars turned inside-out. Regular refrains of the main themes fleetingly surface, stitching the work into a stylistically unified composition; yet consistency arises more from the use of sound quality itself rather than from any salient characteristics of the compositional language. Many have commented on the lack of a ‘glitch’ aesthetic to this work, marking a distinct rupture with the historic Oval project. Despite new ‘live’ and ‘instrumental’ aspects, similarities can be found in the twitchy rhythms, the abrupt spiking frequencies, the soft crackles and distortions, the fiercely intricate yet surprisingly soothing nature of it all.

What this release illustrates, like the rest of the Oval project is a fascination with process. The entire recording is drawn from a very narrow palette of sounds and from this limited world Popp crafts an intricate array of variations, an insular array of worlds that hold much in common yet are so far apart. Like a revisit to the classical model of the theme and variations, the basic material remains the same as we are guided through a plethora of distinct and minute evocations. Here many a contemporary producer and composer can learn a lesson about the value of limitations; like a musical application of Occam’s razor - entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity. Popp touches on a fundamental problem of the digital age; how to navigate through the surfeit of information, the forest of detail, and somehow wed the complexity of over-saturation with the consistency of style

(welcoming Fíacha O’ Dúbhda to the Tumblr side!)