VITAL WEEKLY 23 WEEK 51 STRAFE F.R. - PIANOGUITAR (CD by Staalplaat) I have copies of several things by Strafe FR and this is, oddly enough, not necessarily because I like their music but because I am not sure about it and I find so much of what they do mysterious and completely alien. Lufthunger (Touch) is something I will listen to 4 or 9 times a year for as long as either one of us survives. It is just so darn odd! These masters in the curious art of being unusual have just brought out the CD titled Pianoguitar, a 26 track collage of long and (quite) short pieces which bounce around between various musical styles (including their own, whatever that is) often with humour bordering on the Residential. However...several things put me off -no apparent continuity and a nasty, cheap (no, it's not financial discrimination or equipment snobbery) organ which may have been intended to be so, but which quite ruined some tracks for me. If only they'd held it in abeyance a little more often. I also missed the fabulous field recordings featured on Lufthunger and Ochsle. Maybe I am still waiting for them to stun me again in the same way they did with Lufthunger. Unfortunately Pianoguitar falls wide off the mark for me for this reason. Still it offers no clues as to what planet they're from and that's a good thing. Great material to plunder (oops! ) (MP) // address: SONIC FRACTAL - V-NT (CD by Multimood) I have heard of but hardly heard, music generated through fractal processing. I wonder if, judging from this title and the liner notes indicating the lack of sequencers on this CD, whether it's content falls into this category. Not that it makes a heck of a lot of difference to me. Thick filtered webs float about with weird percussive punctuation dusted onto them. Submerged layers swirl upwards into a developing weave dragging their harmonics with them. I kept anticipating a dramatic turn-about but the composition continued blossoming into layers of toneclouds gradually disintegrating into a rather repetitive loop a rather repetitive loop. Several interesting bits but somehow it failed to shift my gear. (HP) // address: THE MODERN PLAYBOYS - PLAYBOYS (CD by R & S Records) Junglejazz leaps about in this exotic blend of speeding breakbeats and comfortably strange jazzitudes. Tr 1 is a gentle glide on a sliding bass into the soundspace of Pim and Alex Reece. It is a very cool and laid-back place. Tr 2 is perhaps a more direct stab at a larger dancefloor audience with it's heard-it-a-hundred-times-before female vocal hook. Philistine that I am, I usually prefer appropriated and (therefore) re-contextualized vocals on the trendy dance hall type music I listen to. Tr 3 of this mini-cd is a masterpiece...beautiful programmed shifty percussion rubbed up shiny by a throbby bass. (MP) THOMAS KONER - AUBRITE (CD by Barooni) Somehow Thomas Koner seems to me to be busy defining space. His compositions often strike me as the reverberation of an event (probably very, very loud) a long way off, carrying with it in extremely slow decay, slightly more than the residual audible trails. This is sonic space filled with endless pulsations slowly moving off into a void. There is no confinement here, no attempt to wrap the listener in the sound. It moves overhead like a huge sheet of slowly rippling metal filling the sky from the horizon to beyond our backs. The sun is blotted out but the metal seems to reflect trapped light. Everything is covered with a burnished hue. Something on a long thread tentatively lowers itself out of the darkened sky and hangs suspended above our heads. Gradually it passes and brightness returns sliding out much like a sheet itself. Perhaps it was a big planet gliding past so close you could touch it. Or the sound of a sphere heard from inside itself. Where are we anyway, Thomas Thomas (MP) UNKNOWN PUBLIC - ECLECTIC GUITARS (CD by Unknown Public) At last UP have produced a CD which I want to listen to from top to bottom. It's on a much needed theme as well -dedicated to guitars in their many guises and the wide variety of approaches to wielding the instrument. We are treated to 15 tracks of guitar or guitar- centred music, a contemporary classic by one-time bazooki player Frank Zappa and the regular Scratchpad feature, which in their entirety range from the sublime to a sample I have only ever heard on Music With Sound by the Tape Beatles. Some clues...Robert Fripp's String Quintet trots out mechanistic Yamanashi Blues (are their eyes glazed yet ?) and there is an intriguing piece by Terry Edwards which consists of the sounds of amplification (plus a few footpedals) prior to actually plugging the guitar into an amplifier. Seigen Ono provides one of the most irritating piece of music I have heard for a while. Elliot Sharp's gusty track 'Omonok' could almost be considered a prelude to 'Sandstorm' by G.P.Hall performed on a flamenco guitar played with fingers. David Toop continues to report back from the edge (of sound?) with "Reverse World", where, beneath our feet, the dead walk upside down, feet up and head down. Shit comes out of their mouths. Note that this track is included on his new CD "Screen Ceremonies" on Wire Editions -watch this space. '18 Guitars' composed by (not the) J.P.Jones is a brittle, brilliant lattice; a trip into the hurtling rhythmic oddities explored so well by Nancarrow and others. Next up, the highly composed and extremely weird 'Chase' - a topsy-turvy multi-scened audible film. The very bezerk 'Dead Silence' by Nick Didkovsky hacks and wheezes it's way through a pantechnicon of notes and the Scratchpad medley is as mad as ever. Finally Zappa calls the proceedings to a halt through his Chrome Plated Megaphone Of Destiny. Yow! The packaging is, as usual, comprehensive to the point of it's outsize plectrum and includes details of the audible contents in 3 languages. UP recently won the Prudential Award for Music (read; profit from mortgages?) and have promised more regular programming. If the quality and scope of this, their latest (Issue 06) is sustained, I'II probably have to resubscribe, dammit (MP) KEELER - TRAPPED IN THE HIFI ZONE (MULTIMOOD) This is the second CD by Keeler to appear on Multimood and hopefully more will follow (Notes inside the booklet finally reveal more about this peculiar composer). It is also the fourth collection out of eleven that I have heard and, like 'The Age Of The Inventor' it propelled me with the strangest of sounds to a mysterious place where unfamiliarity rules. Keeler categorises his work as Sonic Constructions and this is most apt. He creates structurally with walls and slabs of sounds of and from varying dimensions. His sources remain unknown, disguised by manipulation and massive effects. Thick harmonic coils unwind at varispeed. The sound track for tectonic movements on a ferrous planet. A jungle of twisted steel, rusting undergrowth and flat crystalline lakes. Everything reflects everything. We are on the pristine verge of a holographic river which quietly erodes it's banks, softly preparing to spill it's blur of memories. (MP) JIM O'ROURKE - TERMINAL PHALLACY (CD by Tzadik) This CD contains two new studio works by O'Rourke, the first to come out since his 3" CD for Metamkine. I guess O'Rourke needs no introduction... The two pieces work in contrast with each other. 'Cede' is an electro-acoustic composition and the title piece is an ensemble piece. In 'Cede' O'Rourke places carefully electronic sounds against acoustic sounds (those who were lucky to get a copy of the 'Use' DAT only release by O'Rourke will recognize some of the sounds). Sometimes there is pop music, or treated classical music playing a long. As he explains on the cover. he started to use 'pre- existing' music because that was 'already loaded and had its own set of internal and extramusical connections, which made the formal possibilities more interesting' .To me, this is a difficult way of saying 'recycling' has become a greater part in his work. 'Cede' is a strong piece of collage music. The second piece is also a collage piece of music, but then using 'real' (whatever that may be) instruments, namely accordions, cellos, clarinet, alto flutes, bass flutes and acoustic guitar. Each of these play short sequences which built up to decay afterwards. But I'm not so fond this (shorter) piece, mainly because I don't like the sounds of the instruments so much. (HP) Vital Weekly is published by Frans de Waard and submitted for free to anybody with an e-mail address. If you don't wish to receive this, then let us know. Any feedback is welcome . Forward to your allies. Snail mail: Frans de Waard - P.O.Box 11453 - 1001 GL Amsterdam - The Netherlands All written by Frans de Waard (FdW) and The Square Root Of Sub IMP)