\ / | ----- /\ | \ / |== |== | / | \ / Week 7 \ / | | / \ | \ /\ / | | |/ | \ / Number 69 \/ | | / \ |--- \/ \/ |__ |__ |\ |__ | EN NIHIL - DEATH KEEPS (CD by Red Stream) Welcome to a pitch black world, inhabited by people that call themselves En Nihil and have a pre-occupation with death. Drenched in reverb, delayed endless drones, from which a dark beast arises. 'Open Your Eyes And See Death' is a perfect example, the closing track 'Drift III' has a synth line played in droning mood. If you like stuff from bands like Yen Pox or Caul, then this will appeal to you too. File under 'pitch black'. (FdW) Address: SPECIES OF FISHES - TRIPTRAP (CD by Exotica) >From the Cold Lands of Moscow we have the second CD of this 'ambient-techno' trio Species Of Fishes. Well, ambient... this finds them more in techno territory, where they have learned more skills of the current waves in techno trade. Don't think that everything in this area that is good comes from the UK or Germany. SOF go in many directions, like the harsh hip hop rhythm or the minimal approach. The track that is called [ctrl +s] could have been made by early Panasonic. Towards the end of this CD the longer spacier tracks rule the silver shiny disc. Maybe the mixed interest in the various dance directions will work against these boys, but for home listening, a well varied CD is delivered. If their first one appealed to you, then get out to get this one too. (FdW) Address: PETE NAMLOOK & KLAUS SCHULZE - THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOOG V (CD by Fax) The fifth part of the ongoing collaboration between the old hero of cosmic music and the new master of ambient electronica. Like on Part IV, they are helped, on two tracks, by Bill Laswell. This is the sort of music that has nothing do with musical innovation, progress, but therefore it is downright retro music. And oh yes: I love it. Part IV has been in my CD player so often on those Sunday mornings while reading the newspaper, drinking coffee and talking to the cat. No doubt this CD is going to be my next Sunday morning greatest hit. (FdW) Address: TIPSY - TRIP TEASE (CD by Asphodel) Imagine a high tech cocktail made from one part Martin Denny, two parts "Organ Transplants" by Stock, Hausen & Walkman, with a dash of Combustible Edison added in. Sounds tasty, eh? It is. Campy, amusing, irreverent, and obscenely engaging are all words that describe "Trip Tease". Welcome to the contrived, market-targeted, safe and ultimately, DISPOSABLE world of Tipsy. Much like last year's derivative and tedious wonderboys Loop Guru, Tipsy fit their niche so well that nothing is left to the imagination. Pop this lil' puppy in the player and crank it up! It's the best party music you've ever heard! You love all the catchy hooks and humorous musical jokes. Thirteen perfect pop gems. Play it a few more times and you'll start to notice that nothing's been forgotten, it's a completely perfect listening experience. But wait! Around the tenth listen the whole thing has been reduced to a boring and predictable formula. Without any of the rough edges or esprit of "Organ Transplants", which it so obviously rips off, this album can be expected to rack up some huge sales with the hip set. What's to not like about this record? Nothing and everything. Who got the soul? (CP) Address: PUBLIC WORKS - MATTER (CD by Staalplaat) The cultural critique continues? Last November Staalplaat released the seminal Public Works platter `Music with Sound' on CD. Hot on it's heels comes this package, a rather different beast. Gone is the overt cut up'n'collage technique of old, to be replaced by a more song-orientated approach. Well, not really songs, but these tracks do have `proper' rhythms and bass lines etc, as well as the ubiquitous cut up vocals. The disk begins with deep slurred voices (performedrather than sampled?) and threatening strings. The next couple of tracks disappoint, but things pick up by `Follow Me', where the sounds get noticeably louder and more exaggerated. Track six (`Artifice') has some darn good moments that could pass for Tricky (honest!), while `Progeny' is the kind of slurred, drunken jazz that A Small Good Thing aspire to. The last track is the most bizarre, sounding like an atonal Chinese 78 - big social realism and all that. So take note - while this CD isn't Music with Sound it has a charm all its own. (RTH) Address: FRANCIS DHOMONT - SOUS LE REGARD D'UN SOLEIL NOIR FRANCIS DHOMONT - FORET PROFONDE (Both CDs on Empreintes Digitalis, Canada) Francis Dhomont was born in 1926 and studied under, amongst others, Nadia Boulanger and Charles Koechlin. His theoretical texts and essays are regularly published in various international journals, he lectures regularly and is the author of many radio programmes for national Canadian radio. He has received numerouis prestigous awards and now divides his time between Quebec and France, teaching electroacoustic composition and theory. These two releases are part of the same group of works titled 'Cycle Of Depths', which is comparable to his previous 'Cycle Of Wanderings', not only availible on Empreintes Digitalis but also on BVHaast, a Dutch label partly lorded over by Willem Breuker. 'Sous Regard ...' or 'Under The Glare Of A Black Sun' to folks like you and I was originally produced in 1979-80, completed in 1981 and since then has won a bunch of awards for electroacoustic composition. It was inspired by the works of British psychoanalyst R.D.Laing (author of 'The Politics Of Experience' and 'The Divided Self' and one of the first in his profession to explore the potential of LSD in analysis), and tells the story of a slow descent into madness. The spoken texts are quoted from the works of Laing, Plato, Kafka and Buchner.The piece makes us share the anxiety, anguish and solitude of the schizophrenic, attempting to present us with a sonorous image of a (mostly) inaccesible world. Laing himself once said 'I cannot experience your experience, or vice versa'. Dhomont presents the experience he thinks they (schizophrenics) have, constructing a more general myth through which the 'normal' man may discover his own schizoid traits. 'Sous le...' tells us about ourselves, about the terrifying solitude that faces every man, as if we are sitting at the end of a cavern capable only of looking ahead. There is certainly an element of underlying danger here - not from external forces but rather from those sharp, shiny, sterile, surgical razors with which we perform psychological surgey on ourselves as we lay on a ramshackle operating table constructed out of our belief systems which itself is placed in a dimly lit corner of a huge reverberant space. Bats in the belfry. Too many toys in the attic. No room to spare in this warehouse where ominous chords pace the staves...This is the domain of archetypes Foret Profonde (which sadly translates as 'Deep Forest' - remember that abysmally beige and blandish semi- Gnu Age array of ethnic samples and drum machines with the same name released three or so years ago ?) is fabulous. Foret Profonde is the second part of, what is till now, a diptych (preceded by the above). A third part is imminent. Styled an acousmatic melodrama, Foret Profonde is based on the fascinating book 'The Uses Of Enchantment' by Bruno Bettelheim, and it has gradually taken shape as a composition over fifteen years, culminating in two years' final production. It is, like Bettelheim's book, a guided tour of the childhood soul, which itself is nothing more than a return to initiatory world - both cruel and reassuring - of fairy tales. The composition is divided into 13 sections (6 of which are purely instrumental) all of which contain some form of quotation from Schumann's op.15: Scenes From A Childhood. Texts by Hans Christian Andersen, Dante, Those Grimm Brothers, Shakespeare and of course Bettelheim himself are used in the piece. The recurring theme in fairy tales of being lost in a forest (it's up to you to work out the psychological parallels here) is reiterated here too. To anybody who has heard fairy tales, this image is unforgettable. As Bettelheim says, "...without fantasies to give us hope, we do not have the strength to meet the adversities of life. Childhood is the time when fantasies have to be nurtured." Actually, this is probably the best CD I have heard so far this year. Monstrous. Unpredictable. Hallucinatory. It plays on the memories we all have that we connect to specific sounds. It is an intriguing voyage into familiar and dangerous territories where branches snap for no reason, where long shadows flit between the tree trunks and the passing breeze carries traces of wolf-breath. It's the place where trapped birds are princesses, where the lure is golden, where banished sons become kissable frogs. Magickal slumber, castles and caves, locked rooms (with the key left in the lock, of course) and the endless growth of entangling vegetation...(MP) NOMEX - A MOMENT IN ETERNITY/LANGUAGE OF DISSATISFACTION (7" by Adverse) Sometimes when I hear a new release I like it immediately and buy it. Other times I know I have to play it a few times to grow into it, but still buy it immediately. I know I am going to like it after playing it a few times. I immediately liked this seven inch when I first played it. It is the sound of a needle that skipped onto the label, a terrible noise that normally makes you jump up and run to your turntable in complete distress, because it sounds like the needle is getting fucked. But now it is quite pleasant to know somebody recorded it for me so now I own this sound on record, and can use it whenever I want, without having to create the sound myself, and going through the risk of destroying a good needle. The concept of this release is a very strong one, since it is a sound everybody recoginizes and associates with a record needle going on the label, a mistake, but it is on a record! Concrete sounds as this one have a great impact on people. It is like Steve Reich said about "Concrete Music" when people like Schaeffer and Pierre Henry started to manipulate the sounds they recorded, they also took away some of the original emotional impact these concrete sounds have on people. The sound of a ringing telephone has a different impact on somebody compared to the 'the manipulated, timestretched, pitched, backwards with effects version'. But of course; maybe there still will be a 'fingerprint' of the ringing phone in the end result that makes you run to the phone every time. Subconsciencely the original sound still works. This 7" is accompanied by two pieces of text of which I will put one down here. It is an adapted piece of text from Marcel Proust; "...often one hears nothing when one listens for the first time to a piece of 'music' that is at all complicated. And yet when, later on, this track had been played to me two or three times I found that I 'knew' it...And so it is not wrong to speak of hearing a thing for the first time. If one had indeed, as one supposes, received no impression from the first hearing, the second, the third would be equally "first hearings" and there would be no reason why one should 'understand' it any better after the tenth. Probably what is wanting, the first time, is not comprehension but memory. For our memory, relatively to the complexity of the impressions which it has to face while we are listening, is infinitesimal, as brief as the memory of someone who in their sleep thinks of a thousand things and at once forgets them...Of these multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing us with an immediate picture." (RM.) Address: Adverse - BM Fuzz London WC1N 3XX - UK 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), The Square Root Of Sub (MP), Ching-Chong Jing-Jong (CP), Radboud Mens (RM), Sister Clika (RTH) -- 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: Vital Weekly/Frans de Waard -P.O.Box 11453 - 1001 GL Amsterdam - The Netherlands All written by Frans de Waard (FdW), The Square Root Of Sub (MP, ), Heimir Bjorgulfsson (HB), Dolf Mulder (DM), Meelkop Roel (MR), Brian Lavelle (BL, ), Gerald Schwartz (GS), Niels Mark Pedersen (NMP), Henry Schneider (SH), Jeff Surak (JS), TJ Norris (TJN), Gregg Kowlaksky (GK) and others on a less regular basis. 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