Please Stop Loving Me by nszcz
Not a lot to say about this other than to implore you to go and listen. A vast, glowing sun of a track that is yet more evidence that Nicholas Szczepanik is a remarkable talent.
Reviews for Nicholas' previous releases: Dear Dad and The Chiasmus.
Artist: Natural Snow Buildings
Album: The Centauri Agent
Label: Vulpiano Records
The simple truth is that every home should own at least one Natural Snow Buildings album, at least one. The first thing I heard by them was The Dance of The Moon and the Sun a monstrous folly of a double album which came out in 2006 on a tiny French label (and reviewed on a former incarnation of this site). I remember thinking at the time that they I'd never come across a band so perfectly named - they sounded like spectral ice palaces. Since then they've released countless albums, CDRs and cassettes and I've kind of lost touch a little, only picking up stuff here and there. Then this year they made their new album (another double) available as a free download - The Centauri Agent. It's another dazzling release full of stunning witchy folk music and drones which is, if anything, slightly warmer sounding than stuff they've released in the past. In places it's almost bucolic. It also features more vocals than I remember, with Mehdi Ameziane's delicate whisper rising to what seems near sky-scraping countertenor at times.
My suspicion is that the duo have hacked into the gossammer-thin sound wall that backgrounds everything and merely act as penitent conduits. Here's hoping they keep their secret to themselves.
You can download The Centauri Agent at the Vulpiano site. You can also download a lovely live session from one member of Natural Snow Buildings, TwinSisterMoon, at the Victory Rose site.
Artist: Nicholas Szczepanik
Album: Dear Dad
Label: Goat Eater Arts
Given that a) I reviewed Nicholas Szczepanik's The Chiasmus only recently, ii) that the subject matter inspires a level of exegesis that I probably shouldn't go anywhere near, or presume I have the right to explore and 3) in the spirit of David Toop I have decided for the moment not to take up too much space using silly adjectives, I will keep this one short.
Jacques Lacan ended his famous 'Seminar on The Purloined Letter' with the opaque aphorism that 'every letter reaches its destination' - which to me means something along the lines of that the meaning coded in our attempts at communication is often different than we suppose, or different than we intend. Dear Dad has led to me think quite about the notion of music as a kind of letter, or at least a distinct mode of communication; and clumsy attempts at psychoanalysis aside, isn't music always a kind of open letter? A un/coded message that does always reach its destination somewhere, with someone. And this led me to wonder at Szczepanik's use of the drone as a kind of open letter, which, personal or otherwise, seeks to convey something specific, something monumental? Certainly the ether-piercing quality of the opening track - the 37 minute 'When I'm No Longer Afraid of You - would hint at that. It's such a colossal piece of work, of rolling, broiling drones, and so eager to be free of itself, to go beyond the simple confines of the music/listener relationship, that you have to wonder at the proposed destination. Is it a singular message, or something broader? In the sleevenotes to The Sinking of the Titanic Gavin Bryars makes the following comments about Marconi: 'towards the end of his life, Marconi became convinced that sounds, once generated never die, they simply become fainter and fainter until we can no longer perceive them. Marconi’s hope was to develop sufficiently sensitive equipment, extraordinarily powerful and sensitive filters, I suppose, to pick and hear these past, faint sounds. Ultimately he hoped to be able to hear Christ delivering the Sermon On The Mount." Dear Dad is elemental enough, and vast enough to provoke these kinds of thoughts: that the intended listener - personal, universal, whatever - simply wont be able to miss it; that even if it becomes something akin to background radiation, it will be there, faintly audible; and it may be that Szczepanik has managed the feat of turning the personal into a message for all times, and all destinations.
Artist: Pausal
Album: Lapses
Label: Barge Recordings
To some/many, concentrating on the lambent, aesthetic qualities of the drone is the least interesting mode of exploration of this peculiar and beguiling form of music; or at least, so the narrative goes, concentrating on these qualities ignores the theoretical structures and near-occult gravity the likes of La Monte Young and Elian Radigue (and, more recently, Eleh) brought and bring to bear on the idea of the drone. What it tends to mean is that any artistry and subtlety gets passed over and when confronted with the soft, wheeling keyboard washes and treated guitars the likes of which Pausal deal with, you often hear complaints along the lines of ‘this is such and such lite’ or ‘it’s the easy end of experimental music’. All of which, to me, seems to utterly miss the point. Judged on its own terms, a record like Lapses is a study in warmth and delicacy and its cumulative effect is quietly stunning.
Pausal are duo from the Hampshire wilds, and have been around in one form or another for 5 or so years, releasing their first EP back in 2007. That EP (M*7 review) was expanded and re-packaged for release on High Point Low Life in 2009. As stated above, they tend towards the softer, lighter end of drone and ambient music (something akin to a more bucolic Stars of the Lid), creating painterly, impressionistic washes of light and colour. And whilst Lapses is a long album - with one of the individual tracks reaching towards the fifteen minute mark – the key is in how the duo approach precisely this light touch and how they manage the gradual build and release of their tracks, and the layers of treated sound. Like Mountains, a band I saw them support last year, the art is in the warmth, and the uplift.
And isn’t this kind of warmth and uplift and artistry in and of itself? Not an Eno-like dream to hang half unseen middle-distance but a genuine engagement with brighter tones and the wide light of the upper reaches? The tendency towards a darker throb in drone music must be a heady temptation to avoid – to hang a note out for longer than necessary (as Wim Wenders once said of deciding when to close a shot ‘when people think they’ve seen enough of something, but there’s more, and no change of shot, they react in a curiosly livid way’), to give in to that anxiety of influence and point the thing towards some corporeal vortex. With Lapses, Pausal don’t avoid the negative so much as string it up and send it aloft.
With that in mind, a nine-minute song like ‘Malnourished Minds’ with its shimmering treated guitars and (what sounds like) brushed cello washes, or the enervated pairing of ‘One Watery Lens’ and ‘Midshipman’ (the latter with soft rain field recordings) are not so much gravid with portentous weight, but bright and optimistic, which even as I write it seems like an unusual description for music in this field. So track down Lapses if you can (it’s out now on Barge) and even better get to see them live.
Download/Listen: Pausal - Lapsing
Artist: Nicholas Szczepanik
Album: The Chiasmus
Label: SRA
This also appeared on The Line of Best Fit.
Something I’ve always wondered about with drone music is the methodology behind it. With more traditional music forms it’s no great imaginative leap to strip back the structures to the skeleton beneath. But with these long form creations, that have no skeletal frame as such, what’s the governing impulse? Are we watching the unfolding of a process, or exploration? Or is there a narrative core and does the creator obey some unseen (to us) internal compulsion? Is the best analogue with imaginary landscape painting, or abstract impressionism? And what of the weight of tradition and the anxiety of influence?
Lofty questions I suppose, but I’ve found myself asking them over and over when listening to Nicholas Szczepanik’s The Chiasmus, a towering album of huge soundscapes and measureless metallic drones. It’s the first release of Szczepanik’s I’ve come across, (though it is something like his 5th release), but it feels immediately like a huge statement of intent – ambitious, poignant and profound – and does beg the questions asked above, namely: what is being conjured here? In essence, the construction is minimal and the tracks are built from comparatively little, but they speak of vast things.
‘Temporary Inundation of Sleep By Open Windows’ is a case in point: huge, but built from very little, its rolling deep of metallic drones provides a backdrop over which faint outside sounds intrude – distant rain, insect stridulations, the hum of background radiation. The title points towards a simple re-creation of a state of being, the listener hovers in a hypnagogic state and simply transcribes the experience into an aural medium. In this sense, the track becomes an exploration of the epic in the everyday – the drone functioning as a descriptive apparatus. And Szczepanik’s method does have a very visual quality to it, with ‘The Silhouettes of A Winter Sunset’ having a particularly visual feel. Much like ‘Temporary Inundation…’ it has odd extraneous sounds penetrating the surface of the main drone, which in this instance is a series of plangent, broad and hugely affecting vibrating layered organ tones. The visual element may be partly to do with the suggestive track title, but there is something else at work, something that functions at the edge of the soundwaves, like a ripple, almost becoming solid. It may be purely suggestibility of course, the inner eye looking for purchase. Whatever the reason, it’s quite something.
The Chiasmus closes with ‘Lose Yourself, which is I guess largely self-explanatory. A warm drone slowly builds and recedes, yet as if beneath layers of land, or exuded from deep inside your own limbic system. It’s a simple primitive pulse, inviting and already known – both from convention and from some other deeper strata. As the track swells, it gathers the same sense of high vibration that ‘Silhouttes…’ exuded, and develops a metallic sheen. It closes with a heart-leapingly loud burst of static – the same burst that opens the record, and well, we’re back where we started. Dazzled, and still grasping for answers. And I suspect, from the almost Borgesian aspect of the title, that’s probably the point. It’s a record that asks unanswerable questions and there is much to be said for that.
You can stream 'The Silhouettes of A Winter Sunset' over at Nicholas's website.
The site was down for a few days this week so I'm celebrating its return with some immense kosmiche/drone stuff in the shape of Oneohtrix Point Never - a project of one Daniel Lopatin. Posting the video is kind of pointless, I admit, but well, just wanted to share this beautiful noise and to urge you to get hold of Rifts - it's really something.
I meant to post this last night but got buried under some drones so forgot. Anyway, you'll have to remember for next week: the mighty Mapsadaisical's gLASSsHRIMP radio show returns to Resonance FM on Wednesdays from 9.30-11pm. You can either tune into 104.4FM in London, or listen online (yes, that is a picture of Scott on the Resonance site).
In all my days of writing on here, I don't think I've ever mentioned Fluid Radio. So here is a mention for Fluid Radio - a site that hosts a radio station for ambience, drones, weird folk and fridge noises, plus all manner of reviews and links out to free mixes and downloads. Go there.
Artist: Horseback
Album: The Invisible Mountain
Label: Utech Records
A review I done for the other place. This is a great beast of a record. Yes - beast. More to come on some Utech Records stuff soon.
Impale Golden Horn which came out in 2007 – Jenks Miller’s first album as Horseback – was a huge thing of vast drones set against a gossamer curtain of distorted guitar. Despite being a limited release it was generally well received. Well, via a couple of almost-impossible-to-get CD-Rs, Miller has arrived at The Invisible Mountain – a record that (mostly) does away with the shimmer and glow of his previous work and instead throws up some sort of primeval scurf. This is something akin to deconstructed stoner rock music – deconstructed stone music: a regression into its magmatic past. If the press release is anything to go by, then Miller is on some sort of quest for individuation, the invisible mountain a metaphor for a kind of self-combat, an inward journey towards that most invisible of foes – our own neuroses.
It’s hard to speak about the sonic nature of The Invisible Mountain and not use the present tense: it creeps and seethes; it is inexorable. The constituent parts are rudimentary: Miller’s own fuzzed and gnarled guitar is augmented by Scott Endres’ which at times, as on ‘Tyrant Symmetry’, provides a bright tone which works against the sludge of Miller’s; a basic wall of rhythm is provided John Crouch, a drummer akin to Brant Bjork, all space and ride; and alongside everything, like a dry gulch, is Miller’s rasping bark, which, despite its harshness, perfectly fits the overall sound. Together the 3-piece over 3 of the 4 long tracks find a sludgey groove, lock in and aim at the middle distance.
The title track is a damn near perfect exploration of the form. It climbs from a tattered mess of overdriven bass and drums into a searing riff and for the next seven minutes works and claws at itself, drags itself onward. If the individuation metaphor has any weight then it’s at its most potent here. This has the weight of labour, of midnight toil. As a consequence, Miller’s strange snarl is at its most desperate and demonic here – coupled with the sheer pulverising force of the track it becomes part conjuration, part exorcism. It’s actually quite astonishing and one of the finest drone metal tracks I’ve heard in some time.
The last track, ‘Hatecloud Dissolving Into Nothing’ offers some respite and suggests a certain amount of closure and self-mastery on Miller’s part. Sonically, the track is a return to Impale Golden Horn with enmeshed guitars creating a fog of drones and although the guttural vocals (at their most black metal-like) are discernible, they’re obscured by the wash of treated guitars. As the track reaches a point of climax, it spirals towards a near Godspeed like sense of drama, albeit with much less bombast. It’s a dramatic, heartening close to what is hugely affecting album – one that continues to work its magic when it’s left alone and closed.
Download: Horseback - The Invisible Mountain