Avant Music News

From Musique Machine:

Colin Potter & Michael Begg – Fragile Pitches
For those whose roots are firmly planted behind a laptop in the studio, live albums may at first seem at odds with the assumed activity of constant refinement through engineering. However, the use of live improvisation is not only a more productive route to laying down tracks unshackled by the hesitation and fussiness encouraged by computer-based sequencing, but it also generates results both unpredictable and unachievable through any other means. These results are also more likely to produce organic and metaphysical qualities that are often lacking in the subjugated sterility of purely digital composition.

VagusNerve – Lo Pan
The almost all-black cover art and Chinese characters on the cover, as well as the guitar glittering in the gloom on the back of the sleeve, led me to believe I was about to be sucked into Keiji Haino / Fushitsusha territory. Wonderful! — Well, that’s not where I ended up, although I can’t complain about the trip I did go on.

Cages – Folding Space
Remember trip-hop? Yes, this was the hip blend of hip-hop, electronics and, often, depressed female singers that was hugely popular halfway through the 90s. Portishead, Massive Attack, Morcheeba – each unleashed their own brand of heart-breakingly melancholy music on the world, and fall for it we did. Yet revisiting an album like Portishead’s Dummy now, fifteen years after the fact, doesn’t work as well as it should. If anything did not age well it’s trip-hop. Out-dated beats, 90s aesthetics, artificial grainy vinyl crackle – there’s so much to take offence to. Yet though trip-hop, in its 90s form, has sort of kicked the bucket, much more interesting and timeless derivatives (if such a term is even fitting) have sprung up in its wake. Heck, even Portishead made a glorious return to the music scene – their 2008 release Third is one of the most harrowingly beautiful things you’ll ever hear.

Be Maledetto Now! – 1
Be Maledetto Now! are an Italian duo who make wonderfully hypnotic, often eerily & haunted harmonic space bound analogue snyth scapes. This twelve inch is part one of their first full lenght debut album with part two coming in the form of a cd.

Hunyadi Páncélgránáto Hadosztály – Recycled sounds & Forbidden songs
Hunyadi Páncélgránáto Hadosztály are a Transylvania based Power electronics project & with this their first release they brutal rape & regurgitate old Hungarian military songs from WW2 in quite a rewarding & nasty manner.

Zero Centigrade – I’m Not Like You
It’s incredibly interesting to see what diverse ranges of sounds very minimal set-ups can yield. That goes for both traditional instruments and electronics or other non-musical sound sources, I’d say. Consider, for instance, Aube works such as Pages from the Book or the Millennium series, for which single sound sources were used to create hugely diverse sound scapes. Or, at the more musical end of the spectrum, jazz saxophone player Evan Parker, whose solo sax works such as The Snake Decides sound like anything but works that were conceived either solo or with only a sax.