Tag: Jeff Surak

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Bad Groupy – The Last Piece of Graphite [Zeromoon zero210]; Guro Skumsnes Moe & Philippe Petit – s/t [Public Eyesore PE151]

Twenty twenty-three begins with the releases of two transnational collaborations of textural sound art featuring electronics and basses of diverse sorts.

Bad Groupy, a new transatlantic duo, appears to be the fruit of Washington, DC experimental musician Jeff Surak’s residence in Berlin this past summer. (Another product of that stay, a duet recording with the superb violinist Biliana Voutchkova, was reviewed recently in these pages.) The other half of Bad Groupy is Hamburg-based Estonian Kris Kuldkepp, who plays electric bass, double bass, and electronics. This is their second release; their first, the EP Check-in Ko, came out this past September. The Last Piece of Graphite was recorded in autumn, 2022 in different locations indoors and out in Hamburg and Washington with analogue electronics, double bass, electric bass, guitar, objects, and tapes. The four tracks on the album highlight the duo’s predilection for a timbrally-based sound art of layered electronic or quasi-electronic abstraction. Elevator Talk superimposes undulating sounds over danceable beats; Archive of Generic Legs stacks high-frequency beeps—like morse code from another planet—atop an undertow of rough-surfaced, arco double bass; History Does Not Repeat Its Stuck is a drone piece of variable density running through a wide range of frequencies. Surak and Kuldkepp bring their multilayered texturality to its acme in the concluding twenty-minute-long Black Magic of Audio Seduction.

Guro Skumsnes Moe and Philippe Petit’s self-titled release features the French analogue synthesizer master with Norwegian Moe, who in addition to electric bass and vocals is represented here on the Octobass, a rare, enormous, three-string double bass that sounds in a rumblingly low register. The instrument is a strong presence on the release’s two long tracks—its strings vibrate at such a low frequency one can almost see them as they underscore the sonic kaleidoscope thrown out by Petit’s EMI synth and turntables. The third track, a two-minute interlude between the two longer pieces, offers an economical distillation of the duo’s collective sound.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Biliana Voutchkova & Jeff Surak – The Truth About the Key [Relative Pitch Records]

The Truth About the Key is the sixth installation in violinist Biliana Voutchkova’s DUOS2022 series of duets with musicians of various backgrounds. Voutchkova, who resides half the year in Berlin and the other half on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria, recorded these duets with American experimental musician Jeff Surak in Berlin, where Surak spent much of this past summer. It was a two-day session, the first day of which was spent recording musical and other activities at different places—location-based “guerilla” interventions, something of a specialty for Surak–followed by a studio session the next day. Surak, who’s credited with playing tape recorder and amplified objects, subsequently took the recordings and composed them into the three sound collages appearing on the album.

Safely Uncivilized captures an outdoor ambience pervaded by the sound of a police siren, the thrum of traffic, and snatches of conversation, which provide background for jangling metal in a four-beat rhythm and tremolo bowing on the violin. Unraveled Over Time combines the hiss and scuff of an imaginary untuned radio with Voutchkova’s pizzicato violin, followed by a charming personal travelogue/reminiscence narrated by Voutchkova. At twenty-six minutes long the title track is an abstract sound mass of variable densities bringing together sounds recalling a gamelan, crisply recorded pizzicato and lo-fi arco violin, colliding objects awash in echo, and a phone conversation—culminating in an abrupt halt.

Voutchkova’s repertoire of extended techniques complements the unpredictable and sometimes messy ambient sounds surrounding her as well as Surak’s noise-based sensibilities. They are an unconventional, and yet dissonantly harmonious, match.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Jeff Surak – AllSilver [Zeromoon zero202]

A long time in the making, AllSilver is a collection of provocative sounds from DC area experimentalist Jeff Surak. Surak appreciates and purveys what many of us simply ignore in our sonic environment; the title of the first track on the album, Love and Production, captures something of Surak’s aesthetic: love of the harsher sounds unloved by most, and production of raw sounds from the rawer materials of Dictaphone recordings, old synthesizers, lo-fi radios, mechanical objects, and a defiantly detuned zither. AllSilver is an album that draws on digital and analogue electronic technologies alike to produce an overall sound that’s consistent with Surak’s particular brand of lofi artfulness. Sometimes this sound encompasses expansive audioscapes, as in Love and Production and the lush, undulating drone of Nicéphore Niépce; it can also take the form of the granulated textures of And the Sun Will Eat Itself, or the mysterious percussive sounds that punctuate Keep Dancing After the Music Stops. The Fence is an abrasive bit of post-industrial scrunge—the sounds of machinery in extremis; Zawawa channels the ghost of a broken short-wave radio tuned between stations. The album’s centerpiece is its closing track: the epic, twenty-minute-long Scattered Lie the Saints, a complex drone piece that mixes Berlin-school sounds with a crackle and hiss reminiscent of a tinny transistor radio—debouching into the nothingness of a long-fading echo.

AllSilver comes as a digital download or as a very limited edition CDR that includes two bonus tracks; in either format, the album is a good introduction to Surak’s work. It also is a companion album to Surak’s AllGold, originally released by Staaltapes in 2015 and reissued this year by bluescreen.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Jeff Surak: naming the trees [Zeromoon]; Beau Finley: Processing [11] [Bandcamp]; TL0741: Refractory [HC3 Music HC3TL0CD6]

For a good number of years—good in both senses of the word—the Sonic Circuits organization, through its annual experimental music festival and monthly concert series, helped nurture the DC area’s experimental and electronic music communities. Sonic Circuits may have ceased operations in 2018, but the music underground here continues to maintain an active presence. Three new releases bring us up to date on the work of a troika of the scene’s veteran artists.

Jeff Surak was the curator behind Sonic Circuits; he’s also a sound artist with an eclectic and extensive catalogue of work. On naming the trees, release as both a digital download and a limited edition cassette, he pursues the not-terribly-gentle art of noise in two ten-minute-long slabs. In his live performances as well as on record, Surak tends to favor brutalist strata of raw sound, and there’s much of that to be had here. On left hanging he deftly layers the abrasive sounds of prepared autoharp and the clicks, scratches, and pops of prepared turntable against a background of electronic washes and bell-like drones; on the title track he crafts a tension-filled, dark ambient atmosphere out of throbbing synthesizer tones. Bracing, uneasy listening.

Contrasting with the predominantly harsh sounds of naming the trees is guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Beau Finley’s Processing [11]. Although some of his live performances have involved walls of densely abstract, electronic sounds, Finley’s specialty is euphonic, tonally centered ambient music with well-defined melodic content. Processing [11] is the eleventh installment of a year-long project in which he set out to create 365 minutes of music in twelve monthly sections, with each section having the same number of minutes as days in its month. Starting with the key of C in January, he moved through the circle of fifths at the rate of one key per month. Processing [11] brings him up to November, and if it’s November, it must be B flat. After a very brief prelude outlining the key, the music moves into a hymn-like passage whose chords float slowly over a rich bassline before dissolving into an upbeat, quasi-Baroque chord cycle complete with synthesized arpeggios and counterpoint. And that’s only on the first piece; the remaining four weave together drones, upper chord extensions, unconventional cadences, and off-center sequencing into a suite of music that is really quite beautiful and affecting.

Refractory is the new release from TL0741, the solo synthesizer project of Patrick Gillis. In addition to being a performing artist, Gillis was a key, if largely behind the scenes, part of the Sonic Circuits organization. Refractory follows 2014’s Circulation and is worth the five-year wait. The basic tracks were laid down at live performances in DC-area venues between 2014 and 2017 and subsequently altered, amended and added to in the studio. A colorist with a particularly keen ear for juxtaposition, Gillis draws from a rich palette of timbres recalling the vocabulary of classic electronic and tape music, which he twists and creatively distorts into something uniquely his own. Gillis’ is music that naturally lends itself to synesthesia–a soundtrack for a strangely appealing dream world full of flashing lights of unknown provenance and enigmatic metallic objects receding over the horizon.

Daniel Barbiero