Taken from the album 'Antitrade', released by Ash International in 1999. Also featuring AER, Bruce Gilbert, Disinformation, Leif Elggren, hhh and S.E.T.I.
from
Compilation Tracks,
released November 8, 1998
A shuffle-play, 20 track, 42 minute, international compilation which I received earlier this week and have not yet taken out of the player. Brief spurts of radio distortion, speech loops and silence lace the edges of longer tracks by composers like Leif Elggren, one of the (now several) Kings Of Elgaland - Vargaland, Benny Nilsen, Andrew Lagowski, Joe Banks, AER, Bruce Gilbert and label sleeve designer Jon Wozencroft. His Majesty's contribution to this set titled 'Mother !!?' is constructed from a beautifully processed recording of the Swedish talking clock, which like most talking clocks has to be phoned again after a minute or two. I first heard this track sometime last year and was totally captivated by the sheer intimacy captured within the familiarity of the sound experience. After all, who hasn't asked the phone the time. Elggren's pristine processing of the recording somehow gives it a Terry Gilliam/Brazil type of atmosphere and shrouded it in a sinister cloak much like the one worn by The Conet Project (Quadruple CD, Irdial Discs, 1997). Benny Nilsen, once Morthond, now Hazard released a brilliant CD 'North' under this name on ASH earlier this year. His track on this compilation 'Peenemunde' is of similar ilk, less cold than his music on 'North' - which certainly iced my goolies, more like skin straining as it is slowly stretched across unyielding bone. Andrew Lagowski is perhaps better known as S.E.T.I., and regulars will by now be bored by the deluge of adjectives I manage to unearth in order to express my admiration of his music. The timelessness of his previous works, like 'Knowledge' and the recent 'Above Black' is reiterated in 'Aurora', which is included here as a preview of his forthcoming album 'POD', also destined for release on this same (dead) label. This track opens with a voice describing the propulsion system of an experimental 'black project' triangular-shaped flying machine designed as part of the Aurora Project, about which I have heard, and which prompted me to conduct an AltaVista search, sadly to no avail. I ended up at Bob Lazar's rather glossy homepage (blush). The usual creepy corridors of Lagowski drones uncurl like computer-generated landscapes. Occasional dental whines and distant falling civilisations colour the horizons with uncertain fog and swirling dust. Joe Banks, AKA Disinformation provides yet another of his twisted, buckling recordings of VLF radio anomalies, which stutters and stumbles like a ketamine god blindly seeking an exit. This is followed by a beautiful location recording by AER - Alpha Echo Romeo - which was made in the gardens at a shrine in Tokyo. A beautiful sonic counterpoint to the previous piece. Bruce Gilbert's track 'The Book' was constructed from source material provided by Daniel Menche - it's another exercise in dynamics which ends almost as soon as it starts - clever timing. It's left to superb photographer/ designer Jon Wozencroft to close this chapter with his delightful recording of a fireworks display, aptly titled 'A Happy Belgrade', replete with all the approving 'oohs' and 'aahs' of a Guy Fawkes crowd in London in 1997. (Or maybe it's the G8 overlords and their kin jissing over missile video footage while they pour boiling oil over writhing monkeys' brains, and wait with bad, bated breath for that particular odor of seared evolution to waft nose wards as a sign that it's spoon-dipping time ?) Is there anymore room in the ASH International cap for yet another feather, I wonder? [VITAL]
