Gloria Regular, aka Trans Zimmer
“I’m a very scheduled person, I have to be to find time to make music,” says Pablo Picco, the man behind the immensely prolific and endlessly curious Bardo Todol, a project of wobbling and warping tape cut ups that buckle under the weight of the surreal collages they convey. Picco, who is based in the small town of Salsipuedes, some 15 kilometres from Córdoba in Argentina, is explaining to me over video call the balancing act of being an underground musician and a parent. “If you’ve got kids, you can’t work on music all the time, so when you do you have to be focused. We go deep, but it’s only for thirty minutes a day.”
Picco has never shied from bringing a dose of domestic reality into his music. He records in his kitchen, where he can create a studio atmosphere “in less than ten minutes.” There, he builds up an archive of sounds on tape which become the raw materials for his compositions. On El Dios Immaterial De Llos Pájaros, released last year on Dinzu Artefacts, his kids joined the band. “They were younger, so I didn’t have any time to work on music alone. I started bringing handheld recorders with me and captured the things we were doing together.”
The next Bardo Todol tape, El Violin Dorado, El Violin Arabe, will be released by Full Spectrum Records this month. Partly inspired by Deben Bhattacharya’s Sublime Frequencies book Paris To Calcutta, it’s a cross-pollination of sounds from across the globe. He sampled himself playing the n’vike, a bowed, single stringed instrument which originated with the indigenous Toba people. Picco’s has a body made from a tin can. “It’s an aboriginal instrument, but with something European in it,” he surmises. It’s joined by what he describes as a temperamental hurdy gurdy, mandolin and samples from cassettes of Arabic music. The result is a hazy, radiating trip of volatile drones, clusters of tape whir and sonic clutter. An aural kaleidoscope which needs to keep moving to make sense. “In a way, it’s a homage to Arabic music, but also the violin. For me, it’s connected to the desert. I don’t live in a desert, but there’s a similar feeling. We get droughts, it’s sparsely populated. There’s a connection.”
Picco also curates the Bolinga Everest label, which focuses on artists from South America, and he’s a frequent collaborator in the global experimental underground. Recently, this has manifested in the Floating Tape project with Zhu Wenbo, Anne-F Jacques, and Chemiefaserwerk. An inter-continental game of musique concrete musical chairs, it sees the four piece rotate rolls, two of them laying down audio, one mixing it, and the fourth releasing it on their label. The results are fascinating explorations into discrete yet vivid music that toy with palettes of difficult to place sounds.
In June, Artsy Records released Un Super Groupe Nommé Sapito (A super group called toad), a remote collaboration between Bardo Todol and L’Arbre Nu. The album builds a surreal soundworld of eerie wildlife and haphazard, off the cuff free folk jams. In the gamelan-like groove of the first side comes a sudden deluge of ribbits and croaks, as though you’ve been dropped into the middle of a swamp and surrounded by a community of friendly Anura. Picco reveals it’s actually L’Arbre Nu’s Guy Pierre impersonating amphibians with his kids. Both disarming and charming, it constructs something unfamiliar through play and community, experimental in the most heart-warming sense of the word.
“The other day, I was talking to the parents of one of my kids’ friends,” Picco recalls. “I tried to explain experimental music to him. I said: ‘It’s a global network that collaborates with each other. We’re all very different people with different lives in different situations. We share music and experiences, wherever we are.”
Trans Zimmer & The DJs – Trans Zimmer & The DJs
(Artetra)
Trans Zimmer & The DJs is augmented reality baroque music. A 4D Juke musical about naval maneuvers and fantastic realms. It started with midi classical and chamber midi arrangements from Trans Zimmer (aka Gloria Regular), which, if you squint, you can still hear here. These midi building blocks were passed on to The DJs, who morphed them through a plethora of drum and effects samples. Writing the process down sounds kind of tedious, but the result is the opposite. Pixar-like musical interludes get turned into triumphant blasts of autotuned choirs and rubbery bass. Showtunes twist into hacked RPG soundtracks. This cartoonish hyperreality is fully immersive and remarkably ordered, moments such as the soaring vocal melody buried in the techno-sea shanty of ‘The Adventures Of The SS Romulus’ clearly not happening by accident. It’s life-affirmingly bonkers music, and their commitment and conviction to realising this parallel world is as awe-inspiring as it is fun. There’s something in the playfulness of Trans Zimmer & The DJs which sounds a little like an in-joke, but the enjoyment it creates is universal, stretching and letting everyone in on the punchline.
Dania – Voz
(Geographic North)
‘Aleph’, on Dania Shihab’s Voz, begins with scuffed string loops and plucked harps before she hesitantly whispers letters in a sequence which isn’t random but ordered by a logic known only to the artist. The track’s title is the first letter of the Arabic alphabet. “The letters I’m saying are English letters with a hidden significance,” Baghdad born, currently Barcelona-based Shihab explains to me over email. “I’ve lost a lot of my Arabic language since leaving Iraq and this song is in a way a broken elegy about language and culture loss.” Shihab is a DJ, producer and founder of the fantastic Paralaxe Editions label. On Voz (Spanish for voice) she smudges her vocals through a nave of synths and lush swells. There’s a temptation to throw around words like ethereal when describing music like this, but that implies something hollow designed to dissolve in the ether. Shihab’s music does the opposite, pulling ineffable feelings out of the air and inscribing them onto tape. The ghostly sonics here aren’t mere decoration, they embody a dilemma between shyness and openness. As the liner notes explain, Shihab grew up in a household where singing was culturally frowned upon: “A lot of what I did musically was done in secret. For that, I have a difficult relationship with my voice.” As her productions toy with proximity, whispering directly into our ears and then retreating into caverns of reverb, they collapse the barrier between listener and artist. Engulfing us in sensations that can’t be described in words alone.
Spliff Jacksun – Hitherto
(Crash Symbols)
Hitherto is a homage by Montreal producer Spliff Jacksun to his home city. On the surface, this tape’s dusty, weary-eyed beats bottle a vibe of pure lethargy, painting a hazy picture of the Quebec capital. But underneath is a sound diary among the jazzy keys and liquid bass lines of a city teeming with personality. Through the loungey groove smeared across the twenty-four tracks, equal parts R.I.P.-era Actress and Freestyle Fellowship, real-life events pop up. A party going on in the background of ‘In the Park’, or the distracting yet reassuring clatter which sounds like a poorly secured door on ‘Under Shade’. The whole tape gels together into a slow-moving montage bristling with life. The steady, head-nodding momentum triggered by Spliff Jacksun’s productions acting like a vessel to carry us through the pulsing soul of their surroundings.
Li Yilei – Secondary Self
(LTR Records)
Sequences of cause and effect are abandoned on London-based, Chinese artist Li Yilei’s Secondary Self. Most of their tracks here were originally released digitally through Café Oto’s TakuRoku imprint, but a few extra pieces have been added to the tape edition, including the lysergic synth closer ‘Melt’, a moment of sure-footed clarity to reorientate you after the paranormal swirl that precedes it. The whole album is full of sonic events and textures reversing and folding over each other, so any sense of beginning or end, natural or synthetic, is thrown out the window. On ‘Bird Box’, chirps and tweets become harrowingly electronic. ‘Murmur’ has an uneasy polyphony of whale and bird song smother a discombobulated guitar loop. More potent than the specific timbres is the churn that pulls them us and them together. Li Yilei lulling us into a strange dream of ruptured pastorals and unfamiliar causalities.
Moth Cock – Whipped Stream And Other Earthly Delights
(Hausu Mountain Records)
As we seemingly hurtle into another austerity fuelled Grey Age, making something multicoloured and extravagant from minimal means feels an act of defiance rather than excess. Moth Cock is Ohio duo Doug Gent and Pat Modugno, and on triple cassette opus Whipped Stream and Other Earthly Delights they use a sparse palette of samplers, saxophone and clarinet to create sprawling jams full of ecstatic lunacy. These tracks are compiled from performances the pair did over Twitch, strung together into three and a half hours of head-melting glitch-prog. Opener ‘Castles Off Jersey’ journeys from heavenly sax drones into malfunctioning electronics as though a celestial drone band is getting sucked into an analogue-digital converter before your very ears. ‘Broke Batting Cage’ explores a noir, Twin Peaksish haze. ‘Invisible Pranks’ is a circus-gabba slammer of hyper speed drum machines and mangled voices. These extremes aren’t contrarian, Moth Cock’s music is laden with epiphanies. The moment a few minutes into ‘The Name is Baby’, when two rhythms melt into each other without ever sounding wrong nor quite right, or ‘Sprawl Battles’ effortless segue from jagged vocal cuts into swooning bliss show the miracles they can pull from the maelstrom. Their music transcends through sheer excess, summoning a wave of overstimulation to drown out the mundane.
Webb Crawford – Joiners
(Tripticks Tapes)
The song titles on Webb Crawford’s debut album Joiners are an expanded history of joinery. The second track takes the surname of Richard Hakluyt, an English propagandist who pushed for the colonization of North America to acquire more natural resources. ‘Four Quarter’ is a lumber yard idiom, a measurement of one inch. An instrument builder as well as improvisor, this sense of materiality, of humans and trees colliding, dominates Crawford’s solo guitar instrumentals. It’s a tape full of creaks and strains, prying and sawing. Opener ‘Lumbards’ flowing finger picking is interrupted by pranging, splintered notes. ‘Hakluyt’ sounds less like a guitar than a work party of woodpeckers. Elsewhere come surges of distortion and clangourous drones, conjuring mental images of someone swinging and then trying to dislodge an axe, while ‘Boole’s’ rising and falling staccato mimics the movement of sanding down a surface, going from broader strokes into shorter, faster movements. Crawford’s gestures are often mechanical, but they end up creating remarkable fluidity. As though the movements of a luthier’s craft, of plucking out splinters, cutting wood and varnishing surfaces is being reapplied to the finished instrument. An approach to the guitar that reflects the labour, craft and intricacy that goes into turning a plank of wood into a musical instrument.
Wrekan – Maror
(Realm & Ritual)
Maror is a name with two meanings, in Swedish it pluralises Mara, a wraith like entity that brings nightmares. In Hebrew it means bitter herbs, a symbol for hardship. Wrekan, a one-person black metal project from Sweden who goes by the name ‘M’, takes this mix of meanings as a starting point to process a world on the precipice. He reduces metal down to the barest materials. Guitars are heavy yet barren, at points seeming to leak through the room next door before finally roaring in. The snares could be branches breaking on a snag as it splinters away from the ground. The austere production provides brittle clarity. M’s screams are parched, wrestling with guitar and drums like a call for change left unheeded. In this splintered mess, fragments of something sublime pierces through. Opener ‘Sheep In Wolf’s Clothing’ begins with nothing more than a rasping distortion and a solitary bass tone, before riding on a riff so triumphant it could single handedly throw a spanner in the cogs of the Capitalocene. ‘The Indifferent Stars Above (Dust II)’ rides skyward, capturing a bleak majesty flickering underneath the smog. Maror is charred and desolate, the sound of one person looking out on a damaged world, perhaps, and screaming to anyone who will listen. It doesn’t provide answers, but as it oscillates between rage and awe-inspired shock, it outlines the enormity of the question.
Fischerle – Zamieć
(Patalax)
Warsaw-based Mateusz Wysocki has appeared in this column before through his Fischerle project and as curator of the brilliant Pawlacz Perski label. The former is a consistent vehicle for exquisitely textured house and techno abstraction but he reaches new levels of definition on Zamieć. The off-centre beats remain, but where his grooves previously seemed smudged out of shape, this time the odd contours sound painstakingly hand crafted. ‘Punkty odniesienia’ and ‘Sny’ see gloomy pads and samples ride on intricate percussion patterns, as though the drums have been tweezered into place. ‘Wir’ starts as a straight techno banger, but when hi-hats cut through the whooshing dystopian smog they knock the whole thing into a new plane, dancing around the pulsing bass and filling gaps that don’t really seem to exist. ‘Zamieć ‘is richly layered but never cluttered, a world of constant motion where rhythm is texture and texture is rhythm, locking every sound into an intricate network of fluctuating grids.
Karen & Peter – Aggro Dolce
(Cruel Nature Records)
There’s hardly a dearth of post-industrial land/soundscapes in the tape scene, but Karen Schoemer and Peter Taylor’s engagement with their tarnished surroundings (upstate New York’s Factory Hill and the Calder Valley’s abandoned coal mines respectively) on Aggro Dolce explores how polluted land bleeds into the psyche, rather than just evoking the bleak scenery. Writer and journalist Schoemer’s narrative fragments echo the unpredictable coherence in Clarice Lispector’s prose. Her texts are haunted by a flood both literal and figurative. “This road wasn’t here, this alley wasn’t here, the stream became a reservoir, the flood came down the hill, past the Catholic Church,” she says on ‘Do You Remember the Factory that Burned’. She captures a world of impermanence leaving it’s imprint in the social. “One set of tones dissolves into another, Saturn’s velvet rings replaced by spider webs and tarot symbols,” (‘Truth is in Sounds’). Taylor, who works solo as Mortuus Auris & The Black Hand, contributes a soundscape of collapsing choirs and looming decay, adding to the web of loss that tethers these assemblages together. The duo interrogate the permeable membrane between place and self that Claire Archibald and Kinbrae opened up on ‘Birl of Unmap’ earlier this year. Taking a different vantage point but echoing the awareness that there’s more in our surroundings than the view.
CC Sorensen – Phantom Rooms
(Mappa)
CC Sorensen’s ‘Twin Mirrors’ from earlier this year reflected on a period of prolonged housing uncertainty for them a few years back. Phantom Rooms sticks to questions of home, recollecting on the now Texas-based composer’s childhood house in Kansas. These compositions capture the odd nooks and crannies of a long-gone living space, the distortions, perhaps, of a mind remembering the sensation of being a child in an adult-sized world. The disbelief as you try to apply logic to what, as a kid, seemed magical. Opener ‘Quantic Vision’ sounds like shuffling up the stairs transcribed for chamber ensemble. ‘Snake in Reverse’s cosmic jazz could be the soundtrack to the strange movement of shadows when the landing light has been left on. ‘Ellis’s strings and electrical whines are chilling, evoking the unfamiliar sensation of wandering through the kitchen in absolute darkness. Phantom Rooms seems to be music not so much for haunted houses as haunted former occupants. Sorensen reverse engineering the feeling of enchantment of an unfamiliar place before it becomes familiar. When living spaces could be sites of wonder rather than routine.
