For Jon Hassell, the fourth world mixed real and virtual. A way of making music from an indeterminate place that had echoes of existing human cultures but sprouted from the imagination. Variations and mutations of something similar to this idea crop up on tape a lot. Sometimes actually sounding like Hassell, sometimes applying similarly mundane melting actions to completely different materials.
Milan-based duo Rosso Polare fall into the latter camp. For their fourth album, Campo Amaro (Bitter Field), Cesare Lopopolo and Anna Vezzosi took inspiration from fossi, that is, ditches surrounding fields across Italy. Sites which are, according to them, increasingly polluted but still teeming with life. Stemming from that came an immersion in Mondine chants and songs. Mondina were mostly female workers who weeded Italian rice fields. Their grueling labour pushed them to political organisation. Protests and riots in the early twentieth century saw them win an eight-hour work-day. A rich musical heritage descended from their struggle, protest and resistance songs which ended up sticking around long after the Mondina’s battle had been won.
With these influences and inspirations, Rosso Polare do something which parallels Hassell’s ideas of the fourth world. But for them, the imagined space isn’t limited to the traditionally musical. Even more so than on previous albums, they create songs which double as unstable soundscapes. A sonic world where volatility breeds vibrancy. Concrete sounds blur into acoustic instruments, wildlife calls start to overlap with electronics. Emerging through their electro-organic stew, on the title track, ‘Piaghe’ and ‘Testamento fermo’ come beautiful earworms, sung by the pair’s voices layered on top of each other.
These songs aren’t Mondine chants, but they borrow from them, a stanza reworked here or there, new melodies taking inspiration from old melodies without replicating them. As they explain to me over an Instagram message, Lopopolo and Vezzosi are more interested in the idea of folklore than specifically appropriating from the archive. The result is a music of hybrids and entanglements. Imagined vernaculars reverberating through soundscapes which break binaries of natural and unnatural, human and non-human. It has the outline of a transmission from a messy, complex, polluted real place. Some of the textures are familiar, but the specifics are all new. An indeterminate space chiming with strange resonances. A real and virtual ecology which is endlessly enchanting.
Ensemble TikoroHell ChamberArtetetra
In 2012, Robi Rusdiana, a composer and music theory teacher in Bandung, Indonesia, dove into local extreme metal scenes to recruit vocalists to form an eight-person strong choir. Hell Chamber compiles twenty tracks, composed over the first seven years of the choir’s existence and then recorded in 2021. The pieces only contain human voice with no other instruments or effects added. They roll from massed whispers into extreme, larynx testing contortions. Softly pounding, mantra like chants into sharped edged, rhythmic acapella and rogue, borderline operatic falsettos. At points, the vocalists almost seem like they’re taking up the space a barrage of blast beats and shredded riffs would. At others, they slip into somewhere more atavistic, as if channeling turbulent weather and ominous calms. Metal meets extended technique might be one way to describe it, but the latter term feels too formal for how visceral, instinctive and communal Ensemble Tikoro’s music is. On paper, the idea of a metal choir might seem like a gimmick, but there’s far more to this than novelty. It’s a head-spinning, ear-widening exploration of the human voice and all its unsettling, moving possibilities.
KavalSolastasisNuova Materia
Kaval conjure electro-medieval apparitions on Solastasis. The Dutch duo, Derk Reneman and Ian Martin weave gloomy synthesizer tones through early music frameworks, plucked strings and, on several of the tracks, groaning hurdy-gurdy (played by Jimi Hellinga). On paper, this might sound like dungeon synth or folktronica, but they produce something far more fluid than those rigid genre descriptors would prescribe, carrying resonances with the droning, time-lapsed folk emerging from the Morc Tapes stable but with more of a kosmiche tint. On opener ‘Strings Of Life’ softly crenellated synth pads elicit mental images of looming castles, while a gently incessant pulse and keening wails suggest there’s harrow and turmoil to these anachronistic vistas. On ‘Iron Heart’, jingles and prickly keys evoke a frailty beneath the bravado suggested by the track’s title. Kaval’s music is so compelling because it seems more driven by chronology defying resonances than bolted together fusions. Their sound palette unearths resonances and common ground, shared textures and moods between ancient and modern, rather than hodge-podging them together for novelty. It results in a potent synthesis, a vibrant long exposure photo which captures an-era spanning eeriness and foreboding hidden in the soundscape.
Manja Ristic, Joana Guerra, Verónica CerrottaSlani PejzažiTsss Tapes
Serbian-based Manja Ristić’s process seems as much about capturing snippets of energy and time as audio. Her music dwells in spooky serenity, composing through and with field recordings to evoke moments when surroundings are peaceful yet also tilting slightly off their axis. Slani Pejzaži sees her team up with Verónica Cerrotta and Joana Guerra, and the trio are clearly on the same wavelength. Stasis and activity are perfectly poised, environmental sounds melt into glistening strings, gently throbbing electronics and flickers of wind instruments. Through the second track, a storm rages in the background, instruments and snippets of radio voice perfectly encapsulating the sticky, viscous lethargy of a humid evening. The trio balance intervention and serendipity, knowing when to let sounds simply happen and when to intervene and redirect them. A morose edge seems to drift through their music but it’s so subtle I can’t really tell if it’s coming from them or me. A pair of lucid landscapes which leave space for the listener to add a piece of themselves.
wh0wh0, SKI feat. swrcfx, Hubert ZemlerGroove 16 / 17 / 18Outlines
The Wroclaw headquartered Outlines label has been commissioning fascinating experiments with footwork since 2016, with the latest trio of releases in their Groove series seeing drummers tasked with finding new possibilities at 160bpm. Confirming that we’re living in a golden age of Polish percussionists, the trio, wh0wh0, aka Jacek Prościński on Groove 16, SKI (Damian Kowalczyk) on 17, and Hubert Zemler on 18, spark off into radically different directions from what I assume was a fairly open brief. The latter’s pair of tracks are richly layered exercises in minimalism. The first side has hammered percussion and rippling synth patterns evolve and levitate over gently pounding beats, while the b-side pulls all manner of rhythmic flux out of a psyche rock guitar loop. wh0wh0 stretches footwork intricacy into a fragile, almost Burial-adjacent headspace, snipped vocals stuttering through frazzled pads and high velocity hi-hat patterns. SKI collaborates with Szymon Szwarc, aka swrcfx, the former’s drums wired through effects controlled by the latter, making it difficult to tell where acoustic ends and electronic begins. Their cybernetic feedback loop feels more tightly bound and bi-directional than on their tape from last year, KRE. The first side opens in a space which feels the closest to traditional footwork out of all three tapes, but from there it splinters in perplexing directions, a perpetually reformatting and relentlessly generative circuit forming between the pair. These three tapes all stem from the same idea, but the outcomes open up worlds of possibility in the relations between rhythm and texture.
picoFaradSurvival Techniques From The Old World Vol.1Goods Outward
picoFarad is the solo project of Natalie Williams, one half of East-London duo Leyden Jars. Survival Techniques From The Old World Vol.1 montages together recordings she made between 2003 and 2017. The results are a dusty yet oddly inviting dreamspace where snippets of songs and beats merge together into tattered and warped phantasmagoria. The tracks on the first side of the tape find intimacy in austerity. Rattling percussion, slithers of bass and beats, fragments of vocals rippling through acres of dead air. The second side stays in spacious terrain, yet echoes of something both sci-fi and folk adjacent creep in, as if this dive into the archive has started going forwards and backwards. Throughout, there’s a King Tubby like approach to the mixing desk, tracks whittled down, low-frequency details amplified to find new resonances and reverberations in her loops and sounds. Williams dives deep into the time machine qualities of dub techniques and the mixtape format, finding that odds and sods and sonic bric-a-brac never stop having something to say.
The Concept HorseMore Meaningful AlgebraMolt Fluid
Vienna-based The Concept Horse’s More Meaningful Algebra creates captivation in directionlessness. Aside from a few interludes, the double cassette is packed with concise, bloopy cells on the cusp of rhythmic and textural. These minimal components don’t particularly go anywhere, but neither are they static. They’re frameworks undergoing subtle mutation, each staying for just long enough for you to notice the change (or lack of) before abruptly ending. What could be irritating, anxiety inducing or just plain tedious evades negativity through sheer persistence and playfulness. It’s wonky and elegant, architectural and kind of bouncy all at once. Like Erik Satie’s Furniture Music played by cranky machines for a room where everything has the consistency of a ping pong ball. It’s music that just is, and in this case that’s more than enough.
Angelwings MarmaladeAs The Motherboard Watched BackStrategic Tape Reserve
Angelwings Marmalade is Angel Marcloid, the multi-instrumentalist behind Fire-Toolz and a host of other aliases. As The Motherboard Watched Back sounds like the heaviest and poppiest sides of those other projects converging into a freewheeling singularity. Slams of prog metal are delivered with hardcore ferocity. Sparkles of arena-scaled hooks emerge in unlikely places. On ‘Fuck If I Deserve My Dreams Like Sandwiches in My Brain’ featuring Sarah Sherman, there’s a vocal akin to a death metal croon, an odd little ditty emerging as if we’ve gone behind the charging kick drums and blast beats and heard the sweet melodicism beneath. It’s music that seems to find ecstasy in being conflicted. Angelwings Marmalade’s uncategorisability embraces maximalist plurality to defiantly fly in the face of any force that would attempt to pigeonhole it. It’s so triumphant because coherence rather than chaos comes through this instability. From galloping fusions to Marcloid laying down tracks for other vocalists, this tape is rabble-rousing in an oddly irradiated way.
Seiji Morimoto, Eric WongDzan-pukuAloe Records
Bluetooth speakers are increasingly a tool of choice for experimental sound artists. It makes sense, portable and widely available consumer technology with distinct sonic imprints have long been central to thrifty DIY innovation. Seiji Morimoto and Eric Wong incorporate Bluetooth speakers with Max/MSP and contact and vibrational microphones with intriguing effect on Dzan-puku. I’m not certain about their process, but hazarding a guess I’d imagine at least part of it is sounds being played through the speakers while placed on a surface, the resulting vibration being recorded as much as sounds from the speakers direct. Morimoto and Wong produce humming labyrinths of rattling tone and volatile resonance. Midway through the first side, a beautiful overtone sneaks through the buzz and drone, drawing soothing serenity from their vibrations. Textures rough-edged yet comforting, rigid yet relentlessly active populate the entire tape. Through webs of graceful abrasion, brassy textures occasionally appear, other times hints of melody and odd harmony. It’s a transfixing embrace of quivering matter, as if we’ve been invited to eavesdrop on the secret lives of vibration.
Moth CockHausLive 3: Chicago TwoferHausu Mountain
Last time Kent, Ohio-based duo Moth Cock appeared in this column it was with a triple cassette epic, which points to the scale and ambition that electrifies their brass and electronics propelled free-music. HausLive 3: Chicago Twofer captures two live sets Doug Gent and Pat Modugno performed across Chicago in 2023. It’s part of an irregular series of live bootlegs by Hausu Mountain, originating from the archive of local gig-taper, Joel Berk. The live album format confirms that the zany intensity in Moth Cock’s music isn’t studio manufactured, if anything, recording sessions seem to rein in their glitching free-spirits. The two lengthy sets captured here never pull back from their clown-car freewheeling down a steep and winding hill momentum. At points, Gent pivots into surprisingly sweet, melodic phrases on the saxophone, each time provoking Modugno into dropping prolonged blasts of absurdist synthesis. This dynamic repeatedly impels their interactions, things do occasionally trip into stability, they sometimes get a little swoony, but there’s always a counter pull which knocks everything sideways before it can settle. Moth Cock make electro-skronk with a balloon twister’s penchant for peculiar shapes. It’s vertigo inducing, and exhilarating.
Burning Love JumpsuitHell Bank Note (1993-1995)Nyahh
Burning Love Jumpsuit were an Irish trio active between 1991 and 2002, and Hell Bank Note (1993-1995) compiles tracks from five of their earliest albums. The release notes paint a picture of three film and TV obsessives, sealed away from the outside world and hoarding audio. They also had an odd penchant for funk, but in the uncouth and unhomely way the Butthole Surfers were into funk. Across the tracks, a barrage of samples, predominantly spoken word, are played over sleazy, sneering grooves. There’s a heavy hint of Negativland in what they do, but Burning Love Jumpsuit are less didactic, and seemingly more disturbed by popular culture. Early on there’s an unnerving quality to their samples, single protagonists’ have their speech isolated, cut up and strung together into extended monologues, as if we’re being exposed to the pure, unfiltered dialogue inside someone else’s head. Later tracks become more layered, there’s more voices in the odd-funk mash-ups, and the cultural references are more explicitly of the nineties (OJ Simpson, Kurt Cobain). The compilation is an unsettling time capsule. The trio slicing through the deluge of broadcast information with skill and dark wit.
