A little late on this edition of Rum Music because it is publication week for the book I’ve been working on the last couple of years: Clay: A Human History. Publication week is a strange time – lots of nebulous tasks that don’t add up to a proper list of things to do, the feeling of being on call, for something that is by now old to you, but brand new to everyone else. The book leaves your brain officially and escapes into the world and the excitement of writing it is made fresh again. Eno read this one, and apparently immediately went out and bought some clay, so please do let me know if the same thing happens to you, as people buying bags of clay would be an unintended yet dreamy outcome from this book.
I had leftovers from that project that connected this life (writing on music) with that life (writing on clay) and so I decided to make a zine while the book was at the printers. I say zine, but I got ahead of myself and it turned out to be five zines interviewing five artists and musicians about clay and ceramics in their work, along with nine images and eight fragments, all hand bound and boxed in a screenprinted archive-grade folder, put together with the help of collage wizard Mark Edwards (one half of DR.ME) up at the Islington Mill. We spent about a week printing, folding and stapling. It was a very grounding experience, coupled with mild RSI.
I also wrote a new essay for the sleevenotes of Blume’s reissue of this essential compilation of New Music For Electronic And Recorded Media, which had a subtitle added for its second pressing – Women In Electronic Music. It features a clutch of the greats – Laurie Anderson, Annea Lockwood and Pauline Oliveros, among others, and I wrote quite a personal essay about these women being part of my listening history, and about what it means for me to be able to write about them, and with them now.
Theodora Laird, Caius WilliamsCrosspieceCherche Encore
Not much I come across has a Still House Plants feel, but this collaboration between singer and musician Theodora Laird recording with bass player Caius Williams tickled that memory, possessed of something like SHP’s intentional looseness and space, buttressed by playing from within a lineage of free improvisation. The bass playing is just terrific, particularly on opener ‘Dummy’, where it is gnarly, growling and keening as it is bowed and slapped. It is the rough that plays off the smoothness of Laird’s vocals (which also appeared on Loraine James’ For You And I) which have a plainness that suits the songs’ in-the-room silences and pauses. They are songs, I guess, sparse and elegant, and not tidied up too much. I am glad they are not cleaned up to studio slickness, with the room still audible, they are possessed of an entrancing immediacy and intimacy.
GoldblumTears In LimboSelf-Released
This release out of The Netherlands had me at the track title ‘Who Doesn’t Love A Potato?’, and held me with the chaotic harmonica incursion on ‘Strings Attached’ – you’ll think you’ve got two tabs playing at once. Goldblum are a duo of Marijn Verbiesen (aka Red Brut, and in Sweat Tongue and JSCA) and Michiel Klein from the four piece Lewsberg. The way in which the collaged loops of sound clunk around one another is as if trapped between transitions: they stick then chug, or bend as if deformed by being by a window in hot sun. ‘Fake Ears’ gives me the same feeling as one of my favourite albums of this type, American artist Joseph Hammer’s I Love You Please Love Me Too, in which a loop of the sung phrase “…the water stops…” snags and repeats. It’s nearly annoying, the next phrase never arrives, but in its repetition breaks some structural expectations and transcends irritation to become psychedelic music for thresholds between one state and another. Goldblum does the same, in nonsensical, fairly inexplicably appealing music which I’ve been drawn back to again and again this month.
MTDMARCHIV 2005-2006 没腿的马早期录音Zoomin’ Night
The opening minutes of this release sound like a lost Wuppertal support set in the 1970s, this album is actually made by two arts students from China much more recently. The duo is of Jun-Y Ciao and Tao Yi, who were studying together in Germany at the time. The initial sonic onslaught is caustic and eventful, leading into some happily frantic recorder flourishes that begin from about half way through track one, the instrument squealing under the blasts of breathy energy coming from Ciao.
TOMOvielle-electronicaKnotwilg
I first heard of TOMO early last year, when I saw him playing in a hurdy gurdy duo with Keiji Haino in a tiny venue called Fourth Floor in Tokyo. That was amazing, but this solo album, on the wonderful Knotwilg, is a beast. There are some comparisons to be made with Yann Gourdon, the way both lean into the raw and serrated density of sound it’s possible to generate with a hurdy gurdy, drawing in then distorting traditional forms as on ‘Awkward Bourrée’, (a Bourrée being a traditional French dance). ‘Wheel of Life’ is more lyrical and sparse, sounding in passing moments like Henry Flynt’s ‘You Are My Everlovin”. Don’t sleep on this, it’s gone straight to the top of my (surprisingly large) experimental hurdy gurdy pile.
Linus VandewolkenOude Geuze Uit Niemandaalmorc
Killer out-folk medievalism from morc tapes here, it brings together lots of sound I love, and gives me that feeling of being music from a past on a different timeline. It cotains lots of types of playing that I love – there’s a wide-open type of guitar work that reminds me of Jon Collin (but which I think is actually the sound of his home-made dulcimer), and sharp sometimes discordant pipe sounds that I presumed were Wojciech Rusin’s 3D printed pipes but are actually Vandewolken’s own hand-made flutes, based on traditional Dutch instruments. Linus Vandewolken is not his real name, but the moniker ofan artist namedMcCloud Zicmuse, who has also released on Shelter Press.
Tomoko SauvageIn the Liquid Amber Within The Ivory PorcelainINA-GRM
I interviewed Tomoko for my book on clay and kept her in the fanzine bundle as well. Her work uses a lot of feedback and hydrophones submerged in ceramic bowls filled with water. It’s an instrument inspired by the Carnatic jal tarang – a series of small bowls filled with water to give them different pitches. In this release for GRM, she focuses on a related technique she calls fortune biscuits. Biscuit refers to the still-porous bisque or biscuit fired clay, the fortune refers to the chance operations of this material placed in water, and the sound you hear is from bubbles emanating from the clay in the water. It doesn’t sound like an earthly material though, or even particularly watery (especially in comparison to some of her other work), and instead is crackling and fizzing, like white noise or micro-percussions on metal. Its opening burrs operate at frequencies I find have quite impressively disorienting psycho-acoustic effects, making my skull tingle behind the eyes. It is engrossing in headphones, although was originally intended for the GRM’s Acousmonium, and I would love to hear the many channels of this soundscape for the hadal zone rendered spatially in the concert hall.
AOB
I managed to write a whole entry on just the first track from this forthcoming release before I could even get hold of the rest of it as an advance promo, after becoming instantly ensconced in the first moments of Allan Gilbert Balon’s ‘Stella Maris’ from The Magnesia Suite. It is a recording of organ and voice made inside a church, its architecture responding to the singer with a sweet surrounding cumulus of resonance and delay. These acoustics are such that the church becomes a third instrument, or an outboard, lifting some louder, or higher pitched intonations into the heavens, an effect exaggerated by the recording, which is made at a distance. The voice when it soars to meet the rafters is just exquisite. The rest of the album is out in September, including a deluxe edition which comes with a handmade score, a sculpture, and a short film, but I couldn’t hold off writing about this till then.
Cheers to S for alerting me to the reissue of CHBB, a Liaisons Dangereuses side project that previously existed across some unobtainable cassettes by Beate Bartel (also of Matador, Neubauten) and her LD bandmate Chris Haas (DAF). Here they are brought together onto a single LP. It’s meaty.
On that note, there’s also more Sprung Aus Den Wolken out:
Jenifer Lucy Allan’s new book Clay: A Human History is published tomorrow (25 July) via White Rabbit, and available here.
