Cry’ Me A Shiver

Tuesday, 12th May, 2015 by Krilling for Company in Album Art, Music, Science and tagged "Bruitmal", "Frissonique", "if it's too cold you're too old", 2008, Alexandre, amplificateur du froid, avant garde music, chills, chords of cold, cold, colder, congelations, creation of cold, Cry Me A Shiver, Cryogénie, Cryogénie albums, cryogénique, cryogenesis, cryogenic, cryogenic technology, cryomusic, cryomusique, cryorrhythms, darkness, earplugs, esclaves du froid, experience is the ultimate magic, experimental music, framplicateur, framplifiers, François, French avant-gardists, French band, frost, Gay Science, genius of cold, grêlodie, grêlodies, hail, ice, interview, interview with Cryogénie, invocations of cold, irreproducible music, Ist es nicht kälter geworden?, le chuchotement des étoiles, live concert, live experience, magic, magick, memories, music, Nietzsche, no aftershave no perfume, playing the dark, plus froid, pour la chair, recording memories, ritual, rituals of cold, rivers of shivers, shower carefully, Sibérie, Siberia, silence, spirit of cold, stimulate the flesh, submit you to our chill, talismans, Tïurbeau magazine, the whisper of the stars, triumph of the chill, vous êtes là pour la chair, waves of cold, whisper of the stars | Leave a comment

It’s not true that Cryogénie are best experienced live. That would imply their music can be experienced some other way. It can’t. The live experience is the only experience. And it’s guaranteed unique. These French avant-gardists aren’t the only band to hand out earplugs on the door, but they don’t do it for the conventional reason: that they play so loud.

In fact, they don’t play loud. They don’t play soft either. In the conventional sense, they don’t play at all. Here’s an interview from 2008 with Tïurbeau magazine:

Tïurbeau: I’ve got your latest album in front of me now. Words fail me.

Alexandre: And us too.

François: As usual.

Tïurbeau: Then one has to ask: why do you bother to release albums?

Alexandre: We see it, you could say, as a little ritual, something solid, something material––

François: Something permanent.

Alexandre: Yes, something permanent, to mark the occasion, that will remain with our audience. Often, we hear, they will buy an album after they have attended a concert, as a souvenir, almost. And they will truly play it!

Tïurbeau: They will play thirty-seven minutes of silence?

Cryogénie, Nix Sonica (2008)*

François: Yes. The silence creates a space, a kind of opening in the present, for memories of the concert.

Alexandre: Yes, for memories, exactly so. Although, of course, in one sense we have pride in the irreproducibility of our music, in another sense we are recording every moment we are on stage. On the brain.

François: On the brains of the audience.

Alexandre: We are recording memories.

Tïurbeau: And the albums are designed to trigger the memories?

Alexandre: Trigger?

Tïurbeau: Bring the memories back.

Alexandre: Ah, yes, exactly so. The albums are a focus for memories of a concert.

François: Almost talismans.

Tïurbeau: In a magical sense?

Alexandre: Yes, why not? For us, experience is the ultimate magic. In the moment, but also in memory.

Tïurbeau: And does this relate to the sensory restrictions of your concerts, the way you try to turn down some senses in order to heighten the sense you are seeking to stimulate?

François: Yes, exactly so. Earplugs.

Alexandre: No aftershave, no perfume.

François: And please shower carefully before you attend.

Alexandre: Yes, shower carefully. And we ourselves, we will take care of the light. Remove it, make the scene very dark. You are not at a Cryogénie concert for pleasing your ears, your nose, eyes, mouth. Non, vous êtes là pour la chair!

François: Oui, pour la chair.

Tïurbeau: For the flesh.

Alexandre: Yes, the flesh. And how do we stimulate the flesh when we may not use another mode, not exploit another sense? No vibration, no infra-bass even. Then what?

François: Yes, this was the question we faced in our formative days.

Tïurbeau: And the answer…

Cryogénie, Rois du Froid (1996)**

Alexandre: The cold!

François: Cold.

Alexandre: Please remember a question in the Gay Science of Nietzsche: Ist es nicht kälter geworden?

François: “Has it not become colder?”

Alexandre: And we want, if you attend a Cryogénie concert, for you to say: Ja! Oui! Yes! Kälter, kälter! Plus froid, plus froid! Colder, colder!

Tïurbeau: The triumph of the chill?

François: Yes. Triumph of the chill!

Alexandre: I don’t understand.

François: [Explains briefly in French]

Alexandre: Ah, yes, a triumph.

Tïurbeau: And with the concept came the name?

Alexandre: Yes, and so we had our name also. Cryogénie. With several meanings. Cryogénie is “creation of cold”, but also, for us, “genius of cold”, “spirit of cold”. Remember the concept of ritual. Our concerts, you might say, are rituals of cold, invocations of cold.

François: And: “If it’s too cold, you’re too old!”

Alexandre: Yes, so it’s said. Of course, in truth we welcome all ages, but if you are in poor health, perhaps better not to attend.

François: Nevertheless, visits to the pharmacy surely increase after we have passed through a city.

Tïurbeau: How cold do you go?

Alexandre: Ah, we prefer not to speak of that. No numbers, no statistics. You are there for the music, not to watch le thermomètre.

François: We get cold enough for our purposes.

Tïurbeau: That sounds rather sinister!

François: Yes, perhaps so. But would that not be the ultimate experience, to die pour une grêlodie, for a grêlodie?

Tïurbeau: Grêlodie?

Alexandre: It’s a joke, un calembour, a mixing of words.

François: A pun. In French, grêle is “hail”, you know, the little balls of ice, and mélodie is “melody”, of course, and so you have grêlodie, for a tune as performed by Cryogénie, a tune of ice, a tune of cold.

Tïurbeau: But not literal hail?

Alexandre: No, not literal. Though sometimes the breath of our audience will freeze and fall as a kind of snow. It makes a sound, that, a very delicate sound, le chuchotement des étoiles, comme on dit en Sibérie.

François: Yes, the whisper of the stars, as they say in Siberia. But of course, no-one will hear it, if they have followed their instructions.

Alexandre: Earplugs in!

Cryogénie, Blanchette (2003)***

François: But the snow, the breath-snow, can be felt on the skin as it falls. This is acceptable, though it is an indirect effect of our music, not something we have planned for.

Tïurbeau: I have felt it. In the middle section of “Frissonique”, particularly.

Alexandre: Yes, and in “Bruitmal”.

François: When the framplifiers are cooking, as you might say.

Tïurbeau: Framplifiers? Can you explain for the benefit of our readers?

François: It is from froid and amplificateur. Framplicateur, framplifier. Amplifiers of cold, or generators of cold.

Tïurbeau: That is one of the most widely discussed aspects of your music, isn’t it? Your equipment.

Alexandre: Yes.

François: Yes, certainly.

Tïurbeau: But you’re rather secretive about it, aren’t you?

Alexandre: Yes!

François: You discuss, we are sphinxes.

Tïurbeau: Silent?

François: Yes. We have our – what is the term? – our trade-secrets. It’s not in our interests to expose our techniques. Nor in yours, we think.

Tïurbeau: You want to preserve that air of mystery?

Alexandre: Yes, precisely so. The experience is more strong when you don’t understand.

François: Like magic.

Alexandre: Yes, magic. We perform a ritual. The invocation of the cold. We invoke the cold and we throw the cold, we throw it on the audience.

François: Waves of cold. Cryorrhythms. Chords of cold, congelations, grêlodies, chills, thrills, rivers of shivers. That is the Cryogénie experience.

Tïurbeau: But there’s some serious technology behind the experience, isn’t there?

Alexandre: Yes.

François: Yes.

Tïurbeau: And you’re saying no more?

Alexandre: Yes, no more.

François: It’s not in our interests to explain. Or yours.

Tïurbeau: Nothing?

Alexandre: Nothing.

Tïurbeau: Not even a little?

François: Well, maybe a little. We had problems, in the early days, with unwanted noise, from the equipment.

Alexandre: Just a little.

François: I mean, if you think of a refrigerator, there is noise, of course. And we didn’t want noise, we wanted silence, pure silence.

Tïurbeau: A blank canvas, sensorily speaking?

François: Yes, a blank canvas, for us to paint with cold. So there was that problem to solve. The noise, unwanted noise.

Tïurbeau: And you solved it?

François: Yes, I think we did.

Alexandre: I think so.

Tïurbeau: But the earplugs are still necessary?

Alexandre: Yes, necessary, we think. Because, of course, with silent equipment there is still the movement of people, our movement on the stage, movement of the audience.

François: And the whisper of the stars, with some other effects. There are many things to create noise at a concert. We cannot eliminate them all, or we choose not to, because the earplugs are in themselves symbolic. To use them, you say: “See? I choose to close this door, this sensory mode.”

Alexandre: And you give yourself to us, to Cryogénie, to exploit another sense.

François: To submit you to our chill.

Tïurbeau: Esclaves du froid?

François: Yes, very good. Slaves of cold! But equally we are the slaves.

Alexandre: Yes, esclaves du froid. I like it. Perhaps we will write a song of that title one day.

Elsewhere Other-Engageable:

• Rois du Froid — Cryogénie’s official site

*Sonic Snow.
**Kings of Cold.
***Little White One.

The Sound of Silex

Wednesday, 2nd Jul, 2014 by Krilling for Company in Album Art, Music, Music reviews, Post-Weird, The Sea and tagged "Lady Madonna", "Listen to the music playing in your head", avant garde music, beautiful patterns, brain, Cath Orne, Catherine Orne, EarHax, EarHax fanzine, electronic music, Exeter band, experimental music, gravity, Hector Anderton, interview, Joe Corvin, minimalism, minimalist music, model of reality, Mother Nature, music, music inside the head, nerve signals, patterns in sand, Paul McCartney, Plymouth fanzine, reality, review, sand, sand and air, sand and water, Sand Band, sand patterns, Sculptress of the Sands, Sculptrix Sabulorum, Silica, simple ingredients, skull, Skulsonik, Slow Exploding Gulls, the sea, Umbra Mundi, wind | Leave a comment

Some of the most beautiful patterns in nature arise from the interaction of three very simple things: sand and water, sand and air. Sculptrix Sabulorum, a side-project of the Exeter band Slow Exploding Gulls, are an attempt to do with sound what nature does with sand: turn simple ingredients into beautiful patterns. Here are extracts from an interview and review in the Plymouth fanzine EarHax:

Hector Anderton: OK. The obvious first. Sculptrix Sabulorum. What does it mean and why did you choose it?

Joe Corvin: It’s Latin and literally means “Sculptress of the Sands”. We chose it, well, because we thought it looked and sounded good. Good but mysterious.

Hector Anderton: And who is the sculptress? The sea?

Joe Corvin: Well, the sculptress is Mother Nature, in the fullest sense, but she uses the sea. The wind. Gravity. Simple things, but put them together with sand and interesting things happen.

Cath Orne: Which we wanted to explore, but we didn’t think S.E.G. [Slow Exploding Gulls] was the way to explore them.

Hector Anderton: But hadn’t you done that in Silica?

Joe Corvin: We’d started to, but Silica hadn’t exhausted the theme. Of sand, I mean. It’s something I’d always been interested in, but with S.E.G. we tend to go with the organic side of the sea, with sea life.

Hector Anderton: Whereas sand is inorganic?

Joe Corvin: Exactly. Silica was a bit of a departure for us, in that respect. It was as though we were walking down a corridor and we opened a door in passing and thought, yeah, that room looks interesting.

Sand Band: Sculptrix Sabulorum

Cath Orne: So we’ll come back and have a proper look later.

Joe Corvin: Yeah. Under a new name. Which we’ve done. Hence, Sculptrix Sabulorum.

Extract © EarHax (1992)

Skulsonik, Sculptrix Sabulorum (Umbra Mundi 1995)

Macca to Madonna: “Listen to the music playing in your head.” In fact, we never do anything else. We don’t experience the world: we experience a sensory simulacrum of the world. Light or sound-waves or chemicals floating in the air stimulate the nerves in our eyes or ears or nose and the brain turns the resultant stream of electrical pulses into sight or sound or smell.

Sculptrix Sabulorum: Skulsonik (1995)

But it does more than that: it covers up the cracks. Raw nerve-stuff is not smooth and polished sensation. We have blind-spots, but the brain edits them out. Only a small part of our visual field is actually in clear focus, but we think otherwise. If we could see raw nerve-stuff, it would be a blurry, fuzzy mess.

The same is true of hearing. And Skulsonik is an attempt to record raw nerve-stuff: to capture not sound out there, but sound in here – the music playing in your head. Sculptrix Sabulorum have set out to answer a simple question: “What does music really sound like?” Or rather: what does music cerebrally sound like? What does it sound like in your head?

Extract © EarHax (1995)

Previously pre-posted (please peruse):

• Mental Marine Music – Slow Exploding Gulls

Court in the Act

Monday, 21st Oct, 2013 by Krilling for Company in Album Art, Music, Music reviews and tagged acoustic version, album version, As Tears Go By, band from Coventry, best of album, blonde singer, Bombshell: The Hits and More, bubblegum pop, compilation album, Coventry band, Crash, demo version, female lead singer, female vox, garage band, Glamour, guitar bass and drums, indie, indie band, indie music, Paul Court, pop music, rock and roll, rock music, rock'n'roll, Secrets, The Primitives, The Rolling Stones, Tracy, Way Behind Me | Leave a comment

Bombshell: The Hits and More, The Primitives (1994)

In all walks of life, from pop music to drug-dealing, some people achieve far more success than their talents deserve and some people achieve far less. Paul Court, the song-writer for the late-’eighties-and-a-bit-of-the-’nineties indie group The Primitives, is one of the second group. And perhaps drug-dealing describes his largely unrewarded talents too. Like a drug, music is designed to alter your consciousness and some of the songs on this compilation album are perfect little pills of pop, filling your brain with a two- or three-minute rush of jingly-jangly melodic pleasure. And maybe jungly pleasure too: The Primitives were a primitive band in the garage-and-bubblegum-pop tradition, particularly when they played live. Female vox, occasional male backing vocals, guitar, bass and drums, and that was it. There was no pretension about them, but they achieved the kind of a-lot-in-a-little simplicity that only an intelligent and skilful songwriter can give a band.

“Crash”, their most famous song, both opens and closes the album (apart from the doubly unexpected hidden track). It appears first as the album track, then as a demo, and some of the other songs come in a second version, whether demo or acoustic. I enjoy the chance to hear the different interpretations, but this padding does reflect the brevity of their career, which stretched from about 1987 to about 1992. Unfortunately, a twice-misspelt “Way Behing Me” and the appearance of “Secrets (Demo)” as the already-heard album track rather than the demo also reflect the sloppiness of the German company that put the compilation out. Court deserved better. There’s further proof of that in the single cover version, “As Tears Go By” by the Rolling Stones. It’s given the light treatment of the early Primitives and isn’t anywhere near as good as Court’s own compositions, I’d say.

Perhaps that’s why he chose it, and perhaps the darker songs on their final album, “Glamour”, reflect his frustration at not achieving the success that seemed to await him in the beginning. But there was a big obstacle ahead of him: although bands with attractive female singers can get attention more easily, they find it harder to get taken seriously. The Primitives never did drop any bombshells in the end and I suspect that the title of this compilation is a self-ironizing acknowledgment of that, as well as a reference to Tracy’s gleaming blonde locks.

Tattoo Your Ears

Monday, 23rd Sep, 2013 by Krilling for Company in Album Art, Biology, Boredom, Genetics, Music, Music reviews, Psychology and tagged America, American, American music, amplified music, angst, anomie, beer, beer vs wine, beer-drinkers, beer-drinkers' music, beer-drinking culture, beer-drinking music, beercore, black metal, Boredom, Coca-Colanization, Coca-Colonization, Dionysos, Dionysus, doom metal, Drink or Die, drug-addled crab-infested tinnitus-nagged spirit, electric guitar, electric guitars, Erotic Support, Europe, extended phenotype, Finland, Finnish, Finnish band, Finnish genetics, Finno-Ugric, genes, genetics, genotype, god of wine, H.P. Lovecraft, hangover, hangovers, Helsinki beercore, Ho Bromios, Hunter Gatherer, Indo-European, loud music, masochism, masochistic, Mötley Crüe, MP3, MP3s, music, mutilation, North America, northern paganism, Norway, Norwegian, phenotype, rebellion against Coca-Colonization, rock music as masochism, sado-masochistic ritual, Scandinavian languages, self-hatred, self-mutilation, soundscapes for Finland, soundscapes for Norway, stoner rock, strong and simple flavors, strong and simple flavours, suicide, suicide rate, Swords of Mars, tattoo, tattoo your ears, tattoos, the most merciful thing in the world, the raw bedrock viscerality of rock, the Thunderer, tinnitus, wine, wine vs beer, wine-drinking culture | 4 Comments

“The most merciful thing in the world,” said H.P. Lovecraft, “is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” Nowadays we can’t correlate all the contents of our hard-drives either. But occasionally bits come together. I’ve had two MP3s sitting on my hard-drive for months: “Drink or Die” by Erotic Support and “Hunter Gatherer” by Swords of Mars. I liked them both a lot, but until recently I didn’t realize that they were by two incarnations of the same Finnish band.

They don’t sound very much alike, after all. But now that I’ve correlated them, they’ve inspired some thoughts on music and mutilation. “Drink or Die” is a dense, fuzzy, leather-lunged rumble-rocker that, like a good Mötley Crüe song, your ears can snort like cocaine. But, unlike Mötley Crüe, the auditory rush lasts the whole song, not just the first half. “Hunter Gatherer” is much more sombre. Erotic Support were “Helsinki beercore”; Swords of Mars are darker, doomier and dirgier. They’ve also got a better name – “Erotic Support” seems to have lost something in translation. Finnish is a long way from English: it’s in a different and unrelated language family, the Finno-Ugric, not the Indo-European. So it lines up with Hungarian and Estonian, not English, German and French. But Erotic Support’s lyrics are good English and “Drink or Die” is a clever title. They’d have been a more interesting band if they’d sung entirely in Finnish, but also less successful, because less accessible to the rest of the world.

Es war einmal eine Königstochter, die ging hinaus in den Wald und setzte sich an einen kühlen Brunnen. Sie hatte eine goldene Kugel, die war ihr liebstes Spielwerk, die warf sie in die Höhe und fing sie wieder in der Luft und hatte ihre Lust daran. Einmal war die Kugel gar hoch geflogen, sie hatte die Hand schon ausgestreckt und die Finger gekrümmt, um sie wieder zufangen, da schlug sie neben vorbei auf die Erde, rollte und rollte und geradezu in das Wasser hinein.

Some Indo-European

Mieleni minun tekevi, aivoni ajattelevi
lähteäni laulamahan, saa’ani sanelemahan,
sukuvirttä suoltamahan, lajivirttä laulamahan.
Sanat suussani sulavat, puhe’et putoelevat,
kielelleni kerkiävät, hampahilleni hajoovat.

Veli kulta, veikkoseni, kaunis kasvinkumppalini!
Lähe nyt kanssa laulamahan, saa kera sanelemahan
yhtehen yhyttyämme, kahta’alta käytyämme!
Harvoin yhtehen yhymme, saamme toinen toisihimme
näillä raukoilla rajoilla, poloisilla Pohjan mailla.

Some Finno-Ugric

All the same, being inaccessible sometimes helps a band’s appeal to the rest of the world: the mystique of black metal is much stronger in bands that use only Norwegian or one of the other Scandinavian languages. Erotic Support haven’t joined that rebellion against Coca-Colonization and tried to create an indigenous genre. They’re happy to reproduce more or less American music using the more or less American invention known as the electric guitar. But amplified music would have appeared in Europe even if North America had been colonized by the Chinese, so I wonder what rock would sound like if it had evolved in Europe instead. It wouldn’t be called rock, of course, but what other differences would it have? Would it be more sophisticated, for example? I think it would. The success of American exports depends in part on their strong and simple flavours. “Drink or Die” has those flavours: it’s about volume, rhythm and power. It’s full of a certain “drug-addled, crab-infested, tinnitus-nagged spirit” — the “urge to submerge in the raw bedrock viscerality of rock”, as some metaphor-mixing, über-emphasizing idiot once put it (I think it was me).

Erotic Support are “beercore”, remember. Beer marks the brain with hangovers, just as tattoos mark the skin with ink. And just as loud music marks the ears with tinnitus. There are various kinds of self-mutilation in rock and that self-mutilation can have unhealthy motives. It can be an expression of boredom, angst, anomie and self-hatred. Unsurprisingly, Finland has the nineteenth highest suicide rate in the world. Beer, tattoos and tinnitus are part of the louder, dirtier and loutier end of rock: unlike Radiohead or Coldplay, Erotic Support sound like a band with tattoos who are used to hangovers. “Drink or Die” is a joke about exactly that. But what if rock had evolved in a wine-drinking culture? Would it be less of a sado-masochistic ritual, more a refined rite? Maybe not: the god of wine is Dionysos and he was Ho Bromios, the Thunderer. His brother Pan induces panic with loud noises. But black metal looks towards northern paganism: it’s music for pine forests, cold seas and beer-drinkers, not olive groves, warm seas and oenopotes.

Erotic Support don’t create soundscapes for Finland the way black metal creates soundscapes for Norway, but they do create beer-drinkers’ music, so they do express Finnishness to that extent. Swords of Mars, being darker, doomier and dirgier, are moving nearer an indigenous Finnish rock, or an indigenous Scandinavian rock, at least. This may be related to the fact that genes express themselves more strongly as an individual ages: for example, the correlation between the intelligence of parents and their children is strongest when the children are adults. Erotic Support create faster, more aggressive music than Swords of Mars, so it isn’t surprising that they’re the younger version of the same band. In biology, the genotype creates the phenotype: DNA codes for bodies and behaviour. Music is part of what Richard Dawkins calls the “extended phenotype”, like the nest of a bird or the termite-fishing-rods of a chimpanzee. A bird’s wings are created directly by its genes; a bird’s nest is created indirectly by its genes, viâ the brain. So a bird’s wings are part of the phenotype and a bird’s nest part of the extended phenotype.

Both are under the influence of the genes and both are expressions of biology. Music (like bird-song) is an expression of biology too, as is the difference between the music of Erotic Support and Swords of Mars. As brains age, the behaviour they create changes. Swords of Mars are older and not attracted to reckless self-mutilation as Erotic Support were: it’s not music to precede hangovers and induce tinnitus any more. Sword of Mars aren’t trying to tattoo your ears but to educate your mind.

Songs from the Center of the Sun

Tuesday, 9th Jul, 2013 by Krilling for Company in Album Art, Binary numbers, Lichen, Music and tagged 1011111, 59 seconds, a dragonfly, acceptance, active volcano on Iceland, Antarctica, experimental music, F.T.L., F.T.L. logo, Faster Than Lichen, Faster Than Lichen logo, interview, interview with F.T.L., interview with Faster than Lichen, Lichen, lichens, logo, minimalism, minimalist music, music, O.C.S., Old Church Slavonic, Old Church Slavonick, One-Oh-One-One-One-One-One, polar ecology, polar scientist, research base on Antarctica, Sculptrix Sabulorum, solar eclipse, solar eclipses, Songs from the Center of the Sun, Songs from the Centre of the Sun, Sounds from the Center of the Sun, Sounds from the Centre of the Sun, starlight, the sun | Leave a comment

Faster Than Lichen are minimal men making minimal music. They may even be a minimal man: one story is that F.T.L. is an American or Russian (or possibly Argentinian) scientist living in a research-base on Antarctica. This would fit the name, because lichens are an important part of polar ecology. But perhaps it fits too well. Here is a short interview with F.T.L. conducted by email in November 2012.

Faster Than Lichen #1

Q. How would you describe the music of Faster Than Lichen?

A. Songs from the center of the sun.

Faster Than Lichen #1 (back cover)

Q. Why the sun?

A. Why not?

Q. How long have you been making music?

A. Long enough.

Faster Than Lichen #2

Q. What emotions do you aim to evoke?

A. Acceptance.

Faster Than Lichen #2 (back cover)

Q. Is that all?

A. Usually.

Q. F.T.L. albums have no titles, only numbers. Why?

A. Numbers say more.

Faster Than Lichen logos (please open in new window to animate)

Q. Who created the F.T.L. logo?

A. It evolved.

Faster Than Lichen #6

Q. It’s been two years since #6. Can we hope to hear #7 soon?

A. Yes. We’re working on it now.

Faster Than Lichen #6 (back cover)

Q. So there is more than one of you?

A. Sometimes.

Q. What happened to F.T.L. #5?

A. It was withdrawn before issue.

Q. Will it ever be issued?

A. Maybe.

Faster Than Lichen #3

Q. There is only one track on F.T.L. #3. It’s 59 seconds long and is called “One-Oh-One-One-One-One-One”. But 1011111 is binary for 95. Is this a joke?

A. Sometimes.

Faster Than Lichen #3 (back cover)

Q. Are you aware of the group Old Church Slavonick?

A. Yes. But that is as far as it goes.

Q. So no members of F.T.L. were ever members of O.C.S.?

A. Yes. None.

Q. What are your influences?

A. Lichen, of course. The sun. Starlight.

Q. Other groups?

A. That is for the listener.

Faster Than Lichen #4

Q. Do you have any plans to play live?

A. It’s possible. Maybe next year.

Faster Than Lichen #4 (back cover)

Q. Where would you most like to play live?

A. An active volcano on Iceland.

Q. During a solar eclipse?

A. That would be a bonus. Not essential.

Q. What else would be a bonus?

A. A dragonfly.

Q. Thanks for the interview. Anything to add?

A. Thanks. Always accept all.

• Faster Than Lichen

Previously Pre-Posted (please peruse):

• Angst, Anguish, Abjection
• Mental Marine Music
• Stoch’! (In the Name of Dove)

Angst, Anguish, Abjection

Thursday, 7th Mar, 2013 by Krilling for Company in Album Art, Astronomy, Mathematics, Music, Music reviews and tagged A.W.D.I.M.T.B.F., a3, And What Does It Mean To Be Flesh?, And What Doth It Mean To Be Flesh?, AWDIMTBF, bat-twitter, bat-twitters, bee, bees, Breathing Vacuum, bumblebee, bumblebees, carnal question, Dredge-head, Dredge-heads, Dredgers, ear-worm, ear-worms, fleshtion, gig, gigs, griff, griffs, gruff riff, gruff riffs, industrial noise, infra-sonic, infra-sound, Invention of the Cross, Jerome Daziel, Kargokkult, Kargonauts, lead-singer Jerome Daziel, math, mathematics, maths, Nyctogigas, Ohrwürmer, Ohrwurm, plagiarism suit, pre-biotic, Pyramidion, resonance, resonances, Ruin-Dredger, Scylla / Charybdis, Seventh Sword, silence, star-clusters having tantrums, that A-fucker, Titanomachia, Triple-A, ultra-sonic, ultra-sound, unusual frequencies, unusual frequency, What Does It Mean To Be Flesh?, What Doth It Mean To Be Flesh?, Whilom, wolf-howl, wolves howling, Xoli-Hein | Leave a comment

It’s half tradition, half tic. At every Ruin-Dredger gig, the lead-singer Jerome Daziel asks the same simple question. Sometimes he shouts it and demands a reaction from the audience. Sometimes he whispers it and ignores what the audience does. Depending on the country, he’s asked it in French, Italian, Greek, Russian, Georgian, Mandarin, Thai, Samoan and Quechua. He’s also asked it in complete silence, having written it across his chest and on the palms of his hands in phosph-ink, invisible when the lights are on, glowing ghoulishly when they’re turned off. Occasionally he’s asked it backwards. In English, the question runs like this: “And What Doth It Mean To Be Flesh?”

But you could see the whole of a Ruin-Dredger gig as asking the same searching thing. The band specialize in unusual frequencies that hunt out – and hum out – the resonances of the human body: the lungs, the bones, the blood. And their music sets up strange resonances in the mind. It’s both mindless and masterful, at once tearful and tyrannous. Sometimes it sounds like mathematics trying to come to life, and sometimes like mathematics trying to commit suicide. There’s a lot of science in their music, and a lot of silence too. “Star-clusters having tantrums,” is how one early review ran. “With occasional episodes of narcolepsy.” That mixture of sound and silence is mutually reinforcing: the sounds are sterner, the silence is sharper. They began their career with the albums Xoli-Hein (1992) and Pyramidion (1996), where they forged a series of griffs, or “gruff riffs”, that were often Ohrwürmer, or “ear-worms”, as German calls tunes that stick in your head. Even if you don’t want them to. But I’m not sure “tune” has ever been the right word for the music Ruin-Dredger create. It’s part industrial noise, part wolf-howl, part bat-twitter, but mostly “folded, fused, fissured, fractured, fidgety phonaesthesia.” And if you want to sample it, this album from the turn of the century is a good place to start.

What to call the album is one of the first puzzles it will set you. The band’s website usually calls it “a³” or “a3”; in interviews, the band themselves refer to it as “Triple-A” or “that A-fucker”. The second name comes from a plagiarism suit by the astro-music veterans Kargokkult that put Ruin-Dredger’s career on hold for nearly a year, 2002-3, and allegedly threatened to bankrupt their record-company. In the end the case was thrown out of court and even today some conspiracy-minded Dredge-heads claim it was cooked up for publicity between the ’Dredgers and the Kargonauts. The case might never have got as far as it did without that lunar cover for Triple-A, where the corroded letters of the band’s name and the album’s name hang above a lifeless moon-scape. Only it isn’t our moon. And it isn’t necessarily lifeless. Ruin-Dredger have a bee in their bonnet about the pre-biotic – the conditions necessary for the appearance of life. That’s what the first track on Triple-A, “Invention of the Cross”, is about: the chemicals that gave rise to life. And it literally has bees on it: the band sampled bees and bumblebees in flight and gathering nectar. They then altered the pitch and speed of the buzzing and made it sound both unearthly and unsettling. I’ve known people demand the track be turned off or skipped when it’s played to them.

But skipping track one of Triple-A is a bit like jumping from the frying-pan into the fire, because track two, “Seventh Sword”, is even more unearthly and even more unsettling. Bat-twitters hurtle through the speakers, falling from the ultra-sonic to the infra-sonic, rising in reverse, twisting, turning inside-out, mating, mutating and miscegenating. Then, as though the band have taken mercy on your ears and your mind, everything slows and soothes for track three, “Titanomachia”, which is often preceded in concert by the aforementioned carnal question: “And what doth it mean to be flesh?” This track is one of the last outings for the griffs of their early career: a slow, synth-based triple chord underlain by a sample of waves washing on an unknown shore. Track four, “Breathing Vacuum”, has also been known to provoke a “Turn it off!”, because the mumbling beneath the music is both sinister and sorrowful. You feel as though you should understand the words or, worse, that you will in your dreams. The chimes in the track are sinister too: they sound like a deep-sea, or deep-space, monster tapping on its fangs before putting them to famished use.

Which sets things up nicely, or nastily, for track five, “Scylla / Charybdis”. This is named after a pair of sea-monsters faced by Odysseus on his journey home from Troy and has been described by the ’Dredgers as a “battle-song”. The waves on “Titanomachia” are back, but bigger, badder and in a mood to fight. Daziel’s electronically treated voice wolf-howls a series of unintelligible questions, answered by patches of silence and gong-like drum-rolls. Track six, “Nyctogigas”, starts softly, builds back to the volume and violence of “Scyl/Char”, then breaks apart to allow the bats and bees of “Whilom” to steer your imagination out and up into the freezing star-light on the outer fringes of the solar system, where comets, shorn by the cold and dark, wait to swing sun-ward and regain their blazing locks. I like to listen to “Whilom” in the dark, wearing a blindfold, but then that’s the best way to listen to all of Ruin-Dredger’s music. Listening like that conjures visions and commands the viscera. Not an easy album, nor an unrewarding one, Triple-A isn’t their finest hour, if fan-polls and sales are any guide, but it’s an excellent guide to where they had come from and where they were about to go. If it’s the alpha-and-omega of their career, perhaps that explains the title: the “a” is the alpha (α) and the “3” an omega (ω) tipped on its side. I see it, or hear it, as a bridge between the ’nineties and the ’noughties: they’d give up the griffs and big up the bats, from then on, but they’ve never stopped asking that simple, sinister/sorrowful question of themselves and their listeners: “And What Doth It Mean To Be Flesh?”

a³ / a3 / Triple-A (S.R.K., 2000)

1. Invention of the Cross (5:26)
2. Seventh Sword (3:33)
3. Titanomachia (7:18)
4. Breathing Vacuum (9:03)
5. Scylla / Charybdis (6:11)
6. Nyctogigas (4:20)
7. Whilom (13:37)

Vigor Mortis

Monday, 18th Feb, 2013 by Krilling for Company in Album Art, Biology, History, Music, Our Lady of the Gutter, Post-Weird and tagged band, Best of Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath, compilation album, crustacean, crustaceans, Daphnia, dessication, fresh water, fresh-water biology, fresh-water microbiology, heavy metal, Heysham, Lancashire, Morecambe Bay, ostracod, ostracods, Our Lady of the Gutter, parthenogenesis, parthenogenetic, plankton, rock-grave, rock-graves, seed-shrimp, seed-shrimps, St Patrick’s Chapel, stagnant water, swarm, virgin birth, water-flea, water-fleas, waterflea, waterfleas, winter eggs | Leave a comment

In the Christian religion, the resurrection follows the virgin birth. In the rock-graves at Heysham, the virgin birth follows the resurrection. Or rather: the virgin-births follow the resurrections. There are many of both. The rock-graves at Heysham* are carved in solid rock near the remains of St Patrick’s chapel, an ancient ruin overlooking Morecambe Bay on the coast of Lancashire in England. You may have seen them before, because they appear on the cover of a compilation album by the heavy-metal band Black Sabbath, where they’re filled with ice and look suitably dark and sinister. But the graves are sometimes full of life and activity. In spring, as the rainwater filling them begins to warm, there are resurrections – dozens of them. Tiny crustaceans (a group of animals that includes crabs, shrimps and woodlice) hatch from eggs that have over-wintered in the sediment on the floors of the graves. Some of the crustaceans are called water-fleas, others are called seed-shrimps. Water-fleas, whose scientific name is Daphnia, hop through the water with jerks of their antennae, sieving it for fresh-water plankton. Seed-shrimps, or ostracods, are enclosed in tiny double-sided shells through which their legs protrude. They trundle over the stone sides of the graves, scraping off algae and catching even smaller and simpler animals like rotifers and protozoa.

The rock graves at Heysham (c. 11th century A.D.)

Rock graves at Heysham, Lancs. (c. 1000s)

Water-fleas are famous for parthenogenesis, or their ability to produce offspring without sex. Those that hatch first in spring are female and give birth without mating with any males. A single water-flea in a jar of stagnant water soon becomes a swarm. It’s only later in the year that males are born and the water-fleas mate to produce winter eggs, which sink to the floor of the graves and lie there through the cold weather. The eggs of water-fleas and ostracods can also survive desiccation, or drying-up, and can be blown on the wind to new sites. That is probably how these crustaceans arrived in the rock-graves, which they must have occupied for centuries, through the coldest winters and the hottest summers, dying and being reborn again and again. When a human being or large animal dies, chemical changes in the body make the muscles rigid and wood-like. The scientific term for this is rigor mortis, or the “stiffness of death”. Rigor mortis wears off in time and the body begins to rot. The rock-graves at Heysham are an example of vigor mortis, or the “vigour of death”. Medieval human beings created the graves to bury their dead, but the bodies that were once there have been lost to history. The water-fleas and the seed-shrimps remain, tiny, overlooked and fascinating.

A seed-shrimp

A water-flea

*Heysham is pronounced HEE-shum and is an old coastal village near the city of Lancaster, after which Lancashire is named.

Mental Marine Music

Friday, 8th Feb, 2013 by Krilling for Company in Album Art, Music, Music reviews, The Sea and tagged A Grey Mist, drowned sound, electronic music, Exeter, Exeter band, Exeter experimental music, Exeter group, Exeter-based, experimental music, Gullsegg, Joseph Corvin, Magna Mater Marina, marine music, music, Seaside Excursion Guide, Silica, Slow Exploding Gulls, Swim with Elegant Gods, underwater sound, underwater sounds, Wassernyxe, wind noises, wind sounds, Yr Wylan Ddu | Leave a comment

“Thalassa! Thalassa!” The chant that began the first song on the first side of the first S.E.G. album is still inspiring the group twenty-six years and eighteen albums later. Few fans will need reminding that it is ancient Greek for “The Sea! The Sea!”, as shouted in ecstasy by a mercenary army after a long and dangerous retreat across Asia Minor in 401 BC. Ecstasy is not so much an inspiration to the group as an aspiration. They try to use melody, rhythm and “drowned sound” to take their listeners out of the everyday and into the otherwhere, to sink them “full fathom five” in music as rich and mysterious as the sea. The S.E.G. story begins in 1987, when Joseph Corvin, the ever-present Kapitän und Kappellmeister, as he jokingly calls himself, was living in an old house in the ancient Celto-Roman town of Exeter on the southern English coast. When the sea-wind blew, his living quarters became lowing quarters: “an eerie wailing used to sound from the roof and there were all sorts of weird sound effects in the bathroom, because of air moving in the overflow pipe and the walls. I liked what I heard and I thought I could do something with it, musically speaking.”

Corvin recorded some of the wind-sounds, mixed them with gull-cries and underwater engine-noise, added vocals and electronically treated flute and drums, and put out the results on a cassette-only album called Magna Mater Marina (Latin for Great Marine Mother), under the odd but memorable moniker of Slow Exploding Gulls. The name was inspired by Corvin’s love of the surrealists Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, but it would dog him and his cohorts for years to come, partly because it pigeon-holed the group as “Kraut-rock” and partly because it suggested cruelty to animals, which was not appreciated by some of his potential audience. Both assumptions were completely wrong: Corvin says, first, that, as a fan, he was then much more into The Cure, The Smiths and Siouxsie and the Banshees than anything electronic or experimental, and, second, that far from advocating cruelty to gulls, he was celebrating them:

Not for one moment was I suggesting any harm to anything with wings or feathers. Gulls are my favourite birds, highly potent symbols of freedom, grace and the life-force. The title was meant to be metaphorical, not literal, and it was partly a reference to the explosion of joy that sudden sight of a flying gull can waken in your heart. There’s something very Nietzschean about them and yeah, I will admit to a Friedrich-fixation in the 1980s, though the Kraut-rock label was an albatross around our necks, no pun intended, for most of the ’90s. It came mainly from a review in the N.M.E. [New Musical Express, one of Britain’s big “pop-papers”] claiming to detect similarities between us and Einstürzende Neubaten, which means “Collapsing New Buildings”. Well, I can’t say there wasn’t a subliminal influence, name-wise, but I’d heard very little by any of the German groups at the time and when I did hear more, I didn’t detect many similarities between their music and ours. We were and always will be inspired by sea-sounds, everything you can hear under and over the water of the British coast. The next label they tried to stick on us was “goth”, on the ground that we made gloomy music and always dressed in black. We didn’t: it was dark blue, it wasn’t all the time and there’s nothing gloomy about our music, if it’s listened to right. (Interview on the fan-site GullSegg, November, 2003)

Corvin’s protests were to no avail: S.E.G.’s next album, A Grey Mist (1989), was reviewed under titles like “Submarine Electro-Goths” and “Solipsistic Entrail-Gazing”. Again he says the press had got hold of the wrong end of the stick: “The title of the album comes from ‘Sea-Fever’, a very beautiful poem by John Masefield, and far from attempting to be gloomy or depressing, it was all about the joy of the sea, the cold in the early morning and the bite of the wind, ‘the white clouds flying’ and mist as a symbol of mystery and possibility, not as anything glum and gothic.” Happily, S.E.G. would outlive that early hostility and journalists’ insistence on labelling, rather than listening to, the music they created, but a lasting effect of both has been the playful name-switching they’ve indulged in since their early days. They’ve released albums under at least eight different names and performed gigs under all those and more, but every name has been based on the acronym S.E.G. and had a maritime theme. 1994’s Mew Upsilon Sigma, for example, came out under the name Swim with Elegant Gods, and 2003’s re-mixed Yr Wylan Ddu (Welsh for The Black Gull) under the name Seaside Excursion Guide. They’ve also recorded songs with titles like “Sunken Etruscan Gold”, “Sailing to Ecstatic Gnosis”, “Submersed in the Eternal Gulf” and “She’s an Exeter Girl” (a reference to Cathleen Orne, Joseph’s then girlfriend, now wife, who is indeed an Exeter girl).

This S.E.G. motif means that hardcore fans, of whom they’ve garnered and retained a flighty fair few down the decades, are generally referred to as SEGheads, while their biggest – and best – fan-site is GullSegg, where you can find the earliest and most accurate news on the group’s activities, plus detailed and reasonably objective reviews of every piece of music they’ve ever recorded. So can S.E.G. be described as Shadowy Exeter Goths? No, Soaring Elemental Gods is much closer the mark and I join many mental-marine-music fans in wishing them well in their ambition of recording music in every major sea-side town of the British Isles. Wexford on the eastern coast of Ireland is next, according to GullSegg, and Wassernyxe, album #19 (and German/Greek for “Mermaid-Night”), should be released before the end of the year. It’s unlikely it will sail new seas, or sound new depths, but after twenty-six years of mer-music-making who could expect it to? Yes, never mind the rowlocks! S.E.G.’s Saline Esoterica Gangs on – and gongs on – every time someone plays a classic album like Mew or Thalas/Socratic, their 1996 split-EP with their own whale-song side-project Schatten über Exeter Gruppe (German for “Shadow over Exeter Group”).

Elsewhere other-posted:

• More Musings on Music

Previously pre-posted (please peruse):

• Stoch’! (In the Name of Dove)

Proviously post-posted (please peruse):

• The Sound of Silex

Lauditor Temporis Acti

Monday, 7th Jan, 2013 by Krilling for Company in Album Art, Civilization, History, Latin, Music, Music reviews and tagged CD, David Munrow, early music, Early Music Consort of London, James Bowman, Latin, mediaeval ballad, mediaeval ballads, mediaeval music, medieval ballad, medieval ballads, medieval French, medieval music, Middle Ages, Music of the Crusades, music review, music reviews | Leave a comment

Music of the Crusades, David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London (1991)

If a real mediæval audience could hear this magical and sometimes spine-tinglingly beautiful collection of mediæval ballads, I suspect they’d burst into roars of disbelieving laughter. It might sound like the real thing to us, but nobody knows what the real thing sounded like and this album must be getting something badly wrong. But it can’t be getting everything wrong and I think the spirit of the Middle Ages is here, or several spirits: some songs are wistful and yearning, some boisterous and playful, some pious and icily perfect. As was the medieval way, the artists and musicians did their work gratiâ Dei, for God’s sake, not their own, and most of the songs are attributed to a simple “Anonymous”. But one, “Ja nus hons pris” (“No Man Who’s Gaoled”), is attributed to a certain imprisoned “Richard Coeur-de-lion”. The best performances are by a tenor called James Bowman, who has a voice that would have made him famous across Europe back then; nowadays, when “early music” has to compete with thousands of other genres, it’s a treasure known only to a discerning few, rather like the languages – Latin and mediæval French – in which the songs are performed.

You have to know both the Vulgate and mediæval history to appreciate titles like “Sede, Syon, in Pulvere” (“Seat Thyself, Zion, in the Dust”), but “Palästinalied”, or “Palestine-Song”, the only title in German, shows that the Middle Ages have never really gone away. Wars in the Middle East and the threat of militant Islam have been with us before, and though part of the joy of this album is the way it allows you to escape the modern world, there are some things you can’t escape and a dose of real mediæval life would cure many modern discontents and dissatisfactions. Still, as the human race enters its final days, some of us continue to look back and regret what we’re going to lose and what we’ve already lost. It’s a pleasing irony that a compact disc, product of the scientific hangman, can contain so much of both.

Stoch’! (In the Name of Dove)

Monday, 10th Sep, 2012 by Krilling for Company in Album Art, Georgia / საქართველო, Mathematics, Music, Music reviews, Post-Weird, Prime numbers, Sweden and tagged Clark Ashton Smith, electronic music, experimental music, Georgia / საქართველო, Georgian music, H.P. Lovecraft, math, mathematics, maths, noise music, post-electronic music, post-noise music, prime numbers, primes, Stanislaw Ulam, Stochasma, stochastic music, Sweden, Swedish music | 1 Comment

Stochasma, In Abysso (2012)

The Sueco-Georgian avant-gardists Stochasma were formed, in their own words, “to interrogate, eviscerate, and exterminate the ultimate experimental envelope of acoustic idiosyncrasy”. That’s “Sueco-” as in Sweden and “Georgian” as in the Eurasian nation, not the American state, by the way. Going one up on some bands from Wales, Ireland and Scotland, who issue their material bilingually, in English and one or another of the Celtic languages, Stochasma issue all their material tri-lingually, in English, Swedish, and Georgian. The strangeness and beauty of the Georgian script match and enhance the strangeness and (occasional) beauty of their music, but, unlike their last two releases, there’s no spoken English, Swedish or Georgian here: In Abysso is intended to be an “abhuman listen”.

Believe me, it is! The title of the album is Latin for “In the Abyss” and the liner-notes extend thanks to H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Stanislaw Ulam for “infernal inspiration”. If the last name makes you think “Who?” (or “U?”), you must be new/nu to Stochasma, who draw inspiration not just from art and literature, but from mathematics too. Stanislaw Ulam (1909-84) was a Polish mathematician perhaps most famous for inventing the “Ulam spiral”, a graphical representation of the prime numbers that reveals mysterious patterns in this strange and fascinating set of integers. Ulam stumbled across the spiral while “doodling” during a boring lecture at a scientific meeting. That kind of serendipity has always been important to Stochasma, who explore the musical abyss/chasm partly through random, or stochastic, techniques. For the first track, “Pr1m4l Skr33m”, the five members of the band had electrodes attached to their nipples before being asked, at random, to indicate, with a nod or shake of the head, whether a randomly selected number between 1 and 10,000 was prime or composite (for example, 1,433 is prime, being divisible by no numbers but itself and 1; 1,434 is composite, being divisible by 2, 3 and 239). If they were wrong, they received a painful electric shock.

The resultant collection of grunts, gasps, and screams was electronically worked over in fully traditional Stochasma fashion to create “Pr1m4l Skr33m”, which sounds like a fully traditional Stochasma track: fucking weird and unsettling! Is the irregular chorus of voices in agony or ecstasy? Are the band being tortured in a hell run by sadists or pleasured in a heaven run for masochists? Or both? It’s hard to decide, and at times hard to listen, but as Stochasma themselves put it: “We’re queasy listening, not easy – easy listening is for cubes.”

Elsewhere, the band have used the ultra-sensitive microphones they first experimented with on 2003’s AnguisaquA (sic – it literally means “SnakewateR”). This time they’ve recorded the bloodflow of a dove and the movements of parasites in its feathers for “Täubchen”, which sounds even stranger than it reads. That and “Pr1m4l Skr33m” are the first two tracks: the next fifteen are entitled “Ignisigil I” to “Ignisigil XV”. Stochasma used a fire-proof microphone to record the sound of books being burned. They selected fifteen wildly different authors for this literally incendiary homage, from “J. Aldapuerta to J. Archer, from K. Marx to K. Minogue”, as they themselves put it. (That’s the über-trangressive Spanish horror-writer Jesús Aldapuerta and the über-cruddy British thriller-writer Jeffrey Archer, and the Anglo-German philosophaster Karl Marx and the Australian pop-pixie Kylie Minogue, for those unfamiliar with the names.) And the band insist, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that the sonic textures of the recordings are dependent not just on the physical nature of the paper and ink being burnt, but also on the ideological and aesthetic nature of the burning text.

It’s hard to agree: the “Ignisigils” all sound pretty much alike to me, though that sound is uncharacteristically soothing and relaxing by Stochasma standards (on my first listen, I dropped off during “Ignisigil VIII” and didn’t wake up till “Ignisigil XI”). The album is rounded off with three of the strangest pieces of music I’ve heard this century: “Musgomorrah”, “Gradus ad Parnassum”, and “CoMoXoCoI”. The first sounds like a slowed recording of men in armour fighting in thick mud; the second like a choir of giant glass insects singing themselves to splinters; and the third like echoes chasing each another in a collapsing or burning maze. These three might grow on me or might not: for now, “Pr1m4l Skr33m”, “Täubchen”, and “Ignisigil IV” hit the sonic sweet’n’sour spot that Stochasma seem to have copyrighted. I don’t know why “IV” hits the spot and the rest of the Ignisigils don’t, but that’s often the way with Stochasma: you like the sounds they create and you haven’t a clue as to why. In company with a select band of other electronicognoscenti, I look forward to their seventh album, whenever it appears and whatever musical mélanges or macedoines it manages to mulch, mangle, and miscegenate.

Elsewhere other-engageable:

• Musings on Music

Overlord In Terms of Core Issues Around Maximal Engagement with Key Notions of the Über-Feral

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