11.5.15: Giant Claw – Deep Thoughts
by Scott Scholz
Keith Rankin has been installing “soundfonts” in your Walkman when you weren’t looking. [Check It Out]
Tabs Out | Giant Claw – Deep Thoughts
Giant Claw – Deep Thoughts
11.5.15 by Scott Scholz
Orange Milk’s Keith Rankin has dropped a serious grip of tapes as Giant Claw in the last half-decade. From the poly-prog of “Midnight Murder” to last year’s heavy foray into sample-based music with “DARK WEB”, Rankin is always up for new adventures. And with the new Giant Claw tape, we get a chance to peer directly between his ears and pluck out a fine set of “Deep Thoughts“.
“Deep Thoughts” is a significant departure sonically from “DARK WEB”, whose dominant R&B samples made the album a very percussion-driven affair. It’s quite different from earlier Giant Claw jams, too, which featured all kinds of funky synth tones and a fairly pianistic approach. The timbral palette of “Deep Thoughts” draws from mostly vanilla general MIDI tones, and there is little in the way of percussion. Instead, the focus is on the detailed compositions themselves, created by painstakingly entering notes directly into ye olde piano roll screen, and like you might expect of a digital corollary to Conlon Nancarrow’s player piano studies, the clean and simple sounds help you to focus directly on the wild arrangements themselves.
Conceptually, though, there is a fascinating relationship to sample-based music going on here: when Giant Claw was on tour with Darren Keen a few months ago, Rankin was talking about a concept of “soundfonts” that makes a lot of sense while jamming out to this tape. His “soundfont” concept is different than the old Creative Labs file format from the 90s. In this case, a “soundfont” is like the set of musical information that underlies the basics of a particular style or specific composer: the harmonic and melodic tendencies, the go-to rhythms, that sort of thing. You might have a piece that uses a Glass soundfont for the main section with a Gershwin soundfont in the outro, a Mozart soundfont, an Art of Noise soundfont. You can write through-composed music, using blocks of distinctive kinds of harmony, and the “soundfonts” behave much the same way that samples are used.
In “Deep Thoughts”, you’ll find that Giant Claw can acrobatically deploy almost as many soundfonts as there are general MIDI sounds to play them back with. These pieces plunder familiar flavors of harmony from throughout the 20th century and a few even earlier, deftly pulling them all into a unique, unified whole. And they’re not all “art music” (de)composers brought back to life in MIDI – many pieces, like my favorite, #09, nest their compositional complexity between opening/closing themes that sound like 80’s cop shows or game show themes. Commentary on the utility of “art music?” Aural critiques of appropriation in Western music history? Blurring the lines between sample-based and through-composed music? Deep Thoughts, indeed.
You can snag “Deep Thoughts” on cassette from the Giant Claw Bandcamp page right here, or if you’re into the compact discs, head to Virgin Babylon in Japan.
11.3.15: An Introduction To Vitrine Records
by Bobby Power
Vitrine just released three new cassettes, and yes, they are bonkers. We’ll get to that. But first, how about a bit of history? [Check It Out]
11.3.15: New Batch – Vitrine
by Bobby Power
Vitrine continues it’s uncanny, slow-leak curation with tapes by Darksmith, 010001111000, and Mel Bentley. [Check It Out]
Tabs Out | New Batch – Vitrine
New Batch – Vitrine
11.2.15 by Bobby Power
Boy, oh boy, was I late to the Vitrine party. The label, run by Allen Mozek (who also records as No Intention and is a member of both Good Area and Twin Stumps), has been around since 2013, slowly picking up speed and issuing only a handful of releases for its first two years. But while its output was meager, compared to other like-minded esoterica cassette imprints, the sounds and modest but striking packaging were – and are – downright necessary at this point, which choice highlights that include Safe House’s “Region VI“, Three Legged Race’s “Rope Commercial Vol. 2“, and Good Area’s “Dilettante” Cassette.
But Copley Medal’s mesmerizing and low-key hysteria on “Marble Cage” (VT08, Feb. 2015) was what finally got my attention, and I’m happy to report I’ve been hooked ever since. Each small batch, generally including two or three new tapes at a time, includes a range of sounds and contexts, ensuring some enjoyable level of discovery and intrigue.
This latest round of cassettes highlights both the label and Mozek’s uncanny ear for gloriously tattered sonics that nod to a number of ghastly sounds and ideas. VT15 brings the latest set of bizarrely mutated musique concrète by Tom Darksmith, the beloved tinkerer with past releases on Hanson, Kye, Chondritic Sound, and his own Mom Costume imprint. “Everyone is Welcome In My Room” plays true to Darksmith’s penchant for listlessly foreboding collages, constructing massive but desolate scenes of vague despair and almost guaranteed doom. Found sounds seamlessly intermix with Darksmith’s anonymous trove of instruments (?) and noisemakers, creating an immersive, 30-minute slab of disorienting bliss broken out into two equally engrossing parts.
Next up, 010001111000 (whether it’s pronounced “oh one oh oh oh one one one one oh oh oh” or “zero one zero zero zero one one one one zero zero zero” is yet to be confirmed) brings “lmof”, a slightly more optimistic survey of tape machine fuckery and distant, weary-eyed beauty. For tape’s opening section, dimply pastoral chords waft from some malfunctioning reel, intermittently interrupted by pure electronic signals and mis-firing wire connections. It’s a pleasantly jarring experience that leads perfectly into the tape’s wallowing meander through quietly hellish vignettes. Estranged guitar ditties and apparition-like vocals saunter into frame while other characters and distant textures take form and dissolve from moment to moment. Segues begin to fold into one another, rendering things both grotesque and beautiful obsolete.
Vitrine closes out this particular trio with a captivating tape by Mel Bentley, Philadelphia-based poet, writer, and designer. “Red Green Blue” appears to be Bentley’s debut audio recording, capturing a number of live readings, plus one piece featuring Jim Strong. Bentley’s work here revels in a visceral spew of urbanism, commercialism, identity, social media, and false sense of accomplishment. At times recorded in pure, live readings while elsewhere haphazardly lifted from a MacBook broadcasting from the other side of the room, Red Green Blue might be the perfect middle ground between the avant-poetry and experimental cassette worlds.
Make sure you follow Vitrine’s YouTube channel, perhaps the most reliable way to grab their tapes before they each disappear.