Uncategorized

Pierrot Lunaire – Dog Chakra
8.5.16 by Scott Scholz

“My theory is that when it comes to important subjects, there are only two ways a person can answer. Which way they chose, tells you who that person is. For instance, there are only two kinds of people in the world, Beatles people and Elvis people. Now Beatles people can like Elvis and Elvis people can like the Beatles, but nobody likes them both equally. Somewhere you have to make a choice. And that choice tells you who you are.” – Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction

When I was a little squirtle, I was totally an Elvis person—it wasn’t about musical styles so much as the notion of solo artists versus bands. The psychic weight of responsibility on solo artists seemed so much more interesting to follow, y’know? I still find myself more attracted to folks who strike out on their own musical path, and for the last five years, Pierrot Lunaire has been my Elvis.

I’m super pumped and a little bummed out about the arrival of “Dog Chakra” on Opal Tapes: another tape is great news as a huge fan of Pierrot Lunaire, but it’s bittersweet to know that this is the end of the line. Like the project’s namesake protagonist in Giraud’s poems, Pierrot’s mission has neared its end, and the entheogenic ritual circle must be closed with his role as stand-in poète maudit, the poet iconoclast who leaves us too soon. Another 45 minutes, and we’re on our own.

Taken as a whole, previous Pierrot Lunaire jams on labels like Sic Sic, Hooker Vision, and Tranquility Tapes always felt a little like pieces of a larger puzzle, each made of collaged freakouts as alien as they were deliberate. While it might be possible to “solve” this wild ride now that we have the final puzzle piece, let’s have a little fun with it instead.

PL’s recordings have always combined bits of synth, saxophone and found sounds, and “Dog Chakra” immediately drops us into this weird-but-familiar world. Opener Elegy for a Plastic Bag is heavy on manipulated thrift store tapes, which turn into a kind of dark ecclesiastical memory foam in the hands of Mr. Denizio, a bit of funeral music for the end of the project. Like previous recordings, the formal structure is a sort of “block form,” with abrupt and spatially jarring transitions between ideas.

Looped and layered saxophones play a major role again on most of these pieces, and Denizio’s unique approach to horn playing is one of my favorite things about Pierrot Lunaire. Combining the wild flurries of folks like Arthur Doyle, the hermetic weirdness of Jandek, and an all-in onslaught of psychedelic delays and overdrive, “Dog Chakra” takes horns into refreshingly non-jazz territories. The psych-infused spatial distortions of Transient Surroundings (Too Much LSD), the harsh/subdued contrasting sections of A Conversation with the Flowers in My Kitchen, and the incredibly distorted solo sax passage in Pathetic Oasis that almost morphs into guitar feedback mimicry are among the best sax moments in the Pierrot Lunaire discography.

One subtle deviation found in “Dog Chakra” is that percussion is more prominent in this final chapter, including some lowercase pots & pans and a tabla loop in A Conversation, as well as significant portions of the final two pieces. Stimulus Delta makes for a fine farewell piece: clanging percussion takes focus in the foreground while aquatic and interstellar drones murmur below. Looped, manipulated voices eventually haunt the joint before an abrupt switch to some minimal synth lines that walk us into the final moonlight. RIP, Pierrot Lunaire.

Whether you’ve been into PL for a while, or this is your first taste, “Dog Chakra” is a great place to jump in. Snag one while you still can from Opal Tapes.

Paperbark – Forgotten Narratives
7.28.16 by Scott Scholz

We’re in a golden age of killer synth jammers right now, with folks like Kyle Landstra, Norm Chambers, Joe Bastardo, Daryl Groetsch and many more combining melodic and textural synth work into provocative and introspective soundscapes. It can be a daunting task to keep up with the embarrassment of riches all these folks are dropping, and there are some great newcomers worth hearing as well. Among those, “Forgotten Narratives,” the recorded debut of Jon Mulville’s Paperbark project, has spent a lot of time in my decks over the last few months.

Conceptually, Paperbark embodies a measure of disappointment with the easy, cheap entertainment that defines modern life. “Forgotten Narratives” demands a more mature relationship with its listeners, with an emphasis on layers of texture that frequently dominate more immediate melodic/harmonic considerations. Mulville puts in his fair share of effort to forge these sounds, working with homemade modular units toward a palette of unique, gritty timbres that help to actualize a very personal approach, like the distinct tones of fellow DIY synthesist Günter Schlienz. A little extra effort as a listener is richly rewarded, as these song-length pieces often feel much more expansive than their modest running times.

Where most folks tend to emphasize either melodic or atmospheric development in their work, “Forgotten Narratives” explores strategies to keep both in balance. Several pieces here, like “Letter as Symbols” and the title track, feature some harsher sounds that remain anchored in tonality, while others like “Past the Wooden Fence” and “Tree Verb” are dominated by rich melodic sweeps that are tailed subtly with squarewave industrial percussion. While most of the melodic fragments on this tape are built from drones and pads that gradually drift into one another, this is a great album for deep vertical listening, with some fascinating melodic relationships between different synths cloistered several octaves apart. With lots of heavy stereo panning, it’s also great on its horizontal axis with headphones.

Denver’s Black Box Tapes has released Paperbark’s freshman outing in an edition of 100, and you can still snag a copy at the Paperbark Bandcamp.

New Batch – Never Anything
7.25.16 by Scott Scholz

Fledgling cassette label Never Anything Records may be less than a year old, but this Portland, OR and Chicago co-located label founded by Jeff Lane (Tereshkova), Tyler King, and Clay Mahn (Lustana) has already established a curatorial momentum you’d expect from veteran pressure-pad Pilgrims. A few of my favorite tapes of the last year from folks like Amulets, More Eaze, and Bret Schneider have passed through the hallowed duplicators of Never Anything, and their new batch of four releases (including 2 double-cassettes!) lays down a serious gauntlet in terms of both quality and quantity, Here’s a rundown of this killer quartet:

Mortuus Auris & the Black Hand – The Journal of a Disappointed Man
The latest in a long run of great releases on labels like Stunned and Hyle Tapes, Peter Taylor’s work as Mortuus Auris continues to reach into a unique pocket between outer-space and chamber music vibes. There is a lot of piano on this tape, an instrument that rarely gets its due in experimental circles nowadays. Simple piano motifs shift between solo and chamber music textures, manipulated with delay pedals and looped fragments. On the whole, this is a very tonal and approachable set of pieces, rich with melancholy, but the centerpiece of the album is the longer and more abstracted “Temporal Anomalies of the Mind,” whose cosmic excursions feel like bits of satellite transmissions coalescing into new forms.

Charles Barabé – Cicatrices
Barabé’s solo work is divided into several different approaches that have each been progressing in their own series, including Stigmates and Confessions. With the release of Cicatrices, we get the latest in another series, expanding on the work found on last year’s Cicatrice, Scar, Eclair on 2:00AM Tapes. And what an expansion it is, both in length and depth. At 110 minutes spread across 2 cassettes, the intense integration of composed and repurposed sounds in Cicatrices has the epic scope and narrative strength of a feature film rendered entirely in audio.

Alternately playful, funny, serious, and foreboding, Barabé unites deadly serious and campy musical traditions in a strikingly original series of “parts” divided by synthesized speech pronouncements. Along with its “Stigmates” and “Confessions” companions, there is a Catholic literary reference unfolding across this body of work (“cicatrice” appears in Latin New Testament texts in reference to the post-resurrection scars on Christ), but it seems more general than particular, pointing toward the imposing foundations of Western culture. These pieces employ a truly incredible range of Western musical traditions, adopting idiomatic passages for their familiarity at first glance, but ultimately using them as calibration points for assertive journeys into new and unfamiliar territory. A serious contender for album of the year.

Peter Kris – Labrador
As half of the impossibly prolific German Army, Peter Kris has launched a series of solo albums over the last year. If you’re into German Army, you definitely want to spend some time with Peter Kris, as these guitar-centric and warmer albums are excellent companions to the GeAr discography. But like many of German Army’s 2016 jams, Labrador finds Peter Kris expanding his usual 2- or 3-minute-per-piece approach into longer pieces and new approaches to arrangement.

As a lengthy double-cassette release, Labrador feels like the manifesto to a fully-realized Peter Kris approach, with some tunes that are more ominous and industrial than redemptive. There is a sense of distance in this album that’s new to the PK sound, lending the music a more universal magnetism. While guitars remain the dominant voice of this project, longer pieces like “Trawl” and “Full Circle” are instead constructed from drones and field recordings of unknown provenance. These are balanced with some of the most melodic guitar writing on any Kris albums to date on tunes like “Visiting” and “Evening Grey,” making for a perfectly balanced and immersive exploration of poverty-stricken margins of the Inland Empire and beyond.

Lustana – Pt. II
Rounding out this summer batch, Never Anything’s own co-founder Lustana returns for a second tape on NA. It’s a nice way to round out the work of the label so far as well, since Pt. I was the first NA release last fall. This is the only album of this batch with an emphasis on relatively traditional song-with-vocals writing, and it perfectly captures the long shadows of humid late summer atmospheres. Some tunes employ full band arrangements, like the hazy guitars and gate reverb-laden vocals of “Anywhere But Here” or “Strawberry” that evoke classic 60s vibes with a little twist from more contemporary synth sequencing. The B-side introduces some serious midtempo soul, with the funky basslines of “Swimming Pools” and shimmering organs of “Dance Away.” It’s a great tape to put on for a gentle landing after the long, wild ride of this batch.

Never Anything has kept their consistent design aesthetic going with this batch, featuring simple one-color j-cards with minimal designs printed in black, and simple white tapes with stamped labels. The double cassettes pit the vertical against the horizontal, with the Barabé in a double-height Norelco box, and the Peter Kris in a butterfly case. Most of these are small editions of 50, so don’t delay: hit up Never Anything on Bandcamp.