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| WIRE Nole Plastique-Escaperhead Escaperhead is the second album from the Russian duo Nole Plastique, who seem to have discovered the history of avant pop music through two separate ports of entry: Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd and Christian Fennesz. Within these two references, Nole Plastique re-engineer a particular variant of psychedelia that may have started at one time with simple songs for a couple of guys singing and strumming on their guitars. Yet when these wistful tunes are rendered through their arsenal of DSP tricknology, wooden rhythms end up grafted into the backbone of songs and studiously lysergic effects fire from every direction. The songs dissolve as semi-digitised ghosts with flickers of English lyrics and bright guitar riffs. In this Pink Floyd/Fennesz recombination, Nole Plastique are acutely aware of their American contemporaries (Animal Collective, Indian Jewelry, Black Dice), and while wonderously jubliant, Escaperhead occasionally suffers from being too calculated in the search for the 'new'. Jim Haynes |
| Cracked Nole Plastique-Escaperhead One of my earliest musical relevatory experiences was purchasing a 3-Lp-Box called “The Psychedelic Years” on a whim I still can’t explain, because I was actually too young for such an interest, especially in the late Eighties and that purchase was honestly over my budget back then. But it made me see lines and connections in musical development and there is not a single track on there that is bad and at least two thirds started me off in searching and exploring. And from all the Buffalo Springfield, “White Bird”, Procul Harum, “SF Sorrow is born” and Love it is a straight line through three decades worth of mangling and manipulating to “Escaperhead” by Ukranian avantgardists Nole Plastique. Now maybe I have been spoiled in early teenagehood by “the Psychedelic Years” but I hear the echoes and bitparts of songs and emotions of the late Sixties in every song on “escaperhead”. The interesting things are those that Nole Plastique left out, by circumlocuting basic songstructures, avoiding kitsch and working distorting effects into the single tracks, which, by the way, mostly flow into one another like stoned out trip through a second hand rarity records store. The fall onto a nice, laidback, “trippy” melody here and there, bang a little on the bongos, let all instruments fall into place at the right time in the right speed, to make you happy and feel light. Ease and beauty, just the way life should be. But the structural fundament of the mix makes for an interesting counterpart by destroying the harmony, by rippling through the mellowness like the evil tide of an undercurrent makes a perfect beach unfit for enjoying. It is nevertheless all songs, or treated as such, and that makes for another level of interesting structural theory all together. Putting the alternatives not taken into the focus makes for a lot of interesting if-clause introspections. If Nole Plastique were settled at the West coast of the USA then they’d probably be mixed into the freak folk scene and would have released on Paw Tracks, but then they would be all washy and diffuse and the clear and crystal elements of their music would be missing. If they had a lot of money to spend on recording and were keen on exploring a melody to its end then they would probably be the next Flaming Lips, but then again those lose ends and ideas and melodies only hinted at are a fascinating part of their mix. Like the backwards vocals on “…rolled in slice” or the bongos I heard somehwere and the birdsounds I heard somehwere else. Atmospherically this is like Fennesz “Endless Summer” album time travelled thirty five years backwards to inspire Brian Wilson as he was stoned out somewhere on a beach fusing the vibe of certain damaged melodies. Nole Plastique is currently the duo of Roman Kutnov and Alexei Belousov who have been helped out by a few people on this, their latest recording and first full length album, especially Nexsound label head and renowned Ukrainian noise avantgardist Andrey Kiritchenko. If you have heard them before then you might be surprised about the way the have taken, but then again maybe not, because their noise has always contained a high dose of harmony and romance. So this change is not as drastic as for instance the one of Accelera Deck, but still. Now they have let go of all the disharmonies and distortion they ever had, changed the percentages of "mixing, shaking and breaking" and present life as an endless stream of sunny days and softly flowing sounds. |
| Cracked Saralunden.Björkås.Mjös-Dubious The new branch of the nexsound imperium NSPQP stands for nexsound-popmusic. I does not say so anywhere, but I am sure. Actually, it says that it stands for “pickup”, but I don’t know what that means and my version makes more sense anyway. Because the first two releases on this new segment of the label (this one here and the duo collaboration of Saralunden with label co-leader Andrey Kiritchenko) are definite steps away from the exciting noise-avantgarde / free improvisation / electroacoustic stuff you were used to. This 5-song EP starts with harmonious, almost jazzy singing over acoustic guitar and has just what I said before: songs. With chorus, structure and melodies. Nexsound itself calls it “more accessible” and I think they do not mean in terms of distribution, but in listening. And those are also worth listening to. And to listen to deeply, with concentration and mind open, just like you were used to before. This threesome collaboration has Saralunden and Kyrree Björkas as singers and songwriters and Andreas Mjös adding production and electronics. Now, before you form an opinion, forget all you know about electronic songwriter music, all of the Roisin Murphy-danceshit and also all of the Beth Gibbons-patheticness, and most of all all of the polished to death Kosheen-overproduction. Think of the most intimate experience you had in the last three months (or three years, whatever suits your lifestyle) and then try to remember how those long, late night conversations went, when the music had faded out, the bottle was almost empty and you knew that even the days and weeks ahead could not and would not destroy the memory of the feeling you had. This memory of that feeling is what makes up the main mystery of these songs. Maybe the fact that Björkas and Saralunden were at one time a love couple that was seperated by the distances that part Stockholm and Oslo plays an important role in the melancholy and nostalgia seeping through these songs and low, sad melodies. To me it feels as if you can hear the cold wind of the Scandinavian plains sweeping through the songs. Björkas sings in a smoky bass while Saralunden completes him with a mysterious higher voice that is soft and strong at the same time. Each of the five songs seems to have its own inner enigma to be solved. Only the last on, “Murder”, falls out of the structure. While the first four songs have them singing every line together over various kinds of percussionless music, the last one not only peruses a distinctive drumbeat but also has them duetting properly, with a kind of call-response scheme. Like a postmodern Lee & Nancy electronica murder ballad. There is always a certain strange and dark sense field lurking underneath the songs. That is a give away right from the beginning, when the easy listening “doobie-doobie” turns not into Sinatra’s “doobie-doobie-doo” but into “dubious. It is the kind of atmosphere that made David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” so fascinating and irrestistible in the first few shows. The songs themselves also dib into these kinds of personal obsessions. “I lie naked in my bet / imagine you are there” only to go on stating that “I couldn’t help myself / when I first saw you / I had this instant urge to make you mine” (from “Naked in my bed”) – to hear words such as these from a female / male voice combination in this tonality gives the whole song a fascinating twist. And the other songs all hide one or two of these moments of epiphany or dark enigma in them. A definite favorite for 2007. |
| WIRE Saralunden + Andrey Kiritchenko-There was no end This collaborative project has its roots in a Swedish Institute initiative which took place in spring 2006. With the aim of promoting relations between Sweden and Ukraine, four musicians from each country were asked to work together. There's a curious sense of dislocated tension in these songs which could be derived from their unorthodox genesis, couching Lunden's faux naif, sing song delivery against Kiritchenko's uneasily shifting electronic backcloth. Titles such as "Come With Me" and "Oh So Blue" are knowingly banal and the lyrics offer a similarly deadpan version of the utterly conventional. But they are transformed by the slurred handclaps, queasily manipulated vocals and restlessly uncertain tempos. The overall impression is of a compromised emotional landscape not a million miles away from Throbbing Gristle's 20 Jazz Funk Greats, and the closing, half whispered phrase -"Tonight you gave me something / will always remember"- hangs in the mind after silence has closed over it, resonant and ambiguous. Chris Sharp |
| Signal To Noise Perlonex/Keith Rowe/Charlemage Palestine-Tensions Nexsound has a canny plan to get its small corner of the Ukrainian music scene before a receptive audience. The label, which is helmed by multi-instrumentalist and signal processor Andrey Kiritchenko, has released a series of compilations and collaborations that usually bring locals together with like-minded sound adventurers from around the globe. But for their three latest releases, Kiritchenko and the trio Moglass each get an album to themselves, while the German ensemble Perlonex shares both sets of its fifth birthday celebration. Perlonex, which comprises guitarist Jorg Maria Zeger, percussionist Burkhard Beins, and Ignaz Schick on turntables and electronics, made sure their party went well by inviting two ringers to play with them. English guitarist Keith Rowe, who has previously recorded to great effect with Beins, manages to make this setting his own. It's hard to tell when or exactly what he's playing, but there's no missing his presence; the music's patient evolution, marked by the remorseless grind of adjacent but separate layers and a determined renunciation of vulgar display, is as recognizably his as the high quality of this effort. American minimalist composer, singer, and keyboardist Charlemagne Palestine likewise bends the music to his own will. As with Rowe, the performance is founded upon textured drones. But instead of Rowe's ego-displacement, Palestine uses the continuous sounds as a backdrop upon which to project his identity. Nowadays his repetitive piano figures are like a sheer curtain compared to the voluminous draperies of sound found on records like Strumming Music. Perlonex's metallic cries and electronic hums peak out behind Palestine's flourishes, at once in the background yet much more solid and forceful than his ivory ruminations. Both sets are deeply rewarding. Bill Meyer |
| WIRE Andrey Kiritchenko-Stuffed With/Out Kiritchenko's solo disc Stuffed With/Out is rather more intimate, a series of seven electroacoustic sketches centered around “a little story around stuffed animals”. How it informs the music is anyone’s guess, but there is a playful quality to these tracks absent from the darker rumblings of the collaborative album. He surrounds his repetitive acoustic guitar melodies with digital textures suggestive of wool or kapok, the result vaguely recalling the electronically distressed pop of Fennesz or Kpt. Michigan. Kiritchenko is not as technically adept, but the bossa-like warmth of his solo meanderings is highly attractive. Joseph Stannard |
| WIRE Courtis/Moglass/Kiritchenko-s/t Ukrainian sound artist Andrey Kiritchenko is the founder of the Nexsound label; on these two releases he revelas an uncanny knack both for assembling sympathetic collaborators and for alchemising processed guitar and field recordings into something unsetting without bludgeoning the listener with abject noise. His collaboration with Argentinian guitarist Anla Courtis, formerly as Reynols, and Ukrainian post-rockers The Moglass is especially excellent, with the participants swapping, manipulating and augmenting each other’s sonic matter with a fine balance of boldness and sensitivity. The sixth track in particular credited to The Moglass with sound sources courtesy of Courtis, is an imposing, glassy drone of immense power and boasts an emotional pull almost worthy of Popol Vuh. Joseph Stannard |
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