Nexsound – experimental, ambient, noise, improv record label

Review

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

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

WIRE

Alla Zagaykevych – motus

There’s plenty to admire and enjoy among the five substantial pieces on Motus, the new album from a Ukrainian woman composer whose activities range from playing folk to setting up an electronic music studio at Ukraine’s National Music Academy. Alla Zagaykevych’s work carries a whiff of the conservatoire and the sometimes heartless world of academic electroacoustic music, but for all her confident manipulation of modernist idioms, she never disguises the fact that there are real human beings involved. Motus’s title track is a seething writhe of electronica. Occasionally we hear the good old-fashioned sound of university music studios, what I think of as cuckoo clocks being smashed up with tubular bells, but otherwise Zagaykevych’s palette is more swirling cauldron than hardhat junkyard. She paints powerful sound images which lead to a scalp-stretching climax ten minutes in. Pagode pits the recorders of Jorge Isaac against live electronics, while Heroneya does the same with a quartet of cello, violin, piano and bassoon. Plenty of drama here, though I confess that when the electronics arrived I got an image of a tide of alien slime engulfing a Midwich Cuckoos-type village (the rural bassoon, perhaps), and this image was hard to shake off. There’s also a trio for violin, guitar and accordion, which moves playfully from Webern’s world to meditative moments. Best is the cello duet Gravitation, beautifully performed by Duo Violoncellissimo – no straitjacket here as Zagaykevych achieves the effervescent, skedaddling brio of an improvisation, coupled to the organised synchronicity of composition. Several times Zagaykevych contrives sublime endings to her pieces. In particular the album’s closing minutes, a reverie of high harmonics, show a composer moving from mastery of modernist style into something more personal.
BY CLIVE BELL

WIRE

Zavoloka-Agf – Nature never produces the same beat twice

Katja Zavoloka and Antye Greie Fuchs (AGF) are on a real roll at the moment, producing work both in solo and collaborative configurations that ranks with the best electronic music out there. Fuchs has most recently been seen working with The Lappetites alongside Eliane Radigue and Kaffe Matthews, while Zavoloka’s duo album with Nexsound artist Kotra was an exemplary demonstration of live laptop adventurism. Nature Never Produces The Same Beat Twice is their first venture as a duo. The remit of the collaboration was to produce a form of what they somewhat misleadingly term “powerful Techno”, which would mirror the organic structures found in the natural world. Both have displayed such pastoralism in their work before (indeed AGF’s Explode, recorded with Vladislav Delay in 2004, actually carried a dedication to “nature”), but never so explicitly as here. Comprising 50 one-minute tracks grouped under five headings – Meadow,Trees, Spices, Bushes and Flowers – the album really does exude something of the variegated, organic quality of flora {and a single appearance of fauna on “Bee In The Tree”). At first, the tracks blur together like dense foliage, but listen more closely and the detail reveals itself. Each piece has its own structure quite separate from the others, an astonishing feat considering the number of tracks here, but also includes elements that find echoes elsewhere, a sonic analogue of the patterns and repetitions found in nature. That’s not to say that the album is all process and no action. This would be great stuff even without the contextual. Using theme, a whirligig of cut-up voices, splattering beats and sprays of glitched-out waveforms. This is nature as relentless, bustling activity rather than bucolic calm, a document of great vitality and joy.
Keith Moline

WIRE

Zavoloka – Suspenzia

There’s so much superb Ukrainian electronic music coming out on Andrej Kirichenko’s Nexsound label that it’s tempting to see Kiev shaping up as the new Cologne or Vienna. Katia Zavoloka’s debut is as challenging and rewarding as anything put out by labelmate Kotra or Kirichenko himself. Over the album’s 70 minute span she proves herself to be a sly, witty programmer, as much at home with the confrontational machine noise and modulated radio static of “Laktorybka” as the itchy-twitchy Mouse On Mars-style nearly pop of “Nathnennia”. One of the great things about Suspenzia is the way that it manages to find new things to say with the most overused of vocabulary, Zavoloka’s deployment of delay and reverb effects being particularly noteworthy. This is tense, sinewy music, not easy to digest at first, but well worth the effort.
By Keith Mouline

WIRE

The Moglass – Sparrow Juice

Ukraine trio The Moglass formed in 1997 and have recorded six albums, the latest of which is this collection of softly rippling improvisations, where treated street recordings are sensitively blended into the overall musical patina of the group’s seductively enveloping sound. With trace elements of jazz seeping through, courtesy of Vladimir Bovtenko’s earthy alto and Yuri Kulishenko’s minimalist fusion bass patterns and Derek Bailey-style guitar picking, The Moglass belong as much to the European free jazz movement as they do to avant rock.
Edwin Pouncey

Wire

Kotra – Dissilient

Kotra is ukraine musician Dmytro Fedorenko whose past endeavors have included playing bass in a jazz/noise group, being one half of noise duo Zet and playing alongside such fellow soundshifters as Kim Cascone, Andreas Berthling and Andrey Kiritchenko. The 21 pieces of Dissilient can be heard separately or as a whole. Each is a characteristically different shard of experimentation, loosely held together by Fedorenko’s guitar feedback explorations which, as they progress, become more complex. Titled either “Minus”, “plus” or “Plus/Minus”, each section is a finely cut and polished jewel of noise.
Edwin Pouncey

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

WIRE

Andrey Kiritchenko – True Delusion

Ukrainian electronic musician Andrey Kiritchenko conceived of True Delusion as an album exploring the harmonic overtones of guitar and piano. While these instruments do provide a musical and emotional framework, Kiritchenko’s album is much more about the abstraction of these elements alongside commonplace incidental sounds, quiet rubbings and field recordings of domesticity. In fact, Kiritchenko is not a very good guitarist at all, never venturing beyond a chord or two, which he plucks with Ry Cooder’s sense of space. But what he does with that empty space is captivating, as the quiet tinkling of cutlery, the hushed rustling of a cat scratching its ear and the crickets under the floorboards appear delicate and magical due to Kiritchenko’s care and subtle DSP trickery. Once shifting to the piano, Kiritchenko’s musicianship is far more confident, presenting a polyphony of cascading notes that he in turn blurs into a miasma of ringing minimalism recalling the excellent Vrioon collaboration between Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Jim Haynes