Mille Plateaux is Back!

My Igloo Magazine interview with new label guru Marcus Gabler about his take on the reinvention of the seminal label.

Vernon & Burns – Mort Aux Vaches

VERNON & BURNS
Mort Aux Vaches
Staaplaat

Vernon & Burns are based in Glasgow and Mort Aux Vaches is their latest. In the shadow of People Like Us, Felix Kubin and Donna Summer this record just makes good sense. Humourous party music combines with loungey cartoon beats making tracks like Doing Quisby a bright spot in the lineage of the incredible Staalplaat series. Spoken and sing-song word blend with peculiar noises, rustling through silverware, vintage harmonies and aerodynamic editing, like audio-gaming, stitched together seamlessly. On this twenty-one track disc of short snippets there are discordant marriages between bombs and bloated accordians, syrupy pours and creaky doors. It’s dimensional, a very physical effort. Gangsters and ladies make shady deals, whistling as a Victrola scrapes along the edge of vinyl, output quite rustically over some weary campfire song. It’s all quite vintage, warm good fun — all packaged in raised copper with coinage and frills its imprint keeps its distance but teases of something somehow familiar.

@C – Music for Empty Spaces

@C
Music for Empty Spaces
Baskaru

This sounds like layering vintage records over field recordings and adding some sweet harmonies. Something sad, even when the bird chirps away in the beginning of this seven part work. There’s a wonderful melange of upright bass with digital skips and other percussion. @C are multi-talented artists Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela who have also recorded for the wonderful Portuguese label Crónica. At times there’s a tense quiet filled with the kerplunk of fishing gear, at others it’s a big jumbo jet fueling at dock. If this were but just white noise, how appealing, a sophisticated background noise would be. But beyond the striated theatrics of these layers there are beautiful sequences where a bare piano bleeds through the hum, and this is where this record comes together most physically on 76.5 (listening to K.J.), which is really just a ‘tweener piece at under two minutes, but helps navigate a sort of curvature in what’s to come. Though in the closing tracks a foreboding friction reveals itself in the form of a bee-like buzz, and burrowed down minimal ambiance, a hint of the outdoors. When it rains upon a metal surface it reminds me of home, of shelter, protection and wonder of the elements. It’s like a organic drum beat, romantic and yet unexpected, flaring and receding. Add to that a blurry jazz jam session, the storm brews thicker and then suddenly adrift in drone. For “empty spaces” these parts making a whole seem quite densely packed with all the detritus and credible umph one might want to experience on an effort so diversely performed and delicately lain. These men seem to muster the knack for life and breath.

Ben Swire – From Here to There

BEN SWIRE
From Here to There
Preservation

A hearty welcome back after nearly eight years to the Bay Area’s Ben Swire. He’s been around, but this is pretty much his debut full-length recording – and it’s more than a simple pleasing affair. From Here to There on Australia’s Preservation imprint is Swire’s best-yet handmade melodic work. It’s above the hum and numb of drone, and with just the right balance of electronica-based elements to keep things moving. It’s brisk going, and here, this multimedia artist has depicted a world not unlike his unabashedly wide-open photographic landscapes. On this release, each of the eight tracks is something of a vignette at under six minutes each. A peek into the prowess of something being constructed underneath, something curiously cinematic and yet light. Halfway with its gorgeous opening moments slowly adds a tempered beat and some strings, never feverish or nervous, built almost like a truncated narrative. Though somehow a piece like this leaves you waiting for me, a bit of a tease as the final twenty seconds fade. A track like Far Removed speaks through its title, almost excerpted from a scene in a film like say Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm perhaps. It’s out there. Overall From Here to There is one of the more timeless recordings I’ve heard in many years, blending soft/sweet harmony and classic minimalist tempo with just a perfect amount of right now.

Jake Mandell – Scales of Magnification

JAKE MANDELL
Scales of Magnification
Self-Released

After nearly eight years (Dr.) Jake Mandell is back with probably his most accessible recording in a decade plus. It’s upbeat, almost bouncy – especially on tracks like Pan Culture Workup and China Patterns, which have hooks that sorta sneer slightly at the advent of dubstep without the trappings. Scales of Magnification is an intensified revision of his previous work on Love Songs for Machines with edgier pop twists and quirks aplenty. Part old school Autechre on the risk-it-all Cord Blood where the intensity of the bpms obliterate the balance of idm, but pack a punch nonetheless. There is some filler strewn about (No Free Air, Central Line), but then you have a nearly classic dance track like A Good Bounce which creeps up on you infectiously, like a full-on, sweaty pingpong match. There are dense bass tones, heavyweight at times – but Mandell manages to keep things quite animated, filled with glittering smarts throughout. Seventeen tracks in all which emerge and retreat not unlike a trance-inducing slithering snakedance.

Pjusk – Sval

PJUSK
Sval
12K

The Norwegian duo Pjusk has really fleshed out their sound after their recording Sart. Here there’s a quiet cadence rippling through thick, dreamy tones. Just the perfect blend of ambient to minimal percussion. Reminds me of early work on Chain Reaction, without definitive beats, more organic and flowing here — gauzy and textural in an airy way. The blurred motion of Skumring is as resilient as fireworks on a warm night heard from miles away. There’s this moment on Dis where things become engaged as if ready for take off. The lurking of motors sweetly out of sync slowly engulf the stride with a few sparse disembodied voices, and a touch of piano. With some minor crack and hiss a curvaceous form melts in slow-mo effortlessness on the lovely Skygge. If this were GPS I ask, please take me there.

Troum – Sigqan

TROUM
Sigqan
Drone Records

Broken into three parts Sigqan is the latest release by the Bremen-based duo known as Troum and it is one lush affair. Filled with velvety drones that pass throughout like undulating bodies floating in slow-motion under water. Perhaps it simply invokes the guise of cinema in some subconscious way? The quieter it gets the fuller the sound, like an airport with a constant flow of fueled planes hovering, landing, all in line, patterned throughout the nearby skies. Originally produced in 2002, this studio-based re-release was recorded live in a single take without overdubs. It’s important to note that this was mastered by Robert Rich whose own work is incredibly sleep-inducing. Within this field of warmly encoded aural slumber there’s a bit of a call to natural forces. A composition that finds 2012 reaching around the corner, a fairly imposing soundtrack for our times.

Concert Silence – 9.22.07

CONCERT SILENCE
9.22.07 [2-3 P.M.]
Infraction

Concert Silence is the Portland-based duo comprised of Charles Buckingham and Matthew Cooper. The disc (or 2xLP) is titled 9.22.07. Here six untitled tracks weave harmoniously into each other. In an edition of 900 (in both formats) the cover art is a visual play on seeing, a blurry and myopic treat manipulating organic material by Jason Evans (from It Is What It Is). A sonic low-fi bass hum cascades like a dense waterfall while the ‘chatter’ of electronics awkwardly tumbles like a visceral sphere of jagged matter. Paired with the delicate sounds of these two gentlemen it’s not clear how the origins of their experiment began over kombucha, but that seems less relevant than the warm, meandering tones that fill a room sensitively. I suppose the image of fermentation might be relative, though on this recording the quietude has an air of the Spring solstice, things popping, spreading like pollen.

Mutek Rounds Out Next Edition

Adding to the earlier report of performers featured in this year’s version of Mutek are the next wave of twenty sound artists including Pimmon, Nurse With Wound and Montreal’s-own Herman Kolgen. Sounds eclectic as usual and though my personal travel plans and participation is on the fence I will most certainly be there in spirit either way. Here are the other international performers who plan to take the stage:

ALEXANDRE ST_ONGE (CA), ARNAUD RIVIÈRE (FR), CHRIS HRENO (CA), DEBASHIS SINHA (CA), ELEH (US), HYENA HIVE (CA), JACEK SIENKIEWICZ (PL), JEAN-PIERRE AUBÉ (CA), JEDI ELECTRO (CA), KRILL.MINIMA (DE), MOSSA (CA), NATHAN FAKE (UK), ORPHX (CA), OVERCAST SOUND (CA), PAUL DOLDEN (CA), SAN PROPER (NL), [THE USER] (CA)

The final listing will be posted here on April 13th….

Richard Garet – Four Malleable

RICHARD GARET
Four Malleable
and/OAR

An astonishing talent continues rising as Richard Garet slowly unveils the richly embedded hues that encompass his latest release, Four Malleable. Broken into four stealthy long parts Nocturne offsets things from the top, long before we cross any bridge. A bit of a luminescent drone collage harkening early Thomas Köner. Lapping and drifting, then soaring it’s quite oceanic in scope, and a bit of head trip. It scales outward, feels quite expansive, yet subtly rocks the intimate side of the center of your chest. Deep bass rumbling makes way for something that simulates a creepy, low-fi invasive presence, then quiets to a hollow atonal frequency and elapses into static white noise like a fine mist waterfall. And that’s just track one. The remaining work follows suit, with high-pitched sine waves and molded experimentation. Two Untitled tracks couldn’t be more different, one a bit unnerving dabbling in minimal crispy static while the other sounds like a document of floating in open space, muffled voices, et al. At thirty-one minutes Sceneries is the lengthiest track here and doesn’t skimp on the tonal/pitch play of bells and motors that bring about both sounds of rapid intensity and breathy sensuality. Though take this one a half hour at a time, especially for beginners. If you’ve got a surround system this double disc set is a must — Instructions: play loud in low light.