Ideal Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 12 Items

Venerable avant-gardist John Duncan supplies quietly jaw-dropping new fruits from his fertile relationship with iDEAL Recordings, rendering a concept album for the times split between thoughts on social energy/failure, and intimacy, in his singular style In quizzical pursuit of the haunted muse that’s informed Duncan’s boundary-pushing work since the late ‘70s, and which has lit up the iDEAL catalogue over the past half decade, ’Soft Eyes’ renders Duncan’s oblique reading of the psychic zeitgeist in subtly contrasting sides of furtively rhythm-driven and richly atmospheric songcraft. In keeping with Duncan’s reputation as a sort of avant garde shaman or psychopomp, there’s something unfathomably timeless and ineffably eternal about his work on ’Soft Eyes’, which follows the course of his modern classics such as the songbook of wizened covers ‘Bitter Earth’ (2016), and last year’s ‘Red Sky’ 2CD, without feeling like he’s re-treading old ground, and still sounding vitally unusual. The record’s first half revolves around Duncan’s thoughts on social energy and failure, from crowds to tribal gatherings, in a low-key but extraordinary style. Chamber wind meets a metallic pulse somewhere between dembow and Yemeni folk to underline his achingly hoarse vocals on ‘The Rabid Position’, while the lurking vox of ’Say No’ smartly reaffirms his counter-cultural cache, and the queered ambience of ‘Homecoming’ sees him slip into a sort of curdled tribal reverie. On the other hand, the B-side dwells in a starker, intimate half light, with songs stripped to a spectral quintessence between the petal-fall keys and prickly sax of ‘Foreplay’, a face freezing, ASMR-triggering beauty titled ‘Frenzy’, and an unmissable, abyss-hovering vision ‘Resolve’, and pooling into the miasmic folk strings and stygian glyde of ‘The Beautiful Attempt.’

For anyone keeping a keen eye on these pages in the past 10 years, Human Inferno may be feared and regarded for a 2013 split with Lasse Marhaug on Sonmoi that still sounds like nothing else. ‘To Piss Warm And Drink Cold’ is their feral return after interim sides with Weltschmerz Verlag and Entr’acte, unleashing a torrent of possessed hardware grot and gunk that knows no chill. It is equally applicable to the scuzziest clubs and ritual bedroom practices with a sort of DIY spirit that resonates the mentation electronics of Fortress Crookedjaw (Black Mecha/Wold/Fauchion), the blasted-mind styles of Black Zone Myth Chant or the grotesqueries of The Body, but with an ogre- in-the-basement quality that the band can safely claim as their own. Very loose traces of anglophilic behaviour lurk in their manipulation of raw dub elements and the coarsest noise, as well as track titles such as ‘Derbyshire Collission’ and ‘Brexit Rid’em’, intersecting naturally Norwegian leanings toward BM recordings virtues and pure noise in a manner that places them in very good company among iDEAL’s roster. It serves a frankly filthy good time, descending from the bestial growl of ‘Locust’ to a spannered 16 minutes of slurred power electronics ‘Yout’ via prongs of electro-dub like the iDEALIST jamming with Bzmc over a pack of special brew on ‘Liquid Breakfast’, or going on like Liquid G meets Vox Populi in the hobbled trot of ‘Derbyshire Collission’, and hopping like Tory lizards adopting their true form in the scaly ragga- noise-techno beast of ‘Brexit Rid’em’.

Carla Boregas is best known from her tenure in São Paulo’s genre-bending experimental post-punk scene, playing in long-running outfit Rakta as well as other related offshoots. Her solo material has been knottier to unpick, here developing ideas from a collection of unfinished fragments and notebook scribbles exploring the possibility of finding a wind instrument that could be played collectively by several musicians. Coinciding with the pandemic, however, she soon realised the inherent risks involved with sharing breath and so the concept took a different direction, with added resonance. Boregas developed a synthetic alternative, layering vocals and environmental recordings to suggest wind instrumentation without attempting to mimic it. The sounds here are airy, but rarely diegetic - on the title track, Boregas uses analog arpeggios and plucked, sustained tones to approximate the kosmische world of Ash Ra Tempel or more recently Emeralds, as if trapped in a wind tunnel, moved forward by an unseen force. There’s a whisper of the ancient past that harmonises with Wojciech Rusin’s speculative medieval gasps, and Bloedneus & de Snuitkever’s severely underheard ‘Milli Mille’, an examination of the ancient Greek aulos. On ’Grafia Do Invisível’ the sound is completely different again, but the concept remains, using precise analog drones and minuscule timbral shifts to imitate the character of a wind instrument and simultaneously harmonise with the deep listening meditations of Éliane Radigue and Kali Malone. A voice enters the frame on ‘Sopro’, chopped into deviated gulps and syllables, creating a language that’s unfamiliar and percussive. The use of breath is subtle, and vocalisations criss-cross between synths and faint whistles, forming an expression that’s different from its predecessors but intrinsically interlinked. This is where ‘Pena Ao Mar’ excels, by viewing breath and its application in electronic music from multiple angles simultaneously.

The debut album from group A's Tommi Tokyo is an illusory marvel made up of snatched half-heard voices, ritualistic rhythms, digi-fucked power electronics and emetic sci-fi drones. Impossible to classify, incredible to absorb - like Vainio, Stockhausen, Anima, Porter Ricks and Ramleh playing in a small room.

Since 2012, Tokyo-based duo group A have been toying with the concept of performance, attempting to melt various art styles - from body art and live painting to noise and performance - into their jaw-dropping live sets. Tommi Tokyo strikes out solo with "Senno I", her debut under the Tot Onyx moniker that appears a couple of years after an impressive collaboration with Hiro Kone emerged on "More Light", 2020's Berlin Atonal box set. Alone, Tommi is able to approach her art from a more personal, even biographical angle. She describes the record as a "study of her interior life", and played from beginning to end it feels like being plugged into someone's brain as it dumps its most polar content, "Johnny Mnemonic" style.

Each track appears to comb through a different cortex: opener 'Voice Calling' juxtaposes her voice with distant ritual drums, cyber-animal gurgles and plucked strings; 'A Leaf Laughs' is distorted close-mic'ed fauna crunches set against low-end rumbles; and the lengthy 'Inhabitants of Brain' is a dial-up powered flicker of faint floppy disk buzzes, indecipherable voices and nauseating electronic burbles. The album shifts into a different gear when it hits 'a-h5n1', referencing the flu subtype to help evoke a crushing mood punctuated by ketamized percussion, dissonant string scrapes and retching industrial noise.

It's a record that's honest enough to capture the ugliness and cavernous depth of the mind; all its beauty is inevitably snatched away to be buried by guttural screams or digitally rehashed machine belches. Any rhythm - which emerges frequently and pointedly - is disrupted by Isdn cable interference or ghostly muttering. At its best, the record tips fully into cyberpunk dystopia, coming across like a ghastly simulacrum of recent Porter Ricks transmissions and Slikback on the submerged 'Maggots' and pneumatic 'Plague'. The latter is a particular highlight, electro-plating acoustic drums and forming them into stuttering error-pools of post-Schematic grit and grind.

It's a harrowing journey, tipped to William Gibson fans or anyone who scoures the lower levels of Discogs for rare Japanese improv.

Following releases for L.I.E.S, Alter, Bank Records NYC, Viewlexx, Ascetic House and Unknown Precept, Nick Klein makes his debut appearance on iDEAL with a strong album of morose, self reflective productions that will strongly appeal if you’re into anything from Nate Young to Depeche Mode to Nine Inch Nails and Caustic Window. The album marks the end of an era for Klein, his last work recorded in the USA before a move to Europe, and feels like a kind of sad kiss-off to the city, delivered in five parts that drill into a signature style of sourest synths and machine rhythms that revel in the thrill of grinding dissociation, seething with a seat-edge tension with jolts of rawest electronic expression. The thrumming velocity that took Klein up to 2018 feels tempered and chiselled into some of his most unyielding work, offering palpably pensive nerviness to his typically bullish styles in a way that has begun to bleed into his most recent releases on Psychic Liberation and Viewlexx. ‘Tail Eating’ and the fierce traction of ‘Every Move Move For The Monitor’ are countered with keening choral voices and serotonin-depleted strings of opener ‘Choking On Ice’, while the sparing strokes of ‘Pear Brandy’ casts a long shadow of midnight blooz guitar, and bony flutes creep over the stygian flow of ’Spider In Brown Powder’ in a salty balance of his patented, dissociative dryness with more esoteric, emotive urges. It feels like an album tailor made for this moment, full of uncertainty, sadness, staring into the bleak unknown.

At long last, Boston’s Isabella Koen delivers her long-in-the-making debut album of raving mutant body music, Trance riffs and industrial synth topographies forged with raw and brooding industrial sound design that marks her out among N. America’s most interesting new producers of electronic music. Big tip if yr into Jasss, Helena Hauff, Gesloten Cirkel, AFX. Spanning proper techno artillery, Trance riffs and noise excursions, ’Melody Depleted’ expands on the ruffcut but classy ideas put forth on her tapes and 12”s for the likes of Peder Mannerfelt Production, Börft and Jacktone over the past half decade. It serves a broad but singular showcase of her ability to generate club punishing rhythms, barely-tamed electronic noise and surprisingly sensitive ambient space probes that revel in electronic music’s capacity to evoke fine spectra of technoid feelings with a say it-without-saying-it instrumental finesse.

Egil Kalman has levelled up on this one; we were stunned by his last solo opus, and on ‘Forest of Tines’, the bassist/synthesist has traded the EMS Synthi 100 for the Buchla Series 200, recording at Stockholm’s illustrious Elektronmusikstudion (ems). Here, he builds on themes he explored on his debut with a generous 20 track double album that marks firmer lines between Scandinavian folk music and contemporary electro- acoustic minimalism. Using woody, synthesised tones that gradually open into sawing wails, Kalman suggests harmonies that lie between the 17th century polska and earlier, pre-Renaissance sounds, mimicking the tonal and textural fluctuations of strings with advanced tuning and sequencing techniques. There are plenty of artists delving into the past to unravel their identity, but Kalman’s approach is refreshingly unadulterated. He recorded the entire set on the fly, using just spring reverb to add extra texture, without overdubs or modern DAW-style layering, the Buchla 200 played almost like an acoustic instrument. There’s a glimmer of vintage acid on the lithe ‘Dub One’, a complex, rhythmic experiment that lashes its pulses together with willowy portamento slides. And on ‘Klystron’, he absorbs warehouse techno’s architectural oomph, splaying psychedelic, reverberating ascending sequences over jagged kicks; listen carefully, and there’s something else going on in the background too, as Kalman meets his stabs with flute-like echoes. It’s a peculiar cocktail of ideas and provocations: ‘Mbira’ finds the composer shaping his synth into dusty, fluttering hits that resemble the titular Zimbabwean finger harp, and on ‘Drums’, he pipes pre-recorded percussion through the system, triggering its oscillators and helping shape its rhythmic patterns. He’s most comfortable when he’s mines a hazier past, ‘Autumn Leaves’ is a mystickal, just intoned droner that harmonises with Mattias Petersson’s awesome ‘Triangular Progressions’, and ‘Subtines’ sounds as if Kalman has deployed his instrument in a subterranean crevice, resonating his rumbles around synthetic water droplets. If it’s uncanny court music you’re particularly interested in, there’s plenty of that too. ‘Polska’ is another sublimely hauntological Swedish folk interpolation, while closing track ‘Ocquet’ appears to blur Kalman’s ideas more thoroughly, melting folk phrasing and peaceful, uneasy drones to draw us to a neat conclusion. Soft-hearted but animated, it’s modern electronic music that isn’t afraid of employing vintage techniques to suggest new directions

Elektra (Scream Through the Eyes of a Statue), is a multimedia performance broadly conceptualizing the female voice as an “X-ray to the bones of sound.” It was commissioned by Issue Project Room and performed April 26th, 2018 in Brooklyn, New York. Taking poet, essayist, and Classics professor Anne Carson’s translation of Sophocles’ tragic play Elektra as a point of departure, James K monstrously externalizes the inner sonic world of female vocalization through a scored collaborative framework interpreting each of Elektra’s “screams” in the Greek tragedy.

The piece develops unique methods of screaming through musical and non-musical objects -- performed through manipulated text, videos, and live contributions from James K (voice, electronics, violin, video) Brooklyn-based musician Eve Essex (alto saxophone, various winds and electronics), electronic producer and performer Dylan Shir (electronics), composer and cellist Leila Bordreuil (cello), and poet/artist Eli V Manuscript (textual alchemy, projections).

Within this collaborative framework, James K scores “the scream” to express the various relations between hysteria and the “gender of sound” -- a blurred and overlapping feminine sound defined by its fragmentation and resistance to scripted narrative. Elektra’s presence is emblematic of a radical alienation that occurs as a standing discrepancy to tragic convention. Amongst society, she is the anti-dialogue, a symbol of protest.

‘my cries are wings, they pierce the cage’

Elektra’s vocalizations pierce through language, revealing a shattered interior of multifaceted reflections constructed against habitual linguistic or vocal expression. In tragic convention, such habitual vocalization takes the shape of the often terse, patriarchal voice of the Greek philosopher -- a didactic, conceptual container in opposition to the expressive “becoming” of Elektra’s cries that riot against fixity. As a tragic character, Elektra is radical and alien for Sophocles and his audience -- an ever-present conviction that demonstrates how female shame has constructed a life-size funeral urn around her.

Through translating a text within layers of translations, a fragmentation of the firsthand into traces, James K mirrors Elektra’s deconstruction of reality into siren shards, offering an experiencing of female sign language as a means of sabotage to the world of normal utterances. By sliding on the edge of convention to sharply abandoning rational speech and sonic construction, K’s piece aims to embody Elektra’s strained and stretching screams, as cuts against the glass; her sabotage bound within the blanket loop. In response to rigid vocalization and fixed sonic understandings, Elektra (Scream Through the Eyes of a Statue) takes the scream as an unruly, emotive sonic experience projecting outwards into objects and audience: to the very bones of sound.

This is a live recording of its single performance. Recorded by Bob Bellerue at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, NY. Mixed by James K. Mastered by Jack Callahan. Performed by James K, Eve Essex, Via App, and Leila Bordreuil. Conceived and scored by James K for four players, and written in collaborative improvisation with the performers. Textual alchemy by Eli V Manuscript. Design and layout by Nicola Tirabasso and James K. Label management by Joachim Nordwall.

MAAVAK a two 10xCD box sets presenting the intense, present, sometimes fragile & often challenging music of Swedish/Israeli composer, musician, artist and activist DROR FEILER, celebrating 50 years of musical, artistic and political actions in Sweden and around the world.
These two box sets presents his wide range of styles; from noise attacks to orchestral compositions, from chamber music to solo saxophone pieces. There is a sort of brutal sensitivity to his works, or maybe rather a sensitive brutality. Let it be works for solo acoustic instruments or full symphony orchestra works (in one of them with Blixa Bargeld as vocal solist).

MAAVAK a two 10xCD box sets presenting the intense, present, sometimes fragile & often challenging music of Swedish/Israeli composer, musician, artist and activist DROR FEILER, celebrating 50 years of musical, artistic and political actions in Sweden and around the world.
These two box sets presents his wide range of styles; from noise attacks to orchestral compositions, from chamber music to solo saxophone pieces. There is a sort of brutal sensitivity to his works, or maybe rather a sensitive brutality. Let it be works for solo acoustic instruments or full symphony orchestra works (in one of them with Blixa Bargeld as vocal solist).

Deep and beautiful ambient experimentalism from two true masters. “Roedelius / Hausswolff II”is this duo’s second album. The two met in Vienna in 2016 when Carl Michael invited Hans-Joachim to participate in the collective sound-installation and concert””freq_out ”. Since H-J had been, and still is, organizing the festival “More Ohr Les“ in his home town Baden just outside Vienna it has been natural for him to invite CM to collaborate and perform here. As a result of this iDEAL Recording released the CD “Zurufe“ in 2021 where H-J and CM collaborated with American Tim Story and Brit/Swiss Christopher Chaplin. Like the duo’s first album - ”Nordlicht” (released in the USA in 2017) - this new one follows the path where a dark ambient drone style reveals several epic landscapes and formulas.

A precedent of sorts to, erm, Armand van Helden vs Fatboy Slim’s 1999 bout, ‘The Heavyweight Sound Fight’ takes pride of place among iDEAL’s hall of oddities with one of the zaniest recordings by three international leaders of the avant-garde. Adapting all the pomp and ceremony of a boxing match to ludicrous ends - including a flier depicting each artist with their dukes up - they produced what sounds like a great night out for NYC’s experimental cognoscenti with Charlie Morrow (usa) vs Carles santos (Spain) each backed by a band - Soho Baroque Opera Company with the assistance of the New Wilderness Foundation - while Sweden’s Sten Hanson acts as referee, and Armand Schwerner takes the role of announcer in thick, nasal New York brogue. It’s brilliantly daft and subversive but accomplished in a witty way that maybe escapes too many solemnly po-faced avant-garde conceptualists nowadays, and remains a strange outlier in the history of NYC avant garde and beyond. “Operating as an aural window into an happening that occurred more than 40 years ago, “The Heavyweight Sound Fight” unveils a different context of experimental music than is not often encountered today. Running across the album’s four sides, within all the seriousness of art and technique, is the unmistakable presence of humor, play, and the absurd. The audience can’t help but laugh and cheer as the announcer - effecting a deep New York accent and nodding toward notable attendees like Allison Knowles, Dick Higgins, and Jackson Mac Low - takes an active role in the fight, each artist delivering an array of vocalizations - from extended technique utterances to rants - against the next, with the bands weighing in and engaging in their own battles, ranging from big band dirges and marches, to outright experimental electronic madness. It’s a trully raucous affair that brings that radicalism carried by its sounds into entirely new zones. According to Marrow, he was deemed “winner” in an “off-script” move by the judges, and Santos never spoke to him again, continuing the wild and wonderful mystery and humor of the performance into the present day. Who knows what Santos, who sadly passed away in 2017, would say.”