Pre-Cert Home Entertainment Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 2 Items

Brittle tape-fluxed music box lullabies from art mystics Matt Krefting and Rick Myers, assembled and released via Andy Votel & Sean Canty’s Pre-Cert Home Entertainment label and sounding something like Colleen’s array of music boxes let loose at the GRM basement. Myers (former member of MancRap unit Violators of the English Language with Andy Votel, and whose artwork adorned classic ‘90s release by everyone from Lamb to Doves and Badly Drawn Boy), and Krefting (veteran of idiosyncratic tape miniatures and improv oddness for labels like Penultimate Press, Graham Lambkin’s Kye, Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace! and cult Vancouver imprint Ascetic House) produce something much greater than the sum of its parts here, using a antique hand cranked Reginaphone - an archaic machine that plays both music box discs and 78s - to transport us into a crumbling, cassette dubbed wonderland. The pair explore the various anachronisms of the 100 year old family heirloom with results that are part sound art/sound poetry and part mechanical musical curio, delving into its cogs and wires with wonderfully time-out-of-joint effect springing fractured melodies and a drowsy oneiric ambience that gets under the skin.

Synth legend Suzanne Ciani, Demdike Stare’s Sean Canty & Finders Keepers’ Andy Votel come together on this killer hour-long 2014 synapse popper of a collaboration pooling the occasional group’s esoteric collage-based approach into a remarkably foreboding session pregnant with a dread that’s never quite resolved. Think Vladimir Ussachevsky, Todd Dockstader, Spectre and Company Flow melted thru the Deutsch-Italo industrial DIY tape era and funneled thru an almost impenetrable fog of Ann Arbor basement noizze. Hustling some of Neotantrik’s most amorphous gestures, ’241014’ is a four-segment movement of reduced Buchla treatments, destroyed vinyl loops and scraping foley suspense; like a cosmic dream diary layered into a collage of drones and clatters. Little in Ciani’s extensive catalogue has hinted at what’s on display here; the joyful lullaby-pop of “Seven Waves” or metallic alien soundscraping of “Flowers of Evil” are only hinted at. She instead paints new sonic vistas, allowing space for her collaborators to make themselves known; Votel’s chiming toy autoharp and Bubul Tarang (a Punjab string instrument) add a distinctive flavor, while Canty’s grimy drones and noise-soaked textures drizzle pitch-black molasses into the cracks and crevices. Together, the effect is a bit like hearing Philip Jeck improvising over Popol Vuh’s peerless Moog-led debut “Affenstunde” or Demdike Stare knocking out impromptu reworks of Tangerine Dream’s abstrakt early run. Perhaps unusually, the trio have still never set foot in a studio together, exclusively maintaining their practice in-the-moment and on stage when schedules intersect. So it’s all the more remarkable that their improvisations naturally find a democracy of role and such a heightened level of intuition, beautifully converging their thoughts to mutual, open-ended conclusions that leaves billowing room for interpretation. In a most classic sense, it’s like the sensation of sleep paralysis or dream/nightmare ambiguity, with a level of suggestiveness that’s disorienting from end to end. For the first time the recordings are now available in high fidelity (there was a tape version a couple of years back) - now remastered by Rashad Becker to better represent the otherworldly scope of their actions on stage, from the NWW-like queues and drone of ‘Scanned Accents’ and keening silhouette of ‘Second Action,’ to new sections of subaquatic Porter Ricks-like murk in ‘Anti-Contraction’ and the levitating webs of synth and tactile, sampled textures in ‘Last Canción.’ Tape music and synth music have long shared a passionate embrace, and here turntablism coolly slides in on the action. Canty and Votel’s background in beat tape assembly and crate digging pays off: they’re keenly experimental creators but bring an unfussy sense of rhythm and performance that’s miles beyond any facile repetition of a nostalgia for vintage glory. Combined with Ciani’s delicate Buchla work - it’s a unique proposition.