Reviews
Independent Weekly - Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, NC
Under the ever-expanding umbrella that is experimental, music can lean toward process over beauty. This collaboration avoids the conceit that a work can't be properly appreciated unless it's fully explained. No More Love is what it is, whatever that means: A patchwork of incongruous sounds mixes correctly, shards making unlikely wholes and square pegs fitting into circular holes.
Isaac Trogdon and John McCusker wereare Southern Man, a duo slamming industrial-tinged percussive noise into an unhinged frame of electronics. (Trogdon was also a co-founder of performance space Nightlight before moving to Berlin.) Here as Pykrete, Chuck Johnson's experience with creating mood and texture for film scores provides a buffer for the clatter of McCusker's machine shop roaring at full tilt. Trogdon bobs to and fro, crackly pops of beats and frayed effects splashing on everything. Metal-on-metal clangs and wood slams rubbing against the computer bleeps craft a girder system that gives this set the foreboding vibe of a decrepit building, creaking and swaying in the breeze, ready to be leveled at the foundation. That it's a live recording only adds to its loose, furious nature. "Curretage" acts as the centerpiece here. A collage piece, it grows sentient, slithering rattler-like through a cloud of digital haze, tightly coiled and within striking range.
-Chris Toenes
Other Music
Last up is the Southern Man and Pykrete CD, the first non-New York artist on Phaserprone. The sound is like Lithops doing 'construction-site' techno or subtle, industrial composition. Simple, insistent rhythmic structures are slowly covered in bulldozer/earthmover textures (see "Distance Player"). There's quieter stuff too; "Vacation Rigonda" has warbly analog voices trading space with rummaged metal and other unknown sound sources that build into a small wall of cacophony. New sounds, in beautifully letter-pressed, hand-cut and folded sleeves with inserts and/or tipped in photos. Painfully limited edition pressings of 145 copies or less, so get 'em while they exist.
Outer Space Gamelan
When Jonas of the New York born and bred Phaserprone label wrote to me asking if he could send some stuff in for review, I didn't hesitate to accept. Because I'm a leech. No actually it's because a quick glance at the Phaserprone website revealed four very slick-looking albums that anybody should love to get their hands on. But I was completely unprepared for when the day came to crack open that box and unleash these four (I know I only listed three, more on that later) gems. I don't know if there's government money at work or if the Phaserprone guys were art students and have access to all kinds of fancy machinery but the packaging here is totally decadent - the CD-Rs come packaged in super thick, heavy cardboard gatefolds with letter-pressed art, glossy photos and really weird quasi-dot-matrix-style print outs and Xeroxes (and the CD-Rs themselves have some professionally-printed art going on too). The tape they sent is housed in a cardboard wrap-around with great silver inked artwork and the LP features more letter-press, more photos, and more inserts. I know it's ultimately the music that matters man but isn't it just a billion times better when it comes in such lovely, eye-pleasing formats? I think so.
...
Finally there's a collaboration between two artists I'm completely unfamiliar with, the North Carolina/Berlin duo of Southern Man and Pykrete, also from North Carolina. The sounds here are quite a bit more difficult to place but the playing shakes out images of taking a bath in the vast outer space landscape, with various stars exploding and fizzling out around you and the gentle weeping of Pluto trying to get over its total scientific smackdown. "No More Love" is a bit too jittery to be classed as straight-up ambient but it sure has those tendencies. There's a lot of broken-electronic clatter cobbling itself together to form some kind of mutant, bent rhythm that the group cultivate for the duration of the track, before moving on to something new. The 9-minute "Apheresis Cathect" is almost catatonic as it shifts subtlely between dead battery gizmo gasps and gentle droning white noise dizzy.
Foxy Digitalis
It begins with a discreet wash of ambient noise that quickly morphs into loose strings of distorted frequencies and electronic rattle. A few minutes onwards, a skeletal rhythm track finally emerges from all this. It is barely maintained through a very controlled use of echos and delays. After a while, this somewhat repetive beat finally dissolves, making ample room for various shreds of sounds to move around and grow.
This is a process that will be found throughout the album. Electronically-manipulated sounds come and go as they please - their sources all the more unidentifiable as their shapes are constantly mutating. The acoustic space is real and imaginary - recorded and manipulated in real time in a live context/fused in our minds as we listen on...
There are two characteristics that stand out here. First, a tendency to delineate actual sonic constructs whose fragile architectures owe as much to a certain idea of minimal techno (a la Pansonic) as to the early years of industrial music. In this respect, track #3 "Distance Player" is particularly impressive: as a saturated electronic bass line increases the tension, multiple layers of shape-shifting sonic entities are added and subtracted while other conflicting noise exchanges are being pursued all around.
This organic feel remains intriguing throughout. As a matter of fact, a few sources used on this recording have been mentioned on the label website, but they won't tell you much anything, except maybe from the fact that what we are dealing with something that is definitely hard to categorize. These are: "radiators", "broken refrigerators" or what is being referred to as "dilapidated architecture" and even "fishing in the dead sea"!
No doubt, a highly disparate assemblage which is able to display some astonishing, yet understated results. On the epic fourth track "Curretage", free-flowing electronics respond to chopped loops of statics, while the constant presence of some highly stretched lower-frequency moans maintains a particularly tense and intriguing atmosphere all the way.
The second aspect that can be distinguished here is directly related to what has just been written above. This music is so rich and detailed that it is able to display a singular dronesome quality, one that is slightly overactive, always on the verge of becoming overwhelming, but which remains quietly unsettling and utterly fascinating. It's as if streaks of dark, shattered clouds were playing hide and seek with a few isolated rays of sunlight above some bleak, yet constantly-mutating internal landscape.
What I love about this music is that you cannot really describe it, however, it can affect you in the most direct way once you begin to listen to it. At times, I'm reminded of the impact the music of some Jyrk recording artists has on me - artists like God, Bonus or even the Yellow Swans who are known to explore simultaneously both ends of the noise/silence spectrum.
However the music of Southern Man and Pykrete has a unique kind of vintage electro-acoustic, almost industrial touch that seems to come out of nowhere; as if the cdr had managed to capture some hitherto forgotten pulses that had been beating against the surfaces of the earth for so long.
The label website will reveal that Southern Man is actually a North Carolina/ Berlin duo, while Pykrete is a fellow Carolina resident. I don't know anything else about these guys and about this recording in general, except from the fact that it is was recorded live. Simply put, this is excellent stuff. I highly recommend you check it out as well as all the other releases that can be found on this great label from Brooklyn.
7/10 -- Francois Hubert (18 September, 2006)