Beatriz Ferreyra ‘Echos +’ 12” (Room 40)

Beatriz Ferreyra’s work has found constrained dissemination compared to many other GRM alumni, only a handful of releases emerging in over 50 years of work. ‘Echos’ follows Room40’s Lawrence English performing with Ferreyra in Portugal and Brazil, as well as bringing her to perform in Australia in 2018, and is a significant addition to the Argentinian’s body of recorded work.

The title-track of ‘Echos +’ is a montage of looped, spliced and layered a capella vocals to four Latin-American songs, the focus on audible tape manipulation rather than any greater performer input or manipulation. Ideas are looped, cadences are ruined, and fragments multiplied across the eight and a half minutes of the piece, but the focus wears a little thin. Created in 1978 “Echos” is somehow the most familiar piece of the LP, its editing and layering reflective of the roots of electroacoustic music as no doubt linked to Ferreyra’s tenure at GRM, albeit but with a personal focus linked to the vocal performances which I find somewhat limiting in impact. As an exercise in technique the piece is clever, but I find its listenability more difficult.

“L’Autre … Ou Le Chant Des Marécages” (“The “Double” Or The Swamp’s”) is again derived from vocal performances, but with a performer input far more marked than the lighter touch of “Echos”. Elongated tones are seemingly constructed from teasingly slowed vocal notes, and create an immediate menace to the piece; “L’Autre … Ou Le Chant Des Marécages” frequently returns to the familiarity of those billowing stretches as a kind of comfort creation, but it’s its need to find that comfort which makes the piece special. Repeated sharp syllabic jabs and wilder yowled, yelled and yelped fragments – verging at its peak in near-riotous climax – lift the piece out of any languorous want, fiercely colouring the piece like blood spatter on snow. The breaths, tics and murmurs which skirted the edges of “Echos” are on this second piece part of a arsenal of honed, bright lashings, vivid punctures of sound which flash across the dark stretches of the piece: the “double” which the title speaks of, and which the liner notes describe as a paradoxal personality, split between vibrant colour and the dark subject of matter of Cendrars’ ‘Moravagine’ in a complex convergence of tonality, texture and dynamic impact.

The centrepiece of ‘Echos +’ is 2007 composition “L’Autre Rive” (“The Other Shore”) which assumes the entire B side, a haunting piece utilising percussion and additional electroacoustic sound. The sound manipulation is more integrative than the first side, the percussion performance itself  – such as the timpani swells which alchemise into circularities of sound, its tom rolls which billow reverbed smoke and a comet’s tail of electronics dust, a jazz cymbal riff swallowed by delay, and gong or cymbal scrapings which are stuttered and manipulated more into animal cries than any instrumental output – immersed in technique, and finessed with additional sound inputs.

The piece itself, inspired by the Bardo Thödol (Tibetan Book of the Dead), merges those percussive shocks with dark swathes of largely ambient sound for a genuinely haunting affect making full use of the composed sounds and the spaces between them. The first half of the piece is littered with emergent scares of sparse percussion and sympathetically minimalist treatments, a more dominant sound input from Beatriz emerging moreso over the second tranche of the piece, which is in part led by set pieces of shock which are provoked by volume-driven swells of semi-orchestral noise or aeoliphone-type disturbance, and which rise up in volume and intensity as if reaching a skeletal arm at an unsuspecting passer-by. Beatriz’s heavier sound elements seem to include instrumental off-cuts, voice, reverb-heavy synthesis and even some jarring junk percussion-type elements played against Richard Aratian’s percussion performance, the electroacoustic elements initially structured around the percussive sparks before seeming to switch into a primary role over the later half of the piece. It’s an immersive, unpredictable and somehow darkly humourous piece which stands up to repeat listens – it’s had a lot here since ‘Echos +’ arrived – easily, never failing to engage, surprise and delight.

Moving on from the perhaps timid approach of its title track, ‘Echos +’ is electroacoustic music in full flight, constantly blurring the line between acoustic and imagined, between treatment and creation, and between Beatriz herself as performer and those whose creativity births her works. While distanced from modern experimental music in its genesis, the imprint of Ferreyra’s work is found in contemporary realisations of dark ambient and Dadaist sound creation, and is an excellent introduction for those genre dwellers who have yet to explore historical/academic works with a similar inclination.

https://room40.bandcamp.com/album/echos

The Gerogerigegege ‘Piss Shower Girlfriend’ 12” (FOAD)

Adherents know that while The Gerogerigegege may forever be labelled a noise project, it frequently – sometimes infuriatingly – isn’t. 2016 comeback album ‘Moena Hai’ was an exquisite combination of ambient craftmanship, field recordings and in-the-red shoegaze riffing which was somehow easily defining of the project even in its sprawl. But the following LPs were appropriated from 1970s pop schtick in that nonchalant fuck-you way the project delivers in spades, and newly self-released editions were a confusing mess of archival curiosities, self-bootlegged bootlegs, and a revised presentation of classic LP ‘Senzuri Champion’.

Within all that mess of culled cultural excess, lo-fi curiosities, rehearsal circumspection and hint of class, Juntaro Yamanouchi’s credentials as a noise artist lay untouched and seemingly uncared for in the project’s resurrection, but ‘Piss Shower Girlfriend’ is the exaltation of volume, distortion and abandon which has been lying in wait the last four years of the project (at least). ‘Piss Shower Girlfriend’ effects a more immediate and volume-dependent bustle than even ‘Senzuri Champion’’s centrepiece “Violence Onanie” but is similarly liberally noisy and unrestrained. The LP is a festering squall of high volume feedback and vocal noise, with a heavy Masonna feel in its slashes of shrieking vocal gibberish, cleaving feedback air, flip-switch effect injections and occasional pauses of equipment faltering in overheated exhaustion.

While the first side is utterly primal and unhinged, departing only from its shriek-and-howl template with a bath of reverb in final track “Piss Shower Telephone #4”, the second side seems to push some (probably sampled) junk clatter and movie script speech through its raucous amplification, those moments of performed downtime then fuelling spasmodic spurts of fierce movement, garbled vocal jags and greater equipment defeat/interruption.

Each side plays out as a single piece but let’s not forget that – of course – each isn’t. The LP purports to contain 13 tracks even if it doesn’t really, and to make it better the track titles are divine as only Juntaro could do: personal highlights are “Piss Shower Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon” and “Piss Purple Draank (T.V Bastard)”. For bonus points the pressing is a picture disc, cheesecake muscle men innocently handstanding, their smile and serene pose at dubious odds with the vibrant audio content.

I get why The Gerogerigegege is a difficult or taboo project for many, but any and all unpreparedness or selectivity is out: ‘Piss Shower Girlfriend’ has to be the exception for anyone yearning for liberated and deranged harsh noise with a juvenile fascination for loudness, feedback and human caterwaul. ‘Piss Shower Girlfriend’ is the LP which will yet again entrench The Gerogerigegege in the noise consciousness, and lead to a whole new round of disappointments as that newly attracted audience find the next few releases to bear no sonic resemblance or care for convention.

http://www.foadrecords.it/

Gnaw Their Tongues ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’ CD/LP (Consouling Sounds)

If Maurice De Jong’s recent releases as Hagetisse, Golden Ashes and in duo Dodenbezweerder speak to different paths of black metal historicism, Gnaw Their Tongues is intent on abandoning that association. Only the final tattered remnants of Maurice’s genre trappings are still stapled to the project’s sickly flesh, little left of the beginnings of the project which seems to have occupied the nastiest and bleakest corners of Maurice’s attentions for well over a decade.

‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’ strips away black metal’s layers of traditional musicality to reveal an impassive industrial inside, dominated by blocks of cold sound which have been deprived of melody to instead comprise a set of negatively charged drones owing more to the fringes of European postmortem industrial than its church burning miscreants, then sets in largely short-form compositions which share a dismal production robbed of frequency definition and often constrained from the strangled recordings into which Maurice places his textural aberrations.

Despite Gnaw Their Tongues’ rejection of musicality, percussion is an usual driver of ‘I Speak The truth, Yet With every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’; devoid of melodic form, its drone layers clutch at the trajectory given by the pieces’ rhythmic constructs. The burrowing insect slop which opens the title track, leading into a brief martial industrial refrain and more larval electronics layers, begins to writhe as sparse programmed percussion punches through its murky electronics – reducing its bass guitar to a mucousy substance which bulges as the percussive stabs jab it. Likewise “Purity Coffins” alternates its hellish windstorms with punctuations of tense electronics twitching at the provocation of its electronic drum flashes, the piece almost dramatic in its soundtrack-like percussive hits and orchestra-like swells of permeating sound, and “Abortion Hymn” rides free-form percussion into a storm of reverberated industrial spatter, bass guitar murmur and swampy vocal cries: only a few tentacles of mid-range slither emerge from the depressive mass of sound separately, to warily grasp around and retreat unsatisfied.

Other rhythmic constructs follow the turgid pull of the LP’s familiarly hateful textures, beginning with “White Void Black Wounds” commandeering a blast beat to then requisition it as a tool of war, as a frantic spray of artillery merges with seething distortion textures. The harrowing screams of “Here Is No Corruption” are only unleashed when its quaver drum pattern pauses to allow strains of vocals scrapings to emerge from the moist drone which blankets the track, its subtle pattern changes swamped by the clamouring spawn of the piece’s synth lines. Gnaw Their Tongues has never lurched closer to power electronics than in these moments of insistence, textures caught in the churn and seething in frustration as harrowing vocals whirlpool through the pieces.

While not afraid to borrow from the black industrial setups of MZ.412 and the drone-heavy suffocations of Urfaust, Gnaw Their Tongues brings a newly abstracted darkness to what remains, again somehow shaped by its percussive elements. “To Rival Death In Beauty” begins with grotesque vocals and a marauding synth line but is taken away by intermittent fragmentation of electronica rhythmic constructs, the piece managing to move its heaving carcass in time with the pulse set in motion by those early drum machine patterns. Even more absurd, a noirish wash permeates “A Sombre Gesture In The Faint Light Of Dusk” as faltering error messages and an unsettling bass refrain flare into more swollen pustules of greying drone mush, squirming electronics and dripping vocal screams – its urgencies dictated by the return of its percussive elements, as with closer “Shall Be No More” which ebbs and flows as tied to its rhythmic fortunes.

After half an hour of unpleasantness which plumbs the depths of Maurice’s late night self-torment, reflected in a constantly dismal production which has been stripped of any high end presence, “Shall Be No More” finally settles into ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’’s brief moment of normalcy. Weak rays of sun reach the later half of the track  to reveal an almost uplifting (at least comparable to the remainder of ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’) melody which brings the nightmarishness of the album to a close – as if acknowledging that the LP’s terrors must lurk in both literal and mentally figurative shadows, to be forgotten in the light of day but crawling back into consciousness when the evening arrives.

My initial listens to ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’ thought that perhaps the project had spat out a release too reliant on the emotionless distortion textures which shadow much of the LP, but the shaping of ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’ is a more complex ordeal than that initial impression, its grotesqueness worsened when you realise that even within that putrid production its parts are connected, and that mess is alive and responsive. Gnaw Their Tongues has picked at the rotted flesh of industrial culture for years, but ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’ seems enraptured by the genre’s dark recesses, even as Maurice’s other projects pull threads of more familiar black metal out for focus. Earlier pleasure derived from the chaos and paraphilic pulls of power electronics has failed, leaving only the genre’s bleakest focuses with which to construct this album.

https://gnawtheirtongues.bandcamp.com/album/i-speak-the-truth-yet-with-every-word-uttered-thousands-die