Jooklo Duo and Bill Nace - "Scratch"

Two sides of ecstatic noise captured on tape by Jason Lafarge at Seizures Palace, Brooklyn, in occasion of the East Coast and Midwest Tour of the Italian psychedelic tenor sax and drums duo of Virginia Genta and David Vanzan, joined by guitar wizard Bill Nace.

The music of Jooklo Duo is the most powerful expression in free improvisation, trascending every kind of stereotype and going straight to the center of Uncreated Sound. They have toured extensively in Europe and the USA, performing more than five-hundred concerts and tons of studio-sessions, collaborating with artists as Sonic Youth, Hartmut Geerken, Makoto Kawabata, Sabu Toyozumi, Chris Corsano, Paul Flaherty, C. Spencer Yeh, John Blum, and many others. Bill Nace is definitely one of the best avant-garde guitarists active today, able to drive his guitar into distorsion - nearly breaking it - but still holding the reins. He is already known for his duo throwdowns with Chris Corsano as Vampire Belt as well as the more recent collaboration with Dylan Nyoukis and Karen Constance as Ceylon Mange and in duo with Thurston Moore as Northampton Wools.

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Stefano Pilia "Strings"

A sublime constellation of sound miniatures divided into 3 long tracks (at once random and simultaneous) of delicate field recordings and found objects transformed and woven into intricate electronic tapestries, a slowly building "ambient" work with a unique sense of melancholy.
Strings is a diary composition began in 2004, a series of subtle epiphanies followed by a somewhat enigmatic resolve or 'answers',  richly spacious explorations that appears suspended in time, with distant landscapes and hallucinogenic excursions into further uncharted territories
"My work has become progressevly concerned with the research of the sculputural dimensions of sound and it’s relations with space, memory and time suspension both through instrumental executional-experimental practices (mainly on guitar and dbass) and investigations into the recording and production process"

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Keith Fullerton Whitman - "Antithesis"

Keith Fullerton Whitman hit the (under)ground running in the late 1990s, releasing a disparate batch of singles, remixes, and compilation appearances on the heels of his Oiseaux 96-98 debut as Hrvatski. With a decade of idiom hopping in outré-rock ensembles, Berklee electronic music labs and long-distance RKK label partnerships already behind him, Whitman's newly minted top-10 list fodder (records like Oiseaux and Swarm & Dither, celebrated for their own internal brand of stylistic impatience) were really only tips of an iceberg – one capable of shredding the hull of portentious critical methodologies and drum ‘n’ bass contextualizations alike. Like another New England-dwelling Whitman, the poet who strove “to be absolv’d from previous ties and conventions,” Keith Fullerton Whitman holds fast to the open road. His latest release, Antithesis, is a limited-edition, vinyl-only EP of non-processed “ensemble works” – six- and seven-minute instrumental pieces that don’t fit with his forthcoming Multiples record or his glitch/laptop past. They’re hunks from the aforementioned iceberg, recorded between 1994-2002 and chiseled free for 2004 – discrepant variants that hint at Whitman's multitudes.

"Twin Guitar Rhodes Viola Drone (for Lamonte Young)" is the first track on Antithesis and the easiest to pinpoint chronologically. Recorded in 1994, in the dimming drone-pop afterglow of Loveless, it pits a slowly unfurling strand of guitar melody against refracting viola tones (far less pronounced or scraping than the homage to Young might suggest). The effect is like Eno's Apollo beamed through a tight mesh of shoegaze distortion, and as the drones waft front-to-back they suggest a chorus of ghostly human voices before dissolving into recognizable instrumental tones; a nifty slight-of-hand. As if in response, "Obelisk (For Kurt Schwitters)" establishes the breadth of range that Whitman is seeking. Sinister tones erupt and seep away as percussive elements rattle and clank without warning. Where the previous track felt like a tightly composed symphony in unbounded space, "Obelisk" feels like a random series of utterances tightly contained by wet rock walls. Tribal drums reverberate, guitar distortion howls and an uneasy balance is finally realized.

"Rhodes Viola Multiple" is Antithesis's most interesting piece. A Rhodes phrase is repeatedly played and altered, overlapping and reversing in complicated design so that the mottled sounds begin to bleed together with the calming effect of a Rothko painting. The phrases are introduced quickly, then replaced without time to distinguish themselves, like some prelude to a Sonic Youth song that never begins. The EP concludes with "Schnee," which hews more closely to rock tropes than any of the previous three tracks. Acoustic guitar and pounding toms rotate in Kraut-rock cycles while electric guitar lines slice linearly through the haze. It’s not enough of a shift from what bands like Ash Ra Tempel and Parson Sound were perfecting in the 1970s to really impress, but in the context of Antithesis it’s an intriguing movement into a more organic and rhythm-anchored form.

Antithesis is impressive more for its breadth of approach than the depth of any one piece. For obvious reasons it doesn’t hold together as a unified album, but the diversity of set-ups and approaches encourage meditation on the many variables present.

By Nathan Hogan

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Maurizio Bianchi - "Genocidio 20"

This is a real puzzler, as there's practically no information whatsoever about it on the wmo/r website, which leads me to guess that it dates from the early 80s, Bianchi's "nasty" period, before he became a Jehovah's Witness.. see Marcelo Aguirre's Bianchi roundup from a couple of months ago. But further enquiries by Marcelo, who's hard at work on an extended interview with MB for these pages (I'm told), prompted a response from Bianchi – curiously enough in Spanish – to the effect that the archive sound recordings from Nazi Germany (who's speaking? Rudolf Hess?) are nothing at all to do with him and have been grafted on to the music by someone else. Curiouser and curiouser. Marcelo also reminds me of a quotation from Nigel "Nocturnal Emissions" Ayers: "[Whitehouse's] William Bennett told me, in 81, the first and last time I met him, that Steve Stapleton drew up a 'joke' contract for him [Bianchi] giving Maurizio absolutely no rights to the recording in any way whatever ever, which Maurizio happily signed. Bennett added overdubs of Hitler speeches, Nazi martial music etc. from one of those tapes they used to sell at the lunatic right wing shops." Frans de Waard over at Vital Weekly speculates that this might also be Bianchi's Weltanschauung album (maybe someone could confirm this?) but Bianchi has neither confirmed nor denied that rumour. In any case, whoever did it and whenever it was done, it's pretty unpleasant stuff, even without the speeches and military music (which only feature on the first – and longest – track). I can understand that some folk might still get some kind of perverse kick out of Nazi imagery, even a quarter of a century down the line, but it's hard to imagine anyone saying they actually enjoy the rest of this miserable, sludgy mess. And that presumably includes Maurizio himself, now that he's found GOD – the Supreme Being, that is, not the group of the same name. DW

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Lionel Marchetti - "Knud Un Nom de Serpent"

The name of this disc and much of its liner notes are in French, but, on Knud Un Nom de Serpent, Marchetti’s compositional language is far more exotic than his native tongue. In a novel application of Marchetti’s usual musique concrete approach, Knud Un Nom de Serpent relies heavily on field recordings of ethnic music, creating a mystifying mélange that continually confounds listener expectations. Birthed, in part, from Marchetti’s fascination with shamans and medicine men, Knud Un Nom de Serpent aims high, with Marchetti shooting for a manner of transcendental effect through collage. The cliché of music as journey is, by now, limp from overuse, but if this disc takes the listener on a trip, it’s not one that some will want to take more than once.

Knud Un Nom de Serpent was originally released in 1999, and, 10 years later, it seems no easier to get a handle on. This reissue brings together gamelan, the female orgasm and the lonely sounds of crickets into an amalgam that dispels with any predictability, save for the 10-second silences that separate its tracks. The exploration of human expression dissolves the borders between countries and environments, a roughly cobbled-together Pangea of sound in which throat singing and chanson are next door neighbors, and previously disparate musical forms are thrust upon (and into) one another with vigor. It’s not simply the disc’s volatility that can make it so unsettling, though; within a seemingly random series of sounds, Marchetti creates an atmosphere that can be rather chilling. He avoids the obvious hallmarks of aural evil, but through the power of the unfamiliar, unidentifiable and unexpected, Marchetti puts the listener in an uncomfortable place.

There are many ways in which Knud Un Nom de Serpent is a difficult listen, and it’s not wholly unlikely that even dedicated fans of demanding music may find the disc somewhat impenetrable. Marchetti’s ideas comparing composers to medicine men are interesting, but this disc may be too jarring to elicit the effect he intended. Still, Knud Un Nom de Serpent will strike a chord with some as more than a curiosity: like nearly any challenging artwork, this disc will turn off far more than it seduces, but those who fall under its spell may find it to be quite entrancing.

By Adam Strohm (Dusted Magazine)

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Ornament - "Unicorn Lullaby"

Unicorn Lullaby" was self-released by Ornament in a few copies back in 2000 and is now published by Afe in a fully remastered and repackaged version that showcases the author's visionary attitude. Due to the poor distribution of the original version, this is probably Ornament's less know work, but it's probably his best attempt at Dark Ambient music contaminated with Industrial elements. If we look for some kind of internal reference wondering through the whole Afe catalogue, this can easily be found in Never Known's "Dawn of an Era", but "Unicorn Lullaby" has of course a personality of his own. According to his author, "Unicorn Lullaby" is an oniric / visionary concept in sounds, a travel to and back from an imaginary collapsing world where the "Unicorn Shaped Labyrinth" is the entrance / exit. "Noctifer" is the star shining above this imaginary world, while the gear-sounding "High Density of Grief" is a representation of the slave-citizens forced to work in a consuming production-chain and "From Concealed Gardens" tries to describe its mysterious flora and fauna. After entering the imaginary world, the protagonist wakes up ("I Opened My Eyes in the Liquid Room") and fight against his "Fiendish Ego" as the world begins to collapse ("Under Shivering Columns") as predicted by ancient priests who were charged with heresy ("The Heretics' Heritage"). This heritage is the only key that allows the protagonist to survive the ordeal and return to the place where he belongs as only a few traces of past life surround him ("Only Life Remains"). The distinctive overall sound of the album is subtly achieved with a rich shady substratum of distant sounds that are intentionally and elegantly kept in the background and are fully appreciable at a mid volume level.”

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Kommissar Hjuler & Mama Bar - "Asylum Lunaticum"

Intimate, absurd, feral and aggressive in its homemade weirdness, the music of Kommissar Hjuler & Mama Bar has been a well-kept secret for too long. Hjuler & Bar have self-published their dada-esque sound poetry experiments on small-edition lathe-cut LPs, tapes, and CDRs for years, usually adorning them with elaborate junk sculptures and profane paintings. Intransitive is proud to collect their best recordings so far onto a single, widely available CD so that anyone can hear the music without making a major financial investment.
The husband and wife duo uses deceptively simple means – typically just their voices, a cassette-tape recorder and a microphone – to create astonishing suburban dramas that are somehow both sweetly charming and staggeringly psychotic, sometimes simultaneously. Join Kommissar Hjuler & Mama Bar as they perform acts of banal heroics, like exploring the basement… taking their son for a bicycle ride… walking with a red shirt into a field of cattle… or pondering reforms made to the Danish police system.
Kommissar Hjuler & Mama Bar are painters, sculptors, film-makers, and musicians based in Flensberg, Germany, near the Danish border. Their artwork has been exhibited in galleries and at festivals around the world. They collaborated with like-minded artists such as Thurston Moore, Arnulf Meifert, John Wiese, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, Brume, and Af Ursin, among many others.

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