Shards on the turntable: Undecisive God's RPMs 3-4

I think I was about eight years old when the first turntable appeared in my family household. It was at least a couple of years later that I was allowed to operate it myself and then a couple more years after that that I began to discover, left unsupervised and alone in the house, the amazing things you could do with a turntable. You could play records forwards or backwards, and at different speeds; you could stick bits of paper into the grooves and get different sounds. You could even have two bits of paper in two grooves and get two sounds at the one time.

But it wasn’t until another 40 years after that, when I saw my first Clinton Green turntable installation at Melbourne’s Overground Festival in 2011, that I saw what could really be done with half a dozen turntables: the rhythms you could create out of broken or warped records; the spooked hypnotism of tracks looping endlessly; the music of bumps and scratches; and the strange, almost ghostly, chorus of it all coming together.

So it is not particularly surprising that I approached the turntable-driven latest release of Clinton Green’s solo experimental music project, Undecisive God, with a fair bit of anticipation. RPMs 3-4 actually represents the third and fourth instalments in a series of turntable-based releases – but the early bits are on cassette and so I am stuck with Parts 3 and 4 on their own. A most disconcerting thing for an obsessive completist such as myself, as you can imagine.

But there is nothing undecisive about what Clinton Green does on this album. Here bits of broken music are grabbed and hammered back together in a way that brings a strange but remarkable new unity to them. The turntable settings are gradually sped up or slowed down, and what would otherwise have been the ugly noise of needles, and at one point even a nail, scraping across sharded and scratched vinyl, becomes here a mesmerizing rhythm, amongst which snippets of disembodied voices and instruments play themselves over and over, coming together in a mountain of sound that grows and tumbles, grows and tumbles, but never falls apart. It’s as if the innards of damage have become the glue that holds everything together.

Parts 3 and 4 of the RPMs series are the bread of this album’s sandwich, and its filling is made up of two fascinating explorations of noise, first in ‘Turntables Are Wrong’, where some turntable improvisations were mistakenly recorded at the wrong volume and ended up producing some distorted noise that, despite the mistake, sound fantastic, and then in ‘Summer Holiday 2010-11’, which is a bit of fresh air of summer noise in Melbourne, before the full and epic onslaught of the 43 minute ‘RPMs 4’.

The deconstruction and reconstruction of music and noise is not an easy thing to pull off without it becoming – pardon the pun – little more than a very self-indulgent wank. But in the right hands it not only makes you rethink how the bricks and mortar of music  are put together, it not only makes you see things, everyday things, differently because of the way they are placed and organised in non-everyday ways, but, in the right hands, it actually also sounds good. In the right hands, it builds its own tensions, its own harmonies and counterpoints, its own sense and structure, its own music.

And, in Undecisive God’s Clinton Green, it is very, very much in the right hands.

RPMs 3-4 is available from Shame File Music.

When things no longer go bump in the dark - Tangerine Nightmare's 'Synthicide'

Often it’s not the things you see in nightmares that scare you the most, but rather the things you don’t see. The things that lurk in the shadows; the things that are shapeless, faceless, unconvincingly quiet.

Germany’s electronic, ambient krautrock band, Tangerine Dream, produces in you the sort of psyched out, psychedelic experiences that you just know, after a few years, are going to catch up on you.  And in the one-night only, one-album only, avant-trio of Melbourne based Clinton Green, Andrew McIntosh and Lloyd Barrett, Tangerine Nightmare, all those trippy chemicals finally meet their destiny.

The album is called Synthicide, and it brings you, veiled in its ambient laptop noise, the sounds of things, scary things, that are too crafty, too clever, to go bump in the night. Instead, they slither and rumble along, behind you, around you, just enough to let you know they’re there, but not enough to let you know how to find them or hold them.

The result is unnerving. Your blood drops a few degrees when you hear this music, but you know you can’t escape it because it’s not really slithering and rumbling around you at all – it’s all happening within you: bits of your brain and your life at last seeing the dark side of the things that you had once painted in the colours of fluorescent rainbows.

The five tracks of Synthicide flow into each other with that same kind of coherence you get when you half wake from one nightmare and fall back into another. Things are different, but you know it’s the same dream, exerting the same hold on you.

It’s easy to describe music as ‘dark’ these days, and it is often the word you use when you don’t know what else to say about something that’s vaguely disturbing or sinister. But Synthicide is dark in its much more literal sense: the absence of light, the place where things creep around and wait to pounce. It’s the sort of dark where everything is in camouflage, where demons wear soft-soled shoes, and talk in whispers.

Albums like Synthicide are especially exciting for people who, as I do, live close enough to Melbourne to be able to call Tangerine Nightmare a local musical project - even if it was just a one-off. But it's still a great reminder of what a thriving, vibrant underground music scene we have here. Things like this are popping up all over the place - or, to be more correct, all under the place - if you just know where to look.

Discovered, for me, on 3PBS 106.7 FM's Ear of the Behearer, Synthicide is available from Shame File Music.

The Do-Re-Mi of noise: Merzbow's 'OM Electrique'.

As Fräulein Maria may have said to the von Trapp family kids, had she wanted to introduce them to Merzbow instead of to music more generally, “Let’s start at the very beginning – a very good place to start: when you read you begin with ABC, when you listen to Merzbow you begin with OM Electrique”.

Not that OM Electrique is by any means the best or even the easiest piece of Merzbow to listen to, but it is the first thing Merzbow recorded, back in 1979, and you can always learn a lot from the beginnings of anything.

OM Electrique is Merzbow stripped bare: an austere, minimalist piece of music that nevertheless tells us a lot about his art and his greatness. It consists mostly of a long droning electronic bass note: vaguely, disturbingly, pulsating. After a while it is joined with short, urgent, but feeble spurts of electrical, metallic sound. These tap and beat away throughout – at first sporadically, and then more insistently, always seeking to find a rhythm and a life but never quite mustering enough energy of their own to rise above the dead, dry drone. At best, they are dragged along by it but, really, the rhythm is never entirely settled – beats are missed here and there, and its pace never stays in the one place. And it seems somehow smothered by the relentless drive of the drone.

About a third of the way into Part One, the bass drone is suddenly interrupted by a high, piercing siren, as if the music is trying to awaken you from itself. It shrieks at you, not enough to deafen you, but enough to make you uncomfortable. It seems to be trying to ward off the menace of the drone, or at least to warn you to steer clear of it – but its attempt is half-hearted, as if it has done this a million times before and always, as now, after only a few minutes, the drone returns, reasserts itself as master, and the metallic beat that takes you nowhere strikes up again.

The sounds build in momentum and yet, at the same time, remain static. It’s an incredibly disorienting feeling that is somehow brilliantly intensified when Part One fades out only to give way to the fuller onslaught of the same sounds, the same drone, the same dead dance of electronic beats, in Part Two.

The whole thing is a marvellous study in minimalist noise. There is no more than a handful of sounds in the almost 40 minutes of OM Electrique. But listen to the way Merzbow mixes and blends those sounds, changes their rhythms and their pulse, gets them to converse with one another, build on one another and then collapse again. The incessant drone that threads through everything, even when it’s not there: it’s all a magnificent demonstration of what noise can do, of what noise can be.

Merzbow gives the noise a kind of austere, severe life – a life with the blood drained out of it, an electric, robotic life the seems to be going everywhere and nowhere at once. It is like a meditation that has been feeding you disturbed subliminal messages throughout. It leaves you feeling strangely unsettled when it’s over, as if you have spent those 40 minutes hovering, teetering on the edge of stillness and motion.

Accepting the harsh austerity of OM Electrique is central to appreciating it as music. And, ultimately, this is central to understanding noise as music more generally too. Western music has trained us to listen for quick grabs of themes – melodies, and phrases of melodies, that can be captured and held and sung. But noise is much more about being immersed in the sound itself – like learning to admire a colour because of its colour, not because of the things it colours.

OM Electrique, if it was a piece of pictorial art, would be a mostly barren canvas of blacks and greys, with little speckles of cold, smudged silver throughout and, here and there, cracks of savage white. And, when you look at it, you would see a richness, an unsettling richness, in its stark, monochrome world. And blacks and greys and silvers and whites would never be quite the same again.

OM Electrique shows Merzbow’s genius in taking a word and turning it into a paragraph; his genius in shaping and moulding and crafting noise from its rawest elements into a picture: not one that tells you a story, but rather one that captures you, grabs you, in its own infinitely brief, infinitely long, moment.

The shattering star of the night - Magdalena Solis and 'Hesperia'.

The final part of the trilogy of my great musical discoveries from the last couple of weeks, which began with The Gruntled and then was followed by the Paul Kidney Experience, doesn't come at all from my local musical underground, but from Belgium, in the form of an amazing and daring musical project called Magdalena Solis, who last year shared a Belgian jam with some members of The Gruntled and so, one thing led to another, and now their music, too, is being celebrated on this blog. This, too, is music built through the sheer energy force of musicians who connect and improvise and create, music made from the dregs and dross of organic chaos.

On their new album, Hesperia, Magdalena Solis create a wonderful world of pagan grandeur through music that feels rooted in the spirituality of everyone and no one. Its droning, often pentatonic, tonality at times sounds like an echo from the Far East, like in the album's opening 'Wake up and start to dream'. Hesperia's sounds come to you on a thick, unrelenting, unforgiving wave of electronic sound - the sounds of dense guitars, a spectral harpsichord, an apocalyptic organ, electricity stirring and groaning underneath the Earth - the notes sliding and dancing around each other in a hypnotic heathen ritual. It is mysterious, seductive - something to be feared in the way gods expect to be feared.

The music of Hesperia has an incredible sense of place - places that are darkly spiritual, places where Magdalena Solis plunge into black, gloomy chasms and then build monoliths of music, casting huge grim shadows on you and in you, as if you are standing alone and alarmed at the end of the world.

This is music that towers over you. It leaves you feeling small and frightened and, by 'Lunar Sunrise', at the album's haunted end, where a chilling, child-like tune is hammered out on percussion borrowed from another world, like an alien nursery-rhyme, you find yourself left hanging and helpless in a space that is huge and empty and where the only light is cold and grey, a dying sun reflected by a dying moon.

Hesperia is released on the Dying for Bad Music label and you can check out the album on the label's website, or have a sneak preview of the album's penultimate Prophetic Dreams. This is not music to calm or reassure you - but rather to remind you who you really are.

The spectral disgruntled night of the Paul Kidney Experience

After discovering the sensationally original sounds of The Gruntled just a couple of weeks ago, it only took a hop, step and a jump from there to find myself immersed in the vastly different, but somehow strangely kindred, sound world of the Paul Kidney Experience. PKE's centrepiece is, of course Paul Kidney, The Gruntled's sometime vocalist. Both projects share the guitar of Richard Walsh and both use the incredible improvisation skills of all their members to build their own unique universes of sound, were music and noise mingle, where colours clash and blend, where light and dark caress each other and then beat each other to death.

But the music of PKE is very much its own thing, light years away from The Gruntled, despite their shared ingenuity, despite the bonds that tie them across the universes. In PKE, we find ourselves dragged into a freaky, creepy world, a world where you are scared not just by the things that go bump in the night, but also by the things that don't. It is music that can be very quiet or very loud. But it is never music that goes unnoticed, nor fails to let you know that somewhere, somehow, sometime, it is walking on your grave.

The music is built out of distorted guitars, the freaked-out violin of Nell Day, the insane, guttural, grunting vocals of Paul Kidney, a screeching sax, the unsettlingly soft tinkling of a piano, out of sounds and noise: music that swells and recedes, never really relaxing, just moving its threats and menace around you, sometimes staring you in the face, sometimes lurking around a corner, breathing just loud enough for you to know it's still there.

Its quiet, haunted noises might build and surge, until they become a crazed, manic death march, stomping onwards and downwards in the night into an orgy of ghouls, as they do in 'Dustberries', from the 2010 album Radio Transmissions. Or there might be the irritated, unsettled slumber with which 'Tardigrades', from the same album, opens, as if it was the post-coital slumber following the Dustberry decadence. But it, too, builds into its own frenzy, almost like an Arabian bacchanal with its drones and middle eastern tonality, yet still spooked by the growls and grumbles of an alien night.

It is the daring use of sound in this music - pushing instruments and voice beyond their normal limits, distorting them beyond their normal comfort zones - that helps create its freakish other-worldness. But it is its improvised, unbridled soul, dark, chaotic, and yet somehow controlled too - the way it grows out of itself rather than out of a page or a program - that's what makes this music so authentic, so believable.

And that's what makes you not want to be left alone with it, late at night, when the lights are out.

Necks and Swans float into the murk and mud of Melbourne

Mahler's Eighth Symphony demonstrated, arguably more than anything else in the history of music, that white comes in many shades. It's a massive, prolonged explosion of blinding light and yet, even when you're blinded by it, you can't help but notice its shifting hues, the ways that shadows, as much as dazzle, go to make up the glare. It's a work that can at first seem pretty overwhelming, too bombastic, just too much noise. But when you get to know it, when you delve into its density, you can see that its blaze is really a million billion different specks of white.

And what Mahler did a hundred years ago in Austria for white, the Sydney based Necks and the New York based Swans did last night in Melbourne for black.

The Necks are a drums, bass and piano trio - but the drums are decked with bells and bits of metal, and the bass is a cello/double bass hybrid, and the piano is hit by fists as well as fingers, and nothing these musicians do conforms to music's usual rules and genres. Their music is always organic - improvised from the tiniest thimble-full of notes and ideas, and growing, always growing, into things bigger than any sum or product of their parts.

But if you can imagine a dark lake where ash and smoke mingle, and where bits of molten rock, black and red, bubble and gurgle, where imperceptible simmers of quitely brushed drums and tinkling piano notes have the savage beat of a disgruntled bass plodding beneath them; if you can imagine stasis and motion fused together so that stillness moves to chaos without you noticing that either of them started or finished; if you can imagine music tremoring beneath you, weaving around you, seducing you and smothering you with its single 40 minute arc of darkness, at first hypnotically fine and sensual and then, before you realise what has happened, impenetrably dense: if you can imagine all of that, then you might have a sense of what The Necks created when they opened proceedings at Melbourne's Forum Theatre last night.

But if you can then imagine that hermetic rock, and you, being pounded to dust by a black fist of unspeakably horrible beauty, of unrelenting manic force, pounding and pounding with titanic moodiness, as if every god and demon of history is collectively pissed off: if you can imagine that, then you might also have a sense of what Swans did when it was their turn on The Forum Theatre stage.

Michael Gira - the creator and centrepiece of Swans - once noted that swans are majestic and beautiful creatures, but with very ugly temperaments; and when you listen to his band, with its droning, pounding, guitars; its pummelling drums, knocking at you from inside the doors of hell; with the mad smorgasbord of unimaginable instruments that Thor Harris plays and the worn drone of Gira's voice, then you see those fierce, splendid birds writ large.

It was a night of loud, very loud music - a night where everything was in a minor key, where chords and discords hammered and hammered into you, and smashed the concrete of your brain. But this was music that grows out of the bowels of humanity - music that has its roots in murk and mud. So, despite its dark grace, it can never pretend to tread lightly.

But that is not to say that this music is monochromatic. Like Mahler's white, Swans' black has many shades. But they're all dark and so, even when Thor swings his hammer into his tubular bells, the shaft of light that streams into the music hits you like an axe. It never comforts you. It never brings you relief.

It was a wonderful thing - as wonderful as it was unexpected - that Michael Gira reformed Swans after some 13 years without them. And to be able to see this phenomenal band on stage, to almost be able to feel the old, regurgitated, black acid of Michael Gira's spit land upon my skin when he sang, was something that I never imagined I would come to experience.

But maybe in a world where we want to be able to so quickly and easily decide who is right and wrong, who is good and bad, it is timely for us to be reminded that ugliness and beauty are never black and white.

The old new feeling of being undisgruntled

It has been the lack of time, rather than the lack of great music, that has kept me away from this blog so much over the past weeks - but sometimes, even when there's no time, music appears that is so interesting and compelling, so original and creative, that you just have to make the time to write about it.

It's probably not an altogether good thing that we live in times when we are generally much more familiar with the notion of being disgruntled than being gruntled but, believe it or not, "gruntled" really is a word, and when you listen to the music of Melbourne-based quintet-plus-occasional-extras, The Gruntled, you wonder why so little is known of this very peculiar concept of being satisfied, content and pleased.

I first heard The Gruntled a few weeks ago on an amazing radio program of new music called The Ear of the Behearer, on Melbourne's perennially sensation community radio station, 3PBS FM, and it was one of those "wow, what is that?" moments, where you begin to at first feel a little intrigued, a little curious about the empty, droning, minimalist sounds you are hearing, drawn into them, even before they have taken you anywhere, just like the Earth must have felt when it was little more than inert rock and gas.

But then it builds, imperceptibly steady, beats and sounds from worlds past and worlds yet to come, bagpipes, a shawm, a hurdy gurdy, mingling with guitar and drums, rising from nothing into everything. That's when you sense the real magnitude of this music.

The Gruntled's music builds in massive swells of sound - improvised and yet remarkably formed and structured in a way that only happens when musicians are intimately connected with one another, taking their cues, it seems, as much from each other's souls as from each other's instruments. Its unique combination of new and traditional instruments; its weaving together of age-old drones and futuristic noise; its iron-clad grip, with one hand on the innermost soul of your innermost gut, the other on some remote, godforsaken nothingness; makes this music something that seems to span all the conventional notions of time and space.

The Gruntled's music is still very much on the fringes. The only way I could get my hand on more was by contacting the band directly and buying some of their absurdly cheap CDRs. Perhaps it's inevitable that music like this stays on the fringes because, after all, that's exactly the territory it explores so deeply, so thoroughly. But if being on the fringes means that it's not heard, then that can never be a good thing - because somehow, as you will see when you listen to the music of The Gruntled, the fringes is really where ultimately we all belong.

And ultimately that's a good thing; a satisfying, contenting, pleasing thing. A gruntled thing.