Zbigniew Karkowski One & Many
I picked up this record because someone said it sounded like Tim Hecker's last work, Mirages, upon which I have heaped effusive praise since the moment it first landed in my gungy hands. One & Many is only like Mirages in that they both come on compact disc.
O&M is a searing burst of staticky noise with some occasional fits of low-frequency sine wave modulation. It sounds roughly like my first experiment in additive synthesis using Max/MSP, except recorded in a big living room on cheap microphones. It's a single 40-minute track, which moves from soft to loud to soft to mostly loud without achieving a real sense of movement. It's elementary and silly; mostly, I think of the Tim Olive & Fritz Welch record Sun Reverse the Footpedal that I had for a while last year, which consisted primarily of someone in what sounded like a barn, banging on sheet metal and pipes with hammers; however they had the decency to break up the record into 10 or so unnamed (and undifferentiatable) tracks. I understand that avant-garde music is supposed to be a challenging listen, but in what context is this kind of thing supposed to be engaging? Am I supposed to not be engaged and instead fight the impulse to turn it off for 40 minutes? Wolf Eyes pummels the hell out of the listener and engages in sheer noise brutality, but it's still capable of being addressed in musical language.
Congratulations on challenging my sense of what music can be. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back and put on Señor Coconut.
O&M is a searing burst of staticky noise with some occasional fits of low-frequency sine wave modulation. It sounds roughly like my first experiment in additive synthesis using Max/MSP, except recorded in a big living room on cheap microphones. It's a single 40-minute track, which moves from soft to loud to soft to mostly loud without achieving a real sense of movement. It's elementary and silly; mostly, I think of the Tim Olive & Fritz Welch record Sun Reverse the Footpedal that I had for a while last year, which consisted primarily of someone in what sounded like a barn, banging on sheet metal and pipes with hammers; however they had the decency to break up the record into 10 or so unnamed (and undifferentiatable) tracks. I understand that avant-garde music is supposed to be a challenging listen, but in what context is this kind of thing supposed to be engaging? Am I supposed to not be engaged and instead fight the impulse to turn it off for 40 minutes? Wolf Eyes pummels the hell out of the listener and engages in sheer noise brutality, but it's still capable of being addressed in musical language.
Congratulations on challenging my sense of what music can be. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back and put on Señor Coconut.
posted by P at 6:50 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home