CD – Thrill Jockey

The piece begins with a tribute to the artist and activist Gustav Metzger – one of the founding fathers of kinetic painting and a theorist auto destructive art. In the composition, the confluence of voices and loops is immediately fascinating, a long tale about the evils of the war, without points of reference, a dreamy journey, with a series of found sound and other sonic artefacts peep out, some folk from the Eastern Europe, “stolen” and meticulously modified into new and alluring configurations. In the following “Stolen Androgens” the samples of a male and a female voice predominantly determine the structure of the piece, which is very hypnotic, repetitive and bewitching, almost like a sweet lullaby. In “Oocyte Oil” we can distinguish field recordings that seem like liquids poured from above onto a horizontal surface; these are associated with melodic chords and the sounds of a guttural voice, as well as various small insertions and treatments, puffs and interludes of various instruments, technique that are the hallmark of Marc Richter, known to most as Black To Comm, an artist who literally gives life to his productions by combining multiple small sound events. “Gepackte Zeit (für Hanne Darboven)” is the most choral composition of the album, a chamber score peppered with drones and recordings, a slightly disturbing track but in its own way elegiac and very stylized. It closes with “Rataplan, Rataplan, Rataplan (Arms and Legs Flying in the Air)” which is more jovial and where again a female voice is highlighted, this time set between the fragments of an oblique and synthetic free form jazz. In short, the mixture of ambient, chamber music, folk, post-rock and repetitive music is hard to distinguish and the references often cross each other in a chaotic way. The effect is artfully wrought and the mixture of elements involved is precise and controlled.

 

Black To Comm – Oocyte Oil & Stolen Androgens