edition two: various artists - resonant embers

e/i Magazine AUDIO VERITÉ :
Resonant Embers compiles Paul Bradley and accomplices previously released through parent label, Twenty Hertz. Seven artists linked by a shared aesthetic (let’s call it "experimental") with differing takes: a harder outside of sound art and austere ambience with a soft centre of post-Romanticist melodic drones. First up, NWW collaborator, Matthew Waldron, re-cranks his irr. app. (ext.) vehicle for an discomfiting drive fuelled by a wierd mixture of dissonant effluvia. Inside “Whickering Mechanical Parapropalaehoplophorus” a slowly modulating sound hovers behind an up-close rattle and hum. Twisted moans and a buzz rendered with slapback echo (airplanes? Insect buzz?) infest the sound field. There ensues a woozy stagger attended by an ineffable feeling of fascinated discomfort.

There are more corroded metal shapes and post-Industrial wastelands on “Animate structures No.1”, over which environmental collagist jgrzinich scatters a windblown array of field recordings of high tension wires and rummagings from the blasted post-Soviet heath of his adoptive Estonia. His piece sounds less like electronic music than the inarticulate speech of nature’s dark heart.

More palatable musical soundscapery comes from Miguel Tolosa and project manager Bradley. Tolosa’s project Ubeboet offers in “Agone” an ecstasy of haunting ethereality, smartly smudged. Strings at a remove and sub-aqueous operatics whisper forth from within a carpet of delicate pads, a euphonic shimmer of drone guilded by a ghost violin. Tone-poetry in motion. The unjustly unsung Bradley seems lately to have gradually removed the acousmatic veils from his sounds to reveal their guitar-generated nature. He spools out an electraglide in blue of weaving guitar strata not far removed from Aidan Baker, current doyenne of drone-guitarscapism. “Kaleidoscope” is admittedly more synthetic, less gritty, but still imbued with textural detail cycling across the stereofield, further tones being twirled into a mix of pristine steel lightly blurred at the edges. In between, veteran Colin Potter in “Bella (direct current)” alchemises liquid drones from base metal (bells, actually), sounds swelling and relenting, hypnotically heaving. Bradley protegé, Maile Colbert, and mysterious accomplice Tellemake, spins her voice through a series of looping devices and VLF recordings, in a style somewhere twixt a less woozed-up Grouper and a more corporeal version of the vox-spectres from Akira Rabelais’ Spellewauerynsherde.

A mournful closure comes via doleful occasional black humorist, Andrew Liles, who plays it straight here; the breathy lilt of a violin steeped in Balkan noir emerges from some doom-laden low end-of-pianisms to unravel through ominous tolling. Liles’ “The Relentlessly Banal Landscape” strikes as a rather spare and sad affair, and fails to sound the right endnote for what proves to be a curate’s egg of a collection. Alan Lockett.

Aquarius Records :
Edition Sonoro is the parallel label to Twenty Hertz, both of which are run by the British drone artist Paul Bradley. Resonant Embers is collection of artists who have crossed paths with Mr. Bradley over the years and may be delivering work for Edition Sonoro in the future. There's irr. app. (ext.), jgrzinich, Ueboet, Colin Potter, Bradley himself, Maile Colbert with Tellemake, and Andrew Liles. AQ's beloved bewilderer of sound Matthew Waldron returns to his irr. app. (ext.) moniker with a disorienting chorus for vibrating objects, chiming strings, and distant moans phasing in a tripped out sonic equivalent to a funhouse mirror. Another favorite comes by the way of jgrzinich, who layers together windswept clatter from multiple recordings from high tension wires and the post-Soviet crumbled landscape of his current home in Estonia. A cold, sodden atmosphere oozes from these turnbuckle creaks and (literally) post-industrial ambience.

Ubeboet is a newcomer to us, offering a majestic track of dark ambience haunted with distant strings and underwater operatic vocals. Colin Potter propagates a liquid drone from a series of harmonic belltones, which have all of the sublime power and angelic beauty of a Ligetti chorale. Paul Bradley constructs a series of interwoven guitar loops of midrange timbers that reflect similar ideas found in Aidan Baker's solo work. Maile Colbert flickers her voice through a series of looping devices and VLF recordings, recalling the early albums of Grouper but with Jarboe's vocal style instead. And finally, the comp is completed with a track from Andrew Liles, whose deeply minor chord piano keys and lilting gypsy violin have a noirish, horror film quality, perhaps in homage to Coil's lost soundtrack to Hellraiser?

Furthernoise :
A retinue of respected sound artists sit in a seditious huddle on Resonant Embers. The symbols of alterity they throw up ensure a continuous movement, but it's one that will annoy if your searching for grand gestures and conciliatory attitudes. This disc is more a matter of plentiful rustling, a series of discontinuous clunks, warbles, and gurgling irreducible to an identity, meaning, or any sort of fixed difference as such. Works meander and are engagingly minor; fragments and instances rather than products.

"Whickering mechanical parapropalaeholophorus" has a boozy lurch with a spirit of unsustainable rapture, abjection, and trance. The piece is like looking through grit-blasted glass; inside one sees the penchant of irr. apt. (ext.) for polluted, post-Industrial textures, excessive but precise, as they demur before corrosive metallic incursions and swooping levels of dense distortion.

Over the course of the album, relationships shift on a frequent basis, points occur when there is concord in discord, before the behemoth shoots off into another phase. Certain tracks present a series of rising challenges: among them, Maile Colbert summons a vague fulguration, a bluish shot with rose, encapsulating expansive yearning and unresolved tension with the briefest of melodic strokes. Its chorus of singing electrons and multiplying resonant shimmers reach out to and suggest the arch of the sky like a majestic ceiling above them, while at the same time providing a fine foil for awakening ancestral voices. In this same manner, Andrew Liles coaxes together a surprisingly spare piece, as a breathy violin passage curls through ominous, tolling arpeggios and delicate metallic ricochets.

Taking the opposite approach, others such as Jgrzinich opt to push one back into a corner. These pieces gibber at the edges of the known, sometimes sounding electronic, at other points like garbled constructions of nature. Both moves prove successful - each accommodates and subverts subliminal inter-communication in equal measure, as these artists chase a mood that recedes into the distance just as they start to catch it. Max Schaefer

Tokafi.com :
Variations on "sound evolving in time": A day dream soundtracked by a ghost violin.

Edition Sonoro present a collection of artists in this rich compilation which showcases a variety of contemporary approaches to creating audio art. On several occasions I tried to describe this record in conversation with friends. The word 'spectral' came to mind. In her book "A Provisional History of Spectral Music" (2000) Julian Anderson wrote, "music is ultimately sound evolving in time". This record shows a handful of the many variations these evolutions can take.

The opening track by irr. App involves a mix of sounds that are placed at different distances in the mix. A slowly modulating sound hovers in the background whilst drier  sounds rattle and twinkle in the foreground. Above this a twisted voice moans in places, which gives way to a buzzing noise that fills the mix with its odd slapback-style decay. A haunting intro.

The next track by Jgrzinich uses loose, brittle metallic sounds in the high end with reverberating mids and lows to create an atmosphere which moves from tense and nightmarish to dreamy and relieved. Track three by Ubeboet starts with gentle pad-like tones. A pleasant shimmering drone builds, to this is added a delicate melody which comes and goes like a day dream soundtracked by a ghost violin.

Colin Potter's track is a minimal drone piece using glassy, bell-like tones. The sounds slowly rise and drop in volume creating a hypnotic, drifting body of sound. Paul Bradley's track follows a similar approach, but the tones used sound more synthetic, and the pace of development a little faster. The way in which the looped sounds move slowly in the stereo picture stops the piece from stagnating. The addition of electric guitar in the second half changes the colour. Clean notes and washes of controlled fuzz make the track complete.

The collaboration between Maile Colbert and Tellemake starts with a soft drone which gives way to some peculiar sounding synthesised female voices. These voices are filtered and cut and re-arranged creating a dreamy rhythmic texture which is supplemented by pure guitar-like tones.

The final track by Andrew Liles is a minor key affair. A doom-laden piano plays a simple, spooky melody which leads to some eastern influenced strings accompanied by some quiet vibes. There is a definite air of sadness to the melody, which becomes quite like a film soundtrack as it ends with a synth pad. Barry Cullen

edition one: jgrzinich - rudiment of two

Aquarius Records :
It's easy to get lost in the sounds from John Grizinich, as his slippery compositions for abstracted field recordings impart a stupifying hypnosis when listening to them. While we've had a couple of his solo discs, most of the work that we've encountered by John Grzinich has been through collaborations with the likes of Michael Northam and Seth Nehil. And even though both of those artists have a particular fondness for the drone, it seems as though Grzinich was responsible for directing those collaborations into the depths of sonorous hypnogogia. This was especially true for the impeccable Grzinich / Nehil album Gyre, and the same could be said for the Grzinich / Northam disc The Absurd Evidence. Yet, this sensibility becomes all the more obvious when Grizinich strikes out on his own, as is the case on his stellar 2007 album Rudiment Of Two.

Released by the British drone-artist Paul Bradley on his new Edition Sonoro imprint, Rudiment Of Two contains three lengthy tracks, which engage Grzinich's preferred strategy for vulcanizing field recordings into elegantly serpentine tonalities. Through revolving sets of fluctuating bellows and incrementally changing drones, Rudiment Of Two come across as a painterly take on BJ Nilsen or Jonathan Coleclough. Typical of Grzinich's sound is the trickle of rain on the album's massive 30 minute centerpiece, which activates a silvery auditory filigree amidst the reverberation and metallic vibrations. With the rattle of a heavy iron bell, the crackling textures begin to swarm into a full spectrum chorus of miniscule ticklings that eventually condenses into a bleary drone shot towards infinitude. A really fantastic album from an under-recognized artist.

Touching Extremes :
The materialization of new forms of aural beauty through means of expression that many artists have already exploited, often abusing of them - not a rare occurrence in this field - is what John Grzinich achieves in most everything he releases, "Rudiment of two" being another brilliant outing that celebrates the wedding between processed acoustic sources and massive effects on the receivers. Three tracks, whose length ranges from 11 to 30 minutes, show what Grzinich is capable of doing through a careful selection of frequencies extracted from sounds that he captured in Estonia, Italy, Portugal and Japan, nuances that he subsequently proceeded to edit in his studio. The longest piece "Bounds and magnitudes" is also the most emotionally charged, a steady growth of wavering resonances acting as a memory generator for the brain, which treats these images as backward photographs of our self-doubt while furnishing us with the necessary nervous strength to accept any consequence deriving from indecision. "Stimulus and resolve" is slightly more active-listening oriented, its fixed background flow interspersed with metallic intrusions, gamelan-like patterns and sudden dynamic changes. "Pebble and star" raises clouds of upper partial-derived timbral ambiguities and fuses them in a slow underground pulse, linking the American's sound with unfathomable realities that still border with the "industrial" in terms of sonority. Yet, just like willing to add a dose of security to the overall feel, Grzinich makes use of water sounds throughout; one of the purest elements (despite the modifications) is perceived amidst complex interchanges between the being and the space surrounding it, put in vibration through mechanisms that one can only guess but never really grasp. Here lies this music's most intriguing aspect, which also highlights its composer's talent.

Tokafi.com :
John Grzinich wants you to listen. That may not seem like big news – don’t all artists, after all? There is a subtle difference between Grzinich’s request and the feverish urge to grab some attention, however. “The observing mind hears the rudiment of two”, he oracles on the back cover, before diving into an even more enigmatic booklet text, which talks about the composer living outside of the “mnemonic myth”, “shifting strata of sound” and a “temporal play between essence and fruition”. But just like these words need to be read with the heart instead of the intellect, his music can not be understood by merely opening your ears.

Location is an important element to this album, as it has always been to Grzinich’s music: Again, the source material was captured at different spots in Estonia (his current base), Lisbon, Tokyo, as well as in Topolo, near the Italo-Slovenian border and the Portuguese town of Nodar. Especially the quietude of his rural Estonian home has provided him with the chance of capturing “unpoluted” sounds and of reworking them in the absence of disturbing urban influences. All of this matters, because these field recordings are not just a sidenote to his work, but the very body and essence of it. His pieces are made up of myriads of sound sources, pristine and pure in their original form, which are placed next to each other in fluctuating constellations in a musical game of going to Jerusalem. More than most of his colleagues, Grzinich does not polish his recordings to the point of clean abstraction, but deliberately uses their inbuilt associational oscillations: Each sound creates an image, stirrs a memory, triggers a reflex, releases energy in some way or the other and thereby stimulates the entire perceptive system. Listening is no longer just something one does with one’s ears (if it ever was), but a process associated with manifold organs and brain regions.

“Rudiment of two” is a direct reference to this train of thought (the numeral component relating to the beforementioned bipolarity) and a practical stab at making the idea as transparent as possible. Grzinich creates contexts, rather than compositions, he builds spaces for his sounds to unfold in, leaving the interpretation to his audience. There is an unsettling sense of duality in everything, especially in the gargantuan “bounds and magnitudes”, the thirty minute long state occupying the centre of the album, its entire middle section igniting sweet waves of synaptic impulses with pictures of nocturnal railway turnpikes, frame drums playing themselves and metallic objects being shaken inside aluminum cannisters. In that sense, it is no flattery when Grzinich states that even though his music is undoubtedly a non-linguistic form of comunication, the exact subject of this communication still remains unknown to him.

There are two good things about this approach. Firstly, the advent of home studio technology in the visual sector has made it easy to create your own videoclips and it has offered artists a chance to add, in a second medium, what they were unable to achieve in purely musical terms. John Grzinich’s efforts, meanwhile, emphasize that despite obvious cross-pollination advantages, sound art should be able to make sense on its own. And secondly, if you do away with all of the theory and instead merely listen, immersing yourself fully in the music, you are doing the right thing. (Tobias Fischer)

Wire :
Currently living in Estonia, the American sound artist John Grzinich, aka Jgrzinich, conducts extraordinary alchemical investigations, rendering acoustic sounds as mercurial abstractions. While he operates in the longform theatre of drone, each of his recordings - in particular his most recent offer Rudiment of two - expresses subtle yet rich complexities, penetrating the limitations of the form. He begins with field recordings - rain, water, and wind seem the likely culprits - and the sounds of objects being agitated (a photograph of ornately bulbous glass vases points to such an item). Out of these, Grzinich extracts slippery frequencies, which undulate into graceful sweeps before plunging into numbingly cold passages of nocturnal ambience. Punctuated by use of the original sound sources, often in repeating cycles at lengthy intervals, the elongated timbres engage in a slow-motion tumble. The results are anything but static, a spellbinding dislocation of time and space not unlike that of Richard Chartier or Jonathan Coleclough. (Outer Limits reviewed by Jim Haynes)

ei-mag.com :
In the year of the mournful spirit, that stage during which the hearts of men are deceived, and the ritual house sweeping is enacted as a remedy, time solidifies and assumes the form once occupied by the actual object. The compositions on Rudiment Of Two breathe in this solidified substance of time, that is, the memories, manner, and moods encrusted onto various everyday objects, becoming hypnotized and binding its enjoyment to certain patterns and symbolic formations. In rearranging the electroacoustic vapors and squeaky balloon tones into a narrative, a temporal succession that searches for and simultaneously shields itself from any recognition of primal origins, John Grzinich gentrifies them, but doesn’t yield absolute control, and merely creates a minimum positive consistency through which a slow rotation of events is able to radiate with aplomb. Post-production techniques enable sound sources to shine rather than overwhelm, and interact, however chaotically, rather than embrace one another in a promiscuous confusion. “Pebble And Star” is impeccably guided, its quasi-industrial prismatic refractions and subharmonic pulses are embedded in a variety of contexts, in different relations to the elements which make up the ever-shifting network, each affording the other a specific yet, owing to accumulation, well-rounded identity. The textures of “Stimulus And Resolve,” spun from field recordings gathered in Estonia, Topolo, Lisbon, and Nodar, are complemented with a restless foreground of spindly warbling and scattershot frequencies, erecting, in the process, a tenuous, colossal architecture. At 30 minutes, “Bounds And Magnitudes” begins with luminous single tones that swell on the horizon like pregnant suns. The long oscillating currents are sent deeper and deeper into the bowels of the room, turning the naturally occurring acoustic phenomena into accompanists. The objects soon take on their own aesthetic, branching out on their own while also keeping up with rather than entirely giving into the complex feedback from Grzinich. What ensues is a sustained clammer of perturbed rapture that Grzinich balances right on the edge of instability. In opening these works up as such, he tests the flexibility and usability of his own language, and it holds up rather well in most places. (MS)