Along comes the latest release from PPFN, the label run by Joachim Gaertner of German psyche/kraut powerhouse group S/T, and it’s another that explores the territory somewhere on the borders of electronica and a peculiar concept of pop music. As with most of PPFNs releases, the album is a heavyweight vinyl LP with equally characteristic high-quality hand-made covers.
In this case its a split release in a limited pressing of 100 copies. On one side is “Amiga Mandala” by Cologne group Temple of the Beeheads. Not having heard them before I can’t say where this track sits in terms of their other work. Enough to say that it slowly builds up into a wall of keyboard/synthesiser phrases in the loping, ponderous major key style of, perhaps, early post-Syd Pink Floyd, circa Ummagumma. The recording/compositional approach reminds me of Mike Oldfield‘s plodding constructivism. There’s nothing wrong with this if you are prepared to forgive the group taking the easy road implied by the technology they are using but I’d have like to see more sand poured into the cogs of the machine.
The other side of the vinyl reveals a very different proposition. Parking Non Stop as a project is driven by Alan Holmes, of sterling (as in “why hasn’t everyone heard of them?”) Welsh noise-psyche group Ectogram, along with poet Zoë Skoulding and Dewi Evans. Their debut album Species Corridor was released on the Klangbad label in August 2008 and introduced listeners to their singular approach to location recordings. Rather than the usual focus on psychoacoustics and ambience PNS managed the rare feat of organising location recordings (with only the slight help of more traditional instrumentation) to suggest an emerging mutant form of pop music, full of the sort of kaleidoscopic detail that results from careful use of location sources but harnessed to an extremely melodic and lyrical sensibility. On the Klangbad album this sensibility is served up in well defined song-writerly chunks but here we are treated to an epic variation on the method, in which it is stretched and distended into something more immersive and, I think, even more convincing than on that excellent original release.
“Cold Star” employs recordings made in the RAF bomb depot, Llanberis, Wales, and in Dul Mayrau coal mine, Vinaøice, the Czech Republic, and features a guest appearance by the Slovenian poet Gregor Podlogar recorded in Ljubljana in 2008. Logically, the piece is another PNS essay in psychogeography and a heavily cathected sense of place. The track opens with lullaby vocals singing a descending refrain that can’t help but evoke the sometimes kindergarten music-box electronica of Nurse With Wound. At this point we’re still in the realms of song and the electronics mostly serve to bolster this sense, but already there are flickering, gargling patterns of sound that rise up from the mix. Slowly this extraneous material starts to take over and we are shifted, first, onto the border that separates the inner song from the gauzy noise that wraps it then, at around the half-way mark, we’re finally ejected out into a realm of pure electro-acoustics, all breathy electronics and laser-like insertions. From there on in everything becomes suitably tentative, and the definite sense of place that we started out from dissolves, suggesting something finally unshackled.
-Andy Wilson-
