Stuart Chalmers and Taming Power​ – Collaborations I​-​IV

Blue Tapes

Stuart Chalmers has created a lot of interesting soundscapes with minimal means. Live he’s a walkman wizard, dealing out an aesthetically beautiful seance of strange and slippery shapes, tangling up dialogue with wah-scarred short-wave. An alchemic appetite that’s hooked into numerous experimental collaborations, the best of which blurs the divide between its protagonists, swimming symbiotically as one.

The latest tape with Norway’s Askild Haugland (AKA Taming Power) does just that as a slow thaw of soft curling drones and wavering tones hit you first. A looped mali-esque of out-growing repeats and laying meditatives, real mellow action with zithered frets tinselling the lulling conversation.

The vocabulary shifts to effect-saturated capstan candy for the release’s filling. Two tracks full of valvic whorls and squelchy modular purrs, the pulsing repeats encoded with morse-coded slurry. A live wire of incisive tapers, singing sweet industry and corrupting retraction as alarm free radicals dual with atomising short-wave hissologics and a ping-pong of crumbled appetites.

Waspy Indian zither and backward guitar give a Highlands flavour to the eleven-minute outro. A spidering of kinetic honey that hooks into some lovely fluttering purcussives. Sounds like somebody’s playing building site fencing as its reverbing metallics slip a radiating sustain. A tactile that velcro(s) your imagination, weaves a vocal chorus through the steam of a whistling kettle.

Another fine collaboration from the ever-fertile underground.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-