Software Recorded over the space of ten years up until the early part of the current century, The Baltika Years gathers together a selection of recordings that Ben Zimmerman made almost entirely from samples he manipulated using software running on the now long-defunct Tandy DeskMate computer operating system. Working around and within the limitations of the music software available on DeskMate (such as 22 kHz 8-bit audio), Zimmerman recorded […]
Richard Fontenoy
102 posts
London 21 May 2015 – The Conscious Pause – It is daunting to write about a show that was attended by so many Freq contributors because I know they’ll all read this and I am sure they will all have things to add (or deny). But what does that matter? It is daunting to write about a Swans show, because – Swans – This was my second time […]
Dancing Wayang The third album turmbling forth from the fertile pairing of Alan Courtis (Reynols and more) and Aaron Moore (of Volcano The Bear, Dragon Or Emperor, Invisible Sports, Textile Trio, etc) follows on from the phonographic slurs of last year’s KPPB with four new tracks which find the duo pushing further at the avant-garde fringes of ludic surrealist interplay. For Bring Us Some Honest Food, while the […]
Église Saint-Merri, Paris 9 April 2015 Paris’s historic Église Saint-Merri is the scene for the more sedate concerts in Sonic Protest‘s busy festival schedule of gigs which take place across the city and its environs over a very long weekend. The music which unfolds beneath the multi-coloured illuminations that scatter across the ranks of cherubim, illuminate the stained-glass windows and fall upon the various sculptures and multimedia installations […]
Öm For their third album, K-X-P have upped their psychedelic game as well as expanded their kosmische disco credentials (with a hint of prog) by not only naming the LP III, but Part I thereof, with who knows how many more instalments yet to come. If those aren’t real Mellotron sounds which introduce the thumping tribal drums of “Psychic Hibernation”’s overture, then the synths that sweep majestically into […]
Fixture Remember when any miffed wannabe-Luddite music fan could be relied upon to heap opprobrium upon electronic music with the assertion that “it’s just push-button music”; “the synths are playing the songs” or dismissive words to that effect? That’s essentially what Bob Lee attempted to do, more or less, a quarter of a century ago with his cybernetic alter-ego -bøb-. Recovered from the only remaining recording Lee had […]
Hiatus The first in the Sound X Sound series of 7″ singles which will each explore just one instrument, Music for 8 Recorders finds Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard‘s compositions tackling the alto and soprano varieties on each side of the record. On the evidence of the first disc, the rest of the Sound X Sound series should be well worth following, not least to discover how much Løkkegaard can […]
Dekorder Two companion LPs from Janek Schaefer find this most mercurial of composers expanding upon some of his more exploratory audio ideas across four sides of vinyl (or nine tracks in digital form). “White Lights of Divine Darkness” is a suitably spiritual opener to Unfolding Luxury Beyond the City of Dreams, a piece recorded for Sir John Tavener on the day he died, and the mood of reflective […]
Important Recorded live with no rehearsal, as is Damo Suzuki‘s way — he makes a habit of not meeting or playing with the group who will act as his ‘sound carriers’ before the night of the gig — Start From Zero does just that. Mugstar demonstrate their proficiency as space rockers extraordinaire in from the get-go. While there’s a certain inevitable lurch into the sort of free-form jam […]
Northern Spy Having returned to a simpler production sound for their fourth album, o’death opted to record Out Of Hands We Go’s twelve songs live in the studio with Caleb Mulkerin at the controls. With Greg Jamie’s vocals burning brightly at the band’s heart, o’death bring rock and country instrumentation into close collaboration, mixing in many particular devices of their own devising or finding which they have acquired […]
Gagarin Recorded live in New York in November 2009, 1:17 is one of those glorious conceptual pieces in which the premise – in this case, the use and re-use of a 0.7 millisecond snippet of sound originating from a Diskono collective concert in 2000, itself transformed gradually over the years into a one minute seventeen second blast of noise – is almost entirely irrelevant to the appreciation of […]
A Year in the Country In which the affable retronauts of Howlround limber up their trusty reel-to-reel tape recorders and feed in the sound of the built environment in order to make a fearsome and at times gently life-affirming visit to pastures so old and venerable that they are of course back in style. And what a stye it is – lush reverb and rippling scurries of what […]
Gagarin Commissioned by the Deutscher Musikrat (German Music Council) for their edition elektronik series, Felix Kubin attunes his lateral ears to a subject dear to his heart — and with a title that translates to English as Chromium Dioxide Memory, it’s no surprise that its subject, sound source and (in part) medium is the compact cassette. By contrast with the (allegedly) precise fidelity of digital recordings and the […]
Drag City (North America)/Domino (Europe) Will Oldham has never shied away from revisiting the past. He updated the indie primitivist early work of Palace Brothers (and name variations thereof) from before he took on the Bonnie “Prince” Billy identity with a collection of veteran country session musicians on Sings Golden Palace Music (2004) to excellent effect. The album gave a polish and shine to songs which were only […]
DAC Ciment starts spasmodic and spare, then proceeds to deploy buzzing, whining breath-fragments and scraping flexions among some moments of stark, simple beauty along the way. Pressed on two sides of vinyl, the LP is fully intended to be listened to with all the accumulated crackles, hiss, pops and incidental warmth the format brings with it, for better or worse. All sounds originate with Franck Vigroux‘s guitar, and […]
London 16 September 2014 Mounting the stage with a promise of a different set to the previous night’s show at the same venue, Nik Void, Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti settle quickly into place behind a compact selection of effects boxes, mixers and other instruments. As the gig gets underway, the backdrop lit up by the slowly-cycling op-art imagery familiar from their début album projected overhead, the […]
Recorded Fields Editions Subtitled Selected Pipe Organ Works 1983-2014, Robert Curgenven‘s LP finds him pushing the instrument (with the aid of a few others) in all kinds of intriguing directions. As Circle and Mamiffer ably demonstrated on their recent album for church organ, it’s quite amazing what sounds can be drawn from one in the right hands with a sense of adventure. Presented as four pieces over the […]
Fourth Dimension When invited by Fourth Dimension man Richo to do something outside the ordinary, Richard Youngs accepted the challenge of making a dub album from the perspective of someone who doesn’t like reggae. So, with the aid of boxes of tricks borrowed from occasional collaborator Luke Fowler, he set off on an eight track odyssey into space echoes and spring reverberations to produce Primary Concrete Attack. The […]