Bardoseneticcube & Shinkiro – Inner And Outer Space Label: Zhelezobeton – ZHB-LX Format: CD, Album, Limited Edition, Numbered Country: Russia Released: 23 Dec 2015 Style: Dark Ambient
This is already the second collaboration album of Bardoseneticcube from Russia and Shinkiro from Japan, this time under their own names. The first disc “Four Noble Truths” was released under the combined title of Bashin on the French label Athanor in 2011 and was dedicated to the basic principles of Buddhist teachings. The meditative and contemplative subject continues here as well, now being focused on the aspects of inner and outer space.
We submerge in the dark thick matter of sound, fluid, transparent and stratiform. Woven from abstract electronics, omnifarious samples and transformed voices, textures are smoothly interchanging, always showing new visions in the black mirror of our viewport. Makes you wonder – does the perceivable exist separately from the percipient? In any case this is dark, nocturnal, cosmic music, not devoid of epicism and dramatism. Worth having in your playlist for the next space travel!
The disc is packed in a matte 4-panel cardboard digisleeve with artwork made by Vitaly Stromchinsky (X3D5, Eternal Return Records).
DMT «Ultimatum» is the second album in «Die Zeichen» series run by kultFRONT and ZHELEZOBETON labels. The first part was released in 2013 – Sal Solaris «Die Scherben 2004-2010». The new album is a tribute to Dmitriy Tolmatskiy who unexpectedly left us in 2009. Dmitriy was one of the few journalists who popularized the alternative culture in Russia. In late 90-ies he created the web portal RWCDAX and his famous «Industrial Culture Extended FAQ» which unveiled previously unknown layers of post-industrial art for many Russians.
«Ultimatum» shows the varied musical and stylistical planes of DMT. It mainly consists of compositions never officially released before, taken from CDRs which Dmitriy gave to his friends. There are also a few tracks from the compilations he had time to participate. Unfortunately not always were there notes and years of recordings. One track was digitized from an untitled audiocassette kept by the musician’s friends in his native city of Saratov. The album provides a glimpse into various periods of DMT’s sonic experiments from 1999 to 2008. It also features fragments of a live performance together with Alexei Borisov in St. Petersburg in December 2005.
Marc Behrens – Sleppet Label: Crónica Format:CD, Album Country: Portugal Released: 14 Oct 2009 Style: Abstract, Musique Concrète, Experimental
Sleppet originated from a sound art project in 2007, when six renowned artists — Natasha Barrett, Bjarne Kvinnsland, Steve Roden, Chris Watson, Jana Winderen and Marc Behrens — recorded sounds on a 10-day trip through the Norwegian Westlandet region and used the nature experience for a couple of sound installations and music pieces.
Sleppet leads back to Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, for whom contemplation of nature and its influence on the artistic creation had high significance.
Sleppet deals with the energy and the transformation processes of the early springtime.
In the frame of the composition, realized exclusively with concrete sound material, Behrens created several parentheses: the first part starts with an unaltered field recording of a clamouring flock of seagulls as exposition, from which this part is further developed. The final part ends with an equally unaltered recording of a springlike forest patch with various songbirds, a few kilometers up the hill in the fjord valley — in which seagulls can be discerned in the distance. Bird song can be heard at other points within the piece, as by-products of recording other sounds, as sound windows into spring.
The second parenthesis consists of the sonic intensity of drones used in the first and the last part — in the first part sounding like a string group alongside acute cymbals, in the last part sounding purely electronic, but always displaying a certain sonority. Such nearly tonal quality does not exist in the middle parts of the piece. Instead of that, the third, rather noisy parenthesis depicts movements of tilting, slipping off and falling, as culminations within the internal structure: a rubble avalanche (the loudest one in a sequence in part 2), and a collapsing part of a glacier (which closely missed Behrens when he recorded melt water drops), after or framed by audible melting.
Acoustic utterances of animal impatience, which belong to nordic spring like the melting of snow and ice, bring forward the composition: besides the clamour of seagulls there is the noise of impatient cattle, still chained inside their stable. The atmosphere of a sheep shed in the final part picks up the theme again, but is almost completely warped by noises from a hydroelectric powerplant and a ferry.
Phases of contraction (loud, dense) and expansion (quieter, sometimes permeable) define the structures of parts 4 and 5. The first three parts show a somewhat more consistent sound impression. At many points in parts 1–4, figure/ground and foreground/background relations are fathomed out.
The great movements throughout the course of the 41-minute piece put focus onto the rendering conscious of accumulating and discharging energies.
