[Guest Column] Nestor Matthews // Fascination with the Noisy #3

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Hello, how are you? Below I’ve attempted to write about a few artists I like that revel in the distorted outer limits of lo-fi. Rather than being confined by the circumstances around them, these guys turn it on its head and proceed into the unknown with reckless abandon.

Part Chimp are a trio (sometimes quartet) I saw round off a noisy all-dayer last year and they were loud. Really, really fucking loud. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a sound so thick; forcing huge stoner-pop through their instruments, amps and the PA, all at maximum volume. Creating a juxtaposed combination of feel-good and feedback all the while grinning like lunatics as the elements of their sound struggle to be heard over each other. Intrigued, I purchased their latest album, Thriller, from the very sweaty (but still grinning) band after the show and eagerly anticipated recreating the audio-battle I had just witnessed on stage. Thriller is a bloated juggernaut of feedback, distortion and grit. A worthy studio representation of the chaos produced on stage, but a studio representation none the less. Cleaned up here and there in such a way that it detracted from the raw enthusiastic ignorance of the live show. Most definitely still filthy, but in my opinion lovingly, preciously over-pruned.

It was only when I got my hands on the first two albums, Chart Pimp and I Am Come respectively, that I heard what I wanted to hear. The first two albums serve up all the care-free fuzz, crackle, warp and phase necessary to truly convey the brute force of the music. It doesn’t feel produced or even really mixed, it just is what it is, SOUND. The sincere slacker vocals fight against the loose, perfectly sloppy drums to stay afloat amid a storm of distorted gravel guitars that have made my headphones vibrate themselves off my head on more than one occasion. This noisenoisenoise description may sound rather familiar to my portrayal of Shit & Shine (see TLOBF#2), but in practice they couldn’t be more different. I refer back to the relentless grinning I witnessed during the live show; while Shit & Shine could be regarded narcissistic in their approach to music and relentless dynamic, Part Chimp appear to love the songs they write as much as they love playing them, which just so happens to be at full volume. So turn it up.

Part Chimp – War Machine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOi3gk5WPxU

Part Chimp Live (AND LOUD)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVGzICIj94Q

Liumin by Deepchord presents Echospace is by contrast neither particularly loud nor abrasive, in fact its quite the opposite. An album of fairly indifferent slow-burning minimal techno, it is the ‘bonus’ disc that I initially became interested in. Liumin Reduced is a collection of the field recordings taken by the artist(s)* that are used throughout the album proper. This struck me as unusual in that a lot of electronic artists are stereotypically quite secretive with their methods and samples, so to release them as their own body of work struck me as a bold and honest move. Further still the inclusion of every little splinter of sound, be it a crow cawing or children arguing in the distance, all hidden behind a wash of atmospheric, lo-fi white noise jars with the clean cut, exact-science fixed image most people have of techno music. While I initially cast off Liumin as bland and directionless, Liumin Reduced left me with no option but to retract my preconceptions and re-approach the two collections as one body of work; opening up previously unheard/selectively ignored depths within Liumin and adding a vital sense of narration coupled with eerie premonitions of the artist’s thought process, which all in all leaves me with a thoroughly deserved touch of egg on my face.

*Deepchord is Rod Modell and occasionally Mike Schommer, whereas Echospace is Rod Modell and Stephen Hitchell; it’s all a bit confusing. Ooh err.

Deepchord Presents Echospace – Liumin Reduced Untitled 01

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuueysCh_EQ

Deepchord Presents Echospace – Burnt Sage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtTMSk21fkQ

And now, an apology. I’ve only just discovered William Basinski, and it was by accident too, I’m sorry. I found his Variations for Piano and Tape in a pile of my dad’s old CDs and was intrigued by the title, totally unprepared for it’s beauty and simplicity.

A lot of Basinski’s work is focused more on the manipulation of sound and its cumulative progression/deconstruction rather than the sound itself; Variations for Piano and Tape uses a short piano motif looped over and over onto old magnetic tape which, in time, bleeds between the parts of tape in contact with each other creating a slowly evolving delay loop that endlessly repeats but is never the same twice. For me, it is Basinski’s resignation to the supposed ‘flaws’ in his process that make his work so special. He did not strive to create his sound; it happened by accident upon attempting to transfer old recordings from magnetic tape to a more conventional digital format (this became the first in the Disintegration Loops series), and rather than give up when the transfer didn’t go ‘to plan’, Basinski developed it to create something pure and unique, an equal partnership between man and machine, using the taping process as an active collaborator, not just a means of transposition. I have previously referred to Machinefabriek’s work as organic, and I still believe it is, but organic in an overlorded evolutionary sense. William Basinksi’s work is organic in a truly independent sense; it is the music itself that dictates how it grows and in what direction, with Basinski powerless to intervene until he presses stop or, heaven forbid, runs out of tape.

An extract from William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhfKK547r94