3 on Room40 - Taylor Deupree - Erik M/(Luc Ferrari)/Thomas Lehn - Candlesnuffer

Taylor Deupree
Landing
EDRM411

A mini-disc (about 20 minutes) of very pretty, overtly ambient music—coolly undulating synth chords, charmingly plucked guitar, often with a koto-like quality, soft percussive accents clicking away like raindrops. I hate to say it but, especially given the title, evocations of “On Land” are hard to avoid. The various sonic elements, however, do possess a kind of “cocoon” allowing them to be heard as very separate if intertwining lines. Listened to in this manner, I was able to mentally construct for myself a more interesting set of patterns than could be experienced simply wallowing in the lushness. That combined with the occasional, brief (and welcome) turn toward sourness of a note here and there helped me find the first track more intriguing than I might have otherwise. The same aspect isn’t as present in the second cut which becomes simply pretty. The final piece gets about halfway back to the first’s level of interest. Overall not my cup of tea, but there’s plenty here for fans of well-realized, rich ambient music.

Erik M (Luc Ferrari)/Thomas Lehn
Les Protorhythmiques
RM437

Recorded in performance at the 2006 Musique Action Festival, this was originally intended to be a collaboration between Luc Ferrari and Erik M at the same venue the year prior, a prospect rendered impossible due to Ferrari’s failing health (he would die in August of that year). Erik M took many of the materials he’d worked on with Ferrari and invited Thomas Lehn to collaborate in a concert the following year. You can certainly pick up Ferrari-like sounds, spacious field recordings of children and traffic, for instance, early on in the half-hour piece and popping up here and there throughout. Whether or not those are actually Ferrari contributions, I can’t say for sure but to the extent those “kinds” of sound manifest, the work succeeds quite well. Also, when things are reduced to a low simmer, as occurs about seven minutes in for a good while, it’s a lovely brew, small whirring and pinging elements zigzagging through a warm, curdling gravy. Interspersed among these more “open” kinds of sound, however, are periodic stutter stops involving speech that are a bit too redolent of Max Headroom for comfort. Children’s voices echoing in a room take things out in fine Ferrari fashion. It’s an uneven document with some missteps along the way, but overall the good outweighs the mildly annoying, making Les Protorhythmiques worth hearing.

Candesnuffer
Wakool
EDRM412

With “Wakool”, David Brown (aka Candlesnuffer) investigates the extended properties of various guitarish objects, including bandura (a lute-like instrument with origins in the Ukraine), eukolin (I’m guessing this is of Brown’s own devising), tenor banjo and actual guitar, all prepared to some degree. While the eight pieces can certainly be read as “simply” explorations into the sonics available to Brown in the instruments’ current states, he generally manages to infuse more than enough musicality, often ultimately blues-based, into the improvisations to generate at least one additional layer of depth. His attack can be rough, sometimes brutal (even his quieter drones have something of the buzz-saw about them), but you always have a sense that he’s giving due consideration for the placement of each explosion. I note in passing that the bandura does indeed have a unique sort of sound, a particular resonance that’s inherently appealing. Each piece has its own area of interest and each at least satisfies; in some respects they remind me of recent work by Mike Cooper, though harsher and, by and large, deeper. Still and all, as impressive as most of the tracks are, Brown hits his peak when he allows the blues feel just that much more presence on the final cut, “Words Dissolved in Eyes”. Here, on banjo, he achieves a wonderful balance between the abstract and the gritty, the luminous and the forbidding dark. I’d dearly love to hear more in this vein.

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