Matthew Revert - A Discussion Was Had In Your Absence (Tristes Tropiques)

I think anyone who's familiar with Revert's design work (a sampling of which can be glimpsed here), would be hard pressed not to draw some comparisons with the music heard on this recording. There's a similar transmogrification of the cast-off, the banal and the mass-produced into something worth looking at/listening to differently, often resulting in surprising beauty. The music here is a dense collage of sounds that seem to be derived from a bewilderingly large number of sources: everyday clatter, darkly spoken text, spacey electronic hums, chirps and innumerable other bits of detritus. The choices made are fine. Revert seems to have a predilection for silvered, splintery sounds embedded in thick, grimy masses, a kind of shit-encrusted jewel effect that's unique and, to these ears, extremely attractive. The opening track, "The Sincere Pleasure", positively wallows in this--an iterated, distorted voice weaving through shiny squeaks and squelches coursing through a sonic refuse heap. The aural space expands somewhat in "The Rewarding Conversation", more resonant but also darker and more metallic, the voice acquiring a touch of malevolence. "...slices and slices and slices..." "The Unintended Compliment" stands apart a little, beginning with intoned voices over an ambient hum, reminding me a bit of a portion of Cardew's 'The Great Learning'. Other subsidiary sounds emerge: vague flute-ish tones, high tinkles, shuffled footsteps. But the voices drone on. It's an odd effect--too dirty and cluttered to be meditative but persisting along that route anyway. An excellent and strange release.

Arek Gulbenkoglu - Of Cruelty (Tristes Tropiques)

Gulbenkoglu's work has always been "difficult" but ultimately rewarding to these ears and "Of Cruelty" (intriguing title) is no exception. There are four cuts here, each living in an entirely different universe from the other and each posing its own set of gnarly problems. But also, there's a kind of bluntness about the pieces, a "here it is, deal with it" forthrightness that wins out in the end, though I'd advise listeners to be prepared. 

"A Foregrounding" explodes into one's ears; my first impression was being plunged into a massive traffic tie-up while being shrunk to about ant size. Many of the sonorities resemble vehicular horns (no instrumentation or record of other sources is provided), several of them in constant blare, threaded with needlelike shards, the horns warping into higher registers and then outside the range of human ears. It's a solid wall with internal variations that obtrudes for 7 1/2 minutes. Wake up. "Innards" is the only track to substantially shift over its course. It begins with slivers of a woman's (several women's?) voice, appearing initially out of silences, those silences soon mildly infested with tiny bits of electric dust, intense but barely there. The voices acquire some echo, an electronic transmission loops, filling all gaps; it sits there for a while, subtly amassing some additional energy before, about four minutes into the 13-minute piece, it erupts into a very loud, thick torrent of liquid noise, something like I'd imagine one would hear were a mic to be submersed in flowing lava. The listener bathes in this for the remainder of the track. The amusingly titled, "Haste" seems to be composed of drum machine samples. There's a good bit of space throughout this piece, which runs almost 16 minutes. The predominant element is a kind of bass-marimba-with-a-heavily-padded-mallet sound, slightly resonant, that recurs over the duration of the track, sometimes in a regular (though widely spaced) rhythm, but not always. There's also a flatter, deader bass drum thud and several cymbal-like sounds as well as a hollow-wind segment, all of them clipped and appearing in a random (or intuitive) manner. It's quite odd, like a conversation made up of exceedingly terse and inherently uninteresting statements which, by virtue of simply going on and on and on manages to attain a weird level of fascination. I'm reminded of Henry Gwiadza's strange video/sound constructions, where banally animated figures intermittently engage in even more banal actions but somehow create this engrossing alien world. Finally, we encounter "Consequences". Entirely electronics of a liquid, loopy kind, it seems to consist of two basic strands: a higher-pitched, swirling one that remains pretty much constant, repeating every second or so, and a slightly lower one with a bubblier, more gurgling cast that varies within itself while also repeating, perhaps a bit slower than the other, causing a sequence of pattern and interference that, when noticed, is beguiling. It's simply presented as such and allowed to run as near as I can discern--an object of curiosity and, again, of weird beauty.

I like "Of Cruelty" a lot. Rather surprised at that.

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Tristes Tropiques doesn't have a webpage but does have one on facebook

The recordings may also be ordered from Erst Dist