L. B. Dub Corp – Only The Good Times (Mote-Evolver)

Posted by Dez Wright on

L. B. Dub Corp is techno veteran Luke Slater. “Only the Good Times” is a warm but chilled, wistful but feel-good piece. A nostalgic reminiscence of, well, “Only the Good Times”. The synth riff is like a cinema Wurlitzer heard through fog. A magnificent track. Burial’s remix is more than twice the length – in excess of ten minutes as seems often to be the case. The part of the vocal used is de-genderised by raising the pitch, but stretching it so the duration is the same. There is a muffled kick drum rhythm that threatens to take off, but never really builds, and the original synth melody finally comes in as a coda in the final minute. It’s effortlessly transformed into a Burial track, but on this occasion the emotion of Slater’s superb original is lost.

Tectonics 2024, Glasgow City Halls

Posted by Dez Wright on

I’ve attended every Tectonics bar one over its eleven year span (not counting the COVID years) and one thing I have noticed is that the number of acts has dwindled a little. The price is still dirt cheap compared to any comparable events, so there’s not really much to complain about. For those who don’t know, Tectonics is an annual new music shindig curated by conductor Ilan Volkov and local promoter Alistair Campbell that presents new orchestral works played by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra along with pieces from artists working in all sorts of fields from electronica to free jazz, performance art to noise, folk to avant-pop. It’s always a lucky bag as far as quality goes. Amazing things rub shoulders with not-so-amazing things (to be kind).
This year’s festival had a few of the latter. Not many, though. Everyone is always enthusiastically received, even if it’s more for their efforts rather than the results of them. To pick on the weak spots seems churlish, so I’ll gloss over them.


Day One
Saturday was the stronger of the two. Norway-based duo fiddler Sarah-Jane Summers and guitarist Juhani Silvola collaborated withthe BBC SSO strings on a suite called The Spirit Multitude which combined some slightly out there avant-gardisms with Scottish traditional music. Occasional squalls of electric guitar and atonal string drones punctuated passages of joyful, up-tempo, melodious music. It all blended organically and was a triumphant start to proceedings. Elaine Mitchener’s bio conjoured up the phrases vocal improv and performance art, both of which have my heart sinking to my knees. Just goes to show how you should never presume or pre-judge. Her take on the old spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” was slow, deliberate, and rode upon a dark, metallic noise that reminded me of Scott Walker’s Drift-era journey into darkness. Her version of “Amazing Grace”, again slow and prolonged, used vocal loops to make it a multitude of voices, perhaps echoing the origins of the song in slavery (composer John Newton was an ex-slave ship captain turned abolitionist). In between she did an improvised piece with audience walkabout that was both clever and amusing. The evening’s orchestral concert was totally underwhelming before the interval, and sensational after it. Matthew Shlomowitz and Mariam Rezaei’s Six Scenes for Turntables and Orchestra was a superbly realised and seamless fusion of scratching and looping, and orchestral colour. The latter not just providing a background wash, but actively engaging with the turntablism. It was brilliantly wrought and performed and deservedly got one of the best audience responses I’ve seen at Tectonics.

Day Two
Brian Irvine is an Ulster-born composer, and a conceptualist par excellence. With just one rehearsal he brought together a bunch of musicians of multiple backgrounds, ethnicities, ages and abilities, and created something really quite special. Directions came on cue cards rather than traditional conducting methods. Beginning with a solo violin playing the Londonderry Air, it evolved through music and movement, singing, chanting and playing that at times was a barrage of cacophonous noise, at time plaintive, at times naive, and at times genuinely moving as in the choral finale. And at times it was just bonkers. What there was throughout was a palpable joy of creation, and the fun was transmitted to the audience who were eager to join in when they could. Irvine should be sent to every school and care home in the country. He could do wonders for people’s psyches.
The two solo works for electric guitar played by Yaron Deutsch were both inventive. The first had patches of brilliance, but seemed to lack much structure as it moved linearly from one idea to the next. The second, perhaps lacking those transcendent spells, felt more of a piece. The final orchestral concert featured four works, including two world premieres. All were engaging enough in their own way, but the closing Uberlala, Song of Million Paths for violin and orchestra composed by Mireal Ivecevic was something much more. Beautifully played by soloist Ilya Gringolts (who’d tested my patience on Saturday with a long and tedious piece for solo violin by Salvatore Sciarrino, but was quickly forgiven) and the orchestra, it mixed tonality with experimentation in the way that kept it grounded and yet let it wander off into unexplored spheres. So, another festival ended. The best bits will stay with me. The BBC SSO deserve special praise for their dedication in learning these new works, and giving them the same focus and application as they world a performance of an established work from the classical canon.

Pye Corner Audio – The Endless Echo (Ghost Box)

Posted by Dez Wright on

Head Technician Martin Jenkins is pretty prolific with a trail of digital only EPs and stand alone tracks appearing at regular intervals. Many of these are excellent, and not the half-finished cast offs you might expect. The albums, though, are often bound together with a loose concept. The last one, Let’s Emerge, came out two years ago on Sonic Cathedral, and trod an unfamiliar shoe-gazey path that was hailed in many quarters, but to me seemed slightly formless. Back on Ghost Box, The Endless Echo is about time, the perception of it and the nature of it. I particularly like the Julian Barbour quote ‘All the instants we have experienced are other worlds, for they are not the one we are in now’. Musically this treads more familiar territory, with propulsive, Kraftwerkian beats, sweeping melodies and echoes of Boards of Canada and the Radiophonic Workshop – that kind of pervasive and persuasive nostalgia for how the future was perceived in the past. There is a darkness here too, with a sense of dread nibbling at the edges of otherwise sunny pieces, and blanketing others. There is also a razor sharp focus which hasn’t always been consistently the case on previous PCA records. Longest track “Chronos” is perhaps the most typical of the record, driving forward relentlessly with a groove, whilst swirls of melody orbit its central pulse. It is followed by the beatless “Heat Haze” which drifts with a kind of muscular ethereality. It is these contrasts within each individual piece that make the album fascinating. Definitely one of Jenkin’s best ever records, and an early contender for album of the year.

Adam Wiltzie – Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal (Kranky)

Posted by Dez Wright on

There are only nine, of course, and Wiltzie’s dry sense of humour is evident among some of the track titles, most notably the snappily monickered opener “Buried at Westwood Memorial Park, In an Unmarked Grave, To the Left of Walter Matthau”. Stars of the Lid and A Winged Victory for the Sullen fans are going to instantly feel in familar territory as that piece progresses through its eight minutes at a sedate pace, with swelling strings, guitar sustain and bass drones. None of the other tracks are more than half that length. Some, like “Pelagic Swell”, feel inconsequential standing alone, its backdrop melancholy as a cello drones rises and fades, but they slot in and carry the plot forward, so to speak. “Stock Horror” is creepy without being too disturbing until the throaty death rattle at its close. A firm grasp of counterpoint is key to the success of music like this, as bass drones and sweeping strings play against each other in a slow-motion dance. This can sound magnificent when done as well as it on “As Above So Below”, whilst on “Mexican Helium” it lends a flavour of desolate melancholy (or melancholic desolation). There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of acts of Bandcamp who do the wistful drone thing, taking the template of Stars of the Lid and running (or rather crawling) with it. Few have the instinctive command that Wiltzie does.