Theme Park for Ear

TP005 Thomas Peter - Circular

2010-09-02T16:59:00.000-07:00

Solo improvisation, recorded in an open/closed space.

Thomas Peter - Feedback system, drums & objects, recorded in Zurich Feb 2010.

Edition of 50,
cdR, 6 euros+shipping.

click HERE to make your order

Review(s):
The Watchful Ear
So my thoroughly productive day was soundtracked by all kinds of music, but this evening i have been playing a CD by a musician named Thomas Peter, a release on the Theme Park label named Circular. I knew nothing about Peter before this release, and having listened to it, and done some googling I remain thoroughly ignorant about his activities. He is credited here as playing “feedback system, drums and objects” but what isn’t entirely clear to me is what the feedback system consists of, or at least through what mechanisms it is channeled so as to make the music contained here on the CD.

Circular is a simple, delicate release that mostly consists of thin, wavering slithers of feedback that sound very much like the saxophone feedback output of Graham Halliwell or John Butcher. These lines of sound slip and slide over each other to create a soft, amorphous music not all that dissimilar to the more ambient tracks on Toshi Nakamura’s recent Egrets solo album. The feedback is joined here and there throughout the ten tracks on the disc by other sounds, rubbed drum heads, small knocks and rattles etc, but these are kept to a minimum, so increasing their impact alongside the feedback loops when they appear.

Circular is a little frustrating as there is a lot here that suggests a really strong album could have been made, and in places the disc really shines, but a tendency to allow things to slip into a slightly too easy ambience drags it down here and there for me. The feedback clouds float in and out of view regularly, so any form of continuous drone is avoided. Sometimes the streams of tone just wobble about in a relatively ’safe’ area, but on occasion they spill over into more fierce screeches, or combine with the minimal other sounds to break up the prettiness, and to be fair this happens often and to great effect, but on a few occasions things are left to congeal a little.

The best track here by some way is also the last and longest. Track 10 clocks in at a fraction over ten minutes, and while it contains the same drifting cumulus of billowing feedback there is also a continuous grey background to the track. I think maybe a window had been left open as the piece was recorded, so a featureless, low key murmur can be heard throughout, accompanied occasionally by small percussive sounds and almost clockwork-like scrapes and rubbing, all very muted and hidden under the cloak of the foreground feedback twines. A thoroughly charming track, this last piece points towards the strengths of this album- a sense of subtle understatement wrapped up in the thin blankets of sound thrown over it all. If this last track works well because of its delicacy, elsewhere I might have preferred a little more grit thrown into proceedings, a few extra barbs added here and there to keep the music away from candy-floss territory. As it is, there is a lot of promise in this album, a decent display of skill and control of what is a difficult and unpredictable area of music-making. I just think I’d have preferred a little more edge to the music and/or some more variety in the approach. Still, Thomas Peter is a name I didn’t know before but will now keep an ear open for. I’d be very interested to hear him play in a collaborative setting as well as I suspect his sound would be the perfect foil for a good number of other instrumentation.
- Richard Pinnell -

TP002 Goh Lee Kwang - Half

2010-02-24T02:24:00.000-08:00

01 Half 31’41”
02 Boil 21’01”

Edition of 50,
cdR, 6 euros+shipping.

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TP006 Julien Skrobek - 0.10

2010-01-15T19:19:00.000-08:00

It is a 21'34'' piece called 0.10 in reference to the exposition held in Petrograd in 1915 while Kazimir Malevitch was taking the step from Futurist to Suprematist painting, abandoning the Cubic analysis of figures for a radical abstraction of pure forms and colours... (more line note included with the album)

Edition of 50,
cdR, 6 euros+shipping.

click HERE to make your order

Review(s):
Vital Weekly
0.10 is a reference to Malevitch - Skrobek's interest is in the opposition between popular / folk and high art, and uses such things as acoustic guitar, balloons, electric heater, radio, digital metronome & 220 hz sine wave. It very much resembles the supermatist blocks and shapes with its distinctive abstractions and structures, the early and not the latter which like most of modernism ends in some religio/mystical blankness, a theo-ontology unlike the nihilist ontology of noise itself. Never the less this work deserves attention, an abstract yet aesthetic composition in its own right. Though one could take issue with the idea of a differentiation between high and low/folk art in the post-modern, which we are either located in or have past. The barriers between the two in fact were well under dissolution in the Victorian era where the new bourgeois classes wanted art they could understand, through to the pedaling of impressionism to the Americans and the reciprocity of sending Jazz back across the Atlantic to infiltrate the avant garde. There are problems generated by what Skrobek explores, of elitism and fascism , but its a process which has been explored and intellectualised until nothing is left but dried an bleached bones, perhaps we should make a music with these?
- Jliat -

TP019 Orifice - Daring Maunder

2010-01-15T19:17:00.000-08:00

In real time analog synth
Improvisation and recording by Burkhard Jaeger
July 2009
Hannover, Germany

Cover artwork by Doris Boeker

Edition of 50,
cdR, 6 euros+shipping.

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TP007 Olaf Hochherz - Ornithology

2009-07-28T18:43:00.000-07:00

01 (white-capped) clupper
02 (white-capped) clupper
03 (white-capped) clupper
04 (white-throated) clupper
05 (brown) dripper
06 (blue-billed) quealea
07 (yellow) finchling (some white-throated clupper at the end)
08 (blue) finchling
09 (red) indeobird
10 (black) whida
11 some bees
12 at the sea
13 (white) whida
14 (white) whida (distorted recording)
15 (white sea) whida
16 (blue) clupper
17 (blue-billed) whida
18 at the hills

2009 shanghai
www.shwobl.de
sh0099[at]gmx.de

Edition of 50,
cdR, 6 euros+shipping.

click HERE to make your order

Review(s):
The Watchful Ear
Tonight I have been listening to a CD that falls somewhere between the opposing poles of really intriguing and completely pointless. Which one it sits closest to will be a matter of personal opinion. For me it jumps between the two, though I have to admit I find myself admiring the idea behind it. Ornithology is the title of a CD on the Theme Park label by Olaf Hochherz, the Berlin based Laptop / electronics musician I have written about here before. If the title seems a bit odd, then the track titles, such as (white-throated) clupper, (red) indeobird and (blue-billed) quealea read more like a birdspotters guide book than a CD track listing. However the real surprise comes when you play the CD- It is made up of nineteen tracks of small electronic sounds that are made to resemble the calls of assorted imaginary birds. Unless you already know what you are listening to, unless you listen really quite closely you would be forgiven for thinking that you are hearing some kind of National Geographic audio catalogue of birdcalls. And that’s it – the tracks each sound like a different bird, some more convincing than others, some really very convincing indeed. The question we are left asking though, is why?

But let’s step back a moment first and think about what we are listening to here. There are no birds on this CD, or at least I don’t think there are. The titles of the birds that make up the track titles don’t seem to exist, and their presumably imaginary sounds are created entirely electronically here. Now, most people would consider birdsong to be beautiful, perhaps not great music, but certainly an enjoyable sound to be surrounded by. So if these tracks sound exactly like birdcalls, what would happen if we tried to forget that we know what a bird is and how it sounds and took the tracks here on face value, as just pieces of organised sound. Would we think about them in the same way? Would they feel as relaxing / beautiful as birdsong is supposed to feel? Then, even if we are to acknowledge that these pieces sound like birdsong, should we not still respond to them in the same way we might a field recording of assorted birds? Certainly I doubt I would have much time for a CD of recorded birdcalls, so why have I played this CDr three times tonight and not been annoyed or bored as I might if these sounds had come directly from one of our feathered friends? Is it merely the fact that I know these are fake birds, that I might be able to spot irregularities in the production of the sounds, that the human input into them is indelible, that makes this project quite interesting, even if it doesn’t make for particularly enthralling music?

I guess that in many ways there is little difference between this CD and a Greatest Hits compilation of Roger Whittaker’s wildlife impressions, which is in itself something of a nightmare possibility, so why is this CDr intriguing when released on a familiar label as a piece of “artistic” music? Hochherz offers nothing anywhere about the music other than the track titles. So we are left to project our own ideas, thoughts about the CDr, why it exists, what the message behind it could be, if indeed there is one at all. I suspect that Hochherz might be questioning how we hear sounds when we are aware of their context and their origins. Do we listen differently to field recordings of birds than we do to precisely made electronic manipulations, even if they sound almost identical? If so, why do we? Why does this extra knowledge, or the involvement of human beings change our response?

Whether any of this really matters much, whether these questions are worth asking is up to each of us to decide, and I suspect that how we answer will also colour how much interest we each have in this CD. While I find it musically uninteresting, I was certainly lead to ask a lot of questions by it, the answers to which I am not sure I know. That in itself gives the CD some value for me, though its not one likely to come back down off the shelf in a hurry unless the turn into my forties suddenly makes me feel the urge to go virtual twitching at the weekends…
- Richard Pinnell -

Vital Weekly
I am not sure what Oliver Hochherz's release 'Ornithology' has got to do with birds, but I do recall that the only time I built something from an electronic kit was a mechanical bird. It sounded like the sounds I hear on this release. However it might be so that these are real birds: I am no ornithologist. The tracks have 'round' lengths, 1:00, 2:00 or 19:00, which might be something conceptual I may not understand. There is anyway something conceptual about this release which I may not understand either. A 3"CDR would have been sufficient.
- Frans De Waard -

TP004 Marc Baron - Une Fois, Chaque Fois

2009-07-28T17:50:00.000-07:00

Marc Baron: Saxophone, Recording, Mastering, 2008 - 2009

Text & Image: Loic Blairon

50min+, cdR,
Edition of 60,
6 euros+shipping.

click HERE to make your order

Review(s):
The Watchful Ear
I also listened to quite a lot of music today, including the recent CDr by Marc Baron released on Goh Lee Kwang’s Theme Park label, a piece of music divided into eight parts named Une fois, Chaque Fois, which my somewhat basic French tells me means something along the lines of Once, each time.

Baron seems to be one of a few French musicians that have emerged over recent years with strong interests in the conceptual side of music. To quote the press release for the forthcoming Instal Festival up in Glasgow, which has a definite French lean to it, “Music is about more than just music” and while that is certainly the case for all music, I wonder here if this CD is actually “about” music, our perception of it, our expectations from it. As with a few other other recent releases (Unami and Krebs’ Motubachii is the one that springs immediately to mind) this new CDr seems to be partly about the construction and nature of a CD- what we expect to hear when we press play, what the human contribution to a piece of music should involve, how sounds can be repeated or arranged in strict order.

Although Baron has worked often in the pastas an improviser, Un fois, Chaque fois is not improvised. The disc is a carefully, rigorously structured set of eight pieces, each lasting exactly seven minutes that link together to make one longer work. The music is made up of no more than two elements at any one time, a series of three long, loud saxophone tones, and field/seemingly random recordings placed alongside the tones. In fact, after a couple of runs through the disc it became clear to me that all of the elements are carefully placed in a recurring pattern that restarts at the beginning of each track. So the first track opens with a heavy, clean, feedback-esque sax note and a recording of a woman reading something in what sounds like Russian, maybe a newsreader? The tone drops away after about fifteen seconds leaving the field recording to run alone, which it does for most of the remaining track. At the one minute and forty-five second point we get a further fifteen second blast of what sounds like the same tone, while the recording continues until the five minute mark, when a twenty second long slightly higher note appears. Then a final lower note can be heard for the last fifteen seconds of the track, which turns out to be the same note that opened the piece. As the track ends, so the next immediately begins, using exactly the same sequence of saxophone notes, placed in precisely the same places, but with a different recording used, this time a quiet stream of white noise.

The remaining tracks then follow suit, the third piece uses some kind of barely audible bubbling and scraping recording that I think is of Baron gurgling into his sax but recorded in a quite lo-fi manner. The fourth utilises a field recording of a crowd chattering away, the sort of thing you might overhear at an airport waiting lounge or similar, the sixth contains traffic and street sounds on a rainy day, the seventh a quietly playing early baroque recording lead by a flute, and the eighth a series of tiny clicking sounds, as if Baron flicked his fingernail at the sax once every five or six seconds. The one missing track from that list is the fifth one, which doesn’t seem to contain any sound other than the regular sax intrusions at all, the field recordings replaced by complete silence.

So this album, which is actually quite an enchanting and interesting disc to listen to just as a piece of straight music, is a carefully arranged work that, track five apart obeys a very strict structure that isn’t immediately obvious, because of the space of time between events. Approaching this release as a listener, without prior knowledge of the music’s structure and composed nature it feels like a fluid, constantly surprising work, albeit quite sparse in nature. I put the disc into the player without realising that the music consists of eight equal length tracks, and because there is no silence between the pieces I took the work to consist of one complete whole. When the early music recording kicks in at the start of the seventh piece it comes as a complete shock, and it was only when it cut off suddenly at the seven minute mark that it occurred to me to look for timed patterns in the music.

So is there a significance to the timings? Have the field recordings been chosen randomly or is there a link between them? The music feels very finely crafted, the sounds carefully chosen, the sax tones very cleanly played n a skilful manner, but beyond the choices of sounds made do their organisation or order signify anything? Certainly at first glance this is a peculiar album, some very nice sounds combined in a slightly uncomfortable un-artistic manner, but more consideration makes me wonder if there is a code to be cracked, a reason for the placement of the elements that I haven’t clicked upon yet.

Whether there is greater meaning to be discovered or not, this album certainly had me thinking again about how we listen, what we expect from a CD, from a piece of music, from a saxophonist. The process of listening and learning, deciphering, applying potential meaning to this music is a delightful exercise. If you enjoy music that can be a puzzle as much as a sensual pleasure then I thoroughly recommend this release.
- Richard Pinnell -

Just Outside
Richard posted an excellent, detailed review here that gets to the gist of this very intriguing recording. The sense of structure is indeed quite strong, a suite with certain recurring elements (the held saxophone tones) appearing almost like identical scratches in a set of otherwise obscurely related (if at all) slides. The identical pitches that end and begin each of the eight, 7-minute long tracks serve as bridges or, perhaps less than that, staples or hooks stringing the cuts together as, I suppose, the interior tones do as well, stitching within the frames. The field recordings--a woman calmly speaking in a Slavic tongue; steady state, dense white noise; odd scuffles; crowd noise; silence; automotive driving sounds, possibly in wet conditions; a baroque recording for flute and harpsichord; finally, some sparse, hard clicks (finger snaps?). Eight disparate sonic images then, perhaps "beds" in which to plant the same series of scant seeds, seeing how they mix, how they sound different given their "soil".

There's a fine calmness in play, almost a stateliness, the music moving at a slow, steady pace, allowing the listener ample opportunity to consider each plot.

I enjoyed it a great deal; something ineffable going on there, even something beautiful.
- Brian Olewnick -

Vital Weekly
Marc Baron plays saxophone and the recording and mastering of his 'Une Fois, Chaque Fois' release. Here too some conceptual is done with the lengths of the pieces, as all eight pieces last seven minutes (why not seven pieces, I then wonder). I have no idea who reads the Russian text at the beginning, with some sparse saxophone sounds, but its a nice track. That can also be said of the other tracks. Baron plays saxophone, edits the material along with some field recordings (restaurant?, streets), which suggest the saxophone is played there too. Track seven seems to me a case of plunderphonics of baroque music. That might not be the case, although that's hardly relevant I would think. Quite rudimentary in compositional approach I would think... A very strange release indeed but nevertheless quite nice. Radical some would say.
- Frans de Waard -