buffet of loathsome

in case anyone’s been wondering what i’m up to:

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http://buffetofloathsome.blogspot.com

Мира Древо (Mira Drevo)

Следы на снегу (Footprints In the Snow)

single-sided cassette

Out of Season/Wulfrune Worxxx/Flecktarn Productions (oos27, ulv1108, fleck85)

2017

Great firs stand all around, proud and still. A silent snowfall floats softly, suspended in the evening’s final light as you near home. Your boots on ice provide the only sound, a hard crust giving way to softer powder beneath. Passing into the clearing where your cabin sits, wooden chimes beckon to your doorstep, but you pause. With a deep icy breath, you gaze at the fleeting tangerine sky. The treetops fade from peach, to plum, to the color of wild blackberries in spring --- evanescent before darkness settles on the forest. You are hungry, and the smell of smoked fish wafts from the hearth inside. Pines rustle, calling your name, but they will have to wait til next sunrise for your company. Another day comes to an end, one of many like moments in a rhythm which has persisted in this clearing for many lifetimes.

Graham Lambkin

Two Points On the Angle

cassette/digital

No Rent Records NRR44

February 2017 

What can I say? I’m on a No Rent streak. This is also easily the 200,000th Lambkin or Lambkin-adjacent release I’ve covered in the last 10 years of scribbles. Somehow I always cozy up better to the releases everyone else seems to miss—or at least keep mum about. Odd, too, as this tape dropped outta sight before sundown and then got maybe one write-up? Ya’ll trippin’, cuz what seems at first like a mere ideological link between the worldly Community (Erstwhile, 2016) and the adrift Sirisongs 7” with Mark Harwood (Kye/Penultimate Press, 2017), feels to me far greater. Community reached out socially and stylistically; it set out to hunt, gather and feed. Sirisongs had a stiff drink and a hearty laugh ‘round the corner of the world. Two Points On the Angle seems to brood in the dust and dusk, turn the taste of the world ‘round on its tongue and finally, stoically, swallow. It wonders who is home but also what and how, which, of course, feel like tougher cuts to cook without splatterin’ the backsplash with jewels of grease. He’s not alone, though. Adris Hoyos is in the kitchen, their neighbor José on distant party music, and Will (Sad) from Acapela Group carries us through “Criminal Waves” and “Wind Without Walls” like an automated tour guide thirsty for a cold reboot. Speaking of, “Wind Without Walls” is the standout for me, leaning face-first into the titular concept of if one can experience motion without also experiencing its violence.

This tape gave me good company on my long commute to work. I too am back “home”, if there is such a country, and finding myself often in darkened rooms, or alone on interstates, anxious and straining to hear familiar winds but not feel them whup me. ‘Preciate that.

Yan Jun

sorry i missed it

cassette

Zoomin Night

January 13 2017

 Deep down in the dirt floor basement of my heart, I know that what we do here at Buffet of Loathsome is about as capitalist as music scribblin’ gets. Buffet of Loathsome is, after all, about finding the bright slippery nubbins of goodness in an endless steam table of hot garbage—which we only get to do by devouring the whole wretched spectacle. You don’t go to a buffet to dine; you go to gorge, to feel terrible, to be overwhelmed and, ultimately, numbed into stupefied slumber. Sometimes ya boi is so in it, I look around and everything new thing seems already wack. Ain’t nothing new, duh doi. New, as Yan Jun stated in a stellar interview back in ’10, is a lie. “It’s not about possibility, it’s just killing the possibility. Capitalism’s culture is always the same: we are creating a new thing, we are discovering the possibilities of the world, of everything. But this discovery is actually to manage it, to name it, to fix it. After this, no more possibilities. Real possibility means you have to keep something in the unknown, in the mystery, in the chaos.”

So what now? I’m bloated and over it. Toss me another improv record and I’ll shotgun it with an 1/8th” stereo jack, whole thing straight to the dome, no fucks available. Hell, they reproduce so quick, it’ll be a fresh and full in my mitts before I get to the bottom of the first one. It’s the music to listen to when yer listenin to more than one. Boy howdy, another chance to listen to some folks listenin’ to one another. Maybe, stop listenin’ for a sec. People used to complain that playin with Derek Bailey was like playin’ with an algorithm generator; like he wasn’t even in the room with ya. What’s the problem? And what’s the hurry? Yer time and yer hold on it, however insubstantial, is the first thing capitalism wants you to surrender in the name of “making something.”

sorry i missed it is a one hour document of a one hour composition, made on the “living room tour” round about this time last year. Yan Jun on objects in the living room “and in absence.” Ake on violin in the bedroom. Zhu Wenbo on clarinet in the living room and outside. It contains sounds, all at more or less indoor volume. Some seem explicitly musical, some at the edge of obviously musical, and some completely pedestrian and nonchalant. Some seem to have specific things to say, others nothing at all. None of them seem to be directed, in the old school sense, at one another. The listener ain’t King Shit in this world, neither; we’re here and that’s important, but we ain’t at the center. The center shifts and we’re often not invited. It’s both as big as a house and as spread out as roommates nursin’ hangovers. It’s got as little and as much to do with what happens in the composition as what I’m doin’ while it’s playing. It’s communal. It’s welcoming. It’s challenging but friendly. It’s full of unknowns and, five listens in, damn good surprises. Which is to say, I think it’s damned extraordinary, even in a body of work as toe-to-tip bangin’ as Yan Jun’s. Thanks for remindin’ me, at least for an hour, that it’s good to just get the check and leave with yer craw intact and yer gut under control.

This is still available!

Matthew Revert

Illness Seminars

cassette

No Rent Records NRR48, ltd 100 copies

April 9 2017

 Hazy, clammy, and quivering missive here what crept into my den like a blanket that soaked up one too many fevers. I reckon this was recorded while Revert was down with the flu. Ya ever scrub through a tutorial on YouTube about some such and find yourself 26min in, befuddled and scramblin back and forth, tryin to figure how the dude got a pencil to turn into a werewolf? What was this tutorial about again? Thought it was an upholstery TedTalk—well shit, I lost track after homie swallowed his lavalier mic. As a feller perpetually backtracking to figure out what the fuck happened five minutes ago, I feel like somebody snuck up behind my brain and tapped it on the shoulder meat. Kept thinkin about sickness throughout this, too: how when you're in the thick of it, it seems like it's everywhere. Gotta change the sheets...ugh, gotta flush yer guts...gotta dunk the DVD remote in bleach..gotta deep clean the deep clean... It gets uncomfortably close; makes ya feel small, hurried and flat. And gotdamn the noises. Was that the cat or the gurgle and sphloot of hot lung butter? Was that a gulp of room temp city water or a snot bubble takin its first tentative leap into the world? Every hole has a squelch all its own, don’t it? Tis a rare treat what aims my waves at such a dislocation--and with such dialed-in precision. Not so much about being sick as it is a thoughtful and uncomfortable replication of the feeling in the listener, Illness Seminars yanked me in and out of my body like a preacher 9 snorts deep into the sacramental hooch. Pass me the snake oil while the pan is still rippin' hot. Here’s lookin up yer neck hole!

This is the first Revert release we’ve yet peeped here at Buffet of Loathsome but I am certain twill not be the last ‘un. Pretty sure this is still available irl? If not, there’s plenty digital--but you’ll miss the sweet wrappings, also courtesy Matthew Revert.

Lea Bertucci

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

cassette

NNA Tapes NNA097

2017

Lea Bertucci’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is at once meditative and disorienting, restrained and spacious -- warbling drones and squeals that slowly build into brief moments of bombastic and abrasive atmosphere. Bertucci slowly mounts undertones of unease shaping a vast space which is often desolate, as if the music itself takes up a small amount of the open space it creates.

Listening to this record I find my mind placed in a soundscape that is not at all inviting but still demands attention. I can’t say why, but some detail of these compositions makes them as encapsulating as they are uncomfortable. The unorthodox use of common orchestral instruments (at times paired with tape collage) provides organic tone in a wholly inorganic experiment, and this provides a comfort with the work’s atmosphere, despite the unsettling mood of the piece. The abrasive qualities of this music seem to be somewhat of a side-effect of the composition however. It is Bertucci’s exploration of sound in space that truly drives this music and her scientific approach to acoustics, which led her to record two double bass players performing as they walked across a 50,000 square foot room on “Double Bass Crossfade.” This attention to detail and acoustics means that All That Is Solid retains academic sensibilities even in its disarray, a reflection of Bertucci’s classical training, which bleeds together with her desire to experiment and her affinity for magnetic tape.

As someone who usually enjoys the warmer and psychedelic sides of ambient/drone/experimental (whatever this is) music, All That Is Solid was uncharted territory for me. With my limited exposure to similar music in mind, I still think that Bertucci achieves an atmosphere and experience here that is hers. She somehow succeeds in balancing a mathematical approach to composition, explores the negative emotion that drives abrasive music, and creates a very physical soundscape simultaneously. For fans of experimental, noise, or the like, this is a must listen. And check out the link below for a cool interview which provides insight into Bertucci as a person and composer.

-Andrew Maloney

Dan Melchior

Home of the Blues

LP

Kye

2016

How’s it that there ain’t nary a consonant nor vowel on the Internet about this release? I usually dig about beforehand, just seein whether I’m missing some key element or background info; investigate what the Greek choruses are hollerin back and what have you. Not a peep. What happened? Was everybody too gummed up in the sticky nightmare of last year to notice?

Shame, that, cuz Dan’s Ohio Period (or should I call it The Gray Period?) produced some fine records. Home of the Blues prolly ain’t a “fan-shedder” like Excerpts and Half-Speeds, his last outing on Kye, but it’s just as deep a dunk in the man’s dome pool. I don’t mean just in terms of the inner workings of his craft but his literal interiors. The bod and the abode. Shit, that’s where the blues lives anyhoo. Whatever ain’t guitar, tape or prerecorded music here seems to be bodily or domestic: claps, slaps, close-mic’d mouths, kitchen scrubbins, wood planks, scissors. Hell, the lyrics to “Mouse Stash” are quite literally soaked with malfunctioning bodies and parts thereof. Whether this was a theme in the “series of exercises” he was given to make this record, or he was dropped like a newbie soldier into the wilds of Dayton with nothing but his skivvies and a crumpled picture of Elmore James, I have no earthly notion. But damn do the shoe fit. There is also an overwhelming loneliness and isolation at work here; a man penned in and making do; snappin bits off the brittle edge of the day and tryin to have a laugh with them. Or at them. (But never at us. That’s one of Dan’s gifts: he never sics the shadows on us.) Don’t get much more relevant than that.

Ok fine: Index and Anton Heyboer meet in Ivor Cutler’s Scotch sitting room. There. I did my arcane music mathematics. Happy now? Zat make you wanna hear this? Great. And hey it’s still around! With a poster! Hurrah and hurray and hurry whydontcha?

Now back to yer regularly scheduled tepidity.

Sarah Hennies

Everything Else

cassette

No Rent Records

October 2016

 Taken me a minute to get words around this thing. I listened to it 5 or 6 times today and probably 20 times total since I first got a digital version two months ago. I’m no stranger to Sarah Hennies’s music or the journey it has taken over the last decade or so. There’s still a lot of physical labor involved in the performance, but the days of The Drum Roll That Wouldn’t Die seem to be behind her. The work itself has also shifted; I feel like a lot of what I hear during “Falsetto,” the first composition on this tape, is not so much the assortment of cheap bells but those peals bouncing around in my ears. This is otoacoustics, you betcha, but presented without a trace of the clinical distance. So it’s not just a respectful, almost romantic, treatment of neglected instruments, and an engagement with how literally handled they are; it is a shift of otoacoustic stimuli from the chill of the doctor’s office to the worn metal shelves of Goodwill.

Then again, Western music has been dumping percussion on the sidewalk for ages and experimental music traditions haven’t been any kinder. It’s less like experimental folks dislike rhythm as much as they’re afraid of it and what it might do to them. Maybe…someone will dance? Not only is all that pretentious horseshit, it’s corny, phony and counterproductive. This side of the fence is supposed to be for freaks. Historically speaking, percussion in Western music is pretty fucking freaky. (For example: watch a clip of King Crimson in 1973 and tell me Jamie Muir, bare-chested in a fur vest, birds nesting in his beard, coach whistle in his pencil-thin lips, hopping about, isn’t the only one having a really good time.) As a percussionist at this point in Western music history, Hennies has a lot of heavy lifting to do. After all this time, we’ve still barely even defined percussion. But the position of the queer artist, especially one looking to address queer issues compositionally, is hardly any different. Getting the cis-world to see where the fuck you’re coming from about anything is hard fucking work and—like percussion—often overlooked and thankless. Been to a show lately? By the time I’m done counting hetero white dudes in black t-shirts I’ve missed the opening act. It’s like I blundered into an MMA exhibition by mistake. I could drown you in paragraphs about how mad this shit makes me: the danger of lonely white men moving in herds.

That Hennies confronts these crowds and these topics with emotional availability makes perfect sense and is all the more astounding for it. These aren’t thunderous, overwhelming compositions. They are sometimes intense, but they aren’t angry; they’re resolute. “Everything Else” is like Hennies gathering up the tools of education (typewriter, paper, stapler, cheap membranophones) and claiming them in the name of her craft. She’s quite literally taking y’all to school. And, to be fair, all of these objects and instruments technically qualify as percussion: they require touch and vibration. But it never would have occurred to me to think of them as such, never mind the conceptual implications of using them together and in this context. Did I mention it’s also fun and engaging—even if it is, as the label states, “seemingly without direction”? (There is definitely something holding it all together, I’m just too crowded upstairs to get it.)

These can still be had, which is crazy. Go get one. Go get your ass schooled. Highly recommended.

Secret Stairways

Enchantment of the Ring

cassette

self-released

1997

Secret Stairways is the dungeon synth project of the late Matthew Davis of Baldwinville MA. His first tape, Enchantment of the Ring, originally recorded in 1997, will soon be reissued on the Ancient Recollections label, and excels in both its musical storytelling and emotional quality. Simultaneously providing fantastical narration through its melodies as well as a sense of intimacy with its creator’s depressive state, this tape retains the magical and medieval atmosphere its genre demands, but feels so much more personal than many of its counterparts. Perhaps the recording’s personal air comes from the handwritten liner notes that detail small glimpses into the author’s life, or knowing the proceeds of his bandcamp releases go to Mount Auburn Cemetery (“a place Matthew enjoyed wandering in”). Either way, the imagery on Enchantment of the Ring seems inspired as much by the beauty of its composer’s surroundings as it is by fabricated places. Its ethereal synths reflecting the babbling streams and silent snowfalls of Massachusetts, as much as mythical lands, filtered through one individual’s melancholy.

Listeners familiar with dungeon synth are sure to appreciate this exceptional work in the genre, and I think that there is appeal here for fans of ambient music and scores as well. While there are dungeon tropes throughout Davis’ compositions, particularly in the percussion, they seem to also take inspiration from a larger well of more accessible electronic recordings. But what makes this release so affecting isn’t the fact that sonically it transcends the tight confines of its genre. Instead its uniqueness is derived from the small but intense portrait it paints of Matthew Davis.

Enchantment of the Ring stands as one of those lost musical treasures that motivates you to keep on digging for more. A recording that imparts a visceral experience from another’s imagination, and a unique one at that. A true gem. This is not one to miss. Don’t forget to read the liner notes.

--Andrew Maloney

available May 2017

Ancient Recollections (US): [email protected]

Tour de Garde (CAN): https://t-d-g.net/

Obscure Dungeon (FRA): https://obscuredungeonrecords.com/

Unborn Productions (NOR): http://unbornprod.limitedrun.com/

Manuel Calurano

Ciclos sonorous

digital release (flac/mp3)

Impulsive Habitat IHab123

2017

 I keep thinking about the opening sequence of Sokurov’s Spiritual Voices: the 40-minute-long, seemingly static shot of a Russian beach that fades seamlessly from season to season while someone talks affectionately about classical music. I’m thinking about this because I am an idiot. When faced with the subject of time, I fall like many into a vat of gooey platitudes about eternity, impermanence, and frailty and never climb out. What I affectionately think of as being “discursive” is really a feeble attempt to drag something massive and unknowable down into my media dungeon and poke it until it looks like something I can stuff into a CD player.

It sucks being wrong all the time, even when it means I get to learn shit. Sometimes I just wanna feel like I “get it,” partly because there is cultural and social pressure, even in this corner of the sound world, to do so; partly because it sounds fun and easy; and partly because I know enjoying something isn’t always enough, especially for a writer. After ten years of writing about music and sounds and whatever you wanna call all this, I don’t feel like I’m any closer to “getting it” than when, in 2008, I described Salmon Run as sounding like a summer house full of drunk ghosts. Or when the year before I compared Blues Control’s Puff to a submarine named the USS Ritchie Blackmore sinking slowly into the Hudson River. Do I have what it takes to tackle sound art and field recording and experimental compositions and all that? Or am I yet again over-thinking it? Is it really any more complicated than writing about yet another band that adores the Stooges or The Velvet Underground?

Which is to say, and to bring it back ‘round, is this album actually about time? Or does it just use its tools to build something outside of time? Or is just a pretty and emotive album of recordings in nature and I’m a fucking nitwit? I can say with certainty that this album deals with the plasticity of time; how subjective our experience of it is and how a wide array of stimuli retard or enhance our experience of time. It is also a pretty album full of birds and flowing water and most if not all of the heady crew of nature sounds one comes to expect of an album like this. And in the spirit of digital formats, it literally stretches our experience of “album time”, clocking in at 2hr35min29sec—which I love. I’m perpetually over-stimulated but also prone to hyper-focus so by all means drown me in your recordings. Make it take all day. Fuck it, make it take all week! It’s the safest way to ensure I will pay attention. I will also report it is easy to digest in smaller portions if you don’t have huge swaths of listening time.

Chris Lynn

Qixia

digital release (flax/mp3)

Impulsive Habitat IH127

2017

How do people breathe in Qixia? If I open my mouth to yawn in Qixia, how much sound do I inhale? Straight away we’re dropped into the spongy humidity of “Nanjing Railway Station at Night”. Echoes, engines, exhaust fans, and even the familiar squeal of brakes get ensnared in a great gray fog, carried away as quickly as it came by the barbarian clod of an oncoming train. The train, too, seems more like a mirage—it is practically upon us, and then is merely a shimmering hiss. These shifts in activity and density (active/headyàimposingàsparse/faintàtonalàetc) keep me engaged but apart. Either I’m departing or this station is. Or both. People can be transient, just like spaces. But can people be transient spaces? In a way, Qixia feels more concerned with what it is to be passed through than what it is to be somewhere. I hear a “Soft Shower”—where? On what? It seems to be coming from inside my head; or when I hear my partner grind her teeth in her sleep; like it’s raining inside a very small room. Everything is translucent and permeable, but no more recognizable. Even the birds seem artificial; their songs erupting like pedestrian traffic signals. Thousands of insects get caught in eddies of distant, powerful weather. Or is it the hum of the city? Cicadas or power lines? Lynn’s work obfuscates the artificial and the organic. It’s an effect that is at once nerve-wracking and incredibly familiar. I do feel with absolute certainty that Lynn has really listened to these places. Even the tracks that initially feel like simple illustrations turn out to be incredibly detailed. The richness of sound in “Empty Boat on Xuanwu Lake,” as it bobs and gulps in the waves, is totally hypnotic. In someone else’s hands it might simply be charming or pastoral. Even the fucking rain is interesting. The final track, recorded in Qixia Temple, moves toward and away from us like a wick of flame, but the percussion seems as fixed as the sun, and always right there.

C. Reider

Anent

digital release (flac/mp3)

Impulsive Habitat IH126

2017

Anent feels like a cabinet with fourteen drawers: there is the sense that everything within belongs together but separate. Nothing exotic, just life’s junk dumped out on the living room carpet and stirred about with a forked stick. “Listening events recorded either with zoom H4n or iPhone 4. Mostly 2015-2016, though 'Sky Puppet' is from 2013.” Sounds dryer than a diner pork chop, but it ain’t. It’s fun and weird, richly textured, and occasionally startling. Some tracks feel heavily worked; “Roofers,” for example, feels like it’s been recorded by a stowaway in the belly of a ship everyone else is ditching. The urgency is palpable and, appropriately, unresolved. Others like “Mysterious phone message,” don’t seem to be processed or edited much at all, and yet still come out sounding like, in this case, a xenomorphic cellphone drowning in its own caustic saliva. (Block that number, would ya?) I guess I’m supposed to call these tracks “studies” but “stares” seem more appropriate: Reider’s focus on domestic sounds and events widens, contracts, and finally blurs until what he thinks he saw now seems to be something else entirely. And then he blinks—which is to say, my only complaint here is that some tracks felt a little short. The website had me stoked for two 14+ minute tracks (what can I say; music is a lifelong, crippling fucking addiction) but they’re mislabeled. But whatever; this album is fun as hell. And anyhow, Reider’s previous release for IH, Odio con Plomo (recommended!), stretches out in all directions. And if that ain’t enough, your boy’s got a big discography and a label of his very own.

Luís Antero

O Rio / The river vol. 4

flac/mp3

Impulsive Habitat IH125

2017

This is the 4th in Antero’s O Rio project which started way back in IH038; a series which “document[s] the sounds of the river Alvoco, a 37km stretch of water that begins its journey in the Serra da Estrela and ends when it becomes one with the river Alva.” The components of all previous volumes have been somewhat elemental: water, weather, metal, animal, and human. This is the first volume to feature music composed by Antero, rather than bits here and there recorded in situ with locals. I have mixed feelings about this. The music is pretty and rather delicate and perfectly fine by itself, but lacks the raw, centrifugal force of the field recordings and consequently comes off as decorative. Seen in the context of the project overall, the music makes this volume feel incongruous—more like a quaint piece of radio journalism than a subjective sound composition. That said, the flow of this release is beautiful, as are the recordings themselves, and there are some inspired transitions that feel effortless.

Welp, Impulsive Habitat dropped five new albums and I’m plowing through them. Bandcamp kinda centralized online music culture and left netlabels out in the wilderness. Let’s give em a bite to eat and a bed for the night, shall we?

 A.J. Holmes Robin Hood Gardens Tour

flac/mp3

Impulsive Habitat IH124

2017

 First up is Mr. Holmes’s Robin Hood Gardens Tour, a 70-min mix of recordings made in the soon-to-be-demo’d titular public housing estate designed by the British couple who brought you Brutalism. I leaned in, expecting the sort of spotlit textural studies and concrete edits that seem to be the craze in site-specific soundwork of late, but got something else entirely. I got a ghost. I got a building dreaming rather than a building dying: dreaming of itself as stone, moss, wood and wind. The spaces (meaning the slow, vaporous transitions between recordings) feel translucent; gossamer. The endless eerie fog of nearby traffic never rolls in and never recedes. Airplanes cut the air like a rough fingertip turning a page. When humans do appear (Holmes and a kid trying to get his lost ball back) they’re loud, confused, and communicate poorly. Sounds about right to me.

Gabi Losoncy

Judgement cd-r

caduc. recordings 2016

Gabi Losoncy

2015 quadruple cd-r

self-released 2016

I hate the phrase ‘field recording’ almost as much as 'experimental’–cuz what recording isn’t all of the above in one way or another? A mic in a space somewhere; somebody seeing if something 'works’. Sounds like sound-gathering to me. So let’s skip all of that. Losoncy passes through the world with a smartphone like the rest of us, but engages her surroundings and her device better than most. What to us might’ve been a rough night around town instead is churned up into a maelstrom of ripping wind, swarms of cops, a lost and smothered voice in the distance, and a final stop at a gallows clanging bell-like in the thick gray sky. Losoncy’s walk is audible and it ain’t no stroll. She damn-near takes flight at times. Whether it’s into or away from the chaos remains nicely oblique. A glancing wound; a wound from glances. I popped the disc out feeling cold, displaced, and abandoned, which are all fine by me. Keeps me sharp.

If you were quick enough, you caught Losoncy’s 4x cd-r set “2015” before it peaced out. After a few listens I’ve come to dig it even more than Judgement. They share means of production but 2015 runs in all directions with em: from goofy encounters with strangers after a community college shooting; to quiet lonely spaces to a pair of performances that seem to ideologically link Phillip Best, sound poetry, and motivational  speaking. Losoncy’s public encounters often put me in mind of Jean Rhys’ Good Morning Midnight and Voyage In the Dark, wherein displaced heroines find theater, absurdity, commiseration and revulsion in the company of strangers. Everywhere is safe and nowhere is safe. Hooray and cheers to that!