#acidmilk

aka: AcidCarton, AcidChocolate, ChocolateAcid, MilkAcid

Haves a good day uwu I'll ttyl !

The Slovak musician and engineer Jonáš Gruska was 1200 kilometres from home studying at the Institute of Sonology in the Netherlands when he founded Bratislava’s most adventurous record label LOM in 2011. Being so far away, he felt he had the necessary detachment to to hear afresh the familiar sounds he grew up with. “Suddenly I saw the new and experimental Slovak music scene in a different light and gradually started to feel the need to present it to the world,” he recalls. In the relatively short time since his return to Bratislava, he has been uncommonly active. His LOM label has already put out 11 releases, which range from psychedelic folk, noise and glitch attack to sonic meditations and field recording excursions in Syria. And in 2013, he played a big part in ZVŮK, an illegal outdoor festival that took place under a bridge over the River Danube.  Last September the second ZVŮK festival relocated to an abandoned army bunker surrounded by forest several kilometres along the river. The combination of the bunker’s acoustic and aesthetic qualities, and the wild woods all around it, created an unforgettable atmosphere. But ZVŮK, whose subtitle is “sonic blessing festival, really has no fixed abode. It’s the only Slovak festival that leaves behind clubs and other conventional venues to discover forgotten places around Bratislava. In the process ZVŮK encourages listeners and players alike to think nomadically about music and the environs it’s performed in.  As much a sound artist as a musician, Gruska revels in seeking out special sounds that are unique to their location. His works include Kolokoly, a site-specific piece made for a set of bells in Kamenné Square. Another composition, Rúry (translating as Tubes), was composed as part of a series called Site Specific Resonances for a set of ventilation tubes in front of Tržnica, one of Bratislava’s most popular marketplaces. Gruska says: “Every sound played through [the tubes] acquires a special metallic character, based on resonant frequencies of the tubes and the material they are built from.”  Gruska’s combination of wanderlust and natural curiosity brings to mind a local archetype represented by a landmark in Bratislava’s old town centre. It’s a statue of the city’s famous fictional flaneur, known as the Schöner Náci, who has been strolling the streets since the Sarajevo assassination that started the First World War. It’s one of two popular public statues erected in 1997, five years after the split with Czechoslovakia and the founding of the Slovak Republic. Neither of them are modelled on eminent historical figures. The Schöner Náci might be a city walker with the demeanour of a nobleman, but the other is the Čumil, a workman whose bronze head and shoulders appear to be poking out a manhole above a sewer.  If the Schöner Náci mirrors the personality of Gruska, the closest underground equivalent to the Čumil is a musician called VooDooMan, who seems to spend his days well hidden from the sun, and nights in the shadows avoiding the dim light of the city’s street lamps. This hidden observer of Bratislava life has been pretty much working in solitude since the 1990s. Making music that spans endless distances without any easy reference points, it‘s no surprise that LOM have compiled a two hour anthology of his oeuvre, called Voices From Antidimension. Its release confirms Gruska’s aim “to give space and promote underground experimental artists, which in our belief deserve publicity”. The question now is whether the isolated author and bricoleur who is VooDooMan will ever overcome his stage fright and make his live debut.  For anyone seeking to unravel the philosophy of LOM, the VooDooMan anthology possibly isn’t the best place to start. However, the label’s first release Zvukolom serves as an excellent guide. The goal of this compilation, released in 2011, was to introduce LOM and the artists associated with it, and at the same time reveal the label’s one unifying concept: its encouragement of all its artists to shed their sonic limitations.  It’s just such a desire to find subterranean sonic paths that connects VooDooMan, for example, to another mysterious Bratislava project called Amen Tma, formed in 2011 by two characters trading under the names ::.: and acidmilk. “We have a long history of unfinished tracks,”they say, “recordings made during rehearsals for a number of shows cancelled at the last minute. We also played together in the later live incarnations of the ambient group Angakkut, where we started experimenting with polyrhythms, layering and percussive sounds. We were wondering how these things could be sequenced, in both analogue and digital domains, partly because we no longer had any other players to try out the ideas!”  The pair worked together for more than three years on what finally became a record released under the title Insect Phonetics Research. Its post-industrial deconstructions gradually hover to the surface where they’re coupled with the sounds of a local gamelan orchestra and then subject to the manipulations of a monstrous DIY modular synth. Criss-crossing various compositional techniques, Amen Tma create music that sounds mindblowingly complex.  In the final count, the musical range encompassed by the LOM label and festivals like ZVŮK make it difficult to corral all those involved into one specific scene. What’s happening here is more like a spreading spider web of weird connections stretching beyond Bratislava and Slovakia’s borders to eventually hook up with like-minded souls all over Eastern Europe.