Oct 5, 2015
Karen Gwyer - Waukon From her debut LP 'Needs Continuum' (2013)
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Karen Gwyer - Waukon From her debut LP 'Needs Continuum' (2013)
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Karen Gwyer - Sugar Tots
Karen Gwyer - Some Of My Favourite Lotions (In Fields Remix) - another long electronic track - I could listen to this all night. From Needs Continuum Remix EP II.
Karen Gwyer - Needs Continuum
Karen Gwyer é uma norte americana a viver em Londres. Needs Continuum é o seu primeiro álbum e o seu segundo lançamento a seguir ao EP I've Been You Twice, de 2012. Eletrónica de fácil domesticação; a entrada é directa e sem grandes ou nenhumas complicações, tudo o que Karen Gwyer faz é pintado a cores mornas num atelier acolhedor.
Do equilíbrio nasce um exotismo que parece querer explodir sem que haja estilhaços espalhados - a música vai aparecendo, lentamente, discretamente, com aquela intensidade de quem quer passar despercebido. Ideias simples para resultados simples: Karen Gwyer não precisa de complicar quando a sua arte é feita de coisas tão imediatas. As camadas com voz são pura brisa, acentuam um lado mais intimista num mundo de sintetizadores amigos. As melodias vão tendo um toque familiar que convida à repetição, são quentes. “Trapezoidal Weekly”, “Lentil”, “Waukon”, “Jajja Uses Ancestral Spirit”: nomes enigmáticos para faixas enigmáticas. Está-se numa zona nublosa onde o marulhar sonoro é constante, aceite-se este relaxamento e já tudo passa a valer a pena. Needs Continuum não cria memórias eternas, é uma experiência de baixa energia que sobressai ao não querer sobressair. Não há monotonia na música de Karen Gwyer, por mais pacíficas e controladas que as suas peças sejam. É esse o espaço ideal para alguém que cria um shoegaze eletrónico: evitar a uniformidade irritante. Uma viagem com vários momentos interessantes, portanto.
Song of the Day #70
Karen Gwyer - "Pikku-Kokki" (Needs Continuum, 2013)
I had never heard of Karen Gwyer and had no idea what type of music she made; I listened to this purely because of the fascinating album cover and title. In fact I think I knew I'd love this album before I'd heard a single note - and I was delighted that that same enigmatic aura I was feeling comes across in her music too. It is designed around subconsciousness, liminality - it's an excellent example of what I've described as "hypnagogic music", set to what her press release describes as a "bath house" beat.
Gwyer's synths have a "binaural" quality to them, perhaps (I'm no expert). I'm reminded of Ethernet, whose album Opus 2 I reviewed earlier in the year, as an example of music being crafted almost scientifically with regard to the potential therapeutic qualities of sound waves - Ethernet wrote his thesis on "binaural beats" and uses them in his music. There's something of that on Needs Continuum, in that it's essentially headphone music (she makes full use of effects in stereo), and it's trance-like, delicately-honed to be comforting - but there's something subversive there too, and I think Gwyer is engaging with that gap between objectively soothing tones and the subjective cerebral effect of her music.
In that "hypnagogia" article I talked about kaleidoscopic music and the subliminal mental state of "hypnagogia", which you experience sometimes just before you go to sleep as a myriad of weird, half-imagined shapes and colours, and sometimes sounds. In her videos, especially for "Night Nails" (there's a video for "Pikku-Kokki" too which is similar) she presents kaleidoscopic visual effects which are very reminiscent of hypnagogia, and slowly adds layers until the shapes become indistinct. A white rectangle in the middle of the picture flashes obtrusively on every beat, disturbing the tranquility of the whirring images, framing a snapshot of that kaleidoscope for a moment and pulsating there. Gwyer's music does that too - there's that problem of music reflecting a mental state, but also being necessarily framed, selected, and once recorded, constant: what made the mental state so fascinating is that it was not framed, so how to pin it down? Her music is full of ambiguity but necessarily constrained by structure, and I think her videos are wonderful visual metaphors for that struggle.
On "Pikku-Kokki" she overlays that ambience with a whispered, indistinct vocal part. You can hear stray phrases - "drink water", "it's you" (it's all recognisably English) - but largely it's just stray syllables. It reminds me of Grouper's Dream Loss (my favourite Grouper record), and also previous SotD "Close Chorus" in that respect - you can hear the edges of words rather than the words themselves. That it sounds like some warm, hermetic emnation bears especial significance: Gwyer recorded this album while pregnant with her first child. I'm reminded of scientific studies (like this one) of how babies begin language acquisition while still in the womb. Perhaps one reason why we respond to music so emotionally (and so inexpressibly) is because sound is the first of the five senses we ever experience. Gwyer suggests that psychic link back to womblike pre-knowledge - comforting, but a little uncanny too.
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Ann Arbor roots, represent! Chilled out electronica to soothe heavy spirits. My one question at the moment — was she the one who used the label "bath house"? Hah...hahah.
Buy CD/LP: http://nopaininpop.greedbag.com/buy/needs-continuum/ Karen Gwyer - Needs Continuum 25/02/2013 No Pain In Pop Karen Gwyer – a US-born Londoner – makes slow-burning and sexy “bath house”. Needs Continuum – her debut album, following a 2012 EP on fellow No Pain In Pop artist patten’s own Kaleidoscope label – is a thrillingly unique and intuitive experience. Composed and recorded in the months before the birth of her first child, the record is both a product and champion of immutable, organic cyclical rhythms and disorientating psycho-physical disequilibria. Amongst idiosyncratic, treacle-thick reinterpretations of classic house and digital-psychedelia there are elements of Fuck Buttons or Cabaret Voltaire, fellow Ann Arborite Laurel Halo’s deconstructed-Detroit King Felix project, and Arthur Russell’s emotionally excavating avant-disco. Reference points are dropped throughout, yet it’s simultaneously clear the singular influence on the record is Gwyer herself. As per the title’s neat phrasing, the record is a bridge between memory, experience and a lifetime-wide progression; a defining record of a period rendered in sublime and original musical form. So who better to explain than Gwyer herself..? : Me: My childhood was spent first in Iowa, then Ann Arbor, Michigan. Both my parents were cellists, and I spent many hours as a kid sat in empty concert halls during their rehearsals, which I loved. I plugged away at the cello, violin, then the viola for years, but it was all a bit half-hearted, as I was busy barking up other trees. Amidst all the Brahms, Chopin and Shostakovich at home, I think I horrified my folks when I started watching The New Dance Show, a low-budget house music dance program on Detroit TV. It was the late 80s and early 90s, and the show featured local dancers busting some serious moves to heavy house and techno classics (now). You couldn't see or hear anything like that on MTV, which back then was still all music all the time, and it was the start of a huge love of techno and dance music. The seeds of the Midwest noise scene were beginning to sprout when I was in high school, and that was all very wild and heady. But I was desperate to get out of Ann Arbor, and I moved to New York at 17 to find the last vestiges of that era of house culture being buffed away, to be replaced by years of tepid guitar-themed tedium. Eventually winding up in London, I finally came back around to making music. Fast-forward a few years, and I was operating under the looming deadline of childbirth during the making of this album. The months just before having my little boy were so loaded with anticipation, nerves and thrill. I went into overdrive recording, just trying to make something that measured up to the significance of the start of a new life. Or lives, actually. Big influences: Nico / Ethiopian Amhara wedding songs / The Somali band Dur-Dur / Early 80s Malian groove / Suicide / Thomas Leer / Matthew Young / Arthur Russell / Tuxedomoon / UR. Shake Shakir / The Belleville Three / Dennis Brown / The Twinkle Brothers / Barrington Levy / Fattis Burrell Description of my music: Labyrinthine plasmic pulsations
