Grain
(Zarek) Used CD $5.00
The “first track is one of Rowe’s liveliest performances for several years,” asserts The Wire, while “the second track finds him in more customary static mode, with Beins sounding like he’s arc-welding as a distant thunderstorm subsides into an eerie metallic calm. Beins’s work is more about friction than percussion: his masterly use of polystyrene blocks and small stones to create sustained timbres seems to have no precedent, except perhaps AMM’s Eddie Prévost, of course. The final live track is a tour de force: at first Rowe seems content to lead from the rear, his radio emerging imperceptibly from behind a cloud of cymbals, before he gradually warms up and unleashes a volley of dazzling rattles and buzzes while Beins’s close-mic’d bass drum cranks up the tension.” From 2001
Quatervois Four-track Magnetic Tape Arrangements
(Zarek) Used CD $8.00
2004 reissue of Cincinnati resident Ron Orovitz’s killer sound collage (Drone Disco 2001), who has been using unusual sound sources and layering them into rather dense and industrial etudes of found sound since the late 1980s, when tape and turntable manipulations were the medium. Scientific instruments such as tone generators eventually became a favorite tool, as well as the fashioning of various “procussion” instruments (utilizing fire-works). The recordings here demonstrate some of these characteristics as composed and processed stochastically.
Petit Pale
(Zarek - 05) Used CD $5.00
Arid, abstract, and cerebral, Schick’s live electronics and Neumann’s “inside-piano” converge somewhere between British free improv, German electronics-based improv, and electroacoustics. Occasional bursts of metallic sounds shaped like a human gesture, glitches, lo-fi electronics, and noise come together nicely.
Tabit
(Zarek) Used CD $3.00
“Growling electronic bitterness seeps out of Schick and fills up the room, like exhaust fumes in a suicide garage,” comments Sound Projector. Using wires, piezos, contact mics, digital and analog feedback, mixing board noises and hiss, overdriven bass filters, distorted no-input, fast-forwarded footage, extreme high frequency manipulation, distorted ground, Tabit is “dominated by nagging, rumbling drone, which resembles the sound of an electronic outboard motor…. Tabit is a dark and urban recording, blighted with many symptoms of the evil side of 21st century life – overwork, stress, insomnia, weight problems, loneliness … recognise yourself in any of the above snapshots?” From 2000