The truth is I have no idea who the people on this recording are, and I don’t speak Icelandic, so I didn’t want to damage the fabric, but I wanted to set it, make a really nice frame for it. “I didn’t want to abstract it so much that it lost its essential quality. In working with the tapes, Rabelais was very careful to preserve much of the sound and shape of the originals – giving some of the tracks, such as the lovely track 5 an almost Duchamp-like “found” quality - they sound barely touched, hardly “compositions” at all by most people’s standards. After discovering the neglected tapes, cleaning them up and digitizing them for a library, Rabelais became fascinated with the heartbreaking sadness of the voices and began to think of them as source material for a series of compositions. Shard: fragments, of voices, of ideas, of memories, of the past, brought back to life again.Īs with his earlier release, Eisotrophobia (Ritornell, 2001), in which LA based electronic composer Akira Rabelais transformed recordings of Erik Satie and others, Spellewauerynsherde is built up from found sounds, in this case, a series of field recordings of traditional Icelandic accapella songs recorded in the late 1960s or early 1970s on Ampex tapes and then forgotten about. ![]() Wavering: the shivering of those voices as they dissolve and recombine in Rabelais’ rich filtering systems, turning into pulsating, frequency rich drones. Spell as in speaking, incantation, a digitally constructed matrix of words and voices, summoning up a strange, distant past. (Originally published in Signal to Noise, 2006) As post-colonialist critic Gayatri Spivak says, there are “no guarantees”. Easy to write off as cultural appropriations, these kinds of experiments, whether from Sublime Frequencies or the Boredoms can also be seen as attempts at engagement with other cultures and traditions. One thinks of Jon Hassell circa Aka-Darbari-Java and his fourth world music, an idea whose time may finally have come – musical techniques, practices, from all across the map, converging in sustained tones, without being absorbed into New Age universalizing sludge. Zimbabwean thumb pianos, guitar lines out of King Sunny Ade, vocal chants and horns that sound like Jajouka – still you would not call this a “hot” sound. There’s something very moving, very much alive about this. While Amon Duul really was a collective, Bird Show feels more Apollonian and introspective, like a digital reconstruction of a traditional music – or a community dreamt up in a bedroom. Many of the tracks are built on percussion jams which sound like Psychedelic Underground era Amon Duul I – as does the lo-fi home studio production. But Vida’s evident fascination with mutant folk cultures and the world of traditional ecstatic trance producing musics has deepened on Lightning Ghost, which is the product of a year of playing live. A list on the CD cover included the following: “The Fall”, Chris Marker’s film remarkable meditation on time and place, “Sans Soleil”, David Tibet, Areski and Brigitte Fontaine, Werner Herzog and Robert Wyatt: tough acts to follow. ![]() Green Inferno, the group’s first Kranky release from 2005 was a beautiful but relatively placid disk, mixing environmental recordings from Japan and Puerto Rico with warm drones and Arthur Russell-style intimate vocals. A case in point is Bird Show, a project of Chicago’s Town and Country member Ben Vida. ![]() Kranky continues to be a one stop shopping resource for contemporary drone based music, a genre which has developed beyond the clichés of ambient music in ways that surprise and delight.
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