Totally amazing news from the avant-forces of the Ukrainian underground — digital split release from Riasni Drova and Moglæss. Lviv and Kharkiv joining forces. This is the 1st story of 3 untold ones. More to follow ASAP.
Release notes: "Excavated from recordings made in 2010. The Riasni Drova side is angry and single-minded, clearly aiming to encircle and swallow anything that might come its way so that it can become something even larger. The Moglass side, with its two slabs of rough priestly melon dub, does not look for anything else to apply its forces and desires to, as it feels itself to be already as large as an aircraft carrier."
More forest folk paths and blues meadows of the Finnish master. Simple but exceedingly powerful tunes from the places where deep meets wide. These tracks (all unreleased before) were compiled by Keijo himself from misc recordings made between 2009 and 2012.
"The Blues as the expression of a coherent poetics, or the ‘theory’ or how one can explain the meshing of technique with ideas and images, is based on a limited set of principles. “Midnight Truth: Billie Jo relates the bitterness she feels over her Ma's death, her father's indifference and the dust”. In The Blues these principles include the reconciliation of supposed opposites; repetition and variation, improvisation and planning, dialogue and monologue and progression and stasis. These principles all meet in the music of Keijo, with a perpetual memory tuned to The Blues eternally at play. In the music of Keijo dissonant forms communicate with each other; a wailing guitar is surrounded and given fresh meaning from a mass of insect-like pulses xylophone from deep in an imagined summertime forest. Attention to low-fi recording techniques gives a blues harp the scratchy wail of a treasured field recording, while drums and diaphragm-mic vocals bring the listener to some lonely railway siding in the mean summer of 1935. “Out of the Dust: Billie Jo sneaks out in the middle of the night with a little money and a little food.” It’s all the same in the temple of sound. It is not about either/or, it is about the balance and harmony of each part, growing and forming a single auditory space. The shadow and the shake, repeated cycles of sounds that expand outwards into improvised landscapes of color and light. “Gone West: Billie Jo has been on the train for two days. She's burned up and frozen.” There you find the moment of your own listening. It is there that time collapses and everything is true and everything is permitted. But nothing is real. Keijo produces here seven tracks of transportation. We go beyond time, here there is but the sound and how it hits you. This is tinder dry journey folk wandering out of the woods after hard seasons to take their chances on the road or the coast. Where travel and starvation are better than hanging on to hope and having nothing change. By learning the tempo of your own foot fall the heart can be stilled to a relaxed pace and the air becomes easier to breathe. The Blues becomes the rhythm of your body and you are healed; to the earth is born a true one. Shine on."
Originally titled "Freeze Dried Speculative Damnation", this set was originally released as a cassette in 2008 by the Brighton UK based label Archivo De Sangre De Dios. The individual tracks were culled together from past releases and stuff that had until that point, never found a place. Each piece was recorded in a different context, under a variety of circumstances. Due to Accumulated Slacker Syndrome (A.S.S.), the tape had a very limited run & almost no distribution, in fact it was so small that it created a vacuum of negative spacial displacement. What follows is a brief description and explanation of each piece.
Amplified Bible: This piece was recorded in 2002 at my house on Bushwick Place in Brooklyn. It was one of various versions of a piece i was commissioned to make for a film by Jeff Wyckoff. His piece Alpha-Omega (2003) presented a new view of cardiac and tumor tissues through multi photon microscopy, which sends a high wavelength infrared laser into a standard light microscope. And for clarification on the title, Amplified Bible was one of my pal Joe Garcia's mid 80's stoner blues band names. 1049 Willoughby Ave: In 2010 we moved into a new place in Bushwick. There was an ancient burglar alarm system still attached to one of the walls. The device was mainly a mini reel-to-reel tape recorder remotely connected to a trip switch on the front door. This is a direct document of the message that was meant to scare off potential thieves. Throw Ups: In 2008 i did an installation called Slow Burn at Trace Gallery in Cardiff Wales. The gallery director and legendary performance weirdo Andre Stitt was kind enough to let me spend a week drawing and dribbling all over his walls. The culmination was a 5 hour durational performance using my voice, gongs, cymbals, objects and general un-hingedness. This piece is an excerpt of that action recorded on Alex Baggaley's cell phone. Without Aimed: This one was the part of an installation at Transmission Gallery in Glasgow Scotland in 1998. The show consisted of a series of walldrawings done in-situ over a month long residency accompanied by an audio piece played through speakers that were embedded in the walls. The sound piece was presented on a cd played continuously in random shuffle mode. Many of the tracks were silent and of varying length, from a millisecond to multiple minutes. The effect was meant to be jarring and fragmented but perhaps it only caused mild dyspepsia.... Politic of Egg (Live in Berlin): Side B kicks off with a live track recorded at The Politics of Ecstasy Festival in January 2009 at Hebbel Am Uffer in Berlin. The curator Jeremy Wade asked me to participate in the "Speaking in Tongues" night. I always considered what i did to be purely secular and would never consider handling a snake while boogying. On this occasion i used the old time tested group scream routine that I commonly employed in Peeesseye gigs. Eventually ending up in a gray soup flavored cover of Black Flag's You're Not Evil. Cookie's Lament: Similar to Without Aimed, this piece was a single element of a larger sound piece. It was part of an installation at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans in 2001 called Somnambulant Transgression by Remote Control. It was built in a large circular gallery with a ramp that wrapped around its 6 meter high outer walls. The installation included a massive walldrawing of an exploded skull rendered in wood-grained vinyl, a xerox collage of building rubble soufflé wheat pasted to the wall, a silver foil sign with the words LUCIFER RISING in reverse and a wooden fragmented CONQUER DEATH sculpture. All of the letters were scrambled together with interlocking geometry. Stereo speakers were mounted to the sculpture playing the randomized sound piece. The piece starts with the voice of Cookie, a close friend of mine who had been hospitalized in Queens NY for pneumonia but ended up getting a major staff infection and had to have a chunk of his lung removed. Other sound sources include field recordings from The Transit Museum in Brooklyn, frogs in Sumatra, a sound piece in Vienna and radio transmissions from Java and Brooklyn pirate radio pioneers Free103Point9.
"Sindre Bjerga's music, in some ways, including even the typical live set duration, is akin to cleaning your bedroom or washing your dishes — the day-to-day stuff that encourages a viscous or apathetic type of introspection — and he has a practice of staring deep into these states that is both matter-of-factish and voodoo, opening and re-opening unheeded continuums of Huuuumdruum inside the humdrum. There should be a Bjerga release for every new day!"
Recorded live @ Dienstbar event, 91m2 Gallery, Berlin, Germany, March 11th, 2011.
Sindre: "This track is a recording from a Dienstbar event, held at an ad-hoc venue called the 91m2 gallery in a former run-down brewery in Friedrichshain in Berlin. I remember that the music between the sets were way louder than the concerts, which I found to be a bit weird..."
Recorded live @ FSK Studio, Hamburg, Germany, February 22nd, 2012.
Sindre: "This track was recorded at a TTTT Noise cafe event held in the lobby of the independant FSK radio station. The lobby doubles as a small venue. For some reason that is unclear to me now, I set up my gear under the table and sat there for the whole set..."
This Italian project was revealed by Facebook shared link (thanx, Alessandro Iacopini!) and truly made my day much more productive.
Boiling tunes, jazzcore, punch and pies.
