26/05/2024
Tonight, Modulisme takes over our radioshow with two episodes: Illusion of Safety & Allen Ravenstine. Tune in, Urgent.fm 21-23h
Since 1983, on the labels Complacency, Die Stadt, Experimedia, Odd Size, Silent, Soleilmoon, Staalplaat, Tesco, Korm, Drone, no part of it, and Waystyx, Burke and his conspirators – under the Illusion Of Safety banner – have traversed over the course of 40+ full length releases. Almost every facet of the avant sound plane, from early industrial pop deconstruction, to blindingly minimal sound art, to densely surreal found-sound collage, each unique approach bending and reconstituting the expectations and possibilities of each realm. Plowing through layered field recordings, deeply rumbling tones, and eerie electroacoustic sounds with seamless transitions between cut-and-paste collages and manufactured drones, it’s easy to get lost in the deep passages.
It’s a surreal trip mixing outsourced sounds from all over the world and encompassing everything: abstract analogue synthesizer explorations, chaotic digital noise and voltage fluctuations, generating excitement in the bowels of analog equipment, raucous guitar improvisation, rattle and chilling moan of iron sheets, the creaking floorboards, resonances, fluctuations, scraps of samples is in perpetual motion background.
Driven with all this by some miracle , the author creates a monumental music! Nervous, anxiety-soaked, but at the same time, disturbing & attention-grabbing, creating a powerful hypnotic effect……. The sounds scatter in all directions, like circles on the water, but at the same time, remain the basis of a continuous, almost ritual, form easily detectable, or, conversely, only slightly palpable.
Performing over 300 live concerts throughout Europe and the states included No Fun 2008, the Wroclaw Industrial Music Festival 2009, Sonic Circuits in 2010, with Shen Wei Dance Arts in 2011 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, and at the Crisis Data Transfer Pre-Party October 2023. Outside of IOS Burke has collaborated with Jim O’Rourke, Jon Mueller, Randy Greif, Darin Gray, Z’EV, Cheer-Accident, Thomas Dimuzio, Kevin Drumm, Bill Horist, and others.
Allen Ravenstine was a key figure in the developing art and music scene in Cleveland in the early 70s. Working alone with an early analogue synthesizer, sans keyboard, and a four track tape recorder, he made a series of compositions.
In 1975, one of those compositions titled Terminal Drive got him invited to join a group that was forming called Pere Ubu. That group’s membership changed over the years and eventually included Mayo Thompson who had founded the group Red Crayola in Texas in the 1960’s. During one of Ubu’s breakups, Ravenstine worked for a time in a reformation of Red Crayola both recording and touring. In 1991 he recorded his last album with Ubu and then left music to become an airline pilot.
In 2013, an invitation to contribute to “I Dream of Wires: The Modular Synthesizer Documentary” led to the recording of an impromptu duo performance on the EML-101 and 200 synthesizers, with Robert Wheeler who had replaced him in Pere Ubu. Culled from that session were a pair of albums entitled “City Desk” and “Farm Report”, which were self-released in 2013. The producer of those records, William Blakeney, closely associated with the Electronic Music Foundation, encouraged Ravenstine to return to composing. About a year later, Blakeney produced “The Pharaoh’s Bee”: Ravenstine’s first solo project since the work he had done in the early ‘70s.
On June 29, 2018, Ravenstine released “Waiting for the Bomb” and he and Blakeney have worked together on a series of albums since that time.
The analog abstraction for which Ravenstine became known remains a significant part of his current sound palette, but recent years have seen him turn increasingly toward outlandish eclecticism as his foundation.
