11/01/2024
some words via Vital Weekly about 5 recent Chocolate Monk titles. Still copies available.
POINTS OF FRICTION - SPRINKLE OF BLUNDER (CD by Chocolate Monk)
DURNAL BURDENS & MATT ATKINS - FUTILE PHANTOMS (CDR by Chocolate Monk)
MARIJA KOVA?EVI? & RORO PERROT - PUSH BROKEN DUET (CDR by Chocolate Monk)
IVY NOSTRUM - PACE-DELVE (CDR by Chocolate Monk)
KAREN CONSTANCE - POSITIVELY SUSAN (CDR by Chocolate Monk)
In terms of sheer persistence, going against various grains is the UK label Chocolate Monk. They go back some thirty years now, releasing cassettes when they were not 'hot' at all, and an extensive portion of their catalogue is CDR releases, a medium that I like and which, I think, isn't 'hot' either. Points Of Friction's release is the 600th
release on the label (or instead graced with catalogue number choc.600), and maybe that's the reason why this is a pro-pressed CD. They were a four-piece group (Joseph Hammer, Mitchell Brown, Tim Alexander and Damian Bisciglia; the latter passed away in 2012), having started in 1980. These recordings are from late 2011. It's hard to believe, but this is the group's fourth release. There is little information on the cover, and Seymour Glass' text on the label's firmly under-designed website mentions the presence of tape loops, a synthesiser, lots of objects, prepared instruments, toys, 'hot-wired and damaged goods', and it says sessions individually recorded and played back and made decisions as what is a finished piece or not. If that's how it worked, I am unsure of the exact process. The music is relatively free fall of sounds, mostly loosely connected and sometimes held together by one or two threads, loops, some feedback or a drone of some kind. The music doesn't force itself upon
the listener; it's a continuous stream of sound, more or less on a similar dynamic level, but with many changes within due to the multiple sound sources they use. The music is very much improvised, but with the studio as the instrument holding it all together, it is a different kind of musique concrète, if you will. It is a most enjoyable release, with some wonderfully weird and powerful music, relaxing yet full of just below-the-surface tension, occasionally erupting.
The other four new releases by Chocolate Monk are all on CDR. I started with one that I instantly recognised, a name that is. Diurnal Burdens is Ross Scott-Buccleuch, one of the half Liminal Haze and Steep Gloss label bosses. He plays "Nobsrine, Kastle 1.5 looper, passive ring mod, dictaphone, sampler, modular processing and effects pedals" on the five pieces he recorded with Matt Atkins, a busy bee both solo and in collaboration, and he plays "cassette recorders, looper, objects and field recordings". Their
solo work specialises in putting forward obscured atmospherical sounds of the more hazy and lo-fi variety, music that is right up my alley. None of the field recordings are easily recognised, and it doesn't matter. Fed through some electronics and looped with a low-resolution sampler guarantees that the result is a crumpled sound, like a piece of paper, and if you unfold the paper, you see what's on there. By listening extensively to the music, you can unfold it, and while you may not recognise what it is, you may understand it a bit better. During each of the five pieces, the music unfolds slowly, allowing the listener to adjust and think of his own story and get a picture of what it is. These two musicians play the mood card and do so very well. The music is darkish, ghostly and has a nocturnal feeling; maybe I am thinking of this while I write these words at that time of the day, when day turns to night and has that hazy view of the road just about visible.
I had not heard
of Marija Kova?evi? before, but Roro Perrot, I know. Mostly from his work as Vomir, but he's active under many guises and has a strong interest in breaking musical boundaries. One of them is a sort of outsider take on improvisation, and to that end, he organises 'Broken Impro' soirées at Le Chair de Poule in Paris. It's here where the two met and quickly went into the studio to record their action. It isn't easy to describe this kind of improvisation and why it is more outsider-like than your regular improvisation. Perhaps it's not my kind of territory anyway. The instruments are a guitar and broken violins; maybe there is an effect pedal, like a delay, but more so in the second piece than the first. The first piece is all out scratch and scrape affair, of sounds galore, but curiously, never sounding too chaotic or loud. They are more of a gentle crash-and-burn, perhaps obeying laws of improvisation more than they want to. The second has an ongoing delay pedal effect, adding a more
lo-fi drone-like aspect to the music. Everything takes too much time, but I guess that's the charm of this kind of sufficient weirdo thing.
Who or what has Ivy Nostrum is not explained anywhere. The cover lists the two titles of the pieces, plus "objects, tapes, cheap effects pedals, electronics, sampler, chord organ and guitar", and online, it says, "Cack-handed minimalism, amateur improvisation, barely passable sound art. Some of these things have been ripening for a while. Others are new flowerings. Somewhere between points of departure and dead-end streets", for whatever it is worth. The amateur part is a bit lost on me, as I think these are two beautiful compositions, blending found sound, melodic bits, obscured field recordings from around the house, organ-like minimalism, spoke a word and such like together, resulting in slightly lo-fi, part menacing pieces of music. Sometimes, there's a hard cut in the middle of a piece, and it continues with something completely
different, almost as if two separate pieces of tape are stuck together. Strange as that may sound, it all works wonderfully well together. At twenty-seven minutes, sadly, on the short side of things, I wouldn't have minded hearing another one.
Even a bit shorter is the release by Karen Constance, the partner of label boss Dylan Nyoukis and member of Blood Stereo. I am unsure if I reviewed her solo work (HS did in Vital Weekly 1227). Here, too, we have something resolutely lo-fi, downsampling field recordings, so they become either static or ice drops on a tin plate or, maybe, the crackle of a piece of vinyl and some sound effects. There is also a choir being chopped to pieces. Somewhere halfway through, a slowed-down voice comes in, narrating one thing or another, which moves this into more of a radio play/hörspiel kind of thing. The end section is all about dictaphone abuse, another one of those staple instruments all too common on Chocolate Monk recordings. Constance keeps
her work within reason, and it's not all about the effect of fast-forwarding/reversing tape. Like with the other new releases on this label, atmospherics play an essential role throughout the twenty-six minutes of this piece. With the various sections involving voice material in some ways, I'd say this is very suitable for any daring radio station willing to broadcast more radiophonic stuff.
