In Use @inuse00 - Tumblr Blog

RFG Inventions for Cello and Computer by Peter Zinovieff & Lucy Railton

In what is sure to be one of the most unexpected but inspired collaborations of 2020, the newest PAN release sees experimental cellist and rising star Lucy Railton in deep conversation with legendary music technician and sound designer Peter Zinovieff. Despite this being billed as Zinovieff's first true album, his influence over the British avant garde looms large, both as the inventor behind EMS synthesizers and because of his close connection with the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop. Railton similarly finds herself in an enviable position, coming off the back of her critically lauded debut on the reputable Modern Love, as well as perfomances at notorious experimental festivals like Norberg and Berlin Atonal, where this album was conceived. 'RFG inventions for Cello and Computer' sees Railton's expressive and textural playing refracted by Zinovieff through custom software. Railton subsequently responded and reacted to this stimuli unadorned by digital abstraction. This cyclical, back and forth process of creation and response creates the impression of an infinite number of possible sonic permutations (and indeed, the single 35 minute piece displays many in its diverse movements) whilst also maintaining rigourous cohesion in style and intention, reminiscent of Roland Kayn's seminal experiments in generative, 'cybernetic' computer music. However, as in the work of Kayn, the complex processes behind 'RFG...' are not intended to be fauned over, quantified or understood; they serve as parts within an artistic vision, venerating the humanism inherent to abstraction, boldly ploughing forward in the exploration of new and complex emotion in sound.

Playing this on Friday at the Flying Duck. Tickets 6£ otd. Packing lots of heat! Event page here.

Petrichor by Ans M

Petrichor, exploring bodies of water, is a textural and tactile release from Ans M. It blooms with gorgeous, swelling sounds, amassing an organic energy, sliding by like a mixtape. During some moments my ears pricked up with new concentration, as if to a good blend--a fecundity or fertility in the music which provokes instant refocus. Like a mixtape, the tempo of these tracks is not fixed but constantly fragile, open towards change. At times as a listener you feel as if you're being tossed around in rolling waves and open water. It's been pointed out before that a back-masked (reversed) sound points towards both the originary and the supplement/the unknown/the new. The paranoid and painterly sonic growths of Petrichor sound like lots of things, with their dark bass swells and prickly percussion, but experiencing them is a very different swim.

[HEEL002] EPIPHANY by KROLIK

In Use are proud to have followed Milan's Heel Zone for a few years, and, as such, received a wild education in contemporary electronic music and charmingly absurd press releases. Last year the label moved from a deeply 'internet' kind of label--international, rapidly-releasing, and with a very digital aesthetic--to pressing 12"s. Krolik's Epiphany is the label's third physical release. In many senses it epitomises the Heel Zone style. The tracks here often make intense leaps as if Krolik has flicked a switch (labelled 'bass' maybe), crossing the liminal zone between half and full time, like the interplay between gabber style kicks and pensive keys on 'Away With Pleasure'. Otherwise they're already full-on, huge workouts of nearly idiotic proportions. If idiocy as an essential ingredient 'creates a rupture within the dominant culture', it's clear why the uncontrollable excess of gabber has become the mass vocabulary for a democratic and contagious new dance music--full of crashes, sirens, bass, and exaggeration. Heel Zone carries the spirit of gabber in its outlandish splicing of styles, resulting in radical(ly fun) musical nihilism. Check!

playing games dub by NA DJ

NA DJ chops a gorgeous sample into a hypnotic broken beat tune, delivering 2001 London basement feelings to 2020 20-somethings.

Arthropods by 33EMYBW

On the Arthropod Continent, beings collect fragments of souls to build a golem, a Biblical Adam for a digital future. Following up on the animist theme of 2018's Golem, Arthropods sends the search into space. Golem was tight and frenzied, a monstrous descendant of footwork, with touchstones of Detroit techno, trance, dembow. But on these tracks there is a built in space, distance, and depth, almost as if the Arthropods have been fed on Scientist or The Disciples. Above the steppin’, floating sounds orbit in ribbons, as heard on 'Drum3'--a highlight of the record. The figure of the golem reveals the hubris of humanity’s fascination with creation. But on Arthropods, this has become an endless pursuit: the fever of the search has infected the programming, has become the organising principle. An erratic productivity carries the music: phrases mutate and rhythms clench and then disperse as the songs unwind. Aquatic and deep spaces come into creative contact with precise and percussive sounds. Yet though Arthropods is percussive, it’s not violent, like the smash and grab of other 'club' records on Shanghai's SVBKVLT. It’s explorative. If you retune to hear the constant myriad tapping sounds, the vocal squeals (and choral bursts) of ‘Induce’, and the sonar bleeps of ‘Drum3’ as detection technologies, Arthropods sounds like another world in abeyance, just beyond the fevered radar.

S.L.F. by Aisha Devi

The reintroduction of trance motifs into the vocabulary of the, increasingly genre-vampiric, post-modern electronic music zeitgeist by the likes of Lorenzo Senni, Evian Christ and numerous others has proved at best headline catching and at worst divisive. To some, trance is a rallying point for collective empathy while to others it is an artificial simulacrum so earnest that it falls into the "uncanny valley". Pop experimentalist Aisha Devi, returning to Houndstooth, revels in this dichotomy tapping into what makes the genre so relevant for today's audiences. Flurries of hyper-saccharine super-saw leads and chipmunk vocals could equally be designed to stimulate the seratonin receptors of the chemically-aided raver or the digitally enhanced post-human. A bold postulation of futures that walk a thin line between utopia and dystopia.

Return, return: the music of Iceboy Violet invites this compulsion, from the excellently destructive 'Mook' on Tobago Tracks last year to this 25-minute 'soundtrack' released through Mutualism. 'Babel' repurposes the story of the Tower of Babel into an uncanny rumination on humanity's destructive relationship to nature. Structured in cycles, a spoken-word narrative repeats, hauntingly, a tale of 'productivity' and ecology. Dense fog through which this voice cuts incites Biblical dread. An Eski--Iceboy connection reveals itself in the partly-concealed samples which stray through the music. This alone demonstrates grime's functioning as a productive centre, a deep well from which much of the UK's avant-garde electronic music is drawn from (and to which we all inevitably return, a British high watermark). Like the best of soundtracks, 'Babel' is stunning, verging on spiritual. 'The project is never completed'--returning to Iceboy Violet is like recharging.

5GTOUR by JOHN T. GAST

Very limited CD run in support of JTG's Asian tour - supposedly constructed entirely using a tablet while on flights, don't let that fool you into prejudging the quality on show here - 50 minutes of Gast's signature roughshod digi-steppers and inspired weightless ragga ambience

Death at Number 13 by OLIVER TWIST

UK grime is most alive in its instrumental scene: look at HMRC. Bootlegs, dubs, and collabs are flying from the various soundcloud pages of the collective, and you can hear MCs jump on these productions on radio stations far and wide. On their latest official release, 'Death at Number 13' delivers plate-scrapes and unrelenting muddied kicks; 'How I Felt' loosens its grip but not its power. Function, narrow focus and utility drip from these Oliver Twist tunes: alleyways, bridges, pavement spin through the collage when you shut your eyes and listen--but elsewhere with HMRC you'll find soaring vocals and bubblers, testament to grime's persistent effervescence.

Tqaseem. Mqamat Elharam - تقاسيم. مقامات الهرم by 1127

On his stunning debut album, Cairene artist 1127 constructs dizzyingly intricate digital structures before shattering them into their constituent code with revelatory zeal and autechrian precision. Reflecting an era in which the digital realm has destroyed geographic precedents for artistic relations, "Tqaseem Mqamat Elharam" could be seen to fit into an international school of post-club abstraction and futurist sound design advocated by the likes of M.E.S.H. or Xin. However, 1127 never loses sense of place or identity - "Zezinia 2 ft. She7ta Wel3a" blends affectionately unmanipulated field recordings and Arabic voices with stark washes of noise, imagining radical new lineages in experimental music unshackled from hegemonic Western academia. This lack of precedent for 1127's music is what I think injects so much joy into what otherwise might be perceived as uncompromising, noise inflected compositions. "Tqasem Mqamat Elharam" therefore establishes itself as a glowing exemplar of a burgeoning Cairene scene in which cone crushing bass and fragmented rhythms appear to bump harder than anything within Europe's staid dance orthodoxy.

NEVAEH by MHYSA

'MHYSA is a Queer Black Diva and underground popstar for the cyber resistance': to me, MHYSA is the pinnacle of playful, emotional and experimental dance music which finds its home in label-networks such as Rabit's Halcyon Veil, NAAFI, and Kode9's Hyperdub--which will release MHYSA's upcoming record, NEVAEH, in February. In this addictively tormenting single, MHYSA whispers intimately that she's 'been homesick lately'. The track also piles on trap motifs: trademark shotgun blasts, piano stabs and murmurs of 'turn my music up...' This very Philadelphia mixture makes for a perfectly mischievous single for an 18 track full-length which clearly promises to be a soulful and soul-searching project. Infinitely more engaging than your average electronic-industrial-R&B record, of which there are lots of examples in experimental music, on 'Sanaa Lathan' MHYSA both holds your hand and chucks you around. I'm convinced that NEVAEH will be a wondrous record. With Shygirl's Sega Bodega-produced comeback 'BB' [link] also coming out recently, tightly-wound, ruder-than-the-rest bubblegum music still excites.

Quadraphonic Transmission – Live in S.Vittore and the Forty Martyrs by Neunau

Diffracting high medieval religiosity through post digital subjectivities. Neunau then convolutes these myriad results back into monastic space - live performance released by Until Riots

Baroque by Ena

Formless, arrhythmic, Chain-Reaction affine atmospheres - marking a well executed departure from previous pointilistic Drum n Bass excursions

Lock Phase Variations by VASE

Crystalline and emotive phase-lock based sound design, recorded at Rotterdam's Willem Twee Studios - released Bio-digitally for FIS's Saplings project meaning each sale goes directly to the reforestation of 80 trees.

Antisocial by aircode

Aircode's new material, following an EP on Tobago Tracks, can be seen as part of a tradition of confessional and vocal abstracted experimental music also found in Glasgow-based In Use favourite Sue Zuki. Like Sue Zuki, 'Antisocial' is blurred and often menacing, and always engagingly exploratory.

Newest record from Kelman Duran: rich and sonorous. These songs sound out like echoes of his past work, continuing an ongoing and stubborn use of the same samples. Haunting collage music

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

In Use