Cyberpunk Cyberstream

CD - w.m.o/r
Loic Blairon proposes a postulate. He listens and thinks he
has no ideas to make music, but that people, through listening, can hold
reality. Loic Blairon, in a way, says no to music - and it could not be
otherwise, with a "work" based only on scattered tolls every minute.
This "no" - finally - precisely defines the unilateral relationship that
the "author" seeks to stabilize within and through sound itself, by
following reality, as negative and precluded. It is an extreme work,
supported by Mattin, the wmo/r head honcho, another maker of questions
and "theories" that begin from very radical and intransigent
audio-abuses. Silence dominates, but even when listening with closed
headphones to the absorbing hiss of the 30-minute long suite, the
noises of street traffic and the birds chirping in a nearby garden are
not barred from this execution of non-time. Reality always takes its
revenge somehow, and that timeless nothing already explored by Cage
always reaffirms itself as openness to every possibility: life, more
than music, which certainly does not need to be composed.
Aurelio Cianciotta

3CD - Medama
Textures, rhythms and audio layers mix in this work, following the many forms of an experimental and abstract electronica, in the first of the three volumes of this series of "test tones". It's an anthology that draws inspiration from the music scene of the SuperDeluxe, in Tokyo, a club that represents the more trendy and digital side of the Japanese nightlife. Located in the Shibuya district, the minimalist lounge bar hosts a myriad of small events, with DJ's and radical performances, and is the meeting point of a very non-conventional group of sound manipulators. This triple release is a very effective representation of such fertile musical practices, by virtue of a radical nature never expressed in similar European works. In the second volume, too - in fact - between steelpans, kalimbas, bells, tuning forks and metronomes, we can perceive slight murmurs, steps and other environmental influences. Recordings that, by capturing the immediacy of live performances, do not seem to encourage - however - an inattentive and meditative or scarcely involved listening experience. The selections - edited by Cal Lyall - finally come together in the third and latest CD, in tumultuous drifts towards noise-rock and jazzy leftfield: it could not be otherwise, after presenting so many rarefied styles.
Aurelio Cianciotta

CD -!K7
Gentle melodies and indietronic patterns are veined with a very insistent downtempo melancholy and crystal clear sounds in this finely modulated work by Milosh, a Canadian classical and jazz composer. This is his third release, emblematic in its sensitive junctions, embedded in a tenuous electronic music, carefully diluted with neo-soul influences and polite glitch processes. Scenes from everyday life, simple stories, told with insight and shyness, a falsetto voice and environmental approximations. Deconstructed beats, careful samples, vibrating in the strings and the tremulous synth, unraveled in harmonious solutions and arrangements. It is certainly not a project with a strong experimental character, but it isn't a simple sound wallpaper or contemporary chamber music either. It is poised between many eclectic and unconventional abstractions. Romantic electronic music, impalpable and not all that sweetened, since all these feelings - even if anachronistic - seem genuine enough to us.
Aurelio Cianciotta

4CD - Subrosa
Editor Li Ching Sung and Guy Marc Hinant have come together to produce this anthology of Chinese experimental music, which includes 48 different artists whose works are divided across four engaging CDs. Moving beyond the names that are already internationally known (the same Li Ching-sung - aka Dee Dickinson - or the noise artist Torturing Nurse, or experienced artists Wang Fan and Dajuin Yao), there's an evident desire to emphasise the latest generation, dealing exclusively with the years from 1992 to the present. It has been suggested that the Cultural Revolution, with its anti-intellectual gulags, delayed the emergence of underground arts culture in China by 15 years. The appearance of such a culture is due to more recent developments in digital media (primarily music players and personal computers) in addition to an emerging, previously unheard of youth culture; a phenomenon which, in turn, was aided by a thriving music piracy. It is, then, a pleasure to listen the voice experiments of Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, Li Jianhong's improvisation, Jun Yan's narratives and multimedia inserts. These are all expressions of cutting edge music subgenres that - in various contemporary versions - are now well known and practised in China.
Aurelio Cianciotta

CD" - Evol/Entr'acte
The fifth work in the 'EVOL's Punani' series, this is a 300-copy limited edition, sealed in stylized silver-transparent envelopes, including a CD and a booklet in the shape of a leaflet, along with individual black and white photo cards. The free form sound of the first track is "cut" and extremely inconstant, accelerated using digital processing and containing clear bass clarinet and horn. These sounds are articulated in meticulous but "slipping" scores, skillfully structured by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros and Jacob Draminsky-Højmark. The pieces were created between February 2006 and August of 2007, during which time various live recordings were added. The Kazumoto Endo's remix is also consistent, '23 Cartas de Tamariz ', unravels between skips and neurotic blocks, immediately followed by eRikm's reinterpretation of ' Tupolev Farmyard ', whose original edition was published only on a nickel galvanoplastics 14". Not dissimilar in style and quality, the final tracks are '9 .86960 44010 89358 ... ' remixed by Joe Gilmore, and 'Excelsior Punani', an unpublished 2002 piece, 'captured' using a common portable digital recorder.
Aurelio Cianciotta