Machinefabriek with Anne Bakker - Oehoe

Oehoe is the result of a collaboration between electronic act Machinefabriek (Rutger Zuydervelt) and violin/viola player Anne Bakker. Sitting somewhere between melody and drone, Oehoe blends its numerous individual sound sources into an intimate collage. Bakker has already recorded in a similar style—entwining her vocals and instrumentation together with EP Vox/Voila—but Zuydervelt’s contribution on Oehoe is to push things much farther leftfield, and provide a great deal of sonic intricacy and experimentation.

This intricacy isn’t obvious straight away. Elements are disguised within one another, and the sheer craft of Oehoe only reveals itself when you consciously seek it. Composition and instrumental voicing have a comforting traditionalism—but, to find it, you must blindly stumble through a mix of obfuscated, elongated and inverted natural sounds. Zuydervelt raises thick fog of modernity; a sort of urgent ambience. Bakker shatters through with strains and squeals that possess a wonderful, tense fragility. It feels as though the strings of her viola—or throat—may snap at any second.

It’s an elegant dance of two very different styles, but these two performers remain in service to one another’s work throughout Oehoe. As with any good collaboration, it’s impossible to pinpoint where either’s influence begins or ends. It’s a case of one aim being sought from several radically different, yet complementary, starting points.

Oehoe straddles many years and regions of musical tradition, flitting between touchstones of Swedish folk, modern classical, concrète and noise. It’s unique and brutal work, like half-disintegrated sheet music exhumed from an archaeological dig and digitally reassembled by an AI.

Both Bakker and Zuydervelt rile against the sterile clarity which normally surrounds chamber music. The duo finds truth in scuffiness. That truth: what we actually hear when a tone is produced is a scream, the scream of bow and string slowly shredding each other to pieces. It’s the same sort of cool cacophony as Björk’s Utopia, which made liberal use of the screeching of tropical birds. Oehoe more clearly states its aims though, with neither the ego nor eye-watering budget to follow its artists’ every grandiose impulse. While musically, it may bear superficial resemblance to Björk’s latest, it has the spirit of her earlier (better) work; smudging the line between play and stern efficiency so well you forget such a thing exists.

Oehoe is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Hannya White—Who Put the Flowers In the Garden

Hannya White’s Who Put the Flowers In the Garden is a short but very striking release. It combines the attractive rigidity of post-punk with disordered analogue sensibilities that have come to define Staaltape as a label. Like the label’s other releases, Who Put the Flowers… is a gift in itself. It's enclosed in a tissue-paper chest which must be at least partially destroyed to reveal the cassette inside. Before you even put this in the deck, it’s thus imbued with a bristling sense of mystery.

While all this serves to heighten the intimacy and intrigue of White’s tape, it’s by no means a crutch. Her music is a treasure in and of itself, with molasses-thick synth textures and a beautifully understated tone. It’s rich with experimentation, too. Field recordings, White’s own unadorned non-sequiturs of spoken word, and prolonged periods of rich, tense stagnancy litter the tape.

These wild elements are corralled together by White’s unique and cohesive production. At one point, we hear a police siren—but even that cannot bloom from the tape’s tar-darkness. It’s chewed up and left sluggish; subdued by the toxic atmosphere. The extremities of sounds are severed, their edges are dulled, in service of a unifying bleakness.

Compositions are equally stark, their simplicity buckling to allow textural elements the spotlight. It’s not for lack of musicianship, though: what’s clear through this album’s fog is that White knows exactly what she is doing.

In the spirit of so much outsider music, this tape’s loneliness paradoxically grants it belonging. It’s so insular and introspective that we reward it with a contemplation of our own most private moments. Often, the work we find most intimate and connective is the one which shouts least for our attention—that which feels transmitted, skull-to-skull, between performer and listener. When reapplied to outsider art, the UK government’s cheesy COVID slogan “alone together” says it all.

Who Put the Flowers In the Garden is, inescapably, a work of extreme isolation. It may be grounded, worldly and characterful—but still a grim mystery dominates its soundscape. We are transported into a space of fumbling darkness, a dystopic art installation design to drive its visitors into confusion. But through this labyrinth of fuzzy feeling come occasional moments of clarity.

The album’s title track is, on the surface, like a COUM Transmissions for the twenty-first century—a piece which marches in taunting repetition, stopping sometimes to splash us with synthesised fizzes and bubbles. But its message is less obtuse, and more optimistic, than any work ever put out by COUM or associated acts. Hannya White offers a call to action; a koan instructing participation in the world. No matter how shadowed things are, we can still bring the everyday and the discarded generously under our gaze. Start with this innocuous little tape—who knows where it will take you.

Who Put the Flowers In the Garden is available for purchase directly from Staaltape here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Katie Gately—Loom

Katie Gately’s Loom arranges some disjunct experiments beneath a pleasing umbrella of bizarre balladry. Raw materials of concrète and noise are here refined, reshaped, and given a new life as sturdy foundations for tightly-structured melodic pieces.

‘Ritual’ establishes the album’s tone; a sweep of processed, half-distorted vocals and synthesisers which chatter like sealife. It earns its title, seeming to raise the album from nothingness, conjure it from the air either side. It’s also deceptively complex, layering vocals atop each other in a harmonic stack which feigns simplicity through how well each vocal line complements its peers.

‘Allay’ throws a new element into the mix, with Gately’s maximalist lyrics. Her pedigree as a songwriter and producer for (among others) serpentwithfeet is as clear in these dramatic lyrical lines as the off-kilter production which supports them. Gately leans in even harder on ‘Waltz’; a song which elevates its emotive power through what sounds like the pageantry of a medieval court, but infected nonetheless with a kind of nervous energy. ‘Waltz’ wouldn’t be out of place on Richard Dawson’s Peasant—the disquieting itchiness of thorns surrounds a big red heart.

The album’s centrepiece is ‘Bracer’, a ten-minute single which escalates from almost-whimsical reeded sections to a bludgeoning conclusion. Like most other tracks on Loom, it stands at the threshold of being “too much”. But it’s a threshold Gately seems to relish standing at. The level of control she displays in production, and track’s textural and melodic invention, allow it to sidestep becoming self-important crescendo-core.

‘Bracer’ signals a transition from the album’s first half to its second, which begins with ‘Rite’. A conscious mirror of ‘Ritual’ before it, this track quietens things again with some ramping down that, Disasterpeace-style, could be the glissando of some profane orchestra. It’s a beautiful track which is full of apprehension.

This apprehension is carried through into ‘Tower’, a funereal march which describes digging a hole “you would fit right…into”. The contrast drawn between a coming-together and lowering into a hole lays bare that in any relationship—with any attachment—we invite not only connection but inevitable loss into our lives.

The album is rounded off with ‘Rest’, a piece which holds itself in stasis. Loom leaves us uncertainly wavering at the gate of heaven, as one chord is sustained through three minutes of angelic arrangement. Whether the track is defiant, anxious, accepting, depends on who’s listening. But what’s certain is its reflection of Loom as a whole: as work which confronts death in hope, trepidation, thankfulness and with great power.

Loom is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Rinus Van Alebeek — Let me help you get rid of this

our sheet and rain, our eye of straw;
the saloon door swinging its own frame.

thermalling the wet air as it
crests,
the plougher's flumed community chest,
ascending, clefts the cloudy blue.

an empty schoolroom screams — a tannoy
in the narrow wood (he should
have called by now).

that pebbled leg is down the tube;
he's flipped, rocked, rolled through
a fugue.
he raised a head — he poured a drink
for you
and skated off,
and cleaved the ice in two.

—

Rinus Van Albeek’s Let me help you get rid of this is the Berlin artist’s latest tape. Van Albeek’s releases without exception feel transgressive, unexpected and forbidden. They’re what you found, discarded, forgotten; glinting, a gemstone in that bin on your tired route to and from work. Inside, patchworks of private moments, too candid to be real. Each tape is a new surprise, and Let me help you get rid of this continues the trend.

The tape plays with negative space and quiet — catching your breath in your throat, deepening awareness. And when sounds do emerge from their boltholes, they stay intimate. Everything feels so close it’s inside the microphone, with deep rattles of wind granting even the air tactility.

Morsels of laughter and music break the surface from time to time. We are ushered gently around a carnival, a sea front, exploring the wonder of small things. We never leave this intimate space. Van Albeek positons the listener as genius loci, watching the world with wryness and sympathy.

The South East coast of England hosts hundreds of dying seaside towns. Mown by international air travel, they stand as emptying monuments to domestic tourism. Let me help you get rid of this pins you to the centre of one. The gulls, gales and barren arcades. Towns on the cusp of the future; their last breaths gasped under the shadow of modernity’s vulture.

The tape is nostalgic and premonitory; abstract and concrete; tristful but bursting with uncontained joy. A piece of life itself is being passed and wound on the wheels; a blank portrait, waiting to be filled with someone you recognise from long ago.

Let me help you get rid of this is available to purchase on casette only here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Bardo Todol / M. M. Peres / Úgjü Sectas — Adzer

Adzer is a collaborative tape with its fingers in quite a few pies. It's boldly broad in its content. But where broadness can sometimes deaden a release, Adzer shines.

We hover above soundscapes, no floor beneath our feet; observing from a dispassionate, unplaceable viewpoint. Organic and inorganic rhythms collide and collude. Paranoiac loops flitter by, switching between themselves restlessly. It's the audio equivalent of Gaspar Noé's Into the Void; unpredictable, scuzzy and overwhelming.

We are hovering over indistinct scenes. We arrive after they begin, we leave before they end.

Various techniques are employed to evoke this sense of movement. Bardo Todol brings concrète, field recordings of the mundane suffused with uncanny metallic friction (think the crying which opens Boris' ‘Buzz-In’). M. M. Peres' hosts bells and chimes, and approaches the joyful transcendence and hypnagogia of spiritual jazz. Úgjü Sectas stabs at classic, Parmegiani-style acousmatic chaos. Glitchy elements crash the work, with elegance, into the present day.

But greater than the individual achievements of this releases' contributors is its overall cohesion. What could easily have lacked direction instead cleaves its path straight to the sublime. This is a patchwork of many colours, waiting for you to wrap yourself in it.

Adzer is available for purchase and streaming here. An accompanying short film is also available here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe