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

Various Artists — Ruido En Cuyo

Ruido En Cuyo is, as its title suggests, a noise compilation from the mountainous Cuyo region of western Argentina. It is a wide-ranging release, hulled from the work of diverse and disparate artists. But these differing approaches and intents find common ground in their sublimity and their numinousness. Let's examine the components of this wildly successful whole.

The first track, Ñoki's 'Al gas', heaves things into life with a dysphoric reworking of what can just about be discerned as panpipes. 'Al gas' has a vastness recalling late Caretaker releases — but snatches its own grandeur away, pulling an unexpected hip-hop verse out of the hat. It's one of those tracks which sounds strange on paper, but soars in such assured hands as these.

Ensamble Passionaria follow up with 'Frackmaputechnoising'. This is another oddity. Laid-back house pounds beneath some garbled spoken word, whose tone (somehow) sits between lecturing and apologetic. This track, too, takes a sharp turn at its mid-point, swelling into bright and beautiful noise structures.

The noise reaches its apex in Ese's 'Culpables', which provides the album with a welcome burst of energy. It's a little rote when compared with what's come before — but still incorporates speech wonderfully. Imagine the disembodied narrator of Radiohead's 'Fitter Happier' being fed into a shredder.

Lorenzo Gomez Oviedo's 'Piercing' allows for some breathing room, engulfing the fire of 'Culpables' with a mysterious fog. It plays out like a ramble into the woods as a rāga-style drum beat accompanies. It feels like reaching a frontier; walking deeper and deeper inwards, and exploring the liminal space between the comfort of home and the dark danger of the wilderness.

This sets the tone perfectly for Los Paysasos Muertos' 'El payaso oficial'. From the dark woods we fall into a clearing. A Mike Patton-led cult conjures demons up from the wet soil. Fireflies paint green freckles across the soft orange of the gloaming.

Indro's 'El agarrobal mendoza' makes a retreat from the woods, reintroducing mechanical sounds. Handles creak and rain buzzes on contact with the power lines. It's still unsettling — but plays with familiarity, leaving those untamed, Romantic landscapes in its wake.

This proves, however, to be a short stopover. Roi Maciaz's 'Hechizos de socoscora' brings the focus back to ritual and conjuration. A relentless chug, like the paddles of a steamer, pulls us past the scene. We are drawn in and scared off all at once. Not for the first time on Ruido En Cuyo, we are made to feel on the threshold of something — toes over the tip of the diving board, the water below too black to hold our shadows.

A Casa presents, in 'Días sin nosotros', a number-one single from hell. It's a hopeful, even catchy composition; but one that's shouting from beneath six feet of molten tar. In this sense it's partially reminiscent of Fever Ray — but this is firmly in a style of its own. It comes completely out of left-field, contrasting beautifully with the rest of the compilation.

Things get switched up again. Darío Matta's 'Portantiero / Bábaro' explores negative space and quiet. In such a colourful and varied release, the last sonic mine to be plumbed is silence. It's an understated, noodling sound collage. Alarm-like tones patch its fabric, but never intrude or insist. It pulls attention like a silent crib.

And rounding things off is Inti's 'Pelusa', the compilation's longest piece by some distance. Again we intrude on the liminal; thresholds, cliff edges. 'Pelusa' feels like an industrial Castle Dracula. It shifts through time and space, and provokes the irrational fear of a presence in a corridor you can see is empty.

These ten compositions support each other beautifully. Distinguishable but contiguous, humbly ambitious, they juggle beauty and terror like it's easy.

Contributing artists: Ñoki, Ensamble Passionaria, Ese, Lorenzo Gomez Oviedo, Los Paysasos Muertos, Indro, Roi Maciaz, A Casa, Darío Matta, Inti

Ruido En Cuyo is available for streaming and purchase 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

Yu Su — Roll With the Punches

Roll With the Punches is a pleasing cocktail of the arcane and modern. Melodies plucked on traditional instruments balance atop odd, synthesised shopping-trolley clatters. The foundations of its songs lie in live jams, which gives the whole EP a spontaneous and exciting energy.

The EP owes its name to Yu Su's own informal translation of a passage from the Tao Te Ching ('泉出通川为谷'); and in its improvisatory nature, we can hear a channelling of Tao, a sense of music writing itself, with the musicians' hands the instrument.

'Tipu's Tiger' is a wonderful example of this. It's a restless track, which seems to have perpetual forward movement. (Or perhaps the effortless downward movement of water; as a wave-like hiss sneaks in and out for the second half of the track.)

And while 'The Ultimate Which Manages the World' has a title which would hint at more of the same, it proves to be an altogether different beast. It's, inexplicably, a dub track, with a very pleasing 90s chillout vibe. Only because Roll With the Punches is so expertly judged does this track not send the whole thing off course, tumbling into the bushes somewhere.

A more literal translation of '泉出通川为谷' is 'the spring flows over the plains, and the valley is born'. The valley, and not just in a Freudian sense, represents the feminine yin. The rock has been carved away by currents, and replaced with negative space. It's at once a thing, and a non-thing. Because a valley is defined by absence, and by emptiness.

Roll With the Punches feels like a little memorialised breath of yin; understated, unsurprising, unassuming; passive. It doesn't force anything. But it's there, and you feel it — even when you don't realise.

Roll With the Punches is available for streaming and purchase here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

smog — sequel'70

A minute or two of peace ushers in smog's sequel'70. There's a menacing intake of breath, followed by a harmonic hum. But the quiet doesn't last long. Once this album kicks off, it doesn't let go. It's ludicrously hard, with bass powerful enough to smash every window on the street.

Gabber and noise cosy up to surprising success, as sine waves and blasts of static punctuate the beats enclosing them. These grace notes allow repetition without monotony — crucial, when most of your tracks approach six minutes.

'Dazzle' and 'Abschluss SCAN' both monsters, marrying classic fuck-off breaks and handclaps with futuristic groaning and squealing. But they're also two tracks which begin to drag before they're over. They find their rut and they stick in it, pounding away relentlessly until they're spent.

Even if these tracks could be said to outstay their welcome on a home listen, though, dropped into a set they would soar. And that's clearly what they've been made for. Smog wisely bookends them with 'Straightforward' and the album's outro, too. Both bring some variety. 'Straightforward' feels like a field recording; the slaps of a boat on a dock.

This tactility is something all sequel'70's tracks share; quasi-organic surfaces sliding and scraping on each other, interacting, forming and breaking apart. It's at once rooted in the physical world, and off somewhere else completely. Sequel'70 is a hammering and invigorating experience.

sequel’70 is available to purchase and stream here. smog’s label and associated artists, okqo, can be found here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe