CASCONE
+ CHARTIER + DEUPREE "VARIED" (12K1017)
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AMBIENTRANCE
(US)
Spontaneously
created at Montreal's micro_mutek2, "Cascone + Chartier + Deupree"
(21:37) exhibits an overlapping variety of the minuscule forms
the high-tech triad has been exploring (indeed creating their
own audio niche) jointly and separately. Experience vaporous
drones, purely electronic pulsations, clicky rhythmic streams,
simmering hotbeds of swirly soundgranules, soft expanses of
mystery (and thankfully, no crowd chatter, or drunkenly bellowed
requests..."Decisive forms! Decisive forms!!!"). I can't really
point to who's "playing" which parts as, of course, this isn't
so much garden-variety "music" as it is spaciously arranged
tableaus of digitally spawned esoterica. The three are masters
of their craft, stirring up intriguing evolutions of obtuse
sonics.
Cascone's
New World Rising (New Density Mix) (4:41) does display a new
density... thicker throbbing murk emits fractured gleams and
spattery pips, all ringing out like some alien communiqué.
A deep monotone drones into Chartier's Afterimage, decorated
with barely perceptible chiming activities. In slow movements,
the depths ripple, fade and return, glimmering warmly, if vaguely.
Deupree loops cyclic speckled haze throughout 4+2_stil live,
setting up a hypnotic rise and fall which attracts more energetically
charged atoms, then dimming toward its conclusion.
Before
you listen to After, you may consider your own appreciation
for odd, low-level micronoise, because there are 47 minutes
filled with such indefinite soundscapes, though they are forged
by the digital trinity of Cascone + Chartier + Deupree, so it's
of course thoughtfully rendered... a respectful B from me. On
12k.
BLOW
UP (IT)
...Also very good "Afterimage", a previously unreleased composition
of filtered tones and trails of bass roarings, which Chartier
contribute with to a work with Taylor Deupree and Kim Cascone.
Besides the aforementioned track and the single contributions
of the other two (really formidable the complex algorhythmic
looped structuralizations by Deupree, as a tasting of his forthcoming
album), there's an extended and lively trio laptop improvisation
recorded at last year Micro_Mutek, a concentrate of drones,
sinewaves and patches "de rigueur" via Max/MSP organised in
sharp rhythmic cadences.
HAUNTED
INK (US)
Micro_Mutek
2. Montreal, Canada. 6 April, 2001. Three well-known electronic
artists--Kim Cascone, Richard Chartier, Taylor Deupree-- perform
separately. There was much rejoicing. Then, at the end of the
evening, they come together to perform a 20 minute track, improvising
the sounds off their laptops as they go along.
"Cascone+Chartier+Deupree."
Considering how different each artist's work is from the others--Chartier's
ultra-ultra-ultra minimal, almost not even there soundscapes;
Deupree's abstract, melodic uncertainties; Cascone's fuzz-box
weirdoness--it's surprising how easily the three artists come
together here. The music is haunting--deep, echoing synth tones
float all over the place, like rabid bats or alien spaceship
sounds from early Sci-Fi films. The music is static--glitches
and pops and warbles rumble everywhere, at times forming consistent
rhythms, at other times just adding more menace to the haunting
melodies. The music is beautiful--soft, creepy cricket chirps
smatter about, turning occasionally into digital noise. If anything,
the three artists sound like a digital Pan Sonic--starkly minimal
sounds creating maximum sonic and emotional effects (and affects).
20 minutes is a long time in music terms, but the variety of
sounds here--the constant weaving from one emotion to another,
from one digital burp to another, from one rhythm or anti-rhythm
to another--makes this single track feel like an entire suite
of tracks, each one bound and in synch to the others, but nevertheless
managing an existence all its own.
Time
passes. The artists enjoyed working together, obviously, and
found their creation to be memorable enough to document for
others outside Montreal to hear. So they take that initial track
and create, separately, three other tracks based on that live
recording. Then they release all four tracks in this nice, 12k
packaged work.
"New
World Rising (New Density Mix)." Kim Cascone. Focusing on elements
from the end of the live recording, Cascone here reworks a bath
of sine waves and a creepy, "walking on an old wooden staircase"
melody-rhythm, churning up the tones, adding digital glitches
and stutters to drown out (but not overwhelm) the staircase
creep, and pushing each of these sounds further, into darker
terrains and more discordant avenues of noise. As the title
suggests, this is certainly denser than the original, and coming
after the original as it does here, it plays like a deep, dark
refrain. Interesting.
"Afterimage."
Richard Chartier. Chartier's music is more about silence than
sound. His recent works have embraced the minimalism of Bernhard
Gunter, Brian Eno, and John Cage in their desire to focus the
listener's attention on how silence and sound interact with
one another. 11:37 in length, this track is literally an "afterimage"
of the live recording, in the sense that an afterimage is only
a shadow of the original. At first, there is nothing: silence.
Coming as it does after Cascone's noisy opus, this silence is
significant, as, suddenly, your ears are empty, freed up from
the pulverization of the last two tracks. But then, slowly,
sounds emerge--faintly, almost as though your ears are vibrating
from the sounds you just finished hearing and are only imagining
these new sounds. But no--the sounds are there. They grow, bubble,
hum--still in the background, but nevertheless audible. At times,
sharp clicks and bubbles of noise will suddenly bulge to the
top before disappearing back into the fray. Midway through,
though, the hum grows stronger, louder, warmer, before again
disappearing. Then faint clicks grow, puddle around, like rain,
building slowly and deliberately. As the clicks grow, the hum
returns, though still in the background. These sounds never
"emerge," explode and deaden the silence that still dominates;
rather, they hover, growing, building, retreating, until the
afterimage ends. The song is a test of one's patience if you
are unwilling to listen to the subtle interplay between sound
and silence; but if you consider the silence itself as part
of the song, this track becomes fascinating. That Chartier chose
to create this track out of the glitch-filled, melodious live
recording is not surprising--this is quintessential Chartier,
after all--but it works perfectly here, situated after Cascone's
noise and before Deupree's static.
"4+2_Stil
Live." Taylor Deupree. If Cascone's track is one extreme and
Chartier's another, Deupree's track fits nicely in between.
Borrowing some of the droning hums heard in faint echoes on
"Afterimage," Deupree layers a static rhythm atop a Pan Sonic-like
chorus of deep, dark, menacing tones that grow louder and louder
and louder, building a momentum that seems determined to overwhelm
your ears--in the same way that those tones do NOT overwhelm
your ears on Chartier's track. Interestingly, as this momentum
builds, it is the rhythm that gets the loudest, faint static
stabs pulsing up against your ears as the chorus loops above
and around. This weird avalanche goes on for 9 minutes, building
and swirling and stabbing at your ears, waiting to pounce on
you like a fat guy on a Pop-Tart. What makes this even more
menacing is the fact that there is, in fact, a consistent rhythm
here--those stabs of static actually form patterns, like an
advancing Napoleonic army. This is one fuckingly creepy track,
I've got to say, and it's an incredible end to a decidedly eclectic
47 minutes.
INCURSION.ORG
(CA)
After
was recorded on the occasion of Micro_Mutek 2, an event in Montréal
organized by the curators of the annual Mutek festival of new
electronic music. At the end of their respective solo sets,
laptop sound artists Kim Cascone, Richard Chartier and Taylor
Deupree decided to perform together for a final improvisational
set to conclude the night's activities. This live set is the
first track presented here, which is then followed by three
shorter reconstructions of that material by the three respective
performers. The original live piece, as one might expect, goes
through a series of stages, from resonating tones and sparse
surface crackles to more rhythmical sections and a dense layering
of seemingly incongruous sounds. More revealing, and perhaps
even more interesting than the original performance, however,
are the three reworkings which follow it. Employing custom Max/MSP
extensions, Kim Cascone builds a short track of dense layers;
the crackles and crunches pile upon each other in succession
with a punchy, dramatic effect. Rather than compressing the
sounds and layering them as in Cascone's track, Richard Chartier
turns his mix into an exercise of subtraction and reduction,
with all the subtleties, deep bass frequencies and near silences
we have come to expect from his work. Taylor Deupree completes
the set, using a mix of four loops as the basic material to
create new loops, and then piecing these together to form a
minimal, repetitive piece reminiscent of works by Goem. One
of the nice things about this release is that each of the remixes
reflect an original approach to laptop/microsound composition,
evidence surely that this "genre" is by no means one-dimensional
or static, but rather is living and breathing with new ideas
that are nowhere near running out. [Richard di Santo]
OTHER MUSIC (US)
Taylor
Deupree's increasingly influential and significant 12K imprint
has gained international attention among laptop and improvisational
electronic musicians. This startling record brings together
Deupree's colleague and frequent collaborator Richard Chartier
and stellar artist Kim Cascone, whose music and writing are,
in effect, ground zero for the improv laptop scene. This collaboration
sees the three playing live at the Micro_Mutek 2 festival in
2001 on the opening track, which spans more than 21 minutes.
The talent evident here is the turning away from the simplicities
of the all too common DSP techniques used by so many laptoppers.
Instead, the threesome opts for more architectonic movements,
as subtle and quiet as the movement of glaciers. [TH]
PARISTRANSATLANTIC
(FR)
This
21-minute live set, recorded by Cascone, Chartier and Deupree
in Montréal in April 2001, is beautifully sculpted, elegant
and spacious - and nowhere near as "minimal" as some
of their recent work. Indeed, there's a lot of activity going
on, but the musicians shuffle elements around from foreground
to background with consummate skill and studiously avoid the
in-yer-face rips and snarls of Mego-style electronica. It's
classy stuff, and yields much when subsequently "reconstructed"
(about time we dispensed with the word "remix" for
good) by each artist in turn. Cascone's Max/MSP software on
"New World Rising (New Density Mix)" squeezes the
final few minutes of the music through its own cracks to produce
a compact, pulsing four and a half minutes, while Chartier's
"Afterimage" distills its essence down to static drones
punctuated by tiny bell sounds and frosty panning clicks. On
"4+2_stil live" Deupree's loops crunch out a locked
groove backbeat over which layers of gritty algorithmic crickets
settle - things get alarmingly funky after about six minutes,
but just when you finally expect the thumping 110bpm bass, Deupree
pulls out the clicks and crackles and leaves you with the clouds.
Accomplished and entertaining, if not as captivating as the
three preceding tracks.
VITAL
WEEKLY (NL)
Kim Cascone, Richard Chartier and Taylor Deupree on one night
must be for the laptop freaks a dream becomes true. If they
end up playing (improvising) together, I assume a wet dream
becomes true. They did it last year at a small festival Micro
Mutek in Montreal. They wouldn't be good laptoppers, if they
didn't decide to rework the material by each one afterwards.
So we get here the full improv concert, followed by three smaller
re-creations. The joint concert goes from using the sound of
matrix printers to a densely layered rhythm piece (almost Pan
Sonic/Goem inspired) and in the second half some sort of sound
processing for electro magnetic sounds. The second half I thought
to be less inspired. Kim Cascone's rework is the shortest, but
he seems to be putting all the sounds on top of eachother and
makes the waves more dense. It seems that Richard Chartier does
the exact opposite. His near silent piece doesn't seem to use
any sound from the improv at all, but I'm sure that's all aural
illusion. From all the silent people I know, Chartier is one
of the better. His sound may not be there, but for sure it is
there. Last is taylor Deupree. He takes a tick, builts from
that as if it were a rhythm and then start slowly to add subtle
layers of sound. From the improv part, I think it's multi layered
rhythm piece that got him going most here. A dense, creepy and
intense piece. A fine showcase of possibilities here.
XLR8R
(US)
an interesting experiment, After arose from the residue of a
laptop jam between kim cascone, richard chartier, and taylor
deupree last spring at montreal's micro_mutek event. titled
"cascone + chartier + deupree," the piece moves through perhaps
five moods in twenty minutes, showcasing cascone's abrasive
static tendencies, chartier's obsession with near-inaudible
bass and crystalline sound flashes, and deupree's love of loops
and sinewaves. to round out the release, each contributor used
material from the improvisation to fashion their own through-pieces:
cascone's "new world rising (new density mix)" is tone-signal
beeping and metallic static from the end of the original; chartier's
"afterimage" is textured but quiet bass and glints; and deupree's
"4+2_Stil" develops significant tone structures that add depth
to the original concept. all in all, After is an intruiging
compositional study. - heath k. hignight
