MC,
2013,
Fragment Factory, Hamburg.
Available
edition of 200
REVIEWS
Un autre bois (on l’imagine), et sur cassette, crépite sur Nigredo. C’est que Rudolf Eb.Er et Dave Phillips y ont marché, en route pour Tokyo où ils donnèrent un concert « préparé » sous le nom de Schimpfluch-Gruppe. Devant l’assistance, un souffle fut transformé en râle, ce râle en ombre épaisse et inquiétante, cette ombre en chimère prisonnière d’une cellule de béton gris. Dans un bruit assourdissant de métal (des chaînes, peut-être), ce sera la libération. En face B, un canal chacun, Eb.Er et Phillips exposent le matériau qu’ils composèrent indépendamment pour leur rencontre : ni chimère, ni béton, ni métal, mais des ombres encore.
(Guillaume Belhomme, Le Son du Grisli)A bit of a Schimpfluch kick going on at aQuarius lately, and that’s hardly an infliction that’s for the faint of heart. We recently got in the impeccable, existential blank stare of an album in G✱Park’s Sub, and now we have this super limited cassette from the overarching Schimpfluch-Gruppe. The loose knit Swiss collective of aktionists, noise tacticians, and performance artists mines the psychologically violent territories of the id, including the aforementioned G✱Park, Dave Phillips (aka Dead Peni), Sudden Infant, and Rudolf Eb.Er (aka Runzelstirn & Gurglestock), amongst other malcontents. Here, the Schimpfluch-Gruppe is represented by Rudolf Eb.Er and Dave Phillips, neither of whom are artists known for their subtlety. Surprisingly though, this cassette is a rather slow burning affair based on manipulated field recordings. But lest you think this a droll exercise in phonography, Phillips and Eb.Er guide their composition into something very carcinogenic. Unsettled frequencies from dripping water and early morning bird twitter are extracted and molded into piercing drones, atonal billowing masses, and lurching loops of jittery white noise with horrific exasperated vocalizations from one of those two. Phillips in particular has a facet in his body of work that favors the hellish chorals of Southeast Asian insect noise that can be equally hallucinatory and terrifying; and that’s not too far from what he and Phillips are doing here. Something around 100 copies in existence.
(Jim Haynes, Aquarius Records)SCHIMPFLUCH GRUPPE - NIGREDO (cassette by Fragment Factory)
On a cassette we have Schimpfluch Gruppe, a notorious group of various musicians, with a live recordings from April last year in Tokyo on one side, as recorded by Rudolf Eb.er (a core member!) and Dave Phillips and on the other side a split channel by them, with Phillips in the left channel and Eb.er in the right channel, recording things that were totally independent. It’s interesting to play this straight after the Alice Kemp release, as it shares the similar approach to working with acoustic sound - straight in your face, although especially in the live recording this seems to be not-so-loud. In the split channel piece there is a bit more noise but here too, I must say it’s not a lot. The action may seem obscure; you could hardly think what’s going on. A performance perhaps, but for all we know we have two persons playing sounds from a laptop, or burning bits of wood, strongly amplified. It has for me the same captivating feel to it, but a strong love for anything sound based is quite in place here. Also the music recorded separately works wonderfully well, and I never had the idea of listening to two different things, stuck together on one tape. This is noise, and this is noise that I like.
