"Try To Crawl Out Of It" in The Sound Projector

Nouvelles Aventures
Written by Hazel Lee

Read on The Sound Projector


Surprise, surprise ! This seems to be the common denominator in all three records here, though they do not operate in the same field, as Thomas Ankersmit takes the listener for a ride on the Serge analogue synthesizer, while Alexei Borisov/Anton Mobin conjugate tapes and electronics, dictaphone/voice, and Marc Baron exhumes his Hidden Tapes and plays with the readymade artifacts he supposedly dug out of memory. All three works are very much controlled ones, or so it appears to me, and the outmost quality I found there is a deep sense of adventure being offered : as a Raymond Roussel aficionado, I appreciate these three different trips around (and away from) my own room, blindfolded and headphones on :



Alexei Borisov / Anton Mobin
Try to Crawl Out of It
POLAND MATHKA CD (2013)


Somewhere else is where Alexei Borisov and Anton Mobin take us : their seemingly improvised delivery starts with clinical clicks that introduce resounding whip-cracks and reverberating bells : bouncing bass strings come and go, suspended time draw a prelude : anticipation, preparation, one expects a sudden dive : tension builds up to a concert of winding springs and rattles, inter-cut with mashed metal ! Tapes are somehow unwinding at high speed, spelling more start/stop/rewind action. Words here are mouthed as confessions or even a forgotten poem, with some hiccup-piano rather detuned (or is it my ears), looped. Blips and cuts, curves and hisses, snippets obliterating a conveyor belt-like chain, all crash and then erupts some tape-music. Down phased low sounds, while someone is busy manipulating unnamed objects, bells clang, machine stops. All along, there’s clattering going on with feedback, while a click-track allows a slight cadence; speech, multiple presences, the assembled music builds up, a pulse beats on ! People sometimes voice things over electronic dynamics, and all converge to a motor-like generator sound, gently humming as round shapes build up again, preceding interruption, with feedback sirens, and a beating heart can be heard behind simultaneous events. The beat frenzies upward and melts again, crashing like waves on the shore. It’s a high energy trip we’re going through, not some new-age meditation session.

Electronic glissandi introduce rotor movements, and here comes the gentle machine again, a grainy motor-thing spilling particles, shaking the air (though one can breathe). A beautiful fade-out even reverberates here and there. We’re dealing with a less clinical world here, though its adventurous qualities never suppress your air : you don’t suffocate the least bit, no.

Grains, blocks being moved, volumes changing, fast shrapnels, fluids; rotating landscape, whipping elements flying over. Sparks, as it sounds like. The whole soundscape here seems highly mineral, but with an inflammatory quality to it. As for the two other records, things sound like nothing unusual, nothing alien : operations giving shape to the sounds are like necessary ones : everything is precisely executed (or so it seems, according to a procedure) : whether there are mash-ups, they have to happen whenever they do. Then, surprise, concluding a breathy running sequence, a terminal punch brutally hits. You hadn’t seen it coming.

All along the successive tracks, we meet scraps of “romantic” songs punctured with obvious seams, fast material flying by, voices and vehicles. A subtle cooking of mashing explosions, firecrackers of bouncing elements, tapes winding/unwinding, strings, feedbacks on more clicks and cuts, along with cartoonish beings expressing urgency : communication deteriorates to a climax.

There’s something ritual, processual, building, that allows forms to emerge, in this record. One gives birth to a form, but it is inconstant, hard to sustain : a construction, tense and striving to keep its balance, that which is constantly attacked. Signals abound, like probes sent into the surroundings.

Around the end appears a crushing pandemonium conjuring a fun-fair animation : children, garlands. The dark visual information itself conveys this edgy quality, it’s mad as successive thoughts erupt and vanish madly within one person, within seconds.