ERIC LA CASA & CEDRIC PEYRONNET - LA CREUSE review(s)

VITAL WEEKLY = number 635 - week 28

As far as I remember I’ve never been to the area where Cedric Peyronnet (also better known as Toy Bizarre) and Eric La Casa recorded their work, the Creuse department in central France - maybe I saw it today when watching the Tour de France. However there is a booklet with this CD with pictures of the area, and in each picture there is a pair of microphones to be spotted. This is as close as you can make field recordings visual I guess. A pity that the booklet, a diary it seems, is all in French, with some general English translation on the cover. The area was divided into several specific sites which were recorded by one, and then sent to the other to work on it, to interpret the place. And vice versa of course. Each piece is started by one, finished by the other. Its not easy to hear who did what, but I think that the pieces finished by Peyronnet have a minimal subtle electronic manipulations, and that La Casa’s pieces are entirely made with field recordings. I might be wrong however and no electronic processing took place. We hear rain, wind, footsteps and sounds from water, objects and other sonic events which are hard to be placed somewhere in terms of what one could recognize. Even when this is divided into nine pieces, it’s best enjoyed as a complete picture: listen from start until the end, sit back and transport yourself through time and space - time is the length of the CD and the place is La Creuse. This rural and forest area is pictured quite well before your very eyes. A very refined work.
- Frans De Waard

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bring Furniture to Europe

One of the aim to re-release the Furniture’s ground breaking debut cd TWILIGHT CHASES THE SUN last year was I would like to bring Furniture over to Europe to play some concerts and meet some like-minds bands & musicians. Whoever had heard the music of Furniture and would like to help to make the Furniture’s Europe visit possible, pls get in touch with me.

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Eric La Casa Cédric Peyronnet La Creuse flyer

Feel free to spread this, thank you very much!

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The Sounds Of Herbal - Free On-line Sample Compilation

new!! now  you can listen to the 3 mins sample of all Herbal Concrete Disc releases to date! click here!

Playlist:
1. Goh Lee Kwang:: A Lie To Liar
2. Goh Lee Kwang Tim Blachmann:: DRONE
3. Goh Lee Kwang:: Fragments
4. Goh Lee Kwang:: Good Vibrations #5
5. Goh Lee Kwang:: Internal Pleasures #5
6. Eric Cordier:: OSOREZAN
7. Goh Lee Kwang:: PUNK GUITAR
8. Furniture:: Postcards
9. Beequeen:: Six Notes On Blank Tape

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Goh Lee Kwang Internal Pleasures review(s)

Paris Transatlantic, Jan 2005
Malaysian-born Goh Lee Kwang’s Innere Freuden (”Internal Pleasures”) comes with an A5 handout containing the following text: “By using an analog DJ mixer with the line connection of ‘output back to input’, the electronic signal becomes audioable [sic] NO synth, NO pre-programming, NO on going effects and NO post-overdub.” (That’s almost as many “no”s as a Lou Reed interview..) Dunno whether Lee’s contemplating teaming up with Toshimaru “No Input Mixing Desk” Nakamura, Sachiko “No Samples In The Sampler” M and Otomo “No Records On The Turntable” Yoshihide, but the seven tracks on offer here are every bit as austere and compelling as that trio’s recent excellent Good Morning Good Night double on Erstwhile. I admit I still have a soft spot for the more eclectic train wreck electronica of GLK’s Nerve Center, but no matter ? the vocabulary here is drastically pared down but he still uses to poetic effect. Innere Freuden is by no means an easy listen, but it’s a very rewarding one.
- Dan Warburton -

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Beequeen TIME WAITS FOR NO ONE review(s)

They look absolutely GORGEOUS - I really think it matches the original Monroe-cover when it comes to beauty. The paper you used is really nice, shiny and of good quality. The colour-matching is great!
In all, I am very very happy with this release! A nice little classy artifact of a time long gone by.
Freek Kinkelaar (Beequeen)

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Furniture TWILIGHT CHASES THE SUN

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Beequeen TIME WAITS FOR NO ONE review(s)

The Wire March 1995

After a first listening-trial I concluded that this wasn’t exactly my cup of tea… Some weeks later, however, I had to change my opinion. I had given this CD another chance, and while I was doing something else, this CD was nicely rumbling in the background. By mistake I’d put my CD-player in “random-repeat” mode, and by the time I discovered my horrible act, the music had penetrated my mind several times already … I found myself being carried away on noisy waves, now and then penetrated by beautiful analog bleebs, blobs and distorted frequencies… My heart was beating on the rhythm of short looped sounds and percussion, and at the end of my hallucination I entered the world of Thee Mighty Drone and His o Royal Ambientcy. When I regained back consciousness, Marylin Monroe was sitting next to me and asked me if I liked cream and sugar in my coffee… OK, cut the crap; this is a rather good buy! The gauzy image of Marilyn Monroe on the cover of this record is a bit ambiguous, unless it is reflective of the sometimes austere pace and feel conveyed by the electronics therein. Actually, Frans de Waard and Freek Kinkelaar, with their banks of electronics and other unspecified instruments, convey many alternatively bleak, if imagistic, soundscapes, either through the wheezing of asthmatic machines, drones of catatonia immersed in cryogenic guitar feedback or the steamy smelt of arcane industry. Atonal occasionally, even unearthly, yet strangely accessible, these works are part of an aesthetic wherein the forging of an unfamiliar sound canvas becomes the springboard from which the listener can extract pictures, panoramas, shapes. Any other points of harmonic reference become irrelevant; so ultimately, as the music crystallizes, one is left with Its residual suggestions. Engrossing music that subtly leaves the impression to come back and experience it further.
- Darren Bergstein -

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Goh Lee Kwang PUNK GUITAR review(s)

Music Emissions

Goh Lee Kwang is a solo guitar improviser whose work runs the arc of shades from noise to ambient uses of bare-minimum chords and a lot of silence. Punk Guitar is a collection of tracks released on cd-r in 2002 in an ultra-rare edition of 50 or so copies. This version is cleaned up considerably giving more force and warm to the colors created by Kwang and his axe.
An 18 minute track was recorded exclusively for this release, and it is a beast of silence and noise, drawing on all his mastery of pet themes and visions. Truly a mouth-gaping blast of genius.
Goh Lee Kwang has recorded a good portion of his music to accompany experimental dance in a live setting, mostly the Japanese style known as Butoh. That attention to movement, understanding of chance and acoustic enhancement, drives these meditations. “Punk Guitar” is an apt title, despite the more quiet moments; Punk was about freedom and inhibition, a celebration of mistakes and moments that are pointless a minute after noticing them. Kwang’s music may drift away, but while it was here, it was a shock to the system.
- Mike Wood -

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Eric Cordier OSOREZAN review(s)

Bixobal 3, April 2008

subtitled “Selected Field Recordings 1993 - 2006″, this release does better then your average disc of recordings made outdoors by presenting some rather unique locales. First up are the bubbling gas emanations of the volcanic sites at Niseko and Osorezan in Japan. Illustrated by photographs in the triple-fold cover and 12-page booklet, both in full color, a clear image is created of these special spots full of the sounds of simmering and jetting gases coming from the earth from underneath pools of water or directly through the mud. The sounds are of an unstable environment. After the opening trio of nature sounds, the disc moves on to concern itself with human related activities. Although a clear theme eludes me, the pieces all make fascinating listening featuring as they do the unloading of a French ferry, the wires of a “bridge” on the seacoast of Japan, which leads nowhere (another construction kickback), the building and subsequent burning of a 46-foot bonfire, and activity around a country path - the last two in rural areas of France. What strikes me is that there places are ones that most people would not know about, let alone visit. I’m sure we have all considered volcanos at various points, but their manifestations are numerous leading many sites to be different. And how many outside of Japan know of the huge sums of government money siphoned off by well connected constrators for essentially useless projects, let alone consider what there lonely sites are like? finally, while I could picture a festival in that island nation still burning large pyres, I didn’t realize that such a practice was still active in France. The second piece in that section, “Les tintenelles at le feu”, is a mixture of the dying harmonium from the church, a few drum beats, the wandering sounds of bells, various voices, and the sounds of burning wood. Captured with clarity, the pieces are little aural movie.
- Eric Lanzillotta -

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