Hafler Trio - Kisses With Both Hands From God's Little Toy
(Important)
Since being diagnosed with a serious illness, Andrew McKenzie has emerged from a reclusive recording retirement with a career redefining Muslimgauze-esque release schedule (there has even been a substantial interview piece in The Wire). Most of the output I have heard bears up to repeated exposure, and Kisses with Both Hands... is no exception.
Clocking in at a shade under 20 minutes, this successor to the 2003 Important release, A Small Child Dreams of Voiding the Plague, is akin to a lost 13th addition to the impressive Raster Noton 20 to 2000 series of single-piece electronic tinkerings. The beginning of the CD is typically obtuse—a minute's silence following four or five brief words of foreign introduction—then the satisfying deep, low-frequency drone kicks in like the humming sound of a distant motorway heard from a secluded rural knoll. An overriding sense of calm prevails despite the digital genesis of the sounds. Then another anti-music joke as the drone is interrupted without warning by a sudden, loud cough and subsequent handclaps. Why? Why not, I guess.
The remainder of the disc follows a similar trail—a rapid isolated metronome is succeeded by muffled underwater drones are succeeded by sampled radio or Linguaphone voices ("ecoutez et repetez" in Icelandic, perchance?); at no stage is any one section allowed to continue for such a time as to allow the listener to relax before he (or she) is obliged to contend with an interruption or change in tack. It's reminiscent of radio tuning but without the harsh hiss between receptions.
Despite the relative brevity of the piece and the jagged compositional interventions, an overall impression of fluidity and malleability is sustained, as if transporting the music on a smooth conveyor belt through landscapes from the composer's tamer nightmares.
|
