Apparatus and Hand Junk Receiver
I particularly enjoy listening to music from artists I know nothing about and have never heard before. That experience is enhanced if the artist is undiscovered, unsigned and uncompromising. My desk is covered with unmarked CD-Rs that have arrived from nowhere in particular with just a stamp for company.
I also have a taste for music that I don't quite understand.
Like this.
Junk Receiver is absorbing, enthralling, irritating, simple, complex and stubbornly refuses to go where you expect it to; unfamiliar, and to Romantics like me with a mistrust and fear of sci-fi, it shouldn't even pass into the atmosphere of my green and pleasant world. But despite the reservations induced by a 'Message from the Exterminator' I find myself waving, setting up satellite dishes in the forest, winding up gramophones and turning my head from one speaker to the other in confused anticipation.
It grates, bleeps and scratches its way into orbit and combines white noise with gentle melody in a way that shouldn't really work.
I don't even understand the track titles, but that's how I know they're good. ''Cortex Department Room 23' is perfect Ballard, and one of the album's stand out tracks. Monotonous in the same way that the ocean isn't. Distant ships and muffled song. Bells KlingKlang-ing through the mist. Someone should be plucking a harp now, but instead they're annoying me with echoes, distortion and - and what exactly? There are so many reactions here. Am I annoyed? I think I was then for a minute. Must go back there. Not as lost as I feared I was going to get - remember that guitar chord, and turn left.
When you make music like this, Messrs Apparatus and Hand, how do you decide when a piece is finished? Perhaps Robin Guthrie, Harold Budd, Michel Rother or Edgar Froese could answer the same question. These are references, not comparisons. And who else shall go to the ball?
Here is the news. It's in the trees - it's coming. Komischemuzikmitbiospherics.
There are times when this sea of sound drifts dangerously close to melody and tune, when the Scary Monsters of Vangelis and even JMJ break the surface. But then I see dead people, and hear their voices, and I am reassured. The title track slides in on the oil from the ghost tanker rusting in the fjords, and from the gutter, Cosmic Nova Dust settles on what is now a moonscape. Perhaps this is futuristic after all - when industry and urbanisation finally get bored with each other. Or am I just pretending to see...?
Now I'm listening for all the references I've been told about and I just keep finding different ones. And sirens. Good link. I love this stuff. Sirens wailing in wartime streets; ego-sirens on emergency vehicles; sirens seducing sailors - all sending Messages to one another. Junk. Culture. White noise. White Arcades. Dancing.
And suddenly it's Celtic. That fjord is Bantry Bay. I knew there would be a harp in here somewhere! Just needed a good rummage.
There isn't? Oh. Must go back to that part too.
Frantically scribbling mental notes. Mapping the fog. Getting no nearer.
I don't understand Morse Code either, but there's a Gestalt thing hidden in here. The challenge is letting the musicians inspire you to keep looking.
Clever waymarking, that's their trick, but God knows how they do it.
© Birdsong 2008. Thanks to Mark
