| |
Treetop Drive
$17.99 CD
Imaginary Songs...
$17.99 CD
|
|
DEATHPROD
Treetop Drive
(Rune Grammofon)
 "Treetop Drive 1"
"Treetop Drive 3"
DEATHPROD
Imaginary Songs from Tristan da Cunha
(Rune Grammofon)
"Stony Beach"
"Boatharbour Bay"
Helge Sten might be best known for the role he's played in Supersilent, the Norwegian improvisers who make a kind of hybrid electronic-ambient-jazz; he has also moonlighted with pseudo-rockers Motorpsycho, both as a performer and as a producer. As such, you'd be forgiven for guessing that his solo work would fall somewhere in between these two, but you'd be wrong. In truth, under the Deathprod name Sten produced outstanding (albeit consistently gloomy) audio sculpture that flirts with dark ambient noise, contemporary music theory, and even literary devices. Back in 2004, Rune Grammofon's Deathprod box set offered a nearly complete retrospective of this almost invisible solo career. It contained three full albums, one disc of unreleased material, plus an excellent 32-page book that explained Sten's preoccupation with everything from Giacinto Scelsi and superseded technology to the writing of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Of those four discs, two stood out as exceptional: Treetop Drive, originally released in 1996, and Imaginary Songs from Tristan da Cunha, from 1994; both recordings are now available as stand-alone discs from Rune Grammofon.
With both albums, Helge Sten concerns himself more with the tactile qualities of music and less with melody or conventional forms. On Treetop Drive, Sten and Motorpsycho guitarist Hans Magnus Ryan, who picks up a violin for this record, focus on two distinct musical elements: pulse and texture. Together, they demonstrate the possibilities inherent in just these ingredients by means of contrast. The first two songs, "Treetop Drive 1" and "Treetop Drive 2," feature a prominent orchestral swell that swims up out of the silence the way a lighthouse beacon might sweep out across a shoreline at night. In the first song, this orchestral moan repeats over and over again and is eventually met by the screeching and crying of Ryan's heavily affected strings, which start and stop in unison with that first pulsing figure and the other electronic debris that eventually manifests. In the second song, Sten returns to the same rhythmic figure, but this time the swell sounds like a damaged siren, and its only accompaniment is a blurting low end that's half foghorn and half sea monster. The call and response of the screaming, metallic siren and the floor-shaking bass tones recalls the shape of the first song, but the simple act of mixing up the instrumentation transforms it into something more abrasive and confrontational. In the album's second act, Sten submerges his obsession with pulse beneath a murky fabric that he and Ryan weave from organ tones, distorted strings, and purring synthesizers. All the drama and intensity result from the tiny variations and slow changes that occur within the carpet of noise they lay down right from the start.
Imaginary Songs from Tristan da Cunha, on the other hand, comes at texture by way of technology. Sten brought his friend Ole-Henrik Moe out into the Norwegian wilderness and recorded him playing violin for the trees. He then took those recordings and transferred them to wax cylinders before playing them back and recording them to a digital format. The first four tracks are brief examples of what resulted. The effect is like listening to a radio drama about a haunted house through an antique Zenith radio, but there's enough environmental noise in the mix that it sounds like it could be a field recording. The playback medium itself becomes an instrument, or at least a factor, in how the sounds are interpreted, and for a moment you believe that Sten went to Tristan da Cunha (the world's most isolated island) and found these recordings in someone's basement. The concluding 30-minute behemoth, titled "The Contraceptive Briefcase II," continues the haunted-island vibe, but in a live setting with Theremin, synthesizers, violin, Ligeti-esque vocals, and resonating glass. At once beautiful and slightly unnerving, it shows just how well Sten can work within an improvisational mode without resorting to the techniques found on his Supersilent and Motorpsycho records.
Even though both of these albums are close to 20 years old, it'd be easy to confuse them for new releases in 2012. That's probably because Deathprod draws influence from so many places, and because he's so talented at synthesizing those inspirations. In any case, these records are damn near flawless, and they're perfect for those of us who think the winter months should feel a little chillier than they already do. [LS]
|
|
