Lifespans

10,00 € VAT Included

In stock

Lifespans is a mesmerizing and hallucinating piece of electronic music.
Listen to it at a fairly loud volume, or with headphones, and you will hear myriads of voices and melodies, never repeating themselves.

“Over the past… well, maybe 15-20 years… I have seen a lot of concerts with Jaap Blonk, solo as well as improvising with others. His voice work is known throughout the entire world of avant-garde, I should think. He recites historical sound poetry, does weird stuff with his mouth and plays with musicians. Can he still surprise me, I was thinking right before I started to play ‘Lifespans’. Yes, he surely can. A few years he took a sabbatical and learned how to program computer software; following his return, he offered us new music in which computers and software played some part but the voice was still his main instrument. In ‘Keynote Dialogues’, his previous release (see Vital Weekly 850), he also had a noise pieces and some that were computer processed voice pieces. ‘Lifespans’ is one work, spanning sixty-six minutes (for convenience reasons split into thirteen segments of five minutes each), and its like something I never heard from Blonk before. Apparently its based on a single sound sample, being played through whatever bit of software Blonk has mastered. You don’t recognize a voice in here, but in stead it’s all a rather noise based work. Heavily layered sounds, like a computerized version of Merzbow, but one that slowly builds up and then towards the end (from track ID #10 onwards) it goes down a bit, with less layers and notes being played on a midi keyboard, until finally breaking down to a few notes in the final piece. A very consistent work, and totally alien, it seems to me, for Blonk to do. I don’t think he wants to re-invent himself as a noise composer, but he seems close to people like Ottavi or Mattin here, but finds his own voice (pun intended) in the world of computerized noise music. A surprise? Hell yes, what a surprise indeed. It made me curious if he does this in concert too, and how that would sound, and likewise curious to hear what will come next from him.” (FdW)