Stations

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Culled from live performances 2003-06.
Modifications and enhancements as necessary. Is: Blake Edwards.

To see the new (fourth) CD by Vertonen as the logical next step since the previous release ‘Orchid Collider’ (see Vital Weekly 482) is not possible. There is some distinction between Vertonen in the studio and live, and ‘Stations’ is a collection, or rather a best of, of Vertonen’s live performances from 2003 to 2006. In the studio he crafts these days deep drone works, not unlike Eliane Radigue or The Hafler Trio, but live things are more about rhythm and noise. Using records, turntables, synths and sound effects, Vertonen’s sound pallet seems limited but these sixteen tracks show that he is a man of many talents. Harsh sounds play a big role, and they are cut to the edge, but Vertonen is never a full blown noise maker. The rhythm aspect, made by locking grooves on a piece of vinyl, remind the listener of Boyd Rice’s alter ego Non, but it’s all less minimal than that. As such ‘Stations’ and Vertonen’s live work harks back to the old days of industrial music and that’s ok in as far as he does a great job at that. It would perhaps be an idea to see if he could re-create the sonically richer material of the studio to the concert space as well.
Vinyl releases by Francisco Lopez are pretty rare. As far as I recall there is one LP on Mego and various 7″ releases, four or five, but that might be it. Perhaps it’s no surprise, since it’s not easy to translate his music to vinyl, the sheer inaudibility that is part of perhaps 80% of his work. Here he shares a LP with Micheal Gendreau, formerly of Crawling With Tarts. Micheal’s work deals with using all sorts of records, turntables, hand cut recordio disks, creating music out of the crackles, hum, static, pops, run out grooves. It’s funny to see that Lopez does the same. His piece, ‘Untitled #184’ is audible throughout, and is a densely layered carpet of sound all sorts of sounds coming from vinyl. It hisses, pops and cracks in all sorts of ways, but never in an overtly rhythmic manner. It seems to me that Lopez created all of this by making many layers of sounds and removing any possibility of repetition. The piece by Gendreau uses similar sounds, but here musical elements leak through, or perhaps are created by the various possibilities of playing the records with motors, swift speed change and such like. Whereas Lopez creates a mass of sound, Gendreau presents an audio collage. Two possibilities of working with material like this. Two great examples of those possibilities. Richly textured and no doubt will go down for the very adventurous DJs. (FdW)