Rene Hell’s The Canon EP might be Jeff Witscher’s most spastic and “busy” work
to date; on this cassette he ditches the ambient aspect of his music almost
entirely, instead focusing on cyclical repetition and dense clusters of sound,
bordering on glitch at times.
The opener, “Variation Third” seems to be
the closest to his usual oeuvre as Rene Hell, with a simple synthesizer
sequence relentlessly repeating its way through all sorts of small bleeps and
bloops with massive, bassy drones that can almost be disguised as melody rising
and falling every now and then. At the end, the piece’s structure is almost
toppled by a cluster of rapidly played (or programmed to be rapidly played)
synth piano notes, which continues into the second track, “Melody for Arkham”. What
is characteristic of this tape (and maybe of Witscher’s latest work in general)
is the intentional “fakeness” of sound – one can tell it’s a synthesized piano
from a mile off and Rene Hell isn’t trying to hide this fact. Quite the
contrary – he’s taking refuge from the rest of the scene with his
super-polished and super “fake” sound. “Melody for Arkham” is fast and raving
mad, with superfast clusters of piano notes creating a ripped, irregular melody
which brings to mind La Monte Young’s A
Well Tuned Piano on amphetamines. “Med School Prince” follows the same
path, this time blending the jagged piano madness with massive, gradiental
drones, reaching almost disorienting heights. The closing “Nazi Love Motel II”
can be best considered as “whimsical” – simple, repeating piano motive (oh,
that fakeness of sound!) is joined by high-pitched whining and playful glitches
resembling the sound you make when trying to imitate a horse (not the neighing, the other sound).
The Canon is a nice
little addition to Rene Hell’s discography. The music on the tape is not life
changing, or extremely atmospheric. Instead, Jeff’s trying to craft his own
kind of hyper-real, maniacal minimalism played through the prism of skewed IDM
and glitch, falling somewhere between La Monte Young, James Ferraro and
Autechre. Rene Hell’s idiosyncratic sound is further represented in his art, merging
fashion world and celebrity imagery with abstract shapes, random dots and
commas and cryptic track titles.
Link via The Radiant Now
2 comments:
interesting stuff, thoughtful thoughts
very nice
thanks
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