Jazzkammer: Timex
CD - Rune Grammofon, Norway - 1999
Reviews:
JAZZKAMMER: TIMEX CD
Jazzkammer = post-minimal. New coy genre tags aside, it's inherently useless & silly trying to work with the constraints of the english language to try and paint even a vague picture of the musical treats on this record. These are subconscious sound collages, incorporating field recordings, turntables, vinyl crackles, tape hiss, guitars, and various bits of static sine waves, where any senseof rhythmic structure seems more incidental than premeditated...though, I won't go so far as to call this "improvised". Argue all you want about whether this is or isn't "music", but when i'm looking for something that sonically explores the microscopic DNA that lives in the music ideas that make my motor run fastest, Jazzkammer hit the nail right on the head. "Neon Express", with an almost non-existent electronic blurp hovering in the background, incorporates the sound of a stylus slipping in and out of a run-out groove at the end of an lp side. It's hard to tell whether the field recordings on "Elevator Necklace" are the sounds of subway cars passing overhead, women screaming through an airport, or the sounds of the lake superior zoo once all the cages have been opened at 3:00am on a dark, wintry Friday night and the cries of "freedom!!" have reached even the reptile barn. "Bacteria Less Thermo" effectively conjures up images of the sonic architecture of chemical reactions: humming static, ambient drone, what sounds like the amplified uncoiling of electric guitar strings, all occasionally interrupted with some downright crippling moments of exploding static/noise. It's hard to make out in the final track, "Happy New Year", just when the transformation occurs from the CNN report-style gunfire to 4th of July fireworks, but it all sounds right when all you're left with at disks' end is the head-under-pillow muffled sounds of distant, low-to-ground explosions digitally processed a thousand times over. another ace from norway's Rune Grammofon label - quickly becoming a consistent favorite.
(unknown online review) JAZZKAMMER: timex (CD rune grammofon)
jazzkammer quickly bring us to the here and now, to the urgency of electronic machines, to a continuous flux created with record players, field recordings, guitars, samples, casios, sinusoidal waves, all used in a free improvisation by john hegre and lasse marhaug. both have a more than respectable past in the field of improvisation or soundtracks. lasse had also been part of origami replika, a punk-scum band which also supported einsturzende neubauten. in timex they put their efforts in a cinematic collage of angry sounds that suddenly get quiet, then freaked by noise again. try to imagine merzbow, pan sonic and maybe even ikeda and microstoria all mixed in a bit more than 40 minutes: you'll get something similar to them. a well done mix of noise, shock waves and electric atmospheric statics, this is jazzkammer, that reaches its top in the last track: happy new year, where the sounds of fireworks, innocent celebration of the new year, mix themselves with the sounds of blasts of war stolen from a cnn reportage. really frightening.
(Gino Dal Soler, Blow Up)
Jazzkammer: Timex (cd by Rune Grammofon)
Crackling like electrified air and storms is what happens next. The end of vinyl? The world? Like the naked man cooking bacon, it surges forth, grumbling and grunting slightly. And then, as an airplane at 40,000 feet, the sound mutes, and occasional scratching can be heard trying to rip apart various areas of your speaker cones. It?s a surprisingly gentle series of sounds that threatens to destroy your hi-fi at any moment lest you step up the volume a bit. The crackles and hisses comes in steady waves, crashing on the shore of peripheral consciousness and eddying a bit before turning into waves of mercury, or liquid helium. It?s difficult to tell which of the pieces are acoustical samples of sound events, or manipulated samples. Testament to zeroes and ones, actually. The squeal of metal and wheels zips itself down into the action, as if the contact microphone has become entangled in a gurney trundling down the corridors of a hospital proper. A midi tune ^ from an Asian film ^ and sounds sweep past in fast-motion, through some creaking and ambient room-sounds, into ?Bacteria Less Thermo?, a decidedly louder bit that echoes what seems like gong resonantion but likely isn?t. An incredibly high-pitched tone ^ go ahead, move your head, it changes as you do ^ follows, increasing in pitch and it?s faintly like a tractor-trailer truck, the way the pitch changes so often. Third gear, it?s all right fourth gear, it?s all right twenty-fourth gear, it?s all right The metallic banging and feedbacked ice fog of ?Happy New Year" end the album but, with high-pitched sound, we know that it?s not truly over until it?s.over.
(David Cotner, Usual Scandal Sheets)
JAZZKAMMER - TIMEX (CD by Rune Grammofon)
Combining efforts with John Hegre, busy boy Lasse Marhaug has yet started another project to spread his work around. In a nicely designed digipack we find a CD with a duration of almost 44 minutes that starts with a pretty mean first track, as far as sounds are concerned: pops and white noise with a hollow windy sound underneath stretch out and are completed with other unidentifyable squeaking things. Creapy, but very nice indeed. The second track features more of the same, but by far not as creepy. More subdued and open, it drifts along and could almost be considered an ambient piece. Track three uses loops and noisy cut ups, all in the high frequencies range. Later on some low pulses are added. Except for the low volume, this is a noise piece, lacking a certain tension that was there in the first two pieces. Next one starts with squeaking acoustic sounds (a train?) and other noises added slowly in the course of the piece. All sounds are kept very close together, causing a slow change in the sound, untill there is a sudden break with a stupid piano piece and other sounds.And then it ends. Good stuff!. Track four consists of interrupted acoustic sounds and is very short, but nice. Five greets us with a blast of noise, followed by all kinds of other weird sounds. This one has that peculiar tension again: a little haunting, but with a firm grip. There are some good cuts in there as well. Track seven is one of those very high frequency ear killers, kind of noisy microwave stuff. After a minute or two a wonderful drone fades in and out. Some pops, and we're left with the high ones, slowly getting crazy. The last track sounds almost old- fashioned: reversed music, someone hitting metal, and drones. But the sound is good and the tension as well. The track changes halfway through, when most sounds are faded out and leaves us with a recording of fireworks, which at first seemed to be something entirely different. This is a CD with a very good mix of noise, electronics and electracoustics.
(Roel Meelkop, Vital Weekly) |
