NUM “Memory Machine” C33 (Dinzu Artefacts)

As with all things Dinzu, with “Memory Machine” you’re here for the ride. For the journey. For all the surprises you’re certain to get as you travel along the path. It’s not the ending, the resolution – it’s the process. Here husband-and-wife duo Num – Maryan Sirvan on electronics, flute, and voice, and Milad Bagheri with some more electronics and sound engineering – work through the idea of the mind as machine, the electronic processes and industrial (like Industrial Revolution, not industrial music) mechanics operating in tandem to achieve functionality.

Over two lengthy sides, Sirvan and Bagheri do nothing but tantalize with their interplay, their obvious familiarity with one another a distinct strength as the machinery of their creativity executes its purpose with precision. Through their explorations we get a glimpse of the human mind at work, creating memory, recalling memory, reorganizing memory, recycling memory. It’s as if Num studied a human brain for a while and improvised over its activities.

Dinzu Artefacts


--Ryan

OHM “G5” C50 (Dinzu Artefacts)

I’ve been sitting on this chair in this museum for what seems like hours, and I think everyone has gone home except for Ohm, the Dutch trio tinkering away on … instruments? … in the corner over there. I dare not move, unless I break the spell. That I have an important appointment I simply must get to is inconsequential – I should’ve thought of that before I wandered into this museum and sat down on this chair and become mesmerized by this Ohm group. Oh well – the vice chancellor can wait fifty minutes!

For I am a paragon of patience myself, at one with the slow unfolding of “G5,” unfazed by heaps of objects designated “sound sources”: “sound guns”; “spinning top”; “shredder”; “pencil drums”; “mechanics.” These are the things you hear on “G5,” among others, played live and recorded at two different sessions in 2017: Sonic Acts at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and Gaudeamus Muziekweek, TivoliVredenburg, Utrecht. That I’ve spelled these things correctly is a minor miracle unto itself.

It is impossible to know what is being played while listening to the recordings on cassette tape, but being there, sitting on this chair in this museum, is like being a witness to a slow-motion tornado of minimal rhythmic activity. Ohm’s sounds are like breathing, air flowing into and out of lungs, punctuated by dust motes and germs and coughs – so, smooth, yes, but also tactile and a little disconcerting.

As “G5” passes the fifty-minute mark I unglue myself from my position and wander off toward the entrance, forgetting everything that I was supposed to do in the past hour and not worrying about it anymore anyway, I am inspired to maybe wander through a gallery or two before poking my umbrella-covered head back out into the overcast city. Although if they don’t have any Picassos in here, I’m gonna be pissed.

[Disclaimer: I wasn’t actually there.]

Dinzu Artefacts

--Ryan

BILLY GOMBERG “Transition” C30 (Dinzu Artefacts)

If there’s a Dinzu aesthetic, Billy Gomberg’s got it. It’s like that scene in Back to the Future where Marty’s playing Chuck Berry at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance. “Hey Billy, it’s your cousin, Marvin … Marvin GOMBERG. You know that new sound you’re looking for? Well listen to this!” Obviously, it didn’t quite go down that way, because Billy Gomberg didn’t get a phone call from his cousin directing him to listen to some future person whose sound he would later “originate.” (We can argue closed time loops all day and how ridiculous they are, but we won’t.) But really, is there a more fitting home for Gomberg’s music than Dinzu Artefacts? I submit that there is not.

Transition is an album that lives up to its name, a drifting, evolutionary signpost marking the passage of time. As befits a Dinzu release, field recordings are processed through effects and electronics, the sounds taking on entirely new identities as they’re filtered through Gomberg’s vision of glacial motion. The tracks are untitled, marked only by the amount of time they fill. And fill they do, as you must pay careful attention to the compositions, allowing them to consume your focus so that you don’t miss a single detail. You could call them drones, but that would be selling them short – there’s distinctive movement in the works, distinctive tones, unearthed emotional stimuli whose raw receptors remind you of events in your life that you’d forgotten. Wisps of memory once again become tactile. You remember who you once were.

Now, transitioning back to me being a cad, imagine again Billy Gomberg, hero of high school dances, enlightening an auditorium full of students with his cerebral excursions. Instead of foxtrotting to the pure sound emanating from the PA, everybody would go all glassy-eyed, entranced by the sonics. They’d be under the spell of Billy Gomberg for hours. That would be something. Somebody spike the punch.

Billy Gomberg
Dinzu Artefacts

--Ryan Masteller

ME, CLAUDIUS “Reasons for Balloons” C22 (Dinzu Artefacts)

End-of-the-Line Folk. Some Welsh. All Female.

Me, Claudius in a descriptorific nutshell, and I have nothing to add. And anyway, who needs reasons for balloons? Nobody. Balloons all the time, I always say. But who needs Reasons for Balloons? Oh, that’s a different answer. That answer is everybody. Everybody needs to get in on this one.

Reasons for Balloons is immediately different from everything in the first Dinzu batch. “Heartbreaking Shuffle and Statuesque” is chock full of samples, twisted bass grooves and jazz inflections, filled to overflowing with masterful use of spoken word snippets. “Safari. Church Style. (‘I, the people. Cut into squares’)” is chock full of samples, twisted bass grooves and jazz inflections, filled to overflowing with masterful use of spoken word snippets. Yes, thank god, yes, this becomes a new revelation, the new standard for experimental music. It’s wickedly calculated and expertly crafted. It’s essentially the very definition of kinetic energy, but applied with a nuance that is but should not be surprising. Get off your Norelco shell high horse and live a little! What, you think someone else is going to make all your decisions for you? Actually, if you don’t mind, I will make this decision: you will buy this tape. Enjoy, and tell your friends, and remember that I’m here for you.

Hey, whaddya know, I didn’t even do the whole I, Claudius thing. I restrained myself.

Me, Claudius

Dinzu Artefacts

--Ryan Masteller

SEQUENCES “Carapace” C19 (Dinzu Artefacts)

What, you want stability? No you don’t – I know for a fact that you don’t. You want instability because instability brings surprise. Yeah, sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, but you never expect it, and that’s the key. Sequences is in no mood to deliver upon expectation, instead opting to traffic in diversions, only to pull out the proverbial rug when you think you’ve got him pegged. Niels Geybels, the Belgian behind the Sequences brand, allows us to observe, through nineteen minutes of tenuous constancy, what the churning lagoon sounds like from beneath the waves. But please remove all ideas of pacific beachbound  meditation – there’s not a grain of white sand nor a palm tree within [earshot] of this release. I shouldn’t have to warn you so explicitly – I figured the terms “instability” and “tenuous constancy” would do the trick. You can never be too careful.

The cassette’s cover image provides all the visual cues you need to submerge yourself and allow the currents to move you. Tones oscillate and overwhelm, and sometimes recede for clarity. Changes occur on a dime, with tracks often not reaching three minutes in length, allowing Geybels to fiddle with perception as the whim strikes. Let it happen – there’s no resisting the movement, the pull, the expanse greater than comprehension. Consider the perspective of a turtle or a crustacean, whose titular shell protects it on its path through life. The wide ocean beyond the immediate vicinity is an unfathomable distance. Impose upon the creature’s tiny mind the philosophy of meaning and its place within the space, and you break it. Carapace exists until it, too, breaks, fleeting, active, violent, ultimately unstable, never disappointing.

Sequences Bandcamp

Dinzu Artefacts

--Ryan Masteller

MONTE BURROWS “The Concentration of Brown Owls” C20 (Dinzu Artefacts)

Monte Burrows lives alone in a tiny studio apartment at the top of a run-down building for a reason. No other landlord would take such a reclusive weirdo who just happens to have an unhealthy owl fetish. You’re thinking, Ryan, why is it so weird that Monte Burrows would want to fill his life with figurines and carvings of owls? That’s not too weird. My mother-in-law likes owls. Yeah, but you see, it’s not the figurines and the carvings that gets ol’ Monte up in the morning (if he ever even goes to sleep, and there’s no evidence that I know of that he does). Monte Burrows actually fills his apartment with actual owls, hundreds of them, so that there’s no space uncovered that does not have a living, breathing, eating, shitting owl on it. The entirety of side A is the shut-in’s answer to nature doc, field recordings of ambient noise sounding like the claustrophobia of being alone in a room surrounded by the friction of wings and beaks. Probably smells terrible too. You can hear other birds outside the window with its drawn blinds, but they have no interest in anything going on inside.

We’re inside Monte’s head on side B, keys/strings/stringkeys darken any corners that still have light in them. Even with this mood pastiche and potential glimpse into the madness, it remains opaque, Monte’s thoughts closed off to us as weird bubbly blurps punctuate the strange atmosphere. It’s a nightmare, really. It’s like Eraserhead with owls and no lady in the radiator. The Eraserhead baby has been replaced by a thousand owls. Think of it as a thousand Eraserhead babies. Monte Burrows doesn’t see the owls, he sees the horror of others. He likes it – I think. He’s been locked in that apartment for a long time now. I think he’s taken on some owlish characteristics, like not blinking and swiveling his head all the way around. Eating mice. Other gross stuff. Good tape though.

Monte Burrows

Dinzu Artefacts

--Ryan Masteller

GIOVANNI LAMI “Opale” C22 (Dinzu Artefacts)

The inaugural Dinzu Artefacts batch – the label an extension of the Spring Break Tapes brand (but of course its own thing) – is a monument to sound sculpture. Let those words sink in for a second. Giovanni Lami, whose Opale consists of two sides, “Primo Solco” and “Secondo Solco,” has concocted, for his part, a piece of experimental music that defies the traditional boundaries of concept and execution, of the physical and audible. It’s like he’s placed a theoretical audio mirror in the same room as all the source material he’s drawn from for Opale, and in doing so the monument becomes a monument to the monument, a sound sculpture chiseled in ProTools (or whatever) that acts as a sound sculpture to his sound sculpture. The mirror becomes itself, reflecting whatever it’s defining into infinity, and therefore ends up becoming defined by it.

Lami, a Ravenna-born artist (that’s in Italy, you lazy map truthers), literally builds Opale, his sonic carpentry coalescing itself into one structure or another before moving on to the next level. Field recordings mix with ambient texture, resulting in combinations that are almost tangible. Lami’s experimental processes are never less than interesting, as each moment escapes pure sound and becomes physically tactile, a magic trick that my imagination completes as the willing participant. Each side stretches over ten minutes, and getting lost in the pieces is the easy part – reacclimating yourself to the world as you remember it is the tricky bit. Opale is perfect for museum earbud accompaniment as you stroll through corridors of modern art.

Giovanni Lami

Dinzu Artefacts

--Ryan Masteller