recent Vital reviews

[Sean Cooper <scooper@xxxxxxxx>]

the reviews below appear in the latest issue of Vital, frans de waard's
excellent, long-running weekly reviews newsletter.

sc


RICHARD CHARTIER - A HESITANT FOLD (CD by meme)
Chartier has had quite a few releases lately, all of them in the same
'microwavy' style. This one is no exception; 8 tracks of quiet pulses and
waves, once again best listened to with your headphones on. It is
remarkable how Chartier's music has its own very personal character. In
that sense he is defenitely on the same level as Ikeda or Noto. But in
comparison with them, Chartier's music has got an intimacy, that is not
easily associated with this kind of music. This is probably partly due to
the low volume of the tracks, but also has something to do with the way his
work sounds. The stereo panorama is extensively used for all those pulses
and bleeps and there are no FX to distract from the original synthetic
sounds. So it is the pure nature of this synthetic material, that creates
the intimacy, because of its directness. The tracks have a slow and steady
development, with some breaks here and there, but not any harsh ones.
Chartier makes very clever use of the different qualities of pulses and
waves, alternating or combining them in such a way, that their character is
changing all the time. And that is exactly why this CD is so fascinating:
he is able to make strong compositions with a very limited amount of
material. And I think that deserves a lot of credit.(MR)
Adress: meme-@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

PIMMON - WAVES AND PARTICLES (CD by Meme)
*0 - 0.0 (CD by Meme)
This is Pimmon's, aka Paul Gough, first full length CD. Earlier he released
a beautiful 12" LP on the new ERS label (which sadly enough wasn't reviewed
in Vital Weeky, eternal shame upon ourselves) and there are also released
out or forthcoming on Fat Cat and Static Caravan. According to the rather
uninformative Meme cover, Pimmon uses a personal computer in combination
wwith two old analogue synths. He tapes sounds from the synths and composes
with these sounds on his harddisc. Over the course of his 10 tracks, he
shows a varied pallet of sounds and techniques. There is the obvious noise
bit (as in the short 'Cafu'), and more quiet pieces which places more
interest on the balance. Pimmon mostly uses loops to create his pieces, and
thus a somewhat 'beating' character is added to the pieces. Even when it
would maybe hint at techno music, it never gets anywhere close. At best
some of the pieces are more in the Mego alley, and the majority would be
classified as 'intellectual industrial'. The more noisy variant to RLW,
Meelkop and the like.

*0 is also at his first real CD, after some CDRs and collaborative work
with Richard Chartier. More then Pimmon, *0 is closer to techno and
industrial. High blee ping pulses and deep bass sounds make up his music.
If the work of Ryoji Ikeda means something to you, then you'll find 0*
similar. He uses the same sort of souds, but less hectic and more linear
then Ikeda. It's quite extreme music, very low end bass, very high end
pitches: the middle seems to be playing part. Very homgone material here
and very much tone inspired. What more could I add? (FdW)
Adress: meme-@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx