Verbos 262v Harmonic Oscillator

After a lengthy wait the 262v has finally arrived! We'll see what variety of harmonic mayhem I can unleash with this module...stay "tuned"!!!

SAMPLE & HOLD : zoviet*france

Scheduled to play at the AV Festival at Newcastle upon the Tyne in the UK, the legendary electro-exploratory group Zoviet*France is in dire need of re-evaluation. Arguably the four albums pictured below represent some of their best work ranging from faux tribal percussion work-outs and blurred ghost voices to loopy ambient mirages with cut and paste noise assaults woven throughout.

The titles seem to reflect today's socio-political environment in spite of their 1986-87 productions, a glimpse into our present/future populated by Misfits, Loony Tunes and Squalid Criminals(think Mit Romney and Rick Santorum), Assault and Mirage(the Republican Party overall, and Newt Gingrich specifically), and certainly A Flock of Rotations(just about everyone's inability to move forward and Santorum's absolute need to move backwards socially).

If you can find these beautiful digi-packs housing artfully enigmatic marks and scribbles, allow yourself the "Charm, Ceremony, Chance and Prophecy" this series of Zoviet*France releases signals with a sonorous poetry that is expressively timeless.

WARNING: CONTENTS INCLUDE MATERIALS OF EUROPEAN ORIGIN.

Featuring a voice sample from the 1957 classic Jacques Tourneur film Curse of the Demon, the ether^ra track NI-ALL (recently favorited on Soundcloud by Alessandro Cortini. Thanks Alessandro!) exploits the mutant sonic characteristics of the Buchla 200e and my growing eurorack system. The track, a glitchy soup with cloudy liminal Buchla sounds floating through the mix begins with Niall Mac Ginnis ,who plays the leader of the local witch cult, intoning ominously "...some things are more easily started than stopped." Like the Green Man and Snakes and Ladders, Curse of the Demon mines a particularly british hidden reverse. Curse inhabits and informs my hypnagogic soundworld, quite the opposite of Hawaii Five O and the Boys of Summer.

SAMPLE & HOLD : autechre

Considering my steady intake of sonic debris over the years, this now sounds like a dystopian form of beauty. While this IS Autechre's most assaulting track, the cleaving blocks of sound, micro-moments of halting silence, and the hammering tonalities create a kind of organic geometry that is quite beautiful in its furious expansion and contraction.

SERGE MODULAR & EURORACK CONSUMATION

SAMPLE & HOLD : playlist

*Russell Haswell / Acid Noise Synthesis

* Dead Machines / Futures

*Farmers Manual / Exploreres_We

*John Wall & Alex Rodgers / Works 2006-2011

* Hecker / Sun Pandamonium

*Keith Fullerton Whitman / Multiples

*Cut Hands / Cut Hands

* Sistol / On The Bright Side

*Autechre / 3 EPS 1991-2002

*Marcus Schmickler / Palace of Marvels

*Coil / Musik To Play In The Dark 2

*Severed Heads / Viva! Heads!

SAMPLE & HOLD : john wall & alex rodgers / WORK 2006-2011

Housed in a plastic vacuum bag that thwarts easy access to the disc it contains, WORK 2006-2011(entre'acte) presents the untidy results of 5 years of improvisation by John Wall. At one point Rodgers, who supplies the text, references the Claude Levi-Strauss tome THE RAW AND THE COOKED that makes plain the shifting grounds they walk upon, the civilized and the savage, the structured and the assaulting dystopian.

The frequency range is huge with speakers menaced by low frequencies that swallow the room, and high ones that shatter like digital glass. In this sonic environ Rodgers' surreal texts are delivered dry, surrounded by a bitter silence at times, and punctuated by Wall's improvised drones and glitches. It makes for a an uneasy listen, but one that is rewarding, opening up the flood-gates of personal associations tinged with Beckettian hopelessness, mysterious emptiness, and the episodic un-nerving babble-flux that is the 21th century.