Outside the Honky Tonk Dream Syndicate, Vol. 8
featuring Rolf Julius, Günter Müller and Kevin Drumm
Here at the Honky Tonk Dream House, we believe summer is not just a vibe, but a way of life. And there’s no better way to welcome the warm weather than with a mix of the same old electroacoustic bullshit.
Phill Niblock - Untitled I
This is from Ghosts And Others, which is sort of an anomaly in the late Phill Niblock’s catalogue, one that maybe has more in common with his work as a filmmaker than his compositions. Rather than the usual heavy, all-encompassing drone studies, these are field recordings from Hong Kong, Soviet-era Hungary and other places. This particular portion of the record is heavy on clanging percussion, and there’s a driving sense of movement in this piece, which is fascinating from someone whose work is so associated with stasis. But one thing that does connect this piece with Niblock’s other work is the sense of total immersion it instills in the listener.
Günter Müller & Jim O’Rourke - A Faster Silence
Jim O’Rourke has been mentioned here millions of times, and pretty much every artist in this particular transmission I learned of through some connection to him. But there’s of course many different sides to Jim, and here we find him strictly in improviser mode. He’s playing alongside Günter Müller, one of the foundational progenitors of the electroacoustic free improvisation style that would later be associated with Erstwhile and Keith Rowe’s later work. Fittingly, this track starts off very much in the vein of AMM, with sparse, textured improvisation, but about halfway through it explodes. Müller lets loose on the drums, and Jim lets out his inner Takayanagi. Pure, jagged sonic abstraction.
Rolf Julius - Seestück
Rolf Julius is a sound artist who does a lot of work with speaker installations and the like. He’s referred to his work as “small art,” and you could definitely see a connection between his work and lowercase artists like Steve Roden and Bernhard Günter, but I find his work to be more immediate. This piece is pure static, but it’s loaded with intricate wriggling textures. It sounds like tiny sound organisms under a sonic microscope. Cool shit.
Horacio Vaggione - 24 Variations
One of my favorite labels operating today is Recollections GRM, which releases music from the GRM archives, always with absolutely impeccable sound quality. This includes some of the most legendary and formative composers of the era, such as Xenakis, Ferrari and Parmegiani, but perhaps most illuminating is the work of lesser known composers. Horacio Vaggione is an Argentinian composer whose discography isn’t as vast as Ferrari or Parmegiani, but all of his music is worth spending time with. He does a lot of work with granular synthesis, and this piece fittingly sounds like sonic elements broken down and fragmented into a new whole. It’s as if the sounds are teleporting, going from a distance to right up in your ear within seconds.
RLW - Point 3
Ralf Wehowsky, aka RLW, is a pivotal figure within the post-70s avant-garde, a period where experimental music was no longer the exclusive domain of academia and cassette tape trading allowed the music to spread to unexpected corners. RLW got his start in the industrial group P16.D4, and quickly developed a singular approach as a composer. Much of his work is collaborative, but the record this piece is taken from, Points of Reference, is (I believe) all solo. “Point 3” is an ominous soundscape, with drones that sound like bitcrushed gongs, augmented with wonderful piercing tones. The end result is almost beautifully hypnotic.
Kevin Drumm - Pulling the Taurus Card
Subscribing to Kevin Drumm’s Bandcamp was definitely one of the smarter decisions I’ve made in the past year. Drumm is a legend, and his pre-bandcamp discography is already littered with classics such as his self-titled debut. But these days, Drumm will just drop various projects on Bandcamp with no fanfare, and everything I’ve heard has been excellent. Much like his friend (and former roommate) Jim O’Rourke, Drumm’s music is stylistically wide-spanning - I learned about him as a noise artist but he’s made some of the most gorgeous ambient drone records I can think of. But also like Jim, all of his music has his indelible characteristics. This track, from 2022’s Enter One Side, Exit The Other, is sort of in between the two extremes. It’s centered around crunchy, crackling noises, and if these were amplified to a larger extent it’s not hard to imagine it being as pummeling as some of Drumm’s harshest noise odysseys. But the crumble is low enough that you can hear a beautiful humming drone underneath, like the sunrise peeking through the cracks.