Kairos #110. September 2019, Concertzender.

Another month, another Kairos. At least that is the way it is supposed to be, but our Wo. is still running behind and matters only seem to become worse with all the travelling and stuff in the job he actually gets paid for. One day it will all be caught up with. So let's see what Wo. found out, perhaps even learned from September's Kairos.

Familiar notes change into atmospheric sounds and high sounding synth notes. This blend between 70s synthesizer act Absolute Elsewhere and Pink Floyd turns out to be a re-acquaintance with Harrold Roeland. Absolutely more atmosphere than music in the traditional sense, it holds also some Arabic/eastern Europe sort of vibe in its undertones.

This mood is strengthened when Minco Eggerman is mixed into the atmospheric music. Whether the voice is isolated from the original music I cannot tell. It flows naturally into 'Melisma & Gurian' from Eggeman's album 'Kaykasia', that featured on this show before.

Those following this blog closely know that nepotism knows no end on this show, but .No now even features recordings by himself. Where will this end? In this case with mysterious sounds like a steamtrain rolling by yet different and more modern in reproduction of the sound.

Jane Weaver also returns to Kairos. This time with one of the songs from her latest, remix album on which she sings. Many songs are fully electronic reworkings of existing songs. Here the original is still discernable. Somewhere .No has been remixing 'Cells' as well. "Slightly adapted" is a nice euphemism for this. Joking aside, 'Cells' is a beautiful song, showing one of the many sides of Ms Weaver. An artist who is not afraid of challenging herself and to go in search of what is possible within and beyond her music. Come what may.

Benjamin van Leer returns also. 'Ten Steps Without A Pace' is another track from his album 'I Am Error'. The beginning sounds like a record so scratched that it is beyond saving. Bloody irritating actually. The sparse piano chords are accompanied by higher sounding individual notes, played much faster. The mood is slowly brought forward as more music is added to the originally slow composition. It changes the whole outlook of the song. The scratching remains and is accompanied by all sorts of noises that become more and more predominant. As if the whole record is slowly caving in on itself, while the needle is still in the groove. An extremely weird effect.

Somewhere there is a change to Edgar Wappenhalter, sorry, I did not make up this name. This extremely lo-fi recording holds a recording of a poem by William Wordsworth (1770-1850). "What are words worth?", to quote Tom Tom Club. This does sound sort of special. The music is just a repetition of the same little piece over and over and yet it clearly has something making it special.

According to the time tracker Kairos ought to have been for  a fewminutes in 'Gat Van Pinten II' already, the long atmospheric composition by Broeder Dieleman on his latest, double album 'Komma'. The birds were there every once and again. Wappenhalter slowly fades to give ground to sounds of Zeeuws-Vlaanderen. The field recordings made by Dieleman and put into a whole with the long held droning notes behind them. The second album of 'Komma' is not something to listen to each and every day but I never fail to be somehow deeply impressed and sometimes even moved because of it. Where most atmospheric music on Kairos doesn't touch, even reach me at all, Broeder Dieleman does with his scratching, haltingly fragmented sounds. Why?, I can't even start to explain the why, but do not need to. It is the wrong question. 'Gat Van Pinten' somehow resonates within me, so I usually have no problem at all to listen to it, albeit at the right moment, like right now. Broeder Dieleman has created a universe of his own and has a record label daring to release this universe, as a book, including all the photo's, the album, the work of art 'Komma' is.

Dieleman ends with a spoken word piece in a dialect that I can't understand. It abruptly ends for a high singing man. Iceland is where we travel to. Ásgeir does not sing naturally. His voice is treated in several ways it seems. The same goes for his music. 'Fennir Yfir' does its best to hide the beauty it contains and utterly fails in doing so. The singing reminds me of Antony (Anohni nowadays?). I also seem to remember that Ásgeir's father either writes or translates the lyrics into English. It is inconsequential to the end result. This is mysterious music but mainly because of the way the music is halted and started and all without stopping the flow of 'Fennir Yfir' in any way.

The stop is abrupt for Kairos. A moment that a song ends and starts so clearly defined is a huge exception on this show. We move on to an untitled private recording by Tilo Baumheier & Michael Stratz. Two names, I think, we have had come by on Kairos before. Let me call the music experimental. There's a didgeridoo involved, a flute but that is about all I can make of this.

A guitar weaves into the atmospheric sounds and a female voice starts singing. This must be a new song and it is. Vanishing Twin returns to Kairos with 'You are not an island'. (Now who wrote the line 'No man is an island'? No, not Wordsworth but John Donne (1572 - 1631).) The slow meandering song takes us further into the program in an extremely pleasant way. A faint trace of Van Morrison can be found in this music. Faint but certainly discernable. Another influence seems to be 'You And Your Sister', This Mortal Coil's cover of the Chris Bell penned song. Chris Bell being of Big Star of course. That band that should have been huge in the first half of the 70s, only to become a band's band from the 90s onwards.

Weird sounds take over from the meandering voice of Vanishing Twins' singer. A violin is involved as well but overall things seem to derail here. Ah, Laurie Anderson, the woman who once tried to wake with her hitsingle 'O, Superman' on a morning around 1982 or so; and did not succeed as I sped off into a few nightmares involving an ayatollah in Iran. How long they took, is impossible to know (had I only looked at the time displayed on the alarm radio or remembered doing so). Fact is my conscious told my unconscious that it was Laurie Anderson I was hearing and it was time to leave Iran and wake up. Like 'O, Superman' I would not dare to call 'CNN Predicts a Monster Storm' music. The participation of Kronos Quartet not withstanding. It is wildly imaginative, at times even powerful for sure but music? Nay.

It becomes clear that in the meantime while writing the program has moved on into another piece that is not exactly identifiable as music either. 'A Renewed Awareness of Home' by Yui Onodera & Celer is more meditative. Despite the unrest that is created by the Japanese, incidental sounds and then voices, the undercurrent is contemplative. Until the voices really take over that is. They create their own chant but is (too) disruptive to the previous mood to succeed in keeping me in a contemplative mood. Before this I was typing nearly subconscious I noticed, my mind one with what I am hearing, my fingers one with my thoughts, uninterrupted, hardly thinking, just a free flow of thoughts put into words. The noise that ends this contribution is even more disruptive. What to make of it?

Jherek Bischoff has not only featured on Kairos before. In adapting Bowie's Blackstar for the Stargaze orchestra he even made the pages of this blog by himself. He moves into the noise created by Ondera and Celer with slow, sure sounding notes. long drawn violins but also still a lot of disruption that is repeated over and over in the semi-background. What is what? I have no way of telling. Is it all Bischoff undermining his violin work himself or does .No do this by mixing two works together. I just don't know. It could be either, but to my ears tell me the two just do not belong together. The violins are too traditional in sound for the modern sounding whatevers.

As the whatevers move along into the final track, I suspect the mixing to be the truth here. I Am Oak's single 'Hollow Cove' from his beautiful album 'Osmosis' is allowed to close the September Kairos. It fits beautifully at the end I notice, as if the weirdness I heard before is only an introduction to 'Hollow Cove'. Just one of the extremely strong songs on 'Osmosis', an album very much worth checking out.

Wo.

You can listen to this Kairos here:

https://www.concertzender.nl/programma/kairos_522279/

or listen to playlist on Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/user/glazu53/playlist/6R9FgPd2btrMuMaIrYeCh6?si=KI6LzLaAS5K-wsez5oSO2g


This is this month's playlist:


00:00  Harrold Roeland Lentebloesem. Album ‘Ceres OST’. Self-released.
02:05  Minco Eggersman. Melisma & Gurian. Album ‘Kavkasia’. Volkoren 73
03:55 Trychlerumzug. Private recording Wino Penris.
04:15  Jane Weaver. Cells (slightly adapted by Wino Penris).
Album ‘Loops in the Secret Society’. Fire records.
08:56  Benjamin van Esser. Ten steps without a pace.
Album ‘I am Error’. LAK Unlimited.
13:27  Edgar Wappenhalter. I travelled among unknown men (W. Wordsworth).
Morc #57.
14:41  Broeder Dieleman. Gat van Pinten II. Album ‘Komma’. Snowstar Records.
27:10  Ásgeir. Fennir Yfir. Album ‘Afterglow’. One Little Indian Records TPLP1319CDP.
30:54  Tilo Baumheier & Michael Stratz. Untitled fragment. Private recording.
35:07  Vanishing Twin. You are not an island.
Album ‘The Age of Immunology. Fire records.
41:30  Laurie Anderson. CNN Predicts a Monster Storm. Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet.
Album ‘Landfall‘. Nonesuch Records 7559-79338-9.Kronos Laurie.
44:14  Yui Onodera & Celer. A Renewed Awareness of Home.
Album ‘Generic City’. Two Acorns 2A01. 
53:11 Jherek Bischoff. Cas(s)iopeia. Album ‘Cistern’. LEAF.
56:29  I Am Oak. Hidden Cove. Single. Snowstar Records.