La Carne (“The Meat”) comprises processed noises that – directly or less – were generated from the manipulation of sounds deriving from that element; indeed the last (useless) 15 minutes are occupied by echoes from a slaughterhouse, including the poor mooing animals. Massive slabs of granular, gritty, hissing materials operate aggressively on the ears, and there’s a section in the second track where a female voice – or its ghost – seems to have been looped in the remote background. The problem is that I can’t detect a true compositional sense in any of these sand-in-the-eyes stormy landscapes, whose overall sound is pretty stressing: playing the CD loud causes aural irritation, but keeping it at a lower level the “fine details” don’t get heard. Occasionally useful (say, while walking in the street in a rainy morning in order to avoid listening to people’s bullshit) yet, when everything’s over, one doesn’t feel the need of starting again - especially because of the tactical error of placing those extremely boring slaughterhouse reverberations at the end of an already wearing program.
MICHAEL CHOCHOLAK – Alveromancy
The sound strategy of Michael Chocholak has never really convinced me, despite a few interesting ideas scattered across numerous CDs (admittedly, not all of them were heard). He’s a quite anarchic musician, which is a good starting point. Still, the selection of the tracks for a single work must undergo a stricter process of evaluation, otherwise respectable compositions risk to get meshed with stuff that sounds like a kid at play with a Tascam in the living room. Accordingly, Alveromancy is exactly what was expected by the Oregonian, in that comprises a series of situations ranging from the nearly indigestible havoc of “Ariel” to the heavenly openings of the Audiomulch-generated “Deep Blue Dreaming”. Also, attractive guitar-based fumes are to be inhaled in “Aurora (Daughter Of Heaven”). The whole album is characterized by Chocholak’s typical volatility, an indicator of both his unruly bravery and total incapability of distinguishing what truly deserves publication and what instead is better left in the vault. He should put the very best things in 30-minute editions and proceed from there.
