Imbogodom - Melankolična, daljinska erotika šumova

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Imbogodom - Borogmog's Clock Vimeo video



"Imbogodom’s And They Turned Not When They Went sees Alexander Tucker and Daniel Beban return to the BBC’s Bush House for another nocturnal collection of pure analogue tape work. Here the musique concrète worlds are more defined than on 2010′s The Metallic Year. Using live feeds from the Houses of Parliament’s bell Big Ben, Tucker and Beban create foreboding landscapes for obscure horror soundtracks where foley techniques of everyday objects turn into threatening phone calls from poltergeist entities trapped inside the warm mixing desk and dusty tape machines. Stretched, slowed, and warped source material takes us back to early electronic synthesis of magnetic tape whilst reveling in the endless possibilities thrown up from processes of analogue experimentation."

"Spooky, the roaring of this stethoscope: a sort of inverse-Necks, Imbogodom compress sprawling ideas into dense pieces, their instructive interview with John Crowell disclosing how they submit their own studio recordings to the psychedelic stochastics of tape manipulation in a recursive loop of making and listening.
What is manipulated is the real, rather than the symbolic, producing what Kittler might have called “a strange and unheard-of silver noise… the voice of the listener who makes no sound and is nonetheless supposed to sing once all the conditions of magic have been met”: on “I Am Here, I Am Gone” and “Slate Grey Light,” Alexander Tucker is precisely this silent listener, incanting along with the studio magic of co-conspirator Daniel Beban: winds slowed to inhuman yawns; strings scrambled into Twombly scrawls; stabs of Tucker’s voice, slowed and sped-up, bleeding through a reverb gauze. Chopped and screwed? More slurred and slewed.
The spectrum of noise circumscribes an indiscriminate bundle of frequency-lines, whose varying articulations carry morphological implications. Barthes wrote of Twombly: “His work is based not upon concept (the trace), but rather upon an activity (tracing).” Similarly, Imbogodom’s tweaks, slices, smudges, and stitches are perhaps a tracing in the spirit of Rilke’s “Primal Sound” hypothesis — “What variety of lines, then, occurring anywhere, could one not put under the needle and try out? Is there any contour that that one could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense?” — a series of technical, poetic experiments in laboratory conditions.
First, a “saturated expression of the manifestation of inwardness”; second, “a disappearing of being in the act of being”: Hegel’s dual definition of sound seems relevant here, as sound has become the raw material of introspection. When you discover that “Red Brick Roundhouse” and “Nuclear Wind” are grounded in field recordings, it makes total sense. Despite/because of its reliance upon general principles, And They Turned Not When They Went is a hymn to improvisational specificity. We’re left with a melancholy erotics of noise, Deerhunter’s “Tape Hiss Orchid” concept brought to life in a teeming — a crawling — a gnashing of acousmatic forms, haunted by Burroughs’ lumberjack spirit." - Reed Scott Reid

"In 1948, French composer Pierre Schaeffer recorded one of the first pieces of musique concrete by recording, manipulating, and arranging a variety of sounds produced by steam trains which he entitled, "Etude aux chemins de fer."  Earlier he had given rise to the first heartbeats of the genre, broadcasting from a studio that had been home to the French Resistance movement during the Second World War. Now well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, the experimentation has seen major advances in instrumentation and technique. New artists carry the creative torch forward, and perhaps leading the way are the hallucinogenic Imbogodom. The duo is much the same as the French sound pioneer; both breath lightly haunted sounds from a past era into the present. With an eerie similarity to Schaeffer, musicians Alexander Tucker and Daniel Beban, from the UK and New Zealand respectively, chose to record their latest album, And They Turned Not When They Went, inside broadcast studios dusted by time: at the BBC World Services' recently decommissioned Bush House in London. Surrounded by years of tapes, the temptation to experiment proved deeply enticing for Beban, who was working as an engineer at the time of the album's conception.

Through use of aging and declining tape machinery, Imbogodom certainly shows a musical maturity. Recording deep underground through the night has effectively made sure a pitch black presence exists on ATTNWTW. These are apparitions of sound which only hint at a shadow that previously wasn't there. During recording, the musicians caught subtle flickers of movement out of the corners of their eyes (one track from their first album, The Metallic Year, was titled "Bvsh Hovse Ghost"), and seemingly an ectoplasmic residue has leaked through into their latest album. Illusions of light are often more frightening than anything fully seen. Spectres of half-caught scurrying projects our phobias of the unseen and holds our senses delicately hovering between reality and the imagined.

Following on from The Metallic Year, the pieces on ATTNWTW are largely in the same vein as its predecessor. However, there is a definite forward momentum away from their past that reveals a slightly more developed sound. The real difference lies in the duo's use of songs; a striking first for the band. Typically, recordings are extracted from samples of tape and aurally manipulated by way of pitch changes, either flying off the tape or slowed down to almost unrecognizable and inhuman form, muddy-voiced and primeval. Use of field recordings on location and ancient fingerstyle-plucked acoustic guitars emanate a deep dose of psych-folk. Imbogodom carefully shapes each recording and sculpts it into its own that suggests a mastery of manipulation; it's subliminal music that releases abstract thoughts with no instantly recognizable form. This is where half of the problem lies; there isn't much to grasp for the listener, who quickly becomes entangled in the dense, claustrophobic sounds. Perhaps this is intentional, as it stretches through the whole album, but it can be an uncomfortable listen.

"Borogmog's Clock" strikes the album into existence with an ominous entrance, the bell of Big Ben sounding against a backdrop of rumbling thunder and a warped ringing that acts as a call to arms. The opening track is a contender for the most experimental one on the album. Continuously warped and reversed clicks speed past as an unknown power source tries desperately to revive itself. "Slate Grey Light" and "Heir Looms" introduce a reality check with a semblance of song led by intricate, treble heavy strums and acoustic fingerstyle guitar, quickly dissolving into psych folk; trippy and colourful, it's like Fairport Convention from another dimension. A rippling undercurrent of melancholy sways through the song as it gently fades long before it's due, effectively mirroring an incomplete ancient tale.  The timeworn treble amplifies the rusty strings and worn fretboard of the guitar that's seen its fair share of life. Shades of folk are the only aspect of the record that sounds purposely dated, adding to an old, local charm of past centuries, while the tone remains mysterious and slightly melancholic. No more so is this felt than on "Welcome Away," where a cold wind, phantom footsteps, and silence on the other side of the phone creates a genuine sense of foreboding.

Modern on-site recordings shed special, ghostly atmospheres unique to area. Both "Red Brick Roundhouse" and "Nuclear Wind" were recorded on location in Dungeness, England; the former in an old lighthouse, absorbing the resonance with chant-like, astonishingly spacious vocals, and the latter capturing the smeared, contaminated breeze coming off a nuclear power station which vibrated the strings of a guitar, highlighting the duo's creativity. Although this displays the most admirable of musical skills, sometimes this is not enough to lift the music, and although the sense of oppressiveness never reaches a suffocating level, the experimental pieces feel much like single entities instead of gelling into a more refined whole.

As far apart as these musicians are geographically, their sounds remain tightly woven. Lyrically obscure, they successfully add an emotional layer that much musique concrete seems void of - although one could argue that emotion isn't a vital intention of the genre. The contrasting high and low vocal registers are complementary, increasing the songs feelings of detachment. Closer "Pillars of Ash" is evocative and dreamy, and it even has a ghostly solo, albeit in an unconventionally surreal, slowly vaporous way: a bright, unbalanced melody surrounded by dissonance. A rattlesnake of a tambourine and call and response vocals add a ritualistic feel to the track. Clouded with disorienting lyrics, every verse has a subtle and more pronounced echo. As a finale, this is the most realized piece and one that stays with the listener after the silence returns. It is this ending, in which electronics have largely given way to song, that contradicts the opener; if this is the second volume in a musical trilogy, then it leaves ample room for another venture. The song forms weigh heavily and are the most memorable aspect of the album, even though they only feature on three out of the twelve tracks - "Slate Grey Light," "Heir Looms," and "Pillars of Ash." Perhaps they stand out to the listener because this is a new direction, but it is the surreal, off balance way of the music which buries itself in the listeners' memory.

Musique concrete is a perfect form for suggestion (and simultaneously creates a debate about what constitutes music.) If not wholly engaging, the array of creativity is to be admired. It becomes difficult to push the dissonance and harsh sounding recordings from the mind, and maybe that's a sign Tucker and Beban have worked their trick. Without the songcraft, the experimentally heavy music could be off-putting; it can be quite a dissonant and grinding listen. The genre itself requires an open mind. Yet the feeling remains that this is an acquired taste. No doubt Shaeffer would be proud of the advances in the art form, but a danger remains of being too far out to the left as to become lost, a strange disconnect from the world of reality and the imagined. One thing's for sure - a restless night awaits the listener." - James Catchpole