Twine - Violets (2008)

Rekvijem za novo mračno doba. Alchajmerizirani, statički žubor ledeno lijepih sablasti u katedralama melankolije.
Greg Malcolm iz Baltimorea i Chad Mossholder iz Bouldera ne rade uživo, nego u virtualnom studiju.

streaming ulomaka
streaming: MySpace


Violets is a requiem for the new dark age. A memoir of a dying era, defined by the years of an inevitably dichotomized and isolated nation. On their long-awaited fourth full length, the duo of Greg Malcolm and Chad Mossholder move from the muggy backwoods of their early work towards the sonic approximation of icy remoteness. Created by a process of long distance file-sharing, the layers of Violets mesh together in a synchronous and fragile splendor, melding disembodied vocals, guitar rattles and crispy unpredictability to create a modern classic. The recurring theme of Violets is indeed a fascination with the human voice – voyeuristic telephone and CB conversations, the musings of a girl on dictaphone, crowd noises from anti-war rallies – these elements hover just beneath the lush and temperamental musical surface. On “Endormie”, guitar plucks crystallize in real-time, while the voice of legendary Cranes vocalist Alison Shaw surfaces in frosted gasps. The result is a calming and inescapable melancholic pull. Elsewhere, the massive leitmotif of “Disconnected” evokes images of a lonely neighbor practicing his weathered 6-string in a barren room while explosions overtake his home and psyche. Twine have crafted their most highly polarizing and fully realized record to date. Violets casts a haunting shadow and its many inspirations, from the largesse of world affairs, to the minutiae of domestic life, reinforce its startling relevance in an age of cultural fracture and discontent. - ghostly.com/

Greg Malcolm and Chad Mossholder have always been situated at the most experimental end of Ghostly International's roster, and although thanks to appearances on releases like the SMM series and the label's Idol Tryouts Two compilation they've seemed to be reasonably active in recent times, it's actually taken the duo a full five years to actually get round to penning a follow up album to their eponymous debut. Cranes vocalist Alison Shaw makes appearances on Violets, sounding positively ethereal on miniatures like 'From Memory' and the closing 'Something Like Eternity'. Twine are notable for fusing guitar timbres with abstract digital treatments, and it all fits in with the icy, electronic aesthetic (seriously though, is Fennesz the only electronic musician who knows how to properly record an electric guitar?) At their most successful Twine establish deeply atmospheric radioscapes like 'In Through The Devices', made up of processed instruments, electrostatic noise and vocal recordings that keep tuning in and out of the mix. In fact, vocals play a big part on Violets, with what sounds like a child's singing casting eerie shadows over 'Endormine'. The duo might be said to provide a clarified, more sanitary take on the tangled junction of audio sources offered up by the likes of Tim Hecker - there's a similar meeting between melody and abstraction, electronics and instruments, etc - and fans of those grey areas between electronic music and more humanised sounds could do worse than investigate Twine's haunted circuitry. Excellent. - boomkat

 

 

Surfaces (2006) streaming ulomaka
streaming: MySpace


In anticipation of their fifth proper full-length Violets, abstract ambient duo Twine offer the third installment in the Ghostly Digital EP series, the aptly named Surfaces EP. Markedly darker than the aural architecture of their self-titled LP, “They, Themselves” and “Jetlag” resonate and heave with the eerie woodcreak of a backwoods cabin, while the title track builds steam-pipe hisses from sub-bass rumbles, tapping into a vast sonic palette from which intense beauty is crafted from the most disparate of sources. Twine have again proven their unique ability to create sharply defined environments through astute, calculated digital production on the five tracks of Surfaces, continuing to earn their place as one of the most important acts in the modern avant-garde. - ghostly.com/

One of Ghostly International's most experimental acts, Twine always provide an interesting amalgamation of guitar drone with digital timbres, and this EP is a perfect vehicle for all that, rendering a variety of different permutations of their sound. One of the more extreme pieces here is 'Resemblance' which embraces triple-time beats and wrenching laptop effects, all underscored by contrastingly lovely filtered piano melodies. It's simultaneously disorientating and beguiling, yet there's so much more to the Twine sound, as demonstrated by the Tim Hecker-esque fiery dronescape 'Surfaces', the glistening post-rock treatments of 'Hope' and the sophisticated, amorphous sound sculptures of the marvellous EP closer, 'Jetlag'. - boomkat

Twine (2003) streaming ulomaka

 streaming: MySpace

Friends talk about nothing over the phone; a gentle guitar strum mutates into a gauzy substance; a swell of sub-bass and firework crackling ensues. Fuzzed-out scanners capture distant conversations, and otherworldly voices emerge through the noise, haunting like a recurring dream.
Twine’s self-titled album, their debut release for Ann Arbor’s Ghostly International, is a record about the difficulties of 21st-century communication and the universal threads that unite the physical and immaterial worlds. The experience of Twine is the static on telephone lines, the nighttime whispers, the sounds of the aether; a record of dizzying percussive glitch, eerie textures and vocals grated into a dense fog, a collective but coded dialogue.
Cleveland, Ohio’s Greg Malcolm and Boulder, Colorado’s Chad Mossholder comprise a unique musical entity. Twine is the culmination of their extended history, which includes their acclaimed 2002 LP Recorder for France’s Bip-Hop and their distinguished catalogue for Chicago’s Hefty Records and Sweden’s Komplott. Their self-titled LP contains a mysterious and unresolved quality, the result of the musical relationship which the group’s two main practitioners share. Making music together from across the country, their collaborations are exercises in postmodern abstraction. Songs become experimentations in the virtual realm, with files bounced back and forth across time zone and singular ideas becoming collaborative.
As much a noisy, ambient experience as any heard today, from Fennesz’s Endless Summer to Black Dice’s Beaches and Canyons, Twine also draws influence from the free-floating, sand-blasted vocals of Cocteau Twins. This is a story of the fuzzy lines that connect and distance humanity, and the spiritual in-between that emerges in the nighttime hours. - ghostly.com/

Twine's self-titled album, their debut for Ghostly, is a record about the difficulties of 21st-century communication and the universal threads that unite the physical and immaterial worlds. The experience of twine is the static on telephone lines, the night-time whispers, the sounds of the ether; a record of dizzying percussive glitch, eerie textures and vocals grated into a dense fog, a collective but coded dialogue. Following their acclaimed releases for Chicago's Hefty and Sweden's Komplott, this album contains a mysterious and unresolved quality, derived from the group's two main practitioners' remote collaborative exercises in postmodern abstraction. Songs become experimentations in the virtual realm, with files bounced back and forth across time zones as singular ideas take joint form. As much a noisy, ambient experience as any heard today, from Fennesz's 'Endless Summer' to Black Dice's 'Beaches and Canyons', Twine also draws influence from the free-floating, sand-blasted vocals of the mighty Cocteau Twins. This is a story of the fuzzy lines that connect and distance humanity, and the spiritual in-between that emerges in the nighttime hours. Recommended. - boomkat

You are listening to a record. There’s the music, and then there’s everything else. The time of day, your mood, the room you’re in, the person you’re sitting with. Sometimes the “everything else” can obscure what’s happening with the music, other times it can clarify. In either case, the how and wherefore matter.
I knew Twine’s self-titled record was good the first time I put it on. It was clear that Greg Malcolm and Chad Mossholder had refined their approach, found what was most interesting about their moody style, and amplified it. But I didn’t really hear it until a few weeks later, when hurricane Isabel tore through Richmond in late September and my apartment was without electricity for ten days. The night the storm hit, my wife and I plugged one of my computer speakers into her Walkman radio so we could listen to the news and follow what was happening. Even as a passive transmitter (no batteries for its amp) the speakers made the headphone signal audible as long as we maxxed out the volume.
The next evening, after my wife went to bed and as I was reading by the light of a half-dozen candles, I plugged my CD Discman into the speaker and put on new Twine. With the Discman cranked to 10, the music was loud enough to be heard clearly, but having the internal headphone amp at that level imparted a faint halo of distortion. Which, at that moment, was perfect. It was completely dark except for the candles, even outside my window. Every house on the block, the streetlights, the traffic light on the corner—all were without power. And Twine sounded like they were being beamed in via shortwave from some place halfway around the world.
If only everyone could hear this album under those exact conditions (although you might want to skip the following morning’s bone-chilling shower in a bathroom so dark you can’t see your body to wash it), but it’s not necessary. All you really need is for the sun to go down. Twine is a quintessential nighttime record, filled with broken transmissions and drones stretching into the vanishing horizon; it’s the kind of night where an edge of paranoia is cut with flashes of comforting solitary bliss. You curl up to this thing.
By customary definition, Twine is an IDM act, but the comparisons that stream through my head when I’m listening to this record come from elsewhere. The beats are nothing alike and Twine haven’t a lick of hip-hop in them, but I can’t help thinking of DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, the way this record uses disembodied voices and builds spacious atmosphere brick by brick. There’s also a hint of Stars of the Lid in the drones that Twine favor this time out, and cinematic rock a la Godspeed seems somehow related, although Twine eschew extreme dynamics, and their only conventional instruments are guitar and piano, both of which are treated and looped.
Ultimately, though, the thread holding Twine together is the voices. About half the tracks contain wordless vocals by Shelly Gracon and Alison Scola, and their contributions are key. On “Plectrum”, which is built around slowing strummed guitar, the voice is clipped and percussive, where a word is snatched from meaning mid-syllable and set looping, giving a feel reminiscent of Laurie Anderson. Furthering the modern music references, “Plectrum” combines the sharp punctuation with some Tehillim-style sacred howls. In contrast to this art music approach are the ethereal Middle Eastern vocal drones with Taj Mahal reverb that snake through the 12-minute “Kalea Morning”.
There are the live vocals, and then there are the words, pinched and compressed by cheap radio transistors, which crackle in and fade out almost constantly. Adding “lost transmissions” to brooding electronic soundscapes is nothing new, obviously, but there’s a subtlety to Twine’s approach that makes it work. The voices appear and dissolve unexpectedly and the meaning is unclear; what they’re actually saying doesn’t seem terribly important—the words are another layer in the dark cloud of sound that drifts slowly across the record. On “Pendant” an intercepted telephone conversation (an argument, maybe) is almost completely drowned out by the throb of electronic percussion. The track wouldn’t be complete without it.
Since forming in 1999, Twine have averaged a record a year, but their albums seem carefully laid out and constructed to work as individual pieces. They’re not tossing tracks willy-nilly at every compilation that comes along and then gathering them together as a new CD. Twine has no killer must-hear track, and yet, each piece benefits by its relationship to what came before and what follows. It’s an album in the old-fashioned sense of the word, and a damn good one. Try it at midnight first. - Mark Richardson