ACCELERA DECK – Live Volume II

(CDR, Scarcelight)

I have never been a friend of those high frequencies. Once while listening to John Zorn’s Kristallnacht it made me sick in the stomach and my eyes started to water. Chris Jeely obviously likes to use these in a live setting, because I don’t recall them being so predominantly on his recorded work. So I am glad when the heavy, bassridden white noise sets in with a motion that I can’t help but think of a wild beast mauling its prey. That goes on for quite some time and then the track suddenly breaks in half. What follows is an array of various, unrelated noise pieces of different sentiment, some playfully chaotic and some dense and distorted, arranged in no – to me at least – apparent reason. Glitchy noises are followed by a droning guitar are followed by some thundering, highly distorted video game blasts, are followed by tiny specks of bleeps are followed by a ghostly yet pleasing sound of nightly wind and ever so on. This manoeuvre has two effects on me: one part of me is eagerly anticipating what might come next or – in repeated listenings – what will come when, and one part of me wants to dig out some old recordy by Tony Joe White or Townes Van Zandt to get earth on its tongue and grits in its belly. Or how about a little silence? Just closing your eyes, looking inward and trying not to listen to anything?

The second track doesn’t let up in chaos and its non-structure structure. Jeely combines various kinds of interference sounds from volatile chirping to crazily floating and swirling crunches and hums, with various kinds of other stuff in between. In the middle there are even some soothing, slow atmospheres, which are, of course, shortly broken down by some more beeping and crashing. Like taking a walk through a mirror house, every glance brings something new and unsuspected, though the surprise does tend to wear off with time. Maybe Jeely felt the same way, that’s why he once again breaks the part down after half, to settle for some ambient humming sounds that layer over each other in the background. Like putting the kids to sleep after they have been restless for a long afternoon, this kind of silence is brooding and soothing at the same time. It doesn’t hold for a long time, though. But the noise is more solid and droning than before, and growing growing growing. Towards the end we have drifted off into sleep and find ourselves walking through an animated jungle with all the animals screaming and a little light music playing in the background.

Part two of the Live Volume Series starts out as the more demanding of all three current parts, and both tracks prove this first impression right. Maybe the audience in Washington, DC is stronger than elsewhere and able to digest a hard punch. Who knows, with the government on one side and violent drug crime on the other side, the results of such a show might come out differently than anywhere else. Anyway, now you might have gotten an impression why Jeely called these records live VOLUME instead of live recordings or anything like that. Because Volume in both meanings – as in size and loudness – has major importance here. After all, only with headphones or on justifiedly high volume, depending on how much you respect the people around you, will the full range of sounds and their dynamics be experienced. There is so much variety within the ebb and flow as well as the various bit parts and sound specks in here, that you might lose some of them on the way. The number of interwoven layers nevertheless is quite low, usually about two, at times three. When your mind starts to interfere doing hallucinatory loops and virtual add-ons the number might rise to four or five, but please remember, those are all in your head and not on the record.

It is hard to pin down noise tracks as eloquent and varied as these in just a few tiny words like above and really do them justice. The problem is as old as music criticism itself (or any other kind of criticism of art), how does this mediocre journalistic form (dare not call it literary, that would be too strongly against my own convictions) live up to what it describes. Experimental music and avant-garde music leaves the writer even more helpless than other styles of music, maybe that’s why writing about this genre is more rewarding than others. Most people, I guess, wouldn’t care either way, anyway.

Go and check out parts I und III of this series as well.