ANGEL

same

CD, bip hop

Set the volume and listen. Closely. Avoid any distractions. Unplug the phone, turn off the lights, don’t tell anybody you are at home. Maybe use headphones. But most important: Just listen. Experience the magic of enormous music, of music that is as far from conventions as the artists can take it, of music that evolves by itself from noise and sounds. Experience something different.

I don’t think I have to tell you anything about Ilpo Väisänen (Pan Sonic) and Dirk Dresselhaus (Schneider TM), but I have to tell you that on this collaboration they are really far from where they usually work. There is none of the sharp-cut, frequency-shaped, intestine-grinding beats of Pan Sonic and there is absolutely none of the “electronic music goes pop” that Schneider TM works on lately. “Angel” is the name of a project of annual live-performances of Väisänen und Dresselhaus together, which they have done since 1999 and now Bip Hop has documented the music they played in 2000 in Berlin. This time around they used CD-Players, effects, a manipulated typewriter, amplification (lots!), more effects and the oldest, crummiest electric guitar Dresselhaus could find to dive deep into the uncharted waters of free-form, live-improvised noise. Yes, you might have guessed that there are strong hints at “old industrial music” on this CD, but there are also other elements: like noiserock, drones and every kind of musical genre that has come and gone since Throbbing Gristle first hit the stage many many years ago.

Surely this is not for everyone. It is safe to say, that actually only a minority of people will really listen to this and an even smaller portion of that minority will really like it. Why? Because you need to take some time and effort for this, but if you let yourself go and really start to listen into the sounds, scapes and noisescapes these two musicians produce, you’ll never regret it. This record is mainly about listening, but also about listening conventions. Mainly in those parts where a rhythm seems to slowly dive up from the dark depths and your pulse starts to get into the same rhythm with the music. Or in those instances, where you realise that you regard what you are listening to right now as music in its purest sense, but half an hour ago you would have called it noise (and listened to it nevertheless, as you did with all those Merzbow-CDs some years ago.)

The performance starts slowly, actually with silence at the beginning and then some humming and crackling noises coming up. Dresselhaus and Väisänen go some ways in the three quarters of an hour they took, and they offer a quite varied and dynamic range of sounds and scapes, ranging from a-melodious to pure noise, from very loud to intricate and silent, from complex to profound simplicity (the later might be just superficial), with the more heavy parts awaiting the listener in the end. There is no reason to try and guess which object or instrument produced which sound, because all this really is about is the decoding of analog data via eardrums and sensory equipment of the human body (not to forget the brain and the mind of the listener).

The trackmarks on this CD seem a little arbitrary to me, and as to why this performance has been separated in 10 parts is of no obvious reason to me. Maybe buyers are put off, if a CD has only one track. But then again, I never had the impression that Bip Hop had any intentions into the direction of making their CDs any more easily sellable. Moreover, I don’t see how anybody who wants to listen to this record, would ever pick a single selection. No, you have to try to swallow this as a whole. I know that this is a big bite, but as I said, you won’t regret it.

www.biphop.com

12/2002