HANGEDUP

Clatter for control

CD, constellation

For young people inclined to change the world with their own two hands, a viola and a drumset are a heavy burden. No way you will go tramping and exploring carrying such instruments on your back. So your parent’s plan (more so for the viola than the drums, I guess) either works out and you become a boring loner playing to yourself in your room and accepting the status quo. Or you give liberty to the urges within you to release your creativity and energy and kick the shit out of your bulky instruments by constantly finding new ways to work them. You’ll still have to leave them alone, when you want to go rambling, but in the meantime it is possible to rock out and form interesting musical outfits that defy nomenclatura as they defy norms and boundaries.

I have no idea if my vision of the backgrounds of this duo are persistent with reality and I am afraid of having insulted someone now (I always am, but after I have said what I might should have thought about beforehand – how does that translate to written down speech?) but Hangedup give their basic structure a new and exciting viewpoints. And a lot of noise also.

Percussions and Cello and nothing else sound boring to you? Well, Eric Craven (sticks) and Genevieve Heistek (bows) make it clear from the beginning that rocking out is an important part for their music. So they start “clatter for control” with an enormous up-tempo heavy rocker called “kling klang”, in which they furiously beat on their respective instruments in a fast flight through lively adagios and manipulated rock-riffs. After all the viola is an instrument with strings, so amplification and distortion is easily within reach of a creative mind and Genevieve Heistek uses all kinds of imaginable tools to create new and different sounds of an impressive scale. You’ll hear heavily distorted guitars, air raid sirens, walls of sound, gentle scratches and at one point she even screams into the pickup of her viola. This not only marks the first instance of vocals for Hangedup but also results in a lot of devilish noise and chaos. Free-form avant-noise-rockers Lightning Bolt come to mind.

And for the drumming, Craven owes a lot more to Keith Moon or John Bonham than to Gene Krupa or Buddy Rich (to name a few of my favourites). The best thing is, though, that the duo manages to keep up the level of kinetic energy throughout the whole record, even when they slow things down and loosen them up a bit, there is always this underlying torrent of energetic tides dammed and waiting to break lose.

True, intensity is not necessarily connected to power or size of noise, as Erik Friedlander has proven a lot. (Obviously, I had to mention the only relevant experimentalist and avant-garde-musician playing a cello next to Tom Cora, but with those three the musical field of the cello or viola is ticked down in detail. And please do not mention those awful deathmetal bands to me, that use a cello here and there to adopt a more gothic and sombre tone for their music, because for one they’ll use keyboards on stage and for second it’s nothing more than a gimmick for them.) The sound on here is tight, thick and crafty and will wipe you away if you don’t watch out.

“clatter for control” is already the third album for this duo and the changes are only here and there and come quite naturally. They have expanded their sound to more melodic pieces on the one hand and more noisier and raudier pieces on the other hand. What is gone might be the basic rawness of their first two albums, but again without losing the energy. On “Fuck this place” they are joined by Harris Newman (known from Sackville, Hrsta and solo-works) on bass – this track is the already mentioned explosion of noise and chaos with Heisteks “vocals”. The next track right away is a slow piece with Heistek playing almost traditionally, a melancholic and dark but lovely melody and Craven’s field-drumming that tries to stay as much out of straight rhythm as possible (during the whole record he only falls into a straight rhythm once or twice maximum), which makes for a startling mixture but works out if you listen closely. These two tracks backed up onto each other also show the range of musical work Hangedup have set for themselves on this release.

How much of these recordings were improvised and what has been written down? It is hard to say. Musically and structurally Hangedup are a long way from labelmates Godspeed, though maybe not so much in attitude and way of working. Is it possible to improvise and the result is a perfectly crafted piece of music that appeals to all senses involved? (Or would that rather be “channelling” or “receiving a vision of god”?) I have no idea? The record came out in April already, so I am late as it is, but what can I do about it. Good records are timeless anyway, and if they don’t stand the test of time, they weren’t all that good in the first place.

www.cstrecords.com

6/2005