[insubcd02] DIATRIBES & ABDUL MOIMEME complaintes...

insub

[insubcd02] DIATRIBES & ABDUL MOIMEME complaintes de marée basse


:EA/free/improv:
After the trio with Phonotopy, but recorded a couple of month earlier, Diatribes proposes with Abdul Moimême a new electroacoustique oriented album, where the instrumentation distinction is lost to the benefit of a sounds ensemble strongly linked by skeazing ropes and under permanent tension. Some metalico-organics improvisations develloping under harbour influence, superpostion of poetic evocations like an high-tech nostalgia.

abdul moimême: two prepared guitars, metalic objects, springs, cymbals, metronome
d'incise: laptop, objects, various instruments, snare drums, bow, cymbals, gramophone
cyril bondi: drums, percussions, bow, cymbals, objects, small instruments

+download+ the complet album ((47min08 / 320kbps mp3 / 124Mo))
Edited as 500cd, 18x14cm print in thin sleeve. [15chf/~10euros/~14usd, worldwide shipping]
INSUBORDINATIONS netlabel.

Diatribes is the Geneva-based duo of d’incise, who plays laptop, objects, and percussion, and Cyril Bondi, playing drums and percussion. First coming together in 2004, the duo’s subtle distinguishing mark develops out of Bondi’s relationship to free jazz and d’incise’s relationship to ambient electronica and free improvisation. As environmentally diffused as the sounds may become, Bondi is often knitting at pulse, creating polyrhythms and a momentum that animates the whole, keeping it moving while d’incise pulls sounds from the ether or the street. The spontaneous character of the music is insistently maintained by working constantly with other players, as if Diatribes is only complete when it’s Bondi, d’incise and someone else, as if Diatribes is a principle that always includes the other. The duo has recently released three works, each with a third musician; as different as the guests are, Diatribes manages to create a distinct identity.

Multitude, with bassist Barry Guy, is inevitably influenced by Guy’s own spectacular virtuosity, but it’s also fascinating listening to hear Guy working so intently with improvisers whose fundamental approaches are generally less linear than his own. There is a very close rhythmic connection between Guy and Bondi, evident in the percussive mix of rapid pizzicato bass and drums on “le poids des humeurs.” D’incise’s sounds arise amongst the other two and it is frequently difficult here to demarcate the three. When Guy plays arco, as on “corrosion du possible,” this blurring of identity is even more pronounced, the bassist creating a forest of harmonics and scrapes, sputtering rhythmic figures and sudden movements between registers that seem to spring from and include all the sounds around him (including here the added clarinet of Benoît Moreau). Diatribes, for their part, build up broken fields of percussion and electronic sound, sounding as if their instruments are literally intertwined in the strings of Guy’s bass. Together the three create a world of micro-rhythms and intervals, new patterns interspersing themselves in gaps in time and register.

On Complaintes de Marée Basse with the Lisbon-based guitarist Abdul Moimême, the three musicians seem to be much more aligned in their approach. Moimême plays two prepared table-top guitars, metal objects and small instruments, and both he and d’incise have cymbals in their list of instruments. The playful sound sources extend to Moimême playing metronome and d’incise gramophone. At times the sound is almost industrial—the scraping of metal, the sound of large objects falling—at others it has the most remarkable delicacy, fragile glissandi and barely audible string scrapings. Identity and perspective are constantly changing here. Little noises arise and are gradually subsumed into louder ones or else disappear like unknown but evidently endangered insects in a distant ecosystem. A snare drum rhythm beats against the scratch of a gramophone needle on an exit groove. The sounds are at times so intimate you feel that you are ear-next to a bowed cymbal or a mallet-struck string; at other times the sonic vocabulary of random echoing metal suggests a freight yard, industrial noise in which sound is only a side effect of another process. It is this shifting perspective, this fluctuating succession of different scales—from closet to airplane hangar—that makes this the remarkable dreamscape that it is.

The third Diatribes performance, Partielle d’averse (available as a limited edition mini-CD with a hand-made cover or as a download), was made with Phonotopy, also known as Yann Leguay who’s playing tennis cythar and electric racket. Just over 23-minutes long, it’s a beautifully sustained single piece, Leguay’s transformed sports equipment a perfect complement to Bondi and d’incise. The work is the kind of transforming soundscape that one associates with AMM, a gradual loss and development of identity through audition.

Invisibility, anonymity, and pseudonymity are clearly important here (another Diatribes performance with HKM+ and other German musicians was “recorded in an abandoned building in Leipzig”), for this is music shaped by the acuity of consciousness and the porous frontier of identity, whether of the sound, the instrument or the maker. Watching this music being made might diminish its sonic appeal; living here only in the ear, it elaborates on mysteries of identity which are matters of both cognition and psychology. It’s fitting that some of the works themselves inhabit an area both grey and plural, as limited edition works of art or downloads.
Stuart Broomer / http://www.pointofdeparture.org/PoD32/PoD32MoreMoments4.html

insub

a couple of reviews,..

Tonight I have been listening to another CD involving the Swiss duo Diatribes, who are D’Incise (laptop, assorted bits of percussion and a gramophone) and Cyril Bondi (percussion and objects). On this disc, a release that is also available as a free download on the excellent Insubordinations netlabel here sees them joined by a prepared guitarist named Abdul Moiéme, though I suspect that that name may well be a pseudonym. So as you can go and get the music for free anyway, part of me does wonder why I am reviewing it here, but its quite an enjoyable release so here goes anyway.
Diatribes have always struck me as belonging firmly in the AMM tradition of improvisation, building their music in a laminal manner, buzzing electronics and metallic, often bowed percussion swelling and subsiding slowly. The addition of the prepared guitars here leads me to think that way even more, as although Moiéme’s contributions are quite varied, and as cheap and lazy a comparison as it may be, every so often sounds appear (vibrating springs, metal against pick up etc) that remind me of Keith Rowe. Add this to the streams of percussion and its hard not to find the classic AMM sound evoked. To be clear though, this isn’t a bad thing at all. There is plenty of depth and variety in this release, which before I forget to tell you is named, Complaintes de marée basse. (Laments of low tide? beautiful if this is the case, and quite fitting) but across the seven tracks there is an underlying sensation of dark, brooding slowness, and that feeling of gathering clouds that was present in so many of the trio AMM albums just before the heavens opened. Complaintes de marée bass has seven tracks though, and so ‘the arc’ isn’t as prevalent here and the pieces build to their little mini climaxes without quite the same sense of grandeur, but the image of low waves washing up on a beach at low tide is certainly a fitting one.
Although the guitar stands out in places, its generally quite hard to split the three musicians apart here, but this doesn’t matter as listening carefully is all about the blending and collision of the amassed tiny details and textures that are built up to make this music. There is nothing groundbreaking here, and no one element stands out as worth noting above all others, but none of this matters. The music here is a great example of modern electroacoustic free improvisation as it should be done, sounds merging and folding together in one moment, colliding and contrasting the next. Everything progresses gradually, but it does keep progressing, so there is little repetition or any resorting to drones.
What more is there to say? Not a great deal really. I played Complaintes de marée bass through four times overall today and it didn’t wear thin at all, the detail in the music allowing it to sound different each time as I heard new elements in it on each subsequent spin. The music is available for free, so if you enjoy this area of music (and if you don’t, why are you reading this blog?!) then I recommend you download it and take a listen. If its not your cup of tea then you’ve lost no more than forty-seven minutes of your time, but if you like it, as I suspect you may, then why not click the paypal button at the Insubordinations site and support them by buying a physical copy of the CD.
Richard Pinell/the watchfull ear http://www.thewatchfulear.com/?p=4593

Swiss improvising duo Diatribes offer us another new collaboration, following their memorable team-up with the UK’s Barry Guy which resulted in a strong piece of free grumbly-music with some political undertones. On Complaintes De Marée Basse, Abdul Moimême joins D’Incise and Cyril Bondi to create what they call an “electro-acoustic oriented album”. This phrase may refer to the two prepared guitars (hopefully electric, amplified, and strewn with fragments of junk) that Abdul wields like two massive metallic clubs, ready to smite all opponents of liberty and free expression. Better take cover when this sauce-box starts rubbing his poisoned strings, as he seems equipped to summon the force of an electrical storm (in his quiet and brooding way, of course). His gloom-laden thunderclaps sit well with the skittery multiple percussion effects, bowed objects and laptop twitterments from the two Swiss madcaps on these 2009 recordings made in Lisbon.
Ed Pinsent/the sound projector http://www.thesoundprojector.com/2011/01/23/voile-et-vapeur/

Here’s the netlabel Insubordinations’s second physical release: a collaboration between Swiss duo Diatribes (electronician/percussionist D’Incise and percussionist Cyril Bondi) and Portuguese guitarist Abdul Moimême. Complaintes de marée basse is a very percussive record, since Moimême uses mostly guitar preparations, turning his instrument into a mini-gamelan – combined to Diatribes’ percussive manipulations. This record is a little difficult to get into but vivid, with occasionally contradictory interactions (which is not a bad thing). Some will find it lacking diversity, but I actually find its limited sound palette enticing.
François Couture/monsieur delire http://blog.monsieurdelire.com/2011/01/2011-01-11-diatribesmoimeme-pikapika.html