If ordinariness is the stuff of life, then music is surely a medium for its transformation. Listening is, afterall, a study in itself, and when you listen in the right kind of way, noises become rumours, hints at the rhythms of life fleeting in and out of view. The study of the mundane, in all its fascinating complexity, is the starting point for ‘Rural Psychogeography’, a compilation Ukrainian in origin but international in authorship and appeal. This is music formed of wandering and reflection, composed of a variety of mechanical drones, clicks, and soundscapes interlaced with barely comprehensible cries, distant noises, the whirr of the motorcar, rhythms that call to and answer each other. Nothing here qualifies as a song in conventional parlance, but this hauntingly beautiful study of the real and the possible is all the better for it.
Alex Whitehead 9/10
Review
the Moglass/Tom Carter & Vanessa Arn – Snake-Tongued / Swallow-Tailed
A split release album from the ever-interesting Ukrainian label Nexsound that showcases how music that is fleeting needn’t be ethereal. San Francisco improvisers Tom Carter and Vanessa Arn provide two instrumentals, ‘Mojave’ and ‘Atmanda’. Sustained echoes of electronic noise work their way through these exercises in distension, roving and seeking some kind of substance while the watching guitars sporadically wax and wane. The Moglass, a Ukrainian trio whose work places them somewhere between alt.folk and free noise improve, arrive with a little more focus, albeit not much. ‘Untitled (Tawney Owl)’ introduces itself with dirge and effects that hint at a soundtrack to some post-modern horror film but it’s ‘Kakerlakische kakerlak’, that is the most memorable of five tracks on here, a vista of damaged psychedelia that reverberates its pain by drawing out feedback before the lightest of refrains.
Alex Whitehead 8/10