Monday 9 November 2015

Guy Reibel - Douze Inventions en Six Modes de Jeu (Karl Records)



(Guy) Reibal without a cause? Oh puns, I've got 'em! But this music is serious! It's no laughing matter. It's intellectual. Is it? That's the problem. Rather, a problem with this kind of music. Like Jazz, it's reckoned by some fools that it's a bit...well...'clever'...'too clever for it's own good!'...all that improvisational shenanigans...the stuff without singing...the stuff that isn't Dixie...and you sure as hell can't whistle it...huh...

...I know, I know...this is just a load of noise...12 pieces of noise, to be exact. It's not even the kind of noise you slams your head against a wall and pummels it to dust, enabling you to instantly dismiss it as 'a bloody racket!' You know the kind of thing...white boys love it, lionise it along with the 'free'-est Jazz ever made because they love a racket...because it's their Heavy Metal, I mean, their head-bangin'-scare-the-neighbours sort of noise....macho noise, which proves they can handle what wimps cannot...yes, that...

...Guy Reibel's recordings here, the dates for which I do not have because the label has yet to reply to my email requesting them and they'd better hurry because I'm already halfway, possibly, through this review, although it may stretch further than I currently anticipate...especially if I go on like this...

...Douze Inventions en Six Modes de Jeu is not about creating a wall of electronic sound, more a web...yes, intricate, but very strong, you know? Voile déchirure, for instance, barely exists other than as discreetly disturbing (is that a contradiction in terms?) high-pitched warbles...and yet...by 'disturbing' I mean the nature of this alien sound...purely electronic...'interference' with the notion of what sound should sound like in the form of recording. Is Reibal having a larf?  But he studied composition in Paris with Olivier Messiaen! Was he not paying attention in class? A Reibal with a cause...he worked at the legendary GRM studio but 'conflicts with other members' caused him to leave...why, I wonder? What did they row about? Surely he wasn't too avant-garde for GRM? Whatever, his electronic music seems to have got lost along the many side roads of recording history but Karl records have put that right...

...and they've yet to supply me with recording dates...do they not check their emails regularly? I could say more than I intend to in the hope that the info will arrive within the next ten minutes...such as how he 'often combined amplitude envelopes of acoustic sounds and noises (especially of polysteron) with synthetic electronic sounds', in quotation marks because those aren't my words...I don't know what a 'combined amplitude' is and I doubt that you do, unless you're the person that wrote that, in which case, I hope you don't mind me using your words...

...it may help to understand the technicalities, but I'd rather imagine Reibel as an alien in human form, sent here to transmit coded messages via electronic sound...and if I work out what they mean, I'll tell you...

...Minéral - Animal is fantastic...a juxtaposition of squeaks and squeals with low, deviant bass sounds...whereas Fluide consists mainly of the voice rendered quite terrifying, layered heavy moaning, breath amplified, distorted to such an extent that it would not sound out of place on a Horror film soundtrack..in fact, that's where it belongs, not here, putting the frighteners into me even as I write...

...OK, I'll guess that these pieces were made in the 60s. They were digitised by Reibel and Reinhold Friedl at the GRM studios in December 2014, that much I do know...along with the fact that whilst not a grand as the piece posted below, they are equally fascinating...

(release date unknown but probably in a couple of weeks)

(post edit: I guessed wrong, they were made in 1979)

Karlrecords 


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