The Discoveries serie

Discoveries | DADAISM

In painting, Dadaism is defined as a movement who rejects the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest. Masterpieces of the ’20 show bizarre situations, dreams and nightmares brought on canvas, and no direct meanings can be extrapolated from the observation of a painting (however they are full of deep statements hidden inside). It is possible so to describe them as a immense charming mess, and I believe that the music I am describing now is fitting this definition.

In 2017 Igorrr release his second full-length, Savage Sinusoid, and it captivated not just experimental music fanbase but also a big group of metalheads, touring Europe and participating to quite a lot of important festivals. But Igorrr is not the only project of Gautier Serre: in his production you will find also past experiences under the name Corpo-Mente (with the partnership of his female vocalist Laure Le Prunenec – that also has a solo project called Ele Ypsis) and Whourkr (in which is possible to recognize Laurent Lunoir‘s voice, also in Igorrr and black metal/male counterpart voice). Gautier also featured with RubyMyDear for the release of Maigret (and if this title doesn’t ring you a bell…) and I must say that all the projects listed here have in common the characteristics of a crazy composition of their songs, that looks like more a collage of different type of songs organize randomly, but even in this configuration they are able to move feelings and bring strong messages. Not for nothing, Gautier is described as Dadaist from the critics.

Today we would like to share with you these bands that share this approach. Except Gautier’s projects, Pryapisme, öOoOoOoOoOo and Daexic are added to the list as other members of this music community. Some of them have more influences on hardcore and death metal, others on classic music and rock, however they share common traits of unpredictability and madness. No one said music should be equal to order: a such important form of art should be completely free to develop itself as it needs.

Discoveries | 3 FEMALE VOICES

For me is strange to see a bunch of girls going on stage not caring so much about their appearances and make the crowd “judge” them just for the music, but during these years I was positively shocked about three of them, that I have seen in different stages and different contexts, showing that they can impact more with their real essence respect to a formal super-structure that the normal female singers tend to have.

The first that I saw was in 2016 in Czech Republic, the American Chelsea Wolfe that, at the time, was touring Europe. After it was Esther Shaw from Wrekmeister Harmonies and Caro Tanghe from Oathbreaker, a little bit later.

These girls don’t have so much in common in the music they play nor in the singing style they use, however I felt to put them together under a certain light, since all three have this amazing charm, this obscure and ethereal power to show their humanity and divinity at the same time.

Daughter of a country musician, Chelsea Wolfe is a songwriter and a singer that started her career in 2006 (even if she was going into recording studios and experimenting since she was 9). She plays these drone-rock-depressive songs to “overcome anxiety”. She usually plays wearing total black kind of dresses that don’t reveal any shape of her body. Chelsea prefers recording albums instead of going on-stage (something that she defined “overwhelming” in the past and now that she is used to do it, affirm she is not really good at) but when it goes on she doesn’t let her fans down. Her last album – the 7th – was release last year:

Hiss Spun is heavily connected to her anxiety and sleeping problems. It is a connection to her past, something that just turned out since she moved quite close to the place in which she leaved as a child.

The thing I really appreciate about this amazing musician the times I have seen her is how beautifully and carefully she prepares herself to perform. How serious and calm is every movement she does in order to prepare her material, how she doesn’t waste any drop of energy to do what she has to do to be ready to play. Besides this, Esther Shaw is a great performer and extremely versatile; in 2016 she joined JR Robinson’s Wrekmeister Harmonies with the release of Light Falls, and since then she extensively travels and performs all around the world while owning a roasting business in Oregon.

She devoted her life to music, especially during her childhood and teenage time, growing her musical background into classical sounds and compositions; her heritage is obvious in the way she performs, as I said before, but even if she shows a kind of delicacy during shows she also communicates an enormous obscure energy.

The last release of Wrekmeister Harmonies, Alone Rush, is a concentrate of dark matter.

The thing I like the most of Caro Tanghe is how down-to-earth and at the same time how dramatic is in every taken picture or in every concert she performs. She doesn’t do anything to appear at the center of the attention (no fancy clothes, no strange hair colors), however, the energy she radiates is so powerful that everyone around her can feel it. Not for nothing her band Oathbreaker received such a warming welcome when they started to tour with Rheia, in 2016.

Visual designer in her real life, Caro is not afraid to show herself as she is, with screaming or simply declaim in acoustic. Her style remember sometimes the one that Björk owns, however her black metal rage is something unique and valuable.

Discoveries | CALYPSO

Music is the way of humanity expresses itself. It was for century the core of every important social event, capable to give joy or relief to thousands of people during the century. It is interesting to see how the different style impacted to the local culture in a precise time of the history, as trying to resolve a complicate puzzle of humankind.

Calypso was a genre born during the 19th century in South America, more exactly in Trinidad and Tobago. As the voice of the slaves imported as worker in sugar plantations, it developed from a wonderful rainbow of roots, as Jamaican folk music or sings in French.

Calypso became pretty popular during from the 30s to the 50s, when Harry Belafonte decided to remake the reggae Banana Boat Song:

Today the genre became highly underground, but it still has the beautiful warming harmony of its homeland, although it collected different influences during the way.

Discoveries | MSQ CONCRETE

These days, in which content can be reached worldwide with a simple click, it is a struggle to even decided what to listen to, especially when it is new. In this column – the Discoveries serie – I’ll try to give a solution to this big question: in the upcoming weeks I’ll show you some interesting and underground music I have found during my researches.

I decided to open this serie with a genre that on Bandcamp is defined Musique Concrète. This genre was born in 1948 with the experimentation of the French engineer and musician Pierre Schaeffer, in which he reached another expression of classic music thanks to the manipulation of the sound.

Schaeffer established the foundation of our modern electronic music, but even if not so many people knew about this pioneer, his ideas continue to live in different ways. One of the best example is Arturo Stàlteri, former musician of the progressive italian rock band Pierrot Lunaire, that simply shows how wonderful can be this mix. In ……E Il Pavone Parlo’ Alla Luna (“..and the Peacock spoke to the Moon”) we can hear the beauty of the sounds mixed with the timber of classical instruments, especially in La Pescatrice di Perle (“The Pearlfisher”):

At the border of this genre, but still fascinated by the vibration and the pureness of the sound, there is the young canadian musician Luna Arakawa, by whom I would like to advise the EP Kioq Parade, released last year. As quite standard for experimental music, it is just made of a long piece in which classic synth effects fade with the crystal sounds of xylophone:

Approaching Nothing is another extreme of the Musique Concrète. Lawrence English builds his song using the sounds of the environment, making them “play” as instruments, with their rhythms and melodies. His goal is to put the listener in a rural scene, but at the same time to build a structured composition, as can be a score for an orchestra:

I did not find many information about the american Threshold Consciousness, project that has the oscillator studies as the main strength of its compositions. In particular, なしの順序と (“And No Order”) seems that wants to create a geometrical structure of listening, that ends up on a classic noise ambient:

Controlled distortion and the greatness of an organ-synth: this is the short description of the project Royal Hungarian Noisemakers, a duo that is not afraid to show the delicacies of a long pitched noises and artifacts voices in a whirl of fade in/out:

Musique Concrète was the answer to the need of modernity that the classical music felt to prove. It was also the realization that the world, as it was known after the two world wars, needed to be different and should have had improved. The change of the decades, together with the growth of new technologies, transformed the experimentation in new waves, giving the possibility for genres as martial, drone and noise, to develop into something well known for the (not mainstream) music public. This is just a small excursus on the surface of what we can hear today, but this world is growing, eager to give new expressions of itself.

Discoveries | DIO DRONE

Dio Drone is an Italian underground label with a very peculiar name. The label, infact, remembers a blaspheme way to called God, and in a catholic country like this is extremely rude and anti-social pronounce something even similar in a public place. However, Dio Drone is not afraid to show its peculiar way to see itself as a breaking point from all the mainstream hard music, focusing on (as it defines) a family of outcasts with really high potentiality.

Here is a fine selection of Dio Drone’s roster. From sound poetry to grindcore, it is difficult to reduce is project in few songs. I invite you to go to the Bancamp page to discover more, and leave a comment here if you know other realities like this.