Vertonen

Vertonen

Einige Schadstoffe

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***In Einige Schadstoffe, we have quite the potent homage to the classic era of industrial noise. Think Throbbing Gristle's Second Annual Report, Come's I'm Jack, MB's Symphony For A Genocide, and even Nord's Ego Trip. The sentiment linking all of these records is a clinical detachment in the production and broadcast of scalding tone, sickly rhythm, and unclean readymades, emerging through the spectacle of the human conditions of alienation, paranoia, and cruelty. Ultimately, such works are intended as critiques by way of gonzo journalism, where the intent is not always what it seems. Vertonen, the longstanding project of veteran Chicago avant-noise technician Blake Edwards, masterfully recapitulates these strategies and affects, both aesthetically and materially. On Einige Schadstoffe, Edwards transmits feverish arppegiations cascading through nervous distortion, followed by plodding rhythms and dead-toned electronics that gird case studies on living monstrosities. There is also a rather clever, if oblique and almost Oulipian framework to the album. Plenty of breadcrumbs have been laid as to the nature of Edwards' puzzle, and we have already said too much about that.

Vertonen

Broken Air

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Vertonen is the work of Blake Edwards, a veteran of the Chicago noise and experimental scene. With close to 100 releases many of them published through his own Crippled Intellect Productions and Ballast imprints spread over several decades, Edwards has finetuned his craft of cryptically inclined, electronic invocations that might channel the raw brutality of industrial machinery or the existential claustrophobia of a submariner's voyage nearing its untimely end. There are numerous aesthetic facets to the Vertonen oeuvre - scabrously harsh noise, zoned-out isolationism, roughly tactile cacophonics, polished smooth harmonics. Yet, much of the work is tied to a conceptual precision that informs if not agitates his sounds to act.  Broken Air is the first album for Vertonen to produce for The Helen Scarsdale Agency. Edwards cites both Oulipo founder Raymond Queneau and Butoh icon Kazuo Ohno as profound influences to the construction of Broken Air, in Edwards' own words "to explore the boundaries between the limited and unlimited capabilities of 'communication' in its broadest definition." It is electricity itself that becomes the primary medium for Edwards on Broken Air, as he extracts the errata from outdated and damaged equipment. A particular brand of radio interference leaps out of the stereo field at the onset of the album, interjecting its signal across smoldering noise from Edwards' electronic instability, starved of voltage or succumbing to old age. A monochromatic dead-circuit tone flutters in various phased states as a gird to Edwards' investigations. What sounds like an abject mutation of a...