Bob Bellerue: Music of Liberation
Elevator Bath

Brooklyn-based Bob Bellerue is described as a noise composer and experimental musician, but don't let that scare you away. Issued on Elevator Bath in a 250-copy edition, his latest opus, the double-LP Music of Liberation, is neither cranium-shattering nor eardrum-piercing. Instead, it's a four-sided foray into methodical, slow-burning sound design that even includes a (gasp) melody or two. Rather than bludgeon the listener with a volcanic, high-voltage assault, Bellerue shapes myriad sounds into intense, vivid soundscapes marked by timbral contrasts and attention to detail.

Music of Liberation is presented as four side-long parts ranging from sixteen to twenty minutes at a time. Bellerue recorded the base material on April 3, 2016 during a session at Portugal's Sonoscopia that saw him merging feedback drones with a host of instruments and sound sources—bass, shruti box, gong, harmonica, guitar pedals, contact mic, voice, supercollider, nova drone, mixer, and guitar and bass amps—after which depth, resonance, and dimension were added to the mono source recording at Bellerue's place of employment, Issue Project Room.

With elements common to all four, each side offers a variation on a theme. A natural scene-setter, side one presents material that's by turns droning, garrulous, wobbly, writhing, and roaring, the sheet metal-like mass in places suggesting the amplified belch of an overhead plane or a bass guitar positioned next to an amp and feeding back for minutes at a time. Part two rolls in with a wavering, saxophone-like smear, its form suddenly turning eastward when the gleaming harmonics of the shruti box enter; chords splinter into tonal tendrils that follow their own undulating paths, the droning whole sounding somewhat like a harmonium playing itself and adhering to no formal rules of harmony or structural design. Six minutes in, the sound field briefly retreats into near-silence, the pause portending the upsurge to come. At this stage, the gritty metallic timbres of the first side reemerge, now as a grinding, potentially eruptive force that rises to the level of a razor-sharp screech without veering off the rails—controlled convulsions, as it were.

The third side enters like a dissonant hall of mirrors, each sharp-pitched noise bleeding into another until the whole takes on the character of a junk percussion improv performed by multiple musicians; the closing minutes are marked by a no-holds-barred plunge into guttural feedback and strangulated wail, one of the few times Music of Liberation clothes itself in full noise garb. The final side begins with a softly shimmering, electrical organ-like drone acting as an undercurrent for feedback smears until giving violent birth to some screeching industrial monstrosity.

November 2018