Freiband: {flying}
Scarcelight Recordings

MHFS: Ti Point Wharf
Scarcelight Recordings

Two 3-inch CDRs from the Scarcelight stable, both as different and provocative as those familiar with the label have come to expect.

Frans de Waard's Freiband project was inspired by tape-scratching Asmus Tietchens applied to his Daseinsverfehlung CD, though de Waard displaces the idea into a digital context by scratching the hard-disk, with the result “music made out of popping sounds.” He applied the treatment to his favourite pop songs on Homeward (Bottrop-Boy) and now deploys it to transform The Beatles' lone instrumental “Flying” (from 1967's Magical Mystery Tour) into eight minimal exercises. Predictably, the process renders the original unrecognizable, with the brief vignettes eschewing melody for texture. Over the course of the disc's twenty minutes, {flying} presents a steely array of gentle wavering tones, crackling thrums, muffled machine rhythms, cloudy lappings, and skittering static—a re-imagining of pop music by de Waard, also known as Goem and a founder member of Kapotte Muziek.

Accompanying info to Ti Point Wharf by MHFS (Auckland, New Zealand-based physicist Mark Sadgrove) notes that it is “entirely possible that the sounds on this record were pulled from a 1920's acetate recording found unprotected in an abandoned warehouse overlooking the Ti Point Wharf.” Certainly a sense of location is established by the phantom voices, grainy decay, and blurry rustlings of field noise that haunt the recording's seven untitled tracks. Sounds on this 20-minute disc depict a faintly glimpsed realm of ambient abstractions and hazy folk-blues.

March 2005