Рецензия от Vital Weekly на сборник «Droning Ukrainians»

When I first got music by Pro424, back in Vital Weekly 979, the label assumed I wouldn't like it, but they were wrong. I quite enjoyed that minimal approach towards synthesizers and rhythms. Say where Tangerine Dream could meet up with Plastikman. Here Pro424 releases a cassette with four long pieces he recorded for a radio show, directly onto his ancient four-track Portastudio, which uses cassettes on double speed, so each track was fifteen minutes. They were stuck together, were available for free on Bandcamp but still Lamour Records liked the result so much that it was decided to remaster it on an old reel-to-reel machine and release it on cassette, to make the circle round again. The cover shows us a modular synthesizer set-up so let's assume that's what we get here. There are no rhythm machines as such working overtime here and everything comes out of the modular itself, the slow building sequences, the vague hint towards a melody, the slow arpeggio's — everything that happens here, happens slowly and in due time. It all comes with a bit of tape hiss, just as one would expect from an old-fashioned cassette release. Pro424 says he wanted something that could have been from the 80s, but in those days not a lot of underground musicians were in possession of modular synthesizer. That aside, pro424 created some wonderful spacious music.   

The other cassette by Lamour Records is perhaps a bit of an oddball for this label, which for me always hints towards pop. It is a compilation with drone music from the Ukraine, as compiled by Dao de Noize (of whom we reviewed music before). Two cassettes, twice eighty minutes equals a lot of drone music by lots of people I never heard of; Adrageron, Creation VI, Drop Sum, In Meditarivm, Sche!, Melancholic Memories, Trianov & Dark Monolith, Oil Texture, Dronny Darko, Trianov, Absurd Inspiration vs Filivs Macrocosmi, Saturn Form Essence, Schperrung feat. Dark Monolith, Ravcan, Monocube, Gamardah Fungus, SiJ, Malad and finally Dao De Noize himself, and that might be the only name I recognized. The music was kind of like what I expected this to be: very dark, quasi-mysterious, lots of processed acoustic instruments (voices, guitars, field recordings, flutes) and all of this hovering at the dark end of the deep well. These are the sons of Troum and Zoviet*France, which is quite all right. Not spectacular happens here, except maybe for the noisy ending on the fourth side? It's still a bit of a mystery why Lamour would release this, but it is surely a fine collection. 

(FdW)


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