Tag Archives: Frans de Waard
Vital Weekly 793
JOHN WIESE – GGA (12″ by Teenage Teardrops)
Now here is an interesting record, by noise supremo John Wiese. When I started this 12″ I thought it had something to do with his love for the Haters: smashing glass, highly separated in the two channels. But then a peek on the information learns that this is actually a stereo mix of a 4 channel installation. It sounds great, but then, like Wiese, I am big fan of The Haters too. The sound of smashing, breaking and crunching of glass is very loudly recorded here, and has a great physical quality to it. It bounces loudly and a strong, minimal, conceptual edge to it. This could have lasted LP size to me, instead of 12″. Totally captivating noise in the best sense of the word. Now that’s what I call noise: intelligent, loud, conceptual and listenable. (FdW)
Address: http://teenageteardrops.com
Vital Weekly 666
JOHN WIESE & C. SPENCER YEH – CINCINNATI (CD by Dronedisco)
We may know both of them as noise makers and perhaps best to forward to Jliat, but since meeting both artists, on different occasions I think, the curious me thought it would be good to check ‘what they are doing now’. It was nice to keep and investigate further. Wiese plays here ‘electronics, objects, msp, voice, synthesizer’ and Yeh plays ‘voice, synthesizer, electronics, tabletop bass guitar, objects’. The first thing that can be noticed is that there are fourteen tracks here, which range somewhere between one and half minute and six minutes. That’s perhaps I wouldn’t expect. Maybe I assumed three fifteen minutes of straight forward noise. That also doesn’t happen. Surely things are noisy around ‘Cincinnati’, but the two take their inspiration more from the world of musique concrete than from the true noise world. They cut the sounds to pieces, play around with acoustic objects, amplified and recorded with contact microphones, take back in volume when needed and push things up when necessary. Each of the fourteen pieces has its own character, sounding different from the previous or the next, making this a highly varied but also highly interesting CD. This is the kind of the noise thing that gives me a great smile on my face, certainly some of the more funnier pieces using voices and the the nice cover art. (FdW)