“Magical Writing”, originally released on cassette on Gengras’ own label Peccant Tapes sees MGG take a more intimate and meditative direction. Instead of harsh, abstract synthesis and live-aktion knob twiddling madness, this album offers a deeply personal journey into the ambient territory, soothing the listener with deeeep drones and beautiful, mournful melodies hidden beneath them. Music for intense explorations of the inner self. Recommended.
II, as the name suggests, is the second release by the drone (super)duo of M. Geddes Gengras and Jeremy Kelly. The first cassette, entitled simply I, was released by Stunned Records and (as pretty much all releases by Stunned) was sold out in a heartbeat. The second cassette picks up on the same ideas that put Voder Deth Squad into existence and develops them in order to completely envelop the listener and provide sonic nirvana hidden among the dark, rolling synthesizer sounds.
While many people might associate LA’s Ged Gegras with cold, experimentalist approach to synthesizers and electronic music in general, remembering his lengthy sound collages and nearly lifeless bleeps, bloops and massive drones, he’s also actually ableto create heart-wreckingly beautiful pieces of ambient music, like on his Magical Writing tape. On II, the fresh offering from SicSic Tapes, is a truly immersive journey, where the beatufiul, tape-treated ambience is deepened and a added a darker, more mysterious edge. While MGG’s Magical Writing was almost folk-like in its closeness of Earth and basic emotions, II by the collab with J. Kelly is way closer to the endless coldness of the outer space.
As before, the music on II consists of two side-long, untitled tracks. Side A is built around distantly pulsing, ominous sequence, emerging from the tape hiss like some enormous pillars emerging from the fog in an endlessly huge cosmic structure hidden somewhere on a remote, dark planet. Single synth notes float among the pillars, exchanging signals and tiny scraps of improvised melodies. Waves of sounds rise into echoing clusters bouncing constatly against the huge, background pillar-like sequence. The sound is non-invasive, it is bassy, but in a fear-inducing way, it just envelops the listener and develops gently along the way without much stylisting change. It is the ideal sleeping jam, for those altered nights.
Side B at first might sound like a copy of the previous track, but it soon gets more power and fills the cold vacuum with swirling synthesizer solos, ascending and echoing like there’s no tomorrow. This is the music for the dream stage, when the brain creates non-existent worlds at an incredible pace, adding more surreal details to the whole. II is the simulation, the document of the thought processes happening in the brain during the sleep or in the altered states of consiousness.
The newest tape offering from the LA knob twiddler M. Geddes Gengras is the Kiss of Life, released by the German imprint SicSic Tapes in their probably best batch to date (including, beside MGG, Panabrite and Innercity). The Kiss of Life is a burning, zonked out tapestry of fried electronics trying to submit to an ever-present pulsing rhythm. The fierce sound of the first piece, taking up entire side A is summed up in a simple title: “Burning”. The frenetic pace of this piece, among with glitched out, acerbic electronic textures, stacked upon one another might remind one of the spazzy tek-no muzik of KPLR. There is little, if any, melody in this piece, the only agent bringing the relative piece to the chaotic synthesizer sounds is the sequencer, which is always there, in the background: dictating a fast, stern tempo to which other sounds have to submit, emerging at the top for just a few seconds. “Burning” is an electronic equivalent of an actual fire: there’s a slow, calm set-up, there’s a sudden burst of flames and there’s a long, intense period of heat and destruction before the whole thing dies down by itself.
Side B’s “The Kiss”, follows the similar path, although it’s even less structured in the beginning: high-pitched, abrasive and noisy synth patches pierce through the eerie rising and falling drone with a shy, needle-like melody rising from the droning soundscape in a manner similar to the States series by Greg Davis. After some time, however, the melody emerges on top of jagged, pulsing sounds and marks its reign above the sea of modular madness. This is not an intimate, romantic kiss however: this is a nervous kiss, a desperate kiss, with lips frotting against one another in a frenetic, violent manner. The whole album’s name is reflected in the cassette’s convulsions: it is the kiss, bringing the turbulent, intense life into the dead body with all its ups and downs, the magical spark, prompting the whole machinery to work at a head-spinning pace. The world needs more music like “The Kiss”. Congratulations, Mr Ged Gengras.
