Exotic Connections and Other Such Stuff Vol 2 (various artists)

<a href="https://recordiaudukes.bandcamp.com/album/exotic-connections-other-such-stuff-vol-2">Exotic Connections & Other Such Stuff Vol 2 by Recordiau Dukes</a>

Dukes of Scuba started life in 2018 as a paper fanzine promoting and documenting improvised and experimental music in Wales. It evolved into a webzine, a label and a concert/workshop series (‘Scratch’) in Bangor. Exotic Connections and Other Such Stuff Vol 2 is the latest release by the label – Recordiau Dukes – and is a follow-up album to Vol 1, which came out at the end of 2022. As the album blurb says: To help document and promote the current Welsh scene, Dukes of Scuba has partnered again with The South Wales Improvisers to create the second volume in a series of download compilation albums of free improvisation and experimental music which shine a spotlight upon new music from across the whole of the country. The emphasis in the first Exotic Connections album tended towards improvised music. The emphasis here is, if anything towards the experimental and semi-improvised, although I’ve not added up the minutes and there’s a substantial amount of improvisation, too.

The first track, ‘Limehouse’, is taken from the album Dérive, a collaboration between Observation Point (the alter-ego of South Wales musician Antony Thomas) and composer/creator Susan Matthews. The album explores the mythology that has grown up around 18th-century architect Nicholas Hawksmoor’s esoteric designs for six London churches. These are purportedly connected in a geometrical pattern by ley lines (an idea which finds its way into Alan Moore’s graphic novel, ‘From Hell’). Dérive is a term used by psychogeographers for urban wandering that explores (as Guy Debord, the inventor of psychogeography put it) “specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” The title of the track, ‘Limehouse’, refers to St. Anne’s Church, Limehouse, a Hawksmoor church in Tower Hamlets. Thinking about psychogeography and music it strikes me that a lot can be made of an association between the two: if one goes out on a dérive one expects to be surprised, to see (or hear) things (and see things in things) that one didn’t expect. Listening to ‘Limehouse’, though, I expected to be surprised, but I wasn’t. Thomas and Matthews took a more impressionistic path. That’s not to say the track isn’t effective: it is. It would make great music for a film.

The duo Hopewell Ink (Kathy and David Boswell) combine spoken word with composed music. Kathy writes the words: intense sessions of free-writing are edited down to create a spoken text. David creates the musical element. This might involve a range of sound sources, from more familiar acoustic and electronic instruments to aeolian (wind-powered) instruments and field recordings. ‘No Longer a Car’ (‘It did not liquefy as a corpse should / Instead it became more angular’) was recorded during a live set on Neil Crud’s Punk and Beyond online radio show. Metallic percussion figures prominently in the track and I wondered if metal car-parts were involved (they’re certainly invoked) – a reasonable assumption as we’re talking about an outfit known to fasten contact mics to fences.

John Harvey describes himself, as well as being a performer, as an ‘historian of sound and visual art’. He describes his ‘Musical Instruments Played the Old Familiar Tunes’ as referencing instances of musical instruments playing themselves under the direction of a medium (a stunt popular in the 19^th century). It’s an improvisation for electric guitar processed by software that emulates a ‘spirit box’ – a radio scanner that usually produces white noise which spirits (users claim) can mould into comprehensible words.

Lyndon Owen’s ‘Sonic Fruit and Veg Machine’ is a light-hearted piece of process music. And why not? It’s a process piece that uses the electrical resistance of vegetables to control oscillators. The audience, divided into four groups, are the performers, each group being provided with what sounds like a theremin adapted to be played by cabbages, carrots and such like (with the assistance, of course, of the human participants). From the verbal description, it sounds like it’s great fun to make. The end result is a good listen, even if you know nothing of the process that led up to it. Hopefully, the vegetables are eaten afterwards.

‘Thinking of the River’, created by Martin Lloyd Chitty (better known, perhaps, as a singer-songwriter) is a soundscape using field recordings together with drums and minimal electronics. It’s part of a larger project that takes the poetry of Basil Bunting and the landscape of the Howgills as its starting point.

Lightening In A Bottle is a free improvisation duo consisting of Richard McReynolds (Guitar) & Luke Robinson (Drums). Their performances are spontaneous and unplanned. The uncertainty this creates puts a weight of responsibility on the performers and, listening to this track – ‘Blue Screen Disco Queen’ – I could almost smell the adrenalin. It’s the longest track on the album and, for me, one of the most engaging. Any improvising musician will recognise the chuckles that got caught on the recording at the end, the elation of knowing that synergy happened and somehow, in a way that feels outside your control, what you just did really worked.

We’re not told a lot about ‘CeVoix’ by Simon Rogers (aka Etchedbright). Listening to it, I’d hazard that it’s a piece for violin, electronics, harp and percussion. I, for one, am pleased to think people are still making music like this (be it composed or improvised), in an atonal style that owes a lot to serialism, a sound-world with occasional echoes of Stockhausen. Rogers is a visual artist, as well as a composer.

The Improvisers Ensemble (IE), founded by Spontaneous Music Ensemble-veteran Maggie Nicols, meets every Sunday and makes music over the internet. The line-up varies. ‘Stages of Life’ was recorded in June this year. The piece, the blurb tells us, is based on the title. The line-up is jazz-based – saxophones, bass, drums and voice. The music, as one might expect, becomes less frenetic as time goes on. It says a lot for it that one doesn’t have to know the title and the plan to appreciate it.

South Wales Improvisers meet fortnightly at SHIFT in Cardiff. What we hear of them is a seven-minute excerpt from a session held, again, in June this year. The group welcomes players of all levels, with or without experience. All they ask, to quote their website, is ‘that you love an open mind, a willingness to listen, to respond and enjoy.’ Listening to them made me wish I lived nearer Cardiff.

Pieriant are a duo (Rose and Dan Linn-Pearl) who perform on violin, electric guitar and found objects. They describe what they do as semi-improvised. Their name, Pieriant, translates into English as ‘machine’. One has to imagine not a production line robot but some sort of fantastic device producing curious, enchanting musical artefacts. The track showcased here, ‘Tri Yn Yr Lolfa’, translates as ‘Three in the Lounge’ which, I guess, refers to the fact that as well as the two adult performers, we can hear the voice of a small child whose contributions (live? pre-recorded?) are not only touching, but ask the question, when we feel moved to make sounds in the world, in what circumstances can we consider what we’re doing to be music? Pieriant describe themselves as ‘[pursuing] moods of minimalism, drone, post-rock, soundscape and spoken word’. Listening to them, I would resist any attempt to pigeon-hole them with a genre. As is the case with a lot of interesting musicians, their ‘style’ is probably best described as being whatever the end-product of what they’re trying to do turns out to be.

As is the way with such compilation albums, every track on Exotic Connections is a potential line of enquiry that can lead the listener into the work of the showcased performer. People will have their own favourites. Anyone who finds it interesting will want to check out the first volume, too, if they don’t already know it (see links below).