akira rabelais • spellewauerynsherde [samadhi sound, 2004]
::: when time and space conceptions are lost, no dimension exists. it's all-pervading light, infinite and eternal :::
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"When Texas born Akira Rabelais found a handful of discarded Ampex tapes containing Icelandic a cappella laments - recorded some time between 1960 and 1980 - he decided to bring them back to life using his 'magic realist' code language. Rabelais writes software but likens the process to writing poetry. For him it has the same unpredictable outcome, labyrinthine meaning and constant surprise. He constructed the software Argeiphontes Lyre in the early 90s, a subtle sound processor that randomly distorts and transforms pre-existing sounds. It's a firm favourite of the likes of Terre Thaemlitz and Scanner.
The album has the air of an invented mythical past, with lengthy titles that seem like medieval biblical references - "1483 Caxton Golden Leg. 208 b/2 He put not away the wodenes of his flessh with a sherde or shelle" is about the shortest. Spellewauerynsherde is the third release on David Sylvian's Samadhi Sound label, and the first without input from Sylvian himself.
Graceful, sorrowful hymns are draped with swathes of haunting, echoing noise, like hearing funeral music carried with the wind through a storm. The subtle digital processing slowly transmutes the choral pitches, adding small delays, echoes and loops. He plays the role of a magus using his code as a spell to summon up a dormant spirit hidden within these graceful Icelandic laments. This is lonely, spiritual music evoking the solemn atmosphere of Eliane Radigue's Trilogie De La Mort, the memory music of Philip Jeck and the introverted romance of Sylvian collaborator Fennesz, Rabelais represents an elegiac strand of electronica that goes entirely beyond the plug-in craze of his contemporaries - the clicks, cuts 'n' glitch division that ultimately renders so much electronica similar sounding.
Spellewauerynsherde breathes sublimity through your CD player circuits." the wire
Graceful, sorrowful hymns are draped with swathes of haunting, echoing noise, like hearing funeral music carried with the wind through a storm. The subtle digital processing slowly transmutes the choral pitches, adding small delays, echoes and loops. He plays the role of a magus using his code as a spell to summon up a dormant spirit hidden within these graceful Icelandic laments. This is lonely, spiritual music evoking the solemn atmosphere of Eliane Radigue's Trilogie De La Mort, the memory music of Philip Jeck and the introverted romance of Sylvian collaborator Fennesz, Rabelais represents an elegiac strand of electronica that goes entirely beyond the plug-in craze of his contemporaries - the clicks, cuts 'n' glitch division that ultimately renders so much electronica similar sounding.
Spellewauerynsherde breathes sublimity through your CD player circuits." the wire
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