Category: review

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Review of Radia

“Bach is an improviser and soundscaper from California with an impressive pedigree. I must admit though that his is a new name to me.

From my reading of the press release he seems to operate very much within the area of lowercase music in this case derived from guitar feedback and field recordings. Now, I’ve always had a problematic relationship with lowercase, not from any dislike of the, admittedly few, things I’ve heard that use the name, just in the annoyance that such deliberately quiet music causes me. I like music to have a presence in the room; I like it to show itself. It doesn’t have to be demonstrative or showy it just needs to interact with my environment at a level where I don’t have to strain to hear. For the most part ‘Radia’ was drowned out by my environment. I had to have the stereo turned up to degree that made me uncomfortably paranoid that I’d forget I had done so when I changed the disc (this did in fact happen…twice) and also with the vague feeling that by cranking it up I had done an disservice to the idea of the album. You’ll notice of course that all these issues are with me and the genre not with the music at hand.

The thing I did discover when I turned everything up is that the music on ‘Radia’ is pretty damn good. It’s noise music but of a pretty rarefied and refined nature. The tracks offer a textural ambience that provides a pleasantly gritty atmosphere that is fun to move through. I just wish it was louder.”

–Ian Holloway, Wonderful Wooden Reasons
2 December 2012

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Reviews of Bleu Remix

Here is a blog post from Grand Central Art Center, along with a paragraph on the performance from CSUF Professor Joanna Roach:

“It is with great intention and little pretension that Yann Marussich chooses blue for his performance. In Bleu Remix, Marussich reclines motionless within his heated box, sometimes staring, sometimes with eyes closed, exuding blue. Steve Roden and Glenn Bach’s sound performance Friday night at the Grand Central Art Center was the aural partner to Marussich’s body. Roden and Bach’s sound activates us within the space of the gallery, moving with us around the clear box that contains the artist. But the sound, like the artist’s body, takes us to another place. I’m not sure where it is, but it’s an intense, yet deeply still dimension. I guess it’s a blue place…”

— Joanna Roach, 24 August 2012

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Radia: Review on The Field Reporter

“Standing on a rocky ridge looking out over a vast expanse of landscape in one of Wisconsin’s State Parks beneath an endless sky. The clouds are great citadels of enormous height moving slowly and casting their shadows over the grasslands below. The air is cool and the sun is high.

Long Beach, California sound artist Glenn Bach recorded Radia at various State Parks in California and Wisconsin. The field recordings were then combined with guitar feedback in an extremely subtle way. Released on Brian Lavelle’s Dust Unsettled label, the work is decribed as ‘an exploration of the blurred boundaries of geography, place and memory’, which pretty much nails it.

Radia is a subtle, organic paean to the vast North American wilderness. Rather than grandeur and monumentalism (tropes which have been done to death by numerous painters, photographers and composers), Bach focusses on the clear air and expanding horizons. The solitary figure in the landscape, attentive to the languages and nuances of his environment. Maybe at times there is no figure at all?

Tendrils of guitar generated sound hang in the air like vapour trails, dissolving and reforming in the lucid atmosphere. Sometimes like streamers being twisted in the wind, sometimes like a mist clinging to the ground.

Somehow the music generates these expansive spaces in the listener’s consciousness too. Of course this requires some effort on the listener’s part, but what work of any worth doesn’t? It is a two way process and deep listening yields rewards. Time dilates and the mind is cleansed by clear North American air. I would encourage using headphones and just surrendering.

The field recordings are presented as understated and intimate signs. Rain, grass, birds. At one point a plane flies over, the sound of it’s engine mirroring the drifting feedback that often arches across the tracks on this CD. Planes always draw attention to the spaces above. The extent of the atmosphere, and the fact that wherever you are, the human world is still liable to intrude.

This type of work is often described as ‘lowercase’ music, along with the output of such artists as Steve Roden and Bernhard Günter. However, other than being quite quiet and having few dynamic peaks, it is hard to see the similarity. Although there is space in Radia, there is actually very little silence and there is plenty of detail and development. Also all playback devices have volume knobs these days. You can always turn it up a bit.

Certainly one of my favourite recent releases due to the way it unfurls and the images it conjours. To be able to make a little 5″ silver disc carry such a huge amount of land and sky is quite something.”

–Chris Whitehead, The Field Reporter, 13 May 2012

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Radia: Review on Vital Weekly

vital_weekly

“This solo release uses guitar feedback and field recordings captured in various state parks in California and Wisconsin. This is quiet music, sometimes almost below the threshold of hearing, but it sounds great. Lowercase is a term we don’t hear that much anymore, but it certainly applies to this music. Whatever field recordings he has captured (at some instances I recognized the sound of water and birds), or whatever processes he applied to them, they sound like blurry static pieces of hiss like sounds, in which he places his sparse guitar sounds. There is a lot of space in the music – not in a cosmic sense of the word, but in the sparseness of the sounds used to create this music. This is not the kind of music you put on for ‘fun’, or as ‘background’. This music requires active listening and without such concentrated effort it rather fails to impress the listener. It might be over before you know something had started. That is, I think, a great quality.”

— Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly #821, 28 February 2011.