Music: On Corrosion (The Helen Scarsdale Agency)

The cult of the cassette continues to have followers, I think. It must do for what else would explain this 10-cassette anthology housed in a handcrafted wooden box? Madness? Perhaps, but the kind I applaud, up to a point, that point depending on whether it will be available in other forms too. The cassette format is entirely appropriate for a collection called On Corrosion, I suppose. My memory of them is that they were vulnerable, to say the least. That said, I still have on cassette recordings of both my poetry reading 'live' and, I think, Kerouac reading his haiku, both of which still played after a few decades when I last tried them. 

This box from The Helen Scarsdale Agency features Kleistwahr, Neutral, Pinkcourtesyphone, Alice Kemp, She Spread Sorrow, G*Park, Relay For Death, Francisco Meirino, Himukalt and Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, the last being the only name I had heard of until now.  After all, most of my listening is dedicated music that's much older than this. Yet I notice the timeless nature of much of what's here, by which I mean the debt to the likes of David Tudor and the Minimalist school of the 60s. Isn't all modern ambient music indebted to them? 

'Ambient' may be the wrong word. I dislike Ambient music, actually. It should be reserved for lifts and supermarkets (oh what a change that would make from Pop!). Far better than your average new New Age sonic balm, pieces such as Alles ist im Fluss. Die pure Alchemie by G*Park are heavy with menace, in textural content rather than abrasive noise. Alice Kemp's Song For Unnamed Things also grabs my attention. It's stop/start structure and bass tone work fantastically well, the silences being some of the most compelling (non) sounds I have heard. Ester Kärkkäinen as Himukalt disproves my notion that only boys like to make Noise, or rather, mostly boys, which is probably still the case but what a noise she makes. It will never be a genre I fully embrace but in her work I sense more...craft?...than strikes me in most of it. Even rhythm get a look in, that and bass structures which hint at older, more formal genres expounding the low end theory.

Being so big I've not full digested this box. Each artist has an album within it and there's much to admire from what I've discovered so far.

The Helen Scarsdale Agency