aTelecine’s music is disturbing, bizarre, experimental, boundary pushing and… curiously old fashioned. These two linked releases hark back to a period of fevered creativity in electronic music, to the days when Industrial Records gave its name to a genre (with which it has little to do, especially now), and interestingly, a time when transgressing social and sexual taboos was an important artistic strategy.
- Phase Two
The press release name-checks Coil and Nurse With Wound, and it is certainly possible to hear those artists’ influence in these sounds, but there’s a broader conceptual engagement with the past: the magick tinged sigil which serves as the band’s logo is redolent of the weird techno-paganism that was a theme of the whole COUM Transmissions/ Throbbing Gristle/ Industrial Records/ Psychic TV/ Coil circus; and there is a serious attempt to continue that era’s engagement with fundamental assumptions about art and music.
The sounds themselves are varied, and rarely offer easy or obvious meanings.There are rhythms, but they are not fully articulated in the manner of dance music, and there are tonal or harmonic elements, but they do not possess conventional narrative direction: the recognisable, as a musical trope, is simply a texture to be employed alongside the arrhythmic, atonal, or otherwise a-conventional.
- Phase 3
This is not noisy, clattering chaos, but fits under the broad heading of ambient music; it uses distortion, as does industrial ambient, but in a less obvious way, that is more reminiscent of RF interference; there are vocal elements, but rarely straightforwardly presented, sometimes reminding me of KMFDM’s disturbing cover version of ‘Material Girl’; there are gradual mutations of simple phrases, that reference minimalism. The effect, for me, is of walking through a vast hall, filled with mysterious objects and industrial detritus, in total darkness.
These releases are aTelecine’s first to be available digitally, which suggests that a cultivated obscurity is part of the band’s overall agenda; and every single track has a parenthesis, containing either a mix name, a mix type (‘Tape Mix’ crops up frequently), or other identification, e.g. as a ‘Lost Demo’. There is a sense that everything is provisional, merely one possible version, arbitrarily selected. But of course this is far from arbitrary: this is creative, sonically inventive, and for all its distancing and difficulty, musical experimentalism of the first order.
[...] and for all its distancing and difficulty, musical experimentalism of the first order.”- Everything but Urban Related posts:CHELSEA WOLFE: Album [...]
[...] and for all its distancing and difficulty, musical experimentalism of the first order.”- Everything but Urban Related posts:PSR-0044 | aTelecine – A Cassette Tape Culture (Phase [...]
[...] “These releases are aTelecine’s first to be available digitally, which suggests that a cultivated obscurity is part of the band’s overall agenda; and every single track has a parenthesis, containing either a mix name, a mix type (‘Tape Mix’ crops up frequently), or other identification, e.g. as a ‘Lost Demo’. There is a sense that everything is provisional, merely one possible version, arbitrarily selected. But of course this is far from arbitrary: this is creative, sonically inventive, and for all its distancing and difficulty, musical experimentalism of the first order.” – Everything but Urban [...]