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Torba – Musique Inconcrète
From becalming beginnings serving soothing drones for rabid harshdorks- and rabid harshdorkettes...Torba has come quite the ways. And I'm not just saying that because each and every piece of the now prodigious discog covers so much territory. Or, there again, maybe I am. Jump aboard any given Torba and you're in for a ride. Twists, tangles, knots, weaves. Densely collaged concerns, both concrete and less-than-concrete. Intricate elaborations of the brute and the genteel, juxtaposing scenic nature-scapes, grinding industrial-scrapes, bustling dockyard-crates, chaotic orchestral-clamor, disembodied crowd-murmur. And fat flatulent dollops of heavy duty analog crunch.
In truth, the heavy duty crunch has been in steady retreat for a good few years now. At this point, it may be safe to declare, the last vestiges of rabid harshdork- and rabid harshdorkette- would seem to be gone for good. And I'm not just talking crunch. With reference to the prodigious territories previously negotiated, Inconcrète inclines toward an almost pastoral elaboration of intricate circumspection. No deep dives into roiling industrial-strength cauldrons, rather a tippy-toeing along the cusp, occasional blasts of steam clouding the view but never to a point that may worry the undertaking. You're in safe hands here. Careful, sure, genteel. And then, here and there, because, y'know, leopards and spots and that, muffled snatches of casually cruel violence from sweaty, over-muscled, brute.
Lapjèdr Fòr establishes the essential dyed-in-the-brute tone for the thirty-some minute lp. Low fidelity field recordings meticulously manhandled through rough-n-tumble tape orchestrations of oh-so-ill-kempt rumples and ruptures, elaborating unsteadily in a vaguely narrative play of call and spelunk. Field recordings whose contours are shaped, as much by the recording devices doing the recording as by the fields being recorded. In this orchestra of intermittence, interruption, abbreviation, the fields are obscured, distorted, muffled, warped, leaving the listener with no clear, concrete, idear as to what exactly is being heard, mangled sounds of the recording instruments themselves painting partial pastorals, recognizable, ugly, beautiful, obscure.
Okay then, run the tapes-
Run-out vinyl grooves steadily clump to high-pitched whine, distant voices, repetitive buzz. Rough tape-ejection and then: plop into something resembling roiling industrial-strength cauldron. Masked spoken utterances in the left ear compete with buffeted wind rumblings over amplified crowd noise and, far down the mix, machine-like crank and crinkle. A second rough-cut and the field is almost emptied, snatches of bird-chirp edging around slow-strummed bass pluckings and intermittent flits of radio static. Then a second plop into the cauldron: field suddenly brimming with dragged-out metal scraping, rumble-sheets, whitened washes that resolve into lapping seashores as storm clouds gather overhead, thunder crashing to a steadily pouring deluge, disembodied voices growing anxious, directing hapless assistant to get a fucking tarp over the goods. Trapped by the storm, we make our way inward, deep into darkened tunnel, ghostly organ wavering to whispered voices and roughly warbled crumble-flutter. The light at the end beckons, edged with slowly ascendant strands of higher-end wheedle...inevitably to end on the unceremonious tape-deck ker-plunk.
Intermezzo delivers slow arpeggiated piano over unconcerned crowd noise with all the non-fidelity of tape-recorder left in the next room, scratchings of scrinched-tight tape spools mixed with assorted chokes, coughs and thumps.
Jòdk Ì Vèr divests itself of the some of the ill-fidelities previously posited. Almost immediately we are plonked, unceremoniously, into deep, darkened, layers of densely overlapping rumble walls, mechanical hoist hauling bulky length of protesting cable along pock marked cowpath, heavier boiler-room bulgings coming in slow-rolling undulations. Visibility is poor, but at the l-r edges the concrete snaps and crackles suggest mic getting dragged haphazard through wooded thicket. In the closing minutes we venture back to the surface, masked snatches of voice muttering over grainy factory hum.
On to the flip-side and a more familiarly Torba-like sense of fragmented development. Evjìg reprises the deeply funneling ghost waverings, but filters them through rusted metal whinges, occasional clunks and clanks rounding out proceedings. Hymn to a mine-shaft. Then the aperture widens to admit de-tuned strings plucked over scuffed heel-drag and the regulated plonk of spiky metal bits dropped into unlidded piss-bucket. At the third minute, a genuine attempt to noise things up, high-end wheeze complementing heavily leavened measures of rumbling excess. The noise proper is, of course, short-lived, making way for clipped, subtley panned cuts of close mic'd gasp, dull thunk and creak stretched tight over corroded tapeheads. Toward the end, badly-muffled suggestion of proper music bleeds, backmasked, through thick-walled corridor, as though in tribute to some kind of prehistoric industrial urge. Just when the urges are reaching their fulfillment, a lurching into dead-aired squeak, miniature dustbroom skittering at the corners.
Intermezzo 759 and the return of the arpeggiated chord, this time backed by self-asborbed whisperings whose indecipherable declarations get spliced, in rather gross fashion, into collage of wretched, unparsable, hack 'n gag.
Stòvr Njòedr poses melancholic for the briefest interval before repeated stop-pause interjection nets messy spectacle of dis-voiced, disembodied, disconsolance, seemingly emanating from deep within the radiator. As pressures increase, an encroachment of crumpling ruffle-sheets, saturated piping drip-dribbling the length, soon to acquire surges of whitened momentum that quickly burn out in an inelegantly grafted disturbance of tape-ribbon sausage floss. Enter now return of the stringed strum-motif, melancholic misshapen mico-belches contorting around the exterior, miniscule blurt-particles spinning and splooging in a sickening medley of snorting, slopping 'n snuffling. Symphonies of snot.
Digest spew:
Meticulously ordered disorder of concrete elements rendered unreadable, unparsable- or just plain in-concrete- by the principle instrumentation in play; namely, the electronic devices tasked with the recording of the many and varied fields (said to stretch from Germany to Italy). In these densely collaged symphonies, of intermittence, interruption, abbreviation, the origins are as recognizable as they are obscured, mangled, muffled, warped. There is a very calm, almost pastoral inclination in the intricate elaborations, but so too that recognizably Torba-esque deferral to casually cruel violence. Or to say, brute charm. You can take the rabid harshdork out of the noise...
