Moniek Darge - 'Soundies' (Kye)

Sound art or music?  It's an eternal dilemma; I have vacillated between positions myself, it's certainly easy to group Darge's work into the 'sound art' category.  Especially when presented as Soundies is, a compilation subtitled "selected work 1980-2001", with a list of which sources each recording is culled from. But I want to treat this as music.  If there is a difference, to me, it's in expression and intent.  Darge certainly is interested in the pleasures of listening, but I feel there's a lot of life in the little spaces of this CD. It's an array of fun, including voice, clarinet, violin, "musical objects", harp samples, slides, and "performance"; the resulting tracks vary but all maintain a strong emphasis on detail.  The longest track is the opening, from 1980, 'Sand'; it takes it's time to develop, suggesting the anti-music structures of Anton Bruhin in places, but is not bogged down by it's own conceptualism. As her work progresses (with a 12 year gap between 1983's 'Fairy Tale', my personal favourite, and 1995's 'Harpje', my second favourite track) Darge seems to be more interested in how things layer.  There's a soundscape feel to her late 90's work, partcularly 'Caete' which drapes wind and sea waves over clusters of small sounds. Darge's pieces feel organic and not too carefully meticulous, which keeps them closer to the underground than to the museum, always a good thing. The vocal work is inspiring at times, sometimes leading the pieces into a narrative feel. Her editing style is not as simple as saying 'cut-up', but there's a discordance and motion that always orbits around direction. It's a long disc, as a good archival release should be, and is understandably more varied than her Sounds of Sacred Places recordings, which are beautiful in their own way. I never seem to get tired of music like this, which draws from my own interest in abstract/surrealist sounds - and of course, the unending influence of the NWW list in my life. Darge is too late for that list but clearly comes from similar mental space.  

Alva - 'Slattery for Ungdom' (Menlo Park)

I've always wondered about this record cause Alva was of course Thomas Edison's middle name, and Menlo Park, NJ is where his famous laboratory/inventionworkshop was -- so it this just coincidental that a label called Menlo Park released a CD by Alva? This was Alva's last gasp and only 12 minutes long at that, but it packs the soundspiral of their first disc into a quick demented cockpunch. The medieval aftertaste is still present, as are the ghosty child vocals, bursts of slapstick chamber music, and weirdo atmosphere. If anything is different maybe there's a bit more confidence, some bangers and mash freejazz moments ('Ooon Ong' and the end of 'March to Underneath') and some blatantly 'straight' tracks like 'Happysick' which are actually the strangest of all. In 1999 we were all worried about the y2k bug but we shoulda been morning the demise of Alva, though I don't know if more material would somehow damage their 'legend'. A buddy of mine emailed one of 'em a few years back offering to release any leftover material that might have gone unreleased, but received no reply. It's better off that way, we keep telling ourselves ....