album // Displaced Links
This CD was released as part of a Mute series
curated by producer, engineer and master sound designer Paul
Kendall, also known as PK and Piquet. PK was a
familiar credit on many Mute releases, and at least as responsible
as Flood for creating that unique 'industrial' electronic
style through his work with Nitzer Ebb, Parallax and
countless others. He also mixed tracks for non-Mute act Nerve, whose
album Cancer Of Choice was a gritty slab of early digital
rock, as well as working with Nine Inch Nails, Recoil
and others. Kendall has also just released a solo LP, Angleterror.
Displaced Links was the fourth, and final disc in the
Parallel Series, and saw Kendall collaborating with Simon
Fisher Turner, equally renowned for his approach to sound design.
The outcome is an interesting interplay of tapes, harsh electronic
sounds and processed noises, perhaps best displayed by the layered
tape sprawl of 'Shift'.
Displaced Links should
not be heard without first listening to Shwarma, the 1996
album from Fisher Turner, and his first under the alias SFT.
Recorded at Mute's Worldwide Studios, after its recording
Fisher Turner provided Kendall with a DAT of 'source material'.
According to Kendall's liner notes, he then took these snippets
and created a full album via digital manipulation and extensive
use of ProTools. These days, collaborations of this sort are commonplace
(a regular read of The Wire's review pages confirms this),
but in 1997 this level of duo non-interaction was unheard of. It
does, however, leave you wondering whose album this now is, Kendall's
or Fisher Turner's (or even Wire's Bruce Gilbert,
who supplied 'frequency loops' to the source album).
'Mechanism' is a strong example
of the process in action. The piece sounds like a crunched-up version
of Wire's 1980s signature piece 'Drill', with sequences and
tones replacing that track's maelstrom of guitars. Its chugging
rhythm and swirling static washes are only tempered by some occasional
high-end and almost pleasant synths. Elsewhere, the duo deploy loops
and oscillating drones to create shimmering, almost relaxing tracks;
a kind of harsh industrial ambience in the vein of Andrew Mackenzie's
Hafler Trio. 'Pedal Stop' is another good example - sheets
of heavy noise smother the track, while smaller reverbrating sonic
events are woven into the mix. 'Sump', on the other hand, sounds
like a particularly unpleasant machine, with a central motif that
sounds like a processed print head in your average inkjet. 'Beached
Driver' is one of the most accessible tracks, featuring a sampled
telephone conversation snippet, some phased keyboards and an almost
conventional beat - if Simon Fisher Turner ever provided the music
to a Russian sci-fi thriller, I could imagine it sounding like this.
I was heavily into 'ambient' music during its popularity
in the 1990s, but never got into the whole serene, hippy 'relaxational'
style; I preferred my less frantic music to have a bit of grit,
a bit of an edge. This has those elements in abundance. At times
this disc has an almost beautiful, tone (listen to the rising alien
synth swirls of 'Cylinder'), at others the same devilish harshness
that informed the likes of Throbbing Gristle and early Cabaret
Voltaire (the distorted noises and sqeaky rhythms in the second
section of 'Cylinder'). Displaced Links is clever and captivating
without being inaccessible, and some of the strange, broken noises
used to create rhythms actually pre-date the modern reductionism
and glitsch-iness of today's electronica.
cd:
1. Turbine
2. Mechanism
3. Pedal Stop
4. Sump
5. Cylinder
6. Shift
7. Beached Driver
8. Dismantle
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