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PT17

Richard Kamerman - I'm Sick Of Coming Up With Titles c10


A. When I Hear That Song "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" I Cry Like A Little Bitch, Man.
B. This Wooden Ridge (for Robert, Tyler, Travis, Margaret, and Mozz) mp3

Released October 2011
50 copies

OUT OF PRINT


REVIEWS:

The Watchful Ear (Richard Pinnell)
December 2011

Home late tonight. I was up very early, but then went over to see in Julie’s birthday tonight. Â So tonight’s review is going to be a brief one, about a relatively brief piece of music. The release in question is another cassette, two sides of music lasting probably six or seven minutes each by the New York musician Richard Kamerman. Out on the increasingly interesting Pilgrim Talk label from Chicago, the tape is titled I’m sick of coming up with titles, which given the current vogue amongst younger American improvisers for long, or oblique titles amused me somewhat. Each side of the tape appear to be separate from one another. The first of the two sides is the most interesting to me, albeit for slightly novelty reasons, with the second side offering me little.

Side A then includes a single five minute track named When I hear that song “There is a light that never goes out” I cry like a little bitch, Man. The piece consists of some relatively extreme, raw electronics, or perhaps an analogue synth, that remain quietly present throughout but then also forcefully come and go in little bursts of piercing tones and shrill blasts of distortion. Alongside these, we hear a slightly treated acapella rendition of the (rather great in my opinion) song by The Smiths, partly spoken, partly sung (badly) by an unidentifiable, oddly phased male voice with may be Kamerman, though I suspect not. This is an odd little curio then. Whether we are meant to take anything from the piece beyond its novelty/humour value I am not certain, but certainly there is something nice about the juxtaposition of the raw electronics and this strangely disembodied voice singing one of the great geeky laments, and if that is all is intended here then it works well for me.

The second side of the tape includes a  track of similar length named This Wooden Ridge, which is a little vignette of noisy distortion and static fuzz. The track opens with a short section of low volume white noise  sounding over some little sounds that might as well be bits of light wood tapped together, but on closer listening could be digitally generated. The entire piece, which soon blossoms out into a brittle, quite aggressive stream of noisy abrasion, sudden cuts and wild knob-twiddling synthesis could well be created digitally on a laptop, or might be the result of abused simple electronics. I’m not enough of an expert in this area to be able to tell. This Wooden Ridge feels a bit like something found underneath a table on the cutting room floor to me. Obviously the track’s brevity is an integral part of the piece, but for me it is the feature that lets it down, as what we hear feels a bit throwaway. If the track has momentum and purpose, which for a while it does, then this burns out too quickly, leaving me to have to get up and turn the tape over with a slight feeling of “is that it?”.

Maybe just one for the completists then (and I am sure there are a few of us). I did enjoy the first side of the tape, but perhaps more for its quirky values than anything, and so I await the next, undoutably more meaty Kamerman release, which to his credit will probably sound nothing like this one.

The Sound Projector (Ed Pinsent)
January 2012

From same label, a shorter release (a C10 to be precise) from sound artist Richard Kamerman, whose lament for the day is I’m Sick Of Coming Up With Titles (PT17). This fellow has done some punishingly intense work for his own Copy For Your Records label and this little bruiser doesn’t disappoint, managing to induce near-physical sensations in the listener with its powerful hurlements – even if it does start out small and mysterious, the music soon expands into a grand abstract statement. We learn from the press notes that he likes small sounds, accidents in performance, collecting trash to make sounds, and that he plays his boardful of “repurposed electronics” much like a percussionist, hammering on old printed circuits like a demented fiddler crab or moving mechanical parts around in his claws. The B-side contains an unaccompanied version of a Smiths song performed against electronic wheezes and burrs; the washed-out timbre of the wraithlike voice makes it appear to be beaming in from the other side of the grave. 50 copies of this curio.

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