Coin Gutter’s Lullaby from All your dreams are meaningless (No Type). A musique concrète song, Lullaby mixes the soothing sounds which moms and pops like to let their wee children listen to with bursts of noise and digital fuckery. A song for the 21st century child. Well, a song for my 21st century child. This song will ensure that no matter what sort of music my soon-to-arrive son ultimately finds to annoy Dad with, I’ll have scrambled his noodle first.

All your dreams are meaningless est un disque à écouter et à vivre. Je veux dire par là: ce n’est pas un album à poser sur la platine le temps qu’on plie son linge. Ne serait-ce que parce que le premier titre est une pièce instrumentale de trente-six minutes qui s’ouvre sur des larsens électroniques rebutants. Par la suite, Lift With the Knees (tel en est le nom) fait la part belle aux bruits divers, diversement reconnaissables (des pas… Quoi d’autre?), aux échos incertains et, bref, à l’évasion de l’intellect. Le duo canadien Coin Gutter, formé en 2000 par Emma Hendrix et Graeme Scott (Vancouver), fait preuve d’un talent certain pour nous faire divaguer à l’écoute de leurs paysages audacieux, aussi revêches qu’étincelants.

Le piano et la voix de la cantatrice, multipliés et interférés, offrent à Lullaby un goût inconnu et véritablement fascinant. Les compositions suivantes allient bruits, larsens, sons et voix, dans un grand bain (électroacoustique) lyrique et évanescent, tour à tour sombre et lumineux. Un disque qu’on redécouvre, inquisiteur, à chaque écoute, et qui se réinterprète selon notre humeur.

Embracing a hard-nosed calling card of an album title, Coin Gutter vividly illustrates an album full of sonic peaks and valleys – all demanding of your attention. Dubbing themselves as “new land” (for Western Canada and the Prairies) creators of some musique concrète — Coin Gutter are highly adept at creating fully realized, dynamic, dark narratives all within one track. Their sounds wouldn’t be out of place on a soundtrack, and the Vancouver duo has in fact composed works for modern dance. There is a strong visual element to the sound that Coin Gutter creates: harsh at one moment, quiet, distilled and detailed the next. The crashing sonic build-up that collides into the release of sonic intensity and ultimate quiet make for a highly visceral listening experience. This detailed headphone stuff would definitely equate to an interesting live performance.

Coin Gutter est un [duo] canadien, basé à Vancouver pour être précis, formé par Graeme et Emma. Ensemble ils produisent films et musique depuis 3 ans, et ont créés leur propre structure afin de diffuser leur musique avec le micro-label Vanity Records, exclusivement dédié à leurs productions. Après 3 CDs, dont le premier intitulé Promo, les voici signés chez No Type aux côtés de Tomas Jirku, Books on Tape ou Headphone Science dont on parlera très bientôt. Cet album, qui est aussi pour eux une chance de se faire connaître auprès d’un plus large public, présente la plupart de leurs précédents travaux puisque l’on retrouve ici, à la manière d’une compilation, de nombreuses pièces déjà sorties sur leurs trois précédents CDs.

L’album s’ouvre sur Lift With the Knees qui, avec ses 36 minutes, composait à lui seul leur deuxième disque. Une longue pièce généralement ambient malgré ses deux passages bruitistes, composées d’une multitude d’éléments: on démarre avec quelques grésillements et une rapide explosion qui forme une longue nappe de bruit grésillant. Quand celle-ci s’éteint, elle ne laisse derrière elle que quelques bleeps suraigus. On passe alors à des paysages désolés formés par des souffles, des ronronnements de machines, de moteurs et autres bruits sourds, des ambiances moites, des voix lointaines extraites d’ondes radio, des nappes produites par la résonance infinie de quelques tintements, des martèlement sourds qui font penser aux battement d’un cœur, des grésillements et grincements saturés qui nous rappellent une imprimante matricielle, et pour finir, un retour à l’apaisement avec de longues notes plus claire.

Si l’ensemble est plutôt original et d’une construction intéressante, ce n’est rien au regard de ce qui nous attend.

Lullaby par exemple débute par une voix grave, déformée, inquiétante. Une fraction de seconde bruitiste sert de coupure et semble nous transporter dans une autre dimension: musique classique avec solo de piano et bientôt une voix à mi-chemin entre le chant religieux et l’opéra, dans lequel se glisse quelques erreurs numériques imitant un CD qui saute ou encore ces textures bruitistes qui s’immiscent au beau milieu de ce chant. Le genre de morceau sur lequel pourraient se retrouver les fans de Dead Can Dance et Fennesz. A propos de Fennesz, Terminal nous rappelle fortement le travail de l’autrichien: ils font ici pleurer les machines avec une magnifique mélodie cruellement noyée dans des distorsions numériques. Le mélange se révèle de toute beauté, fin et sensible.

D’ailleurs le duo se rapproche petit à petit de l’intime puisque sur Solitaire et Timewise des voix viennent donner vie et apporter une dimension cinématographique à la musique de Coin Gutter. Des boucles ambient se répètent et évoluent lentement, un femme répète «He’s gone… he’s just gone» de façon de plus en plus triste, émouvante. Puis une autre voix prend le relais et ajoute «She’s crying» à la manière d’une voix off. Quand on les abandonne, il n’y a que le tic-tac de la pendule qui continue, imperturbable.

S’il y a parfois des raisons de se dire que l’electronica tourne un peu en rond, ce genre de disque, tout comme celui de Leafcutter John chroniqué il y a quelques temps, nous redonne confiance en ouvrant de nouveaux territoires d’expérimentation. A ce titre et pour sa charge émotionnelle, Coin Gutter est notre gros coup de cœur du moment.

Since forming the electroacoustic duo Coin Gutter in 2000, Vancouver’s Emma Hendrix and Graeme Scott have been blessing local ears with their consistently beautiful noise. The pair’s latest release, All your dreams are meaningless is like a surrealist landscape painting rooted firmly in our city’s rich tradition of experimental sound design. As if October hadn’t already given us enough wonderful electronic music concerts, Coin Gutter adds to the lovely din with an appearance on Tuesday (October 28) at the Railway Club. Noise freaks unite!

Vers vocht uit de druipende uiers van het Canadese No Type-label. Het duo Coin Gutter maakt niets ontziende, hard industriële en dan weer sacrale elektronische ambient en noise, vaak doorspekt met moderne compositie. Denk aan Yannis Kyriakides in een remix door Merzbow.

Oeuf Korreckt is, ondanks zijn lullige groepsnaam, een bijzonder groovy elektronicacollectief dat met scherpe, licht industriële ritmes erg doeltreffend uit de hoek komt. Alleen jammer van die introverte, weinig verheffende productie.

De sampling-artieste Diane Labrosse werkte de voorbije tien jaar met klinkende namen zoals Ikue Mori, Martin Tétreault en Zeena Parkins. Elektronicafreak A_Dontigny was dan weer lid van het beruchte collectief Napalm Jazz. Tesamen brengen Labrosse en Dontigny spannende, verrassende en verontrustende elektronica -en ambientpassages die je het best beluistert met de deur op slot en het huisalarm op extra sensitive.

We Remain Faded van Headphone Science is de meest beklijvende release bij No Type. Met zijn mix van stuiterende hiphop en aan flarden gesneden raps leunt dit project van Dustin Craig nog het meest aan bij Prefuse 73. Maar de epische soundtrackmuziek die Craig in zijn composities verstopt, sleept deze plaat weg uit het avanthophoekje.

Twee erg leuke 10inch-vinylletjes zijn die van de Zweedse Claudia Bonarelli en de Amerikaan Todd Brooks a.k.a. Books on Tape. Met respectievelijk wollige clickhouse en punky elektrobeats zetten zij de street credibility van No Type extra in de verf.

[…] Queste sono alcune delle coordinate che ci servono per accennare la cd di debutto del duo canadese Coin Gutter (Emma Hendrix e Graeme Scott) All your dreams are meaningnless (No Type label). I due manifestano uno spettro d’azione musicale a 360°, hanno esperienze nella produzione di film e si destreggiano nel cd con una serie di composizioni che guardano alle teorie musicali sull’acusmatica, mescolano abilmente elettroacustica (con inserti stranianti di pianoforte), poinitillisme sonori di frequenze e granelli di suoni degni della miglior microwaves, scariche noise e l’utilizzo inoltre di parti vocali, il tutto scandito da dilatazioni ambientali dal gusto cinematografico, la loro estetica si colloca all’incrocio di esperienze quali Metamkine, Lionel Marchetti e le produzioni sonore di ZimmeFrei.

En matière de musiques expérimentales, la scène canadienne est aujourd’hui une des plus actives qui soient. Qu’il s’agisse de post-rock (la nébuleuse gravitant autour de Godspeed You! Black Emperor en est un bon exemple), de musique improvisée (ses représentants œuvrent depuis quasiment trois décennies) ou plus généralement électronique, beaucoup de choses se passent là-bas, deux labels, No Type et Alien8Recordings qui ne sont pas les seuls d’ailleurs, se faisant régulièrement écho de ces avancées. Du côté de la mouvance post-industrielle, le jeune duo Coin Gutter (Emma Hendrix et Graeme Scott), originaire de Vancouver, est un des plus prometteurs. Peu connue, car jusqu’ici elle n’avait réalisé que des CD-R autoproduits, cette formation bénéficie enfin de la production qu’elle mérite, et qui aura été relayée en mai dernier par sa présence remarquée au festival Mutek. On ne peut mieux situer cet opus qu’en révélant sa parenté avec certaines œuvres de Merzbow, Francisco López, Plastikman ou Ryoji Ikeda. Tour à tour minimalistes ou échevelés, et donc toujours contrastés, les climats mis en place (qui prennent leur source dans un vague concept autour du mouvement artistique et architectural Bauhaus) envoûtent constamment, au point que ce disque soit, dans le genre, une des très grandes surprises de l’année.

Sublime atmospheric material I would not call ambient because the mood is too tumultuous to be considered bliss-out material. All your dreams are meaningless is intense and varied, ranging from noise to heavily processed field recordings to sustained electronic drones. Sounds akin to the tempest from computer and television monitors are coupled with sound chaos found in urban intersections that occur with stream-of-consciousness serendipity. The sounds though sometimes harsh and disagreeable are more often than not gorgeous. Because the sounds are juxtaposed with harsh textures, this actually heightens the beauty of the more agreeable parts. Some close analogies would be the sounds of Tim Hecker, only Coin Gutter is less restrictive and more adventurous. Rather All Your Dreams… culminates into a wondrously heady din.

Noise artists Emma Hendrix and Graeme Scott seem at home in the Barfly-esque Astoria Hotel, an offbeat hangout for an out-of-the-ordinary duo that emulates neither dance culture nor the classical tradition.

In Coin Gutter’s work, beats are rare. Likewise absent is the contemplative, whooshy blip-bloop sound associated with the electroacoustic composers of academe. Both members admire popular and classical music but are not pulled in either direction, as listeners will hear in the pair’s concert at the Scotiabank Dance Centre.

Typically, Coin Gutter compositions feature electronic sounds improvised around samples, creating shadowy, ominous narratives.

“I put my guitar down one day and started fiddling with a cheap, crappy sampler back in 1999. That was like opening Pandora’s box,” says Scott. “It was like walking into an orgy, a big free-for-all where you could sample everything and everybody.”

“Before then, we were playing music,” continues blond, angular Hendrix, “but when we pooled our gear and started making noise together, we created dialogues. It seemed stupid to attach these dialogues to some art tradition or disco. What’s the point of making something [original] and then pussying out by attaching it to something familiar?”

“In the novel Trainspotting, the dialogue’s vernacular is strange to most readers,” Scott says by way of example. “But as these unfamiliar words are repeated in different intonations and contexts, they acquire meaning for the reader. We try and set up the same kind of discovery process with noise.”

“Noise is traditionally unwanted sound,” says Hendrix. “It’s mentally discarded. But if people concentrate on organized noise, it intrigues.”

“We’ve never intentionally put up barriers,” Scott argues. “Compared to the loudness of the Japanese noise bands, we’re quite polite.”

Polite in terms of volume perhaps, but a scrappiness pervades Coin Gutter’s material. In Timewise, from its latest recording, All your dreams are meaningless, a woman’s voice repeats the words “he’s gone” as Hendrix and Scott improvise around the quote with electronic noise.

The listener’s focus is made to shift gradually from anxiety over the missing man to concern for the speaker herself.

Hendrix and Scott’s nuanced soundscapes range from subtle to calamitous. In another Coin Gutter track, Lullaby, a recorded song by Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu seems caught in a whirlwind of aural waste, flying from the mix’s background to foreground, compromised by crackle and hiss. The song itself now rages in a cyberpunk mode that Martinu could never have envisioned.

Each Coin Gutter piece has its own edginess, as does the Astoria. It’s late. A sunburned man tries to sell us a power drill. I pay and leave. Hendrix and Scott remain, acclimatized and comfortable.

Working tirelessly on the fringes of Canada’s music scene, Coin Gutter is emerging as one of the northwest’s premiere experimental outfits. All your dreams are meaningless’s uncompromising opener — featuring an immediate blast of cold, harsh noise — dares you to concur. Lift With the Knees, which first saw light in 2001 as a 36-and-a-half-minute EP, jumps from Merzbow brutality to Lull isolationism to Mille Plateau granulation within the first ten minutes. By the time this Vancouver duo (Emma Hendrix and Graeme Scott) brings in the second movement (tick tock rhythms and creeping crescendos of industrial ambience), you’ll have realized that these two ambient/concrete composers have something special going. Actually, Coin Gutter tours quite a bit throughout Canada, so it’s reasonable they can craft such tight, eclectic arrangements so seamlessly. What’s surprising is that Lift With the Knees is hardly the best track on the disc.

One contender is Lullaby, which, with a twisted interpretation of its title, features an operatic performance of female singer and piano arrangement that we’ll assume has been lifted out of obscurity. Coin Gutter dissects it in glitch fashion, pitching things down, stuttering it, distorting it and layering it upon itself into a sudden maddening mash. Occasionally the two roast it with hot white noise like kids pulling wings off of butterflies, and you share in their delighted grins.

Terminal is another standout. The source material, masked by room effects and distortion, could be a choral hymn with organ accompaniment, but who knows? Transformed into a wall of sound, with tones and voices escaping the maelstrom, it’s powerful and borderline spiritual.

My favorite, Timewise, was recorded in 2000, before even Lift With the Knees. Featuring vocal narration by Tara Nelson and thick howling drones that you can cut with a knife, the track packs enough mesmeric punch to paralyze a bull, while emitting delicate pain and melancholy. Snippets of Nelson saying “He’s gone” and “She’s crying; She always wanted to go inside” send this one into profound hopelessness… but in a good way.

All your dreams are meaningless is one of the most exciting electroacoustic soundtracks I’ve heard in a while. I’m all for guys making a racket, but when I can see past the molested sine waves into something of depth, something that touches me in areas outside of adrenaline, I’m suddenly taking notes. It’s said that the inspiration of this release stems from Bauhaus architects; the round building featured on the packaging seems to back this up. (What was that Thelonious Monk quote, again?) For my next fix of oblique conceptual audio, I’ll be keeping eyes peeled for more Coin Gutter.

Coin Gutter are a new duo from Canada, who play out a lot. Apart from some released CDRs, this is the first real CD, more widely available. They come round more in the No Type style of recentely, taking their inspirations from 80s industrial music and 90s glitch music. Lift With the Knees, the opening piece is a tour de noise in full force that slowly dissolves in a mighty drone and then adds some rhythms to it. This track takes up more than half the disc’s space here and is most of the times quite an ambient piece. Unlikely influences ranging from Merzbow to Zoviet France drop here. In the eight remaining short(er) pieces (I must admit that i don’t understand why they didn’t cut the first track in seperate tracks), Coin Gutter is more single focussed on sounds and atmospheres. Ending with a glitchy piece Southern Yukon / Northern BC (perhaps parts of Alaska), Coin Gutter manages to absorb many influences, from noise to ambient and glitch, but I must say that I was quite pleased with their mixture of these various influences. Maybe sometimes the small progress in music comes out of the right cross-over between various influences.

Il duo Coin Gutter dopo una serie di CDR autoprodotti approda alla No Type con questo cd, edito nella abstract series dell’etichetta guidata da David Turgeon ed Érick d’Orion. Un originale compendio di mezzo secolo e passa di pratiche sperimentali, dalla musica concreta alla nuova elettronica del glitch, passando per industrial, ambient, minimalismo e noise (paradigmatica in tal senso la lunga e inquietante composizione d’apertura), sublimato in una magnifica Lullaby a base di voci operistiche, più o meno manipolate, e cd-skipping.

If you can survive the first three minutes of the epic Lift with Your Knees, the first half of Coin Gutter’s All your dreams are meaningless, then the rest of the 36-minute opener is a much more pleasant experience. Coin Gutter are one of the new “landscape” groups to be coming out of Western Canada and their style of musique concrète is intended to capture their impressions of the physical landscapes of their environments. Songs about the air and sky and rocks and soil, when you get right down to it. What you hear are tracks which encompass the drone of subtle winds, the chirping song of fields of insects, and the tumultuous grating of rock against stone.

Formed in February 2000 by Emma Hendrix and Graeme Scott, Coin Gutter had released several self-produced CD-Rs before All your dreams are meaningless. The nine tracks here move like weather across unstructured plains — sometimes the wind is kind and gentle, other times it is harsh and cold. The landscape is beautiful and ripe in the spring, empty and jagged in the winter. Lift with Your Knees charts a year in the wilderness, a slow time-lapse recording of the passage of time. The rest of the tracks build off the theme of the opener; some are more chaotic, some less so.

The standout track is Lullaby, a song for a musique concrète child. It is a beautiful piano and soprano duet with jets of digital noise and CD artifacts. I love how it starts with these swelling drones like movements of rock under great pressure before being smashed under a brief deluge of white noise. In the aftermath, the piano begins. The operatic voice glides in and is completely tripped up by skips and cut-ups, the vocal line hiccupping and stuttering for a few seconds before settling down. The duet continues — piano and voice — and the bit signal mash up and the bleats of noise pursues the pair, threatening and snapping at them. There is a final chaotic moment where the piano is possessed by the sound of the static bomb and becomes a carnival organ for a few seconds and then all the avant garde elements slink away and we drift out with just two traditional instruments again.

All your dreams are meaningless isn’t necessarily easy listening. The opening of Lift with Your Knees is a howling storm of noise and the final minute of Southern Yukon / Northern BC (perhaps parts of Alaska) is just as abrasive. In between there are laments and drones and wistful landscapes. But, like all adventures out in the wilderness, you’ve got to keep an eye out for falling rocks. Keeping an eye on the sky (or, in this case, a hand near the volume knob) keeps you slightly on edge and Coin Gutter’s work asks that you not nod off while listening. It’s kind of like having the timpani player hurl a mallet at you during the adagio movement of the symphony when you start to doze.

«C’est au nombre de ses ennemis qu’on reconnaît la valeur d’un homme, la qualité d’une construction.» De même que l’utopisme moderniste et décapant du Bauhaus, avait au début du siècle dernier déchaîné les passions, La musique de Coin Gutter, belle épure de lignes courbes, d’à-plats limpides, de textures lisses, béton lavé, vitres dépolies, de parements arc-boutés se veut un prolongement de la recherche d’esthétisme, entre dynamique harmonieuse, sensible et rupture soudaine. Emma Hendrix et Graeme Scott veulent croire, par analogie, à l’utopie d’une musique qui aurait les vertus d’élever l’homme au dessus de sa condition; la musique non pas comme un placebo aux maux de nos vies, mais comme un brasero ardent, irradiant l’esprit par l’audition. Une proposition abstraite de faits et d’actes, de principes musicaux qui puisent dans les musiques strato-atmosphèrique, environnementale, isolationniste, électroacoustique minimaliste. Lift With the Knees, lente ascension mentale (36 minutes), a la même beauté embrumée que la progression mythique introduisant le film d’Herzog, Aguire, où la colère de dieu par Popol Vuh. A bien y regarder, on peut aussi déceler des touches de Throbbing Gristle, des apartés de Thomas Köner et d’Alan Lamb, des petites alcôves sonores de piano, un zapping terroriste, mélangeant attentat sonores de bruits blancs (lignée Mego) et musique de chambre (Lullaby) Brouillard spectraux façon Dissolve ou Labradford, d’échos de cartes postales sonore, façon La Casa où Ouie Dire rec, et de musique électronique atonale. Introspectif et méditatif.

Duo vancouvérois formé de Graeme Scott et Emma Hendrix, qui ont apparemment traficoté dans le monde du rock avant de passer en 2000 du côté de la musique «électroacoustique». Je mets des guillemets parce qu’il ne s’agit pas ici d’un travail assimilable à ce que font des compositeurs comme Robert Normandeau ou François Bayle. On est beaucoup plus près de ce que pouvaient faire les groupes de la mouvance industrielle au début des années 80 (SPK, Test Department, Severed Heads). Un univers onirique (… ou cauchemardesque) dans lequel des sons «trouvés» servent à tisser des pans de bruit sur lesquels se greffent occasionnellement des voix dépersonnalisées. Sombre et pessimiste, mais aussi dynamique et varié dans l’ensemble.

The 20th century European avant garde form of “musique concrète” is alive and well in the hands of this West Coast duo (Emma Hendrix & Graeme Scott) who just took part in the No Type label’s showcase at the prestigious Mutek festival in Montréal. Since recording tape allowed composers to bring natural sounds to the concert stage, experimenters have explored a brave new world of texture and form. Today samplers make things easier to mix and manipulate, so the art is in arranging unique sounds into potent impressionistic pieces. On their debut Coin Gutter launch themselves with an ambitious 36-minute piece Lift With the Knees that is like a meeting of Merzbow style power electronics and Hafler Trio-type subtleties. Human voices are also part of their sound, as spoken word and female operatic singing find places in their accomplished sequence of pieces.

A Canadian duo, this is their first label release and contains two demos — the single long track and a second series of short pieces. The packaging (obliquely) and title appear, from their ’manifesto’, to relate to architectural and social dreams for a better world which always fail. ’I am fatigued by dreams of a better world. They are so many, they no longer inspire’. I read that before listening to the music, and was worried by the sense of ennui — and wondered how the sounds would reflect this.

Indulge me while I look at the second half first. There are seven tracks in about 30 minutes, and while they track across three years, they are almost an addendum to the opening track. ’Lullaby’ starts with slow backwards voice and tones and then swaps to a piano, almost straight, and soprano (singing a probably well known aria) that is very subtly and skilfully looped. Big crunchy tones, industrially ambient, with a voice entering later, ending woobly in ’Terminal’ before the brief ’No5’ where more big noises segue into tonal pulses. Something of a trend is emerging with ’Solitaire’ when pulsing industrial ambient with hypno-tape is overtaken by a building buzz, then a tapping over that before the voice loops at the end. The oldest piece on the disk is perhaps the most immediately striking (and makes it onto the sampler). A haunting ambience of scrapes tocs and washes is joined by a disturbed voice saying variants of “he’s gone”. Small breath cuts create percussive effects, then we move to ticking scrapes and heavy thudder as a different voice talks about “she’s crying”. ’Tlia3ml’ travels from a high scraping buzz that drops under soft tones but returns refreshed with some percussive, then another short compilation of rumbles choppedsamples ping and other noises rapidly alternating in ’Scission’. The final track is ’Southern yukon/northern bc (and perhaps parts of alaska)’ a slowly burning combination of soft buzz, crackles and binaural ticks that gains little tonalities, puttering, a deep dronal tone, cycling wash, pinging scratches, pulsing and clicks building to a very active state at 10 minutes, some voice, a brief dip and then a full noise assault for a minute which suddenly ends. Snap.

These tracks demonstrate a fair bit about Coin Gutter — they construct and assemble their pieces, more akin to the electroacoustic style; in that construction they shift the sound of a track quite a distance across its length; they are not averse to either noise or mellifluousness; their sound palette is broad and they focus on the details. As an album in its own right, this collection would not be uninteresting, but the wow-factor on the album comes during the 36 minutes of ’Lift with the knees’.

The first time I played/scanned this album, just to get an idea of it, the track turned me off, and it was only when I went into full listening did I get into it. The opening few minutes is a noise assault as a high buzz becomes white noises which has things in it but is quite in-there. It slips to one channel and gradually fades to a crackle, after which the piece moves into its more enfolding phase. It is a sequences of musical constructions that slide effortless into each other as an interlocking suite. Composed of all manner of sounds — tones, crackles, drips, phone tones, beats, piano, little noises, blurts and more it is varied and yet consistent. Echoes and shimmers, loops and gradual modulations, changes of pace and mood create a series of musical images, pictures at an exhibition that we are walking through, the aura of one touching onto the next and affecting our view as we bring it into focus. Some are small pictures while others are larger or more intricate. It would be difficult to try and describe each, some reflect the activity in the shorter pieces, though there is less voice in there. The whole coheres and the parts are impressive.

Either half of this release would be worth hearing and having, together they make a great impression. But definitely one where you need to listen to more than the opening 30 seconds.

The disk is part of an ’abstract’ (less dependent on beat?) series — Magali Babin was the first and another is slated for later in the year.

I was lucky enough to get a promo-sampler, and the material on that from the forthcoming albums suggests the next lot (Books On Tape and Bonarelli with 10” vinyl and a Headphone Science album) derive from the third arm (aside from improv) of intelligent and exciting ’techno’.

This first label release by the Vancouver duo Coin Gutter offers a selection of new tracks and remastered highlights from their previous self-released CDRs. This is a peculiar form of experimental electronica that has one foot in the less glitchy ambiences of the Mego roaster (Florian Hecker, Pita) and another in post-industrial drones (think Cranioclast or Maeror Tri). The album begins with Lift With the Knees, almost 37 minutes long. A mood-shifting piece, it rewards repeated attentive listens, but one wonders if it couldn’t have been shortened or at least split into three separate tracks. Its drifting, elongated ideas make a nice contrast though with the seven sharper-focused pieces following it. Among them is Lullaby: a slowed-down voice croons the intro, followed by a piano/voice lieder (sorry, I don’t recognize this particular one) given the CD skipping treatment. The piece appears childish at first (anyone can rewind or fast-forward on a CD player, right?), but paired with the intro and the other electronics wrapped around, it exerts a strange fascination. The dark Timewise provides another highlight. The disc concludes with the 12-minute Southern Yukon / Northern BC (perhaps parts of Alaska). Beginning as an abstract glitchy construction, it builds up to an infernal finale of digital noise, leaving the listener stunned.

The 36 minute long opening track heads of with some hardly audible electronic sounds, before some white noise in the Merzbow tradition takes over. This extreme noise gets calmer after a while and the music even gets soundscape-like, slightly reminding of John Hudak. Lullaby, the next composition, is an experimental piano track with classical vocal art and dramatical noise outbursts. Terminal is a track with long drawn-out cascading electronics. No5 is heads of with pure white noisy that slowly disappears. Solitaire is the combination of a speech and sophisticated cold electronic frequencies that slowly get more in the foreground. The seventhth track entitled tlia3ml features a fine-tuned metal sound. This song as well as the last track remind me of Richard Chartier’s more minimal and hardly audible output. Scission is a short noise composition, slightly more hectical as most other tracks on this album. All in all, a very intelligent use of different atmospheres and clear sounds.

Burgeoning local leftfield label No Type comes on strong with the second release in their ‘abstract’ series, proving that they are certainly a label to watch out for. On the first track, the half-hour long ambient epic Lift With the Knees, Canadian duo Coin Gutter (Emma Hendrix and Graeme Scott) manage to straddle the line between noise and ambient/concrète electronic music favouring mood over melody. Bursts of noise interrupt echoed and pitched-down classical string samples as operatic vocals and conversation samples are glitched and stuttered. Coin Gutter manage a restrained density that, at the same time, sounds pleasing to the ear. 8/10