Sometimes the impact of geography on a record is impossible to ignore, even if we don’t precisely know how much the sound has to do with the location in which it was created. That Jesse Poe’s Tanakh project was started in Richmond, Va. — my hometown — won’t mean much to most people, so outsiders will have to trust me when I say that elements of the city are captured on this self-titled double album.

During this time in Richmond, Poe lived with several musicians in a former Masonic Temple in Church Hill, one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods. Tanakh’s HQ was called the Pyramid Institute and they made noise with whatever happened to be lying around. For instance, a broken piano found on the street was disemboweled and the wires were bolted to the walls of the space and tuned. The bowed drone of those strings provide the tonal center for this record.

The first disc contains an almost hour-long piece that begins with a simple three-note motif before, one-by-one, various sounds slowly crawl from dark corners of the temple. Some are easy to identify (guitar, piano, short-wave radio, djembe) and many of them aren’t (the various flavors of metallic rustling may or may not come from the mounted strings), but it all coalesces into a singular sound universe that implies industry, decay, anxiety, and, possibly, evil. The second disc is just under 30 minutes and features some of the same types of sounds but with added cello and more guitar, as Mick Turner-style moments of blurred lyricism mix with the groan and wheeze. Both tracks are effective slices of dark ambience.

This is a much different Tanakh than we’ve heard on their past two records, the second of which saw Poe moving increasingly toward a song-oriented direction. But here there’s no voice and nothing approaching a tune — just two long pieces of constantly shifting drone. It has something of a classic Alien8 sound, as these two tracks fit easily next to some of Sam Shalabi’s quieter improv releases. It’s easy for such records to devolve into a messy thicket of meaningless noise, but the players in Tanakh are generous with space and have a strong sense of balance, allowing the listener’s focus to shift gradually from one detailed and finely rendered element to the next.

One final bit of history: The church on this hill where the album was recorded is St. John’s Episcopal, where Patrick Henry gave his “Give me liberty or give me death” speech in 1775. The church is still standing and the blocks surrounding it are filled with ancient brick homes in various states of repair, endless tangles of wrought iron, and dark, overgrown alleyways with broken cobblestone underfoot. Church Hill is, in short, one of the more shadowy and gothic places in America, and Tanakh is an excellent choice for its soundtrack.

Les nouvelles parutions de l’étiquette Alien8 Recordings sont disponibles: Tim Hecker nous offre, suite à son album Radio Amor, de nouveaux Mirages; Tanakh présente son nouveau disque Tanakh, dont tous les sons proviennent d’un instrument construit avec les restes d’un vieux piano; les Lesbians on Ecstasy proposent sur Lesbians on Ecstasy une récupération de grands succès lesbiens et finalement, le rock pétrochimique post-punk et bruitiste des Les Georges Leningrad, Black Eskimo.

Those who think minimal Techno should be dark, dour and deadly serious are advised to stay far away from Spells Disaster…, Crackhaus’s second album. Even the presence of Matthew Herbert, who leads off the album by talking about his practice of sampling “accidental” sounds (the quote itself is itself sampled — ah, the irony from a press interview Herbert once gave in the Crackhaus duo’s home town of Montréal) can’t disguise the goofiness at work on Spells Disaster…. Crackhaus rhythms have always taken House music’s washing machine and propped it up at an absurd tilt, leaving each 4/4 cycle spinning with a ridiculous, lopsided swing. Here they throw a batch of bluegrass 78s into the load — hence titles like Soggy Bottom Bass and create something that could only be described as hillbilly House. Instead of Moby’s earnest anachronisms, however, Crackhaus draw from the most deliriously bent string plucks and harmonica squeals, using them as flashes of colour between their stuttering, static-laden beats.

Le premier prix du Concours d’interprétation spatialisée L’Espace du son 2004 a été attribué ex-aequo à Adrian Moore et à Isabel Pires.

Du 19 au 21 novembre 2004, Francis Dhomont sera l’invité du Festival Rainy Days 2004 organisé par l’Institut de recherche musicale du Luxembourg en compagnie de Bernard Parmegiani, François Bayle et Annette Vande Gorne. Il y présentera sa composition Espace / Escape. Par la suite, du 25 au 28 novembre 2004, il donnera deux concerts à l’Operafonic Festival de Szczecin (Pologne). Il y aura de plus la présentation de 2 œuvres vidéo d’Inés Wickmann avec musiques de Chantale Laplante et Francis Dhomont.

Le premier prix du concours de composition acousmatique Métamorphoses 2004 a été attribué ex-aequo à Elizabeth Anderson pour sa pièce Les Forges de l’invisible et à Ondrej Adamek pour sa pièce Cercle des rythmes vitaux.