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.
