BEN REYNOLDS: Music is the Music Language - CD 13.00 €
12 tracks - total 41:09 mins
MP3 samples: Compass & Void Play Nice / Moon Circuitory / Curiosity
In the Spring months of 2005 Ben Reynolds began taking yet more jabs from mankind’s collective unconscious and turning them into sounds that love being in your ears. They have since been collected under the title ‘Music Is The Music Language’ and kindly unleashed by new Finnish label Ikuisuus. This is the first CD release from Ben after a torrent of CDRs bearing his name came flowing from various corners of the globe throughout 2004/2005.
The sounds contained within the present release were moulded with less care but an equal if not greater amount of love as previous creations; The age old fight between the human controlling impulse and the natural (non) laws of chance ceased momentarily and a brief collaboration between the usually warring factions ensued. The results were welcomed by the overseer of this collaboration as a job well done and has since continued to pursue methods of creation whereby this fight will be done with once and for all.
As for how all this sounds, that’s for your ears to decide.
reviews:
It’s no secret
that Ben Reynolds has put out a heap of records within a very short
time. Pretty much every review of his work begins by exclaiming
how prolific he has been recently. Luckily, his work ethic (he has
also recently begun collaborating with Ashtray Navigations and he plays bass with The Wow) is matched by a desire to push boundaries and
stretch musical ideas. Many of Reynolds’ past CD-R releases have
been beautiful marriages of acoustic guitar flurries with amorphous
electronic drones. On “Music is the Music Language,” his first ‘legit’
CD and the first release for the Finnish Ikuisuus label, Ben has
tangled up his previous musical ideas and created what is perhaps
his most abstract and phantasmagoric release yet.
It’s
immediately apparent from the first ten seconds or so into the record
that something unearthly is going on. “Swing + Maths” begins with
a subtle electronic trill with what sounds like haphazardly manipulated
hand drums overtop. One instantly gets the feeling of being trapped
somewhere on the wrong side of the solar system. Suddenly we’re
transported to the bottom of an ocean, seemingly inside a pedal-powered
submarine, as “Mother Legato” begins and shifts the musical mood.
It can be quite exciting when someone can evoke two such disparate
images in two succeeding songs.
On “Spacious Yowl,” we’re
treated to some of that delicious acoustic guitar resting atop the
diluted remains of a synthetic beast’s mating call. Echoey chirps
wrapped up in a gooey amorphous hum are prevalent on the perfectly
titled “Overcome Your Infinity (Fornever).” One of the longer pieces,
“Bird to Flame” is also one of the more abstract, being composed
exclusively with densely layered electronics. “Quester” brings back
the acoustic guitar, however Ben’s playing is freer and farther
out in the realms of improvisation. Subtly manipulated tribal percussion
– undoubtedly produced electronically – on “Curiosity” leads into
a final acoustic guitar number, the lush “Serial Hoper.”
There’s no shortage of whirrs, chirps, hiccups and burps in the
forty-odd minutes contained in “Music is the Music Language.” But
then again, did we really expect Ben Reynolds to rest on his laurels?
This is truly engaging, envelope-pushing music, and however far
“Music is the Music Language” veers to the left in comparison to
Reynolds’ other records, fans of abstract electronic composition
should seek this out straightaway.- Bryon Hayes / Foxy Digitalis
New full-length CD from born-again Glaswegian Ben Reynolds combines a title that conflates the obvious with the obviously fucked, as well as a trampoline full of hand-percussion, twonks of steel string and whole choir of wraiths in what sounds like a broadcast from the still-smoking skull sockets of the late Angus MacLise. Comes in a full-colour four panel fold-out digipak. - Volcanic Tongue
Music is the music language is the first release from Ikuisuus, the fledging label/open-ended art project and vision of Jani Hirvonen (a.k.a. Uton) and Timo Puustinen. Ben Reynolds’ own unmoored and unbounded vision is a fitting flagship for a label whose name translates as eternity.
The 12 pieces here are too diffuse to be labeled songs, yet too modest to merit the composition moniker. Instead, sound menageries seems a more appropriate tag, as Reynolds gathers up a wild kingdom of mostly computer generated exotica: filtered moans and gnomic groans, pulsating neon and day-glo tones, flapping drones, avian trills, errant guitar chords. There’s an air of the surreal to pieces like “Swing + Maths” and “Mother Legato.” Both could soundtrack an aquarium of deep-sea creatures, as bubbling streams pulse and flow past half-melodies and misshapen guitar riffs, each following its own undercurrent.
The 40 minutes of Music is the music language drift by without so much as a hint of where Reynolds wants to take the listener. In fact, he seems intent on not taking the listener anywhere in particular, as the pieces wind their way through the same hermetic vacuum of slippery, malleable sound that Stockhausen, Subotnick and other early explorers of the electronic wilderness mapped out.
But rather than a haughty air of arch intellectualism, Reynolds lightens the mood into one of playful mystery. “Spacious Yowl” and “Dictionary Song” teeter and waver like refugees from ’50s B-grade space cinema, while “Curiosity” skips along on an infectious figure that doubles as a melody and rhythm. But it’s pieces like “Serial Hoper” and “Compass & Void Play nice” that reveal Reynolds’ accomplishment. Both feature his finger-picked stylings, here waves of airy notes that get shaped and blended with the surrounding glow of programmed sounds. Reynolds, however, takes no sides between them. Such a lack of hierarchy lets listeners shape and reshape the piece upon each spin, all the time hitting upon new relationships between the sounds. - Matthew Wuethrich / Dusted Magazine