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Accelera Deck. Live Volume III. CDR (out of print)
digital reissue edition available from - - - LATHELIGHT LTD - - - features one live set recorded at Art Works in Richmond, VA on June 6th, 2005 and focuses on material from Pop Polling + several unreleased songs. This set is perhaps the most cohesive and best representation of Adeck's penchant for fusing droning guitar riffs and shoegaze style metallic ambience into a massive wall of sound.
01. Art Works - Richmond, VA. 06.06.2005 |: cover by Cataract Press |
| Reviews |
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When I popped this into my iTunes for import, the internet database sprung up with the following track info: Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), 4. Satz, Finale. Allegro Moderato, Live Vol. 3,
style: Alternative & Punk. See how that second to last one is correct. The “allegro moderato”-score is also close by. Funnily this set starts with some sounds that could easily be
interpreted as some classical strumming on a harpsichord, then mutilated, but only slightly. Later on there are some bass-loaded melodies that owe its sombre melancholy and orchestral
heaviness as much to doom-metal as to Beethoven. There are no coincidences, as an ex-office colleague of mine used to say. The mutilation continues throughout the slightly over
30 minutes track, with various layers added. My favourite ones are those that sound like big walls of glacially moving distorted guitars. As if Fear Falls Burning took a little peek
into the venue. And those little sounds here and there that sound like birds singing in the wilderness. Or those warbly, swooshy, washing and fading pieces that are akin to a revved up
My Bloody Valentine, though there was obviously no guitar to be seen anywhere close to where these sounds were produced, except maybe for deep within the intestines of the computer’s harddisk.
Just think about what some of the more basically fundamental music critics would make of the thought: guitars to be heard but not to be seen because worked from and with through a
computer interface and, gasp, software. Most of them would hide behind the sentiment that, luckily, we are facing some experimental noise music anyway, which is not at all important
as long as Metallica and Oasis are able to fill up stadiums. Wrong. Just like the photographic camera was inherently hidden within traditional painting and not invented as a contrasting
or competing medium, the future of music in whichever way it might face us in the coming decades, is already set within the confines of music as it is. These developments are not at
all invented as challenges – those are inventions of critics and established artists who are unable to see anything regarding the status quo as anything else than a threat, and usually
from a very commercial viewpoint too – but evolutionary developments coming from themselves.
Am I at the moment imagining a stadium filled with tens of thousands of people and on stage there is a little figure behind a small stack of electronic equipment, blasting at the audience
sounds of all kinds and structure with unlimited force? Sure, I am. And imaginary it will remain for at least a few thousand years or so – I am still steadily rooted in reality. Partly at
least. Is this vision a good thing? I remember seeing live-footage of Jean Michel Jarre, which came up as a déjà vu right now, and I am not at all sure. A truly better version would be
welcome. Parts of “Live Volume III” not played in a small arts-venue called ArtWorks in Richmond Virginia, but blasted in stadium rock volume over a city like Graz or Manchester or
Brussels, would be a real treat. Changing the sound atmosphere of the city from air raid to springtime to apocalypse within just a few minutes would be a big thing. Which city official
would be daring enough to stage this, thinking of all the complaints people would have due to the truly heavy noise factor of some of the parts of this piece.
Within the context of the three Live-Recordings issued in a row as well as within the rest of the work that I know from Accelera Deck, this one here is outstanding for its pure vivacity,
boldness and almost symphonic structre structure. Chris Jeely takes listeners through his repertoire of recent works in a heavy headtrip. Some of the changes from one part to the next
are really somewhat abrupt and harsh, but he goes so many ways and detours during this set. E.g. there is one part at about minute 15 to 20 somewhere, where he mangles the recording of
a noiseband with drums, guitars and bass (Skulllike?) into a zooming and hovering miasma of noise, from which only appreggios of chords emerge, which are finally overwhelmed by an evil
bass white noise part which slowly melts out into a more mellow fog of noise (from which my mind tricks me into hearing a classical male choir singing in the back). Noise live sets are
often very strenuous and close to boring (while those artists trying to push their audience by pure extremity, like Haswell, bug me from start off by their arrogance) but this is one
I wish I had been there.
One more thing at the end of reviewing all three of these live set CDRs, which made me feel like one of those Grateful Dead-fans or Dylanheads: people putting on shows with musicians
that use computers, mixing desks, laptops or anything else that is put on a desk and not carried around, please use tables that are high enough for the artist to be able to stand up
straight. Yes, that might look like a bank clerk cashing out, but those pictures of people hunching over their equipment starts to give me pains the back. Moreover, I don’t want the
picture of an artist bowing deeply over his tools, showing the audience his hunchback and the top of his head, to become the iconographic image for this kind of music
(I might already be too late, anyway). Cracked Zine
As sonically encompassing as Accelera Deck's Ipsissima Vox and Pop Polling are, they're dwarfed by the
103 minutes of 2003-05 live performances spread across these three discs. It's the most challenging
collection of AD material by Chris Jeely to date, with the fearless provocateur sculpting seething monoliths
of noise, offset by some carefully placed moments of relative quietude. Fans of Jeely's guitar work should
know that his six-string playing hardly dominates, with the material more heavily weighted towards pure
electronics.
The overall mood is established in the first volume's fifteen-minute opener, a blistering, howling take on
“Dross” (from the Sunstrings EP) that, in its most aggressive moments, recalls the work of Florian Hecker
or Peter Rehberg. It's not wholly tumultuous, however, as less harrowing passages offer respite from the
sounds of machinery writhing in agonized death throes. At certain moments, the piece resembles the amplified
sound of mating rats, or what you'd hear if someone shoved a microphone up a pig's snout. The subsequent calm
after the storm draws upon Ipsissima Vox's quieter material with placid guitar strums carving a path through
less harsh electronic terrain.
Chris Jeely's Accelera Deck have been around for some years now, and has probably played
live on quite some occasions. So it eludes me why now three CDRs are released with live shows
from the recent years. Maybe an archival clean up? Maybe the first in a long series of all Accelera Deck
live recordings available? We don't know (yet). The CDr format is of course one of the better formats to
make these sort of recordings possible, especially when they have a punk approach to the cover, such as
these three. On all three we get a peak at the Accelera Deck gear, which includes two mixing consoles and
a large PC screen - not y'r local laptop freak. Although I have heard quite a bit of Accelera Deck, I am
not the man to speak in terms of song recognition. On all three CDs, Accelera Deck play songs from
their albums, like from the most recent 'Pop Polling' on 'Live Volume III' and 'Ipsissima Vox' on
the first two. In some of the sets he plays (on the first two there are two different live recordings,
so these discs contain five different concerts) either with quite noise related material, such as the
first set on 'Live Volume II', or with pleasantly softer material, such as the second set of the first
volume. It's less beat oriented than some of his previous work that was released on vinyl, but the
experimental/glitch tag suits him better, I think. Promoters of concerts should get the third
volume from the series since this reflects his recent live sound (and putting up a concert from
Accelera Deck seems to me a most enjoyable and probably highly surprising thing). |