Description

DREW DANIEL / JOHN WIESE - 'Continuous Hole'

CSR325CD (July 2023)
CD in 6-panel digipak
Barcode: 0641871746101

This collaborative album by Drew Daniel (Matmos, The Soft Pink Truth) and John Wiese (Sissy Spacek, Smegma, LHD) is the fruit of over 10 years of recordings in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Baltimore.

Originally issued in 2018 as a vinyl only release (Gilgongo Recs), "Continuous Hole" melds improvisation and musique concrète composition into a unique document of labour-intensive rhythm. A finger puzzle of reconciled opposites: lockstep structure and constant flux.

Relentlessly variable source material is relegated to precisely timed gated forms and patterns. Without using any sampling or MIDI sequencing, the rhythmic cuts are constructed entirely from volcanic, gnarled abstraction, and eschew typical genre elements.

Raw yet precise, from mayhem to menace, this is a album of strong contrasts from two American artists discovering common ground in the joy of frenzied cutting.

Our personal favourite is 'Abhorred Shears', which reminds of the cut-up works of COIL's LSD yet remains utterly unique.

Presented in a 6-panel matt-laminate digipak with photography by John Wiese.

Track Listing:

1. Intro
2. Abhorred Shears
3. Un Mask
4. Scramble Suit/e
5. Progress Bar
6. OBV
7. Done It
8. Dress Up
9. Sleek Disorder
10. Cosmic Joke
11. Surprise

REVIEWS:

"I mean, it’s not like other collaborations haven’t been worthy of excitement — buuuuut... In the case of John Wiese and Drew Daniel, it’s almost as though the album that resulted was the logistically miraculous product of two ingenious minds belying natural law and combining dangerously creative forces. Wiese somehow allowed time in the midst of his exhausting/exhaustive multimedia work, while Daniel managed to offer availability despite his Matmosian gig doing constant loads of laundry and his exploits as an insightful author. I like to imagine that a wormhole opened up upon the moment of their verbal agreement, at which point their brains left their respective bodies to temporarily fuse as one super brain outside of established space and time... the results sound every bit as crazy as the project’s temporally varied origins." (Tiny Mix Tapes)

"Reminiscent of Coil at their most abstract, this is not an easy listen right from the 15 second opener of jangly noise, through the stuttering and uncomfortable 'Un Mask' to the Musique Concrete of the closing 'Surprise'. 'Continuous Hole’ is a tightly grafted and abrasive series of disjointed and distorted cut ups that have a distinctly unsettling effect" (Alan Rider, Outside Left)

"Veteran LA noise maven John Wiese has dramatically slowed his release schedule in recent years, but he’s made up for that relative scarcity by increasing the rigor in each project. Continuous Hole [is] a stunning collaboration with Drew Daniel of Matmos that redirects his penchant for sonic violence. The pair spent a decade developing the album’s 11 terse, fat-free tracks, arranging impossibly dense packets of visceral noise into ferocious rhythmic patterns borrowed from club music" (Chicago Reader)

"The duo constructed a tightly arranged set of rhythmic glitch pieces that perfectly fuse the playful sensibilities of the early-2000s Tigerbeat6 laptop IDM scene with Wiese's mastery of precise, nearly cinematic sound engineering. The duo sculpt finely tuned static bursts into gated, panned rhythms, creating a sort of audio strobe effect in stereo, and every second is filled with distinct details, from slivers of trapped voices to splintered timbral shifts... resembling a glitchier, higher-definition Throbbing Gristle, it's somehow both overwhelming and filled with enough space to observe everything that's happening... Daniel and Wiese have been highly creative, heavily conceptual figures in experimental music for decades, and Continuous Hole still sounds like nothing else in either artist's vast catalogs. The very definition of a hidden gem." (Allmusic)

"Is this a rhythmic album? Well, it's not danceable if that is what you think. It is more structured than rhythmic, which is how I mostly like my rhythms. Of course, I like rhythmic music, but that is for dancing; this is an album for listening. I've listened to the album several times, and the origin of the sounds remains a mystery for me. They're probably from all over the place, samples, field recordings, computer generated and everything in between or outside that perspective. This mystery adds to the mystery and enjoyment of this album. And when you listen carefully, you might hear a bit of the subdued yet heavily manipulated layers of Coil's 'Love's Secret Domain' or 'Stolen and Contaminated' era. Now the question is whether Drew or John have been exploding frogs to get those sounds... it's all delightful in a kind of glitchy musique concrete collage way" (Vital Weekly)

"Sequenced gates let in small bits of unsculpted, rough machine sound; short glimpses into windows of very chaotic places. While this technique may sound harsh and industrial, the result is surprisingly benevolent, if deranged in spirit, emphasized by bright dots of pointillistic major key tonality... The level of detail and the speed at which they come at you is some real ear-squinting... galloping rhythm works with a more conventional take on fast moving, electronic noise... impressively novel as rhythmic material" (Igloo Mag)