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  Alan Courtis 
  Unstringed Guitar And Cymbals
  (Blossoming Noise) 


  
   review by Jeph Jerman
  2008-07-17
Alan Courtis: Unstringed Guitar And Cymbals (Blossoming Noise)

Former Reynols member Courtis here offers minimal noisescapes constructed from the barest of materials. The cover photo is of a stringless, hardware-stripped guitar with a contact microphone taped to it, and the first piece ("Cardamomo") begins by sounding just like that, the ambient sounds of the room filtered through the guitar's hollow body. Gradually, slow howls of feedback gain power and pile up. It's not so much pummeling as it is engulfing, an army of slowly turning speakers on lazy susans. Toward the end of the piece it's stripped back to grinding metallic sounds before hot winds rise up and the howling returns.

"Coriandro" starts more scrapey, with the feedback held at bay, giving it a slight mechanical sound. This scraping or sliding grows more insistent, with harmonics shifting slightly in the high end, and an ever-increasing metallic gradually takes everything over, like a vacuum cleaner coming closer and closer until that's all you can hear. "Fenogreco" (why the spices?) sounds like things are being played through an old Echoplex or maybe small guitar pedals. It's definitely got that tape-delay thing happening and this lends an odd retro feeling to the proceedings. Again things start quietly and gradually gather momentum, mashed into s semi-shapeless mass. Later on, what sounds like actual guitar playing, like a loop of a speed metal solo enters and eventually becomes the focus, the metal cherry on top. Everything then melts into a vibrating puddle of spinning metallics and rising and falling feedback. The label name is apt for these recordings, as each does indeed blossom from slight beginnings into flowers of noise.





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