'Projector Gunship Held {Ø}' is the first release in an expansive trilogy that combines earth shattering drums with guitars, bass and effects to produce a sprawling series of instrumental atmospheres.
The album arcs through different interpretations of drone-rock from the heavily blissed out haze of 'The Sun Was Gone But Our Faces Shone' through the shimering loops and sonics of 'Super Futures Axis Neo Tokyo' to the destructive dirge of 'Kill Command (Arc Light Operations)' taking in kraut-rock, drone, electronica and avant-garde influences on the way to produce a jaw dropping cinematic explosion of sound.
Simply awesome.

01. The Sun Was Gone But Our Faces Shone
02. The Signals From Your Radar Are Closing In On Me
03. Blacking Out Through Chinese Walls
04. Super Futures Axis Neo Tokyo
05. Kill Command (Arc Light Operations)

PAN002

2x180g LP

66:10

2 March 2009

Bearded ▼
This three-piece produce ambient electronica as strangely intriguing as their name, mixing Boards of Canada, Krautrock, prog and drone. The tracks are long, each in excess of ten minutes, and feature expanses of sounds built up from languid loops, chittering electronic landscapes and simple guitar and drum patterns. Not much happens but it often happens rather beautifully - like walking across a Scottish moor haunted by Krautrock spectres.
The danger, of course, is if basic ideas aren't interesting enough you get mediocre noodling, and CIN do fall into that trap with the irritating guitar twangs of 'The Signals From Your Radar Are Closing In On Me'. Thankfully, the percussive contributions are top-notch on the three great tracks that highlight this record. 'Super Futures Axis Neo Tokyo' is a masterful 15 minutes bookended by the distant chirps and calls of a remote moor, 'The sun Was gone But Our Faces Shone' deploys a mix of soulful accordion-like drones offset by nervy little chirrups that ebb and flow like the tides, and 'Blacking Out Through Chinese Walls' is beautiful mid-tempo electronica with beautiful drums skitters.
Musique Machine 4/5 ▼
On two 180 grams slabs of vinyl, in a limited edition of 250, comes the first part of a trilogy. The bandname doesn't give away much about the sound of this British threepiece. With the album's title your thoughts tend to go in the direction of something sci-fi.
Not entirely off the mark, as the rhythm-oriented kraut-rock does have ties with the outer space obsessions of long ago, especially in the seventies and perhaps the Star Wars ideas from Reaganite times. That said, it's not necessarily all that fixed. Although tapping from the more repetitive aspects of Kraut-rock the sound can't be described as being 'retro'. Most pieces build on a single rhythm, with only very minor other events to dress it up. Even though this may seem a bit uninteresting in text or even on first listen, after a couple of spins pieces grow on you. The subtle drones and loops that are often underneath the steady drums set an interesting mood in which you it's easy drift away in as a listener. Within the pieces there's little activity, sometimes shifting or building up so slow you'd hardly notice. Between the several sides (except for side two all sides hold one piece of music) there's quite a bit of variation. The Sun Was Gone But Our Faces Shone is slow and moody, while the flipside with The Signals Of Your Radar Are Closing In On Me has a beat that reminds of Clyde Stubblefield's infamous Funky Drummer made famous by James Brown. Blacking Out Your Chinese Walls has a shifting layer of a backwards guitar, looping against the 3/4 rhythm. These polyrhythmic shifts are also found in the driving Super Futures Axis Neo Tokyo. The final side/track is Kill Commmand (Arc Light Operations) which is also the most aggressive track, both in playing as well as the distorted sounds.
Generally you could compare it to Circle, but with less testosterone, aiming for a more cinematic sound. This being the start of a trilogy, Projector Gunship Held {Ø} makes you curious to hear where this is going to lead to, but for now there's an interesting start.
Norman Records album of the week ▼
Now for a treat...who loved that Minus Pilots LP? Well...the label Panic Arrest have their second experimental odyssey available through us. It's by Cut Iowa Network and this double 180gm treat has been christened 'Projector Gunship Held'. Beginning its climb with gracefully melancholic bowed strings and cheeky smatterings of free percussion, taking in some juddering electronic pulses and spellbinding atmospherics, this is a fine exercise in drama & intention. Then the drum kit kicks into action, slowly rolling syncopated beats and a lulling Tortoise style bassline, all imbued with this widescreen aura of space & time. The second track takes the hypnotic krautrock flavour further, a sharp, funky beat and strange one-note chimes & echo-ey whirrs, pulsing away, feeding your head, whilst the bass frequencies hover & lurk around like ominous waves of subconscious sound. Truly brilliant stuff. Track 3 is like a continuation of the theme into slightly harder, wilder pastures, a little bit more improvised & slightly psychedelic. The second disc opens with 'Super Futures Axis Neo Tokyo', Beginning with drifting atmospherics & looped sound, it builds into another tight, percussive workout, definetely in debt to old masters Can but sounding incredibly taut & minty fresh. There is something very warm yet clinically executed about this record, glowing with an organic feel yet very precise and metronomic. As is usual with my reviews, i'll leave the final track to your perusal! I've been bored silly with post rock of late but this opus combines the best of mid-late 90's Chicago instrumental rock with exciting & modern drone/experimental textures whilst flexing its Herculean Krautrock backbone. All finely mastered by Harris Newman, a member of that Godspeed clan! Bloody marvellous, in deluxe packaging. This is without a doubt shaping up to be a very special label!
Textura ▼
Panic Arrest follows its superb Minus Pilots release, Superior Proof of Cinema, with a solid double-album set by Cut Iowa Network, a forward-thinking trio comprised of Tim Evans (guitars, effects, loops and tapes), Adam Barringer (basses, low-end frequencies and loops), and Steve d'Enton (drums and percussion). Recorded in late 2008 and the first chapter in a planned trilogy, Projector Gunship Held {Ø} spreads sixty-six minutes of freewheeling "instrumental drone-rock" across four 180g-vinyl sides. Cut Iowa Network plays in a live and loose jam-like style that's anything but off-putting, though the trio does have a tendency to fixate on a particular riff a little too long (see side two).
Side one's "The Sun Was Gone But Our Faces Shone" initiates the journey sleepily with opening minutes dedicated to hazy guitar textures and cymbal shimmer. The mood is languorous as razor-sharp guitar lines drift across subtle percussive punctuations. At the seven-minute mark, the full drum kit kicks in, rousing the music from slumber and setting it on its way. With Barringer's bass joining in soon after, the music slowly gathers steam, becoming a dusty trudge before fading. The tempo picks up on side two with "The Signals From Your Radar Are Closing In On Me" leaping from the gate with a stabbing guitar motif repeating over a punchy drum pulse, and "Blacking Out Through Chinese Walls" perpetuating that steady increase in intensity.
Repeating figures in "Super Futures Axis Neo Tokyo" boost the third side's psychedelic character, as does the krautrock-like attack stoked by the band. Midway through, a brief breakdown paves the way for some dive-bombing guitar lines (a subtle nod to No Pussyfooting perhaps?) before the band starts up again, even more aggressively this time, before decompressing in haze at track's end. The band's experimental side moves to the forefront during side four's culminating "Kill Command (Arc Light Operations)" where strangulated swells roar and churn noisily overtop throbbing and occasionally eruptive rhythms (d'Enton's spirited playing the focal point in this case). Though the vinyl format obviously splits it into four sides, Projector Gunship Held {Ø} needs to be heard in its entirety for the music's progression and incremental build to be appreciated.
The Silent Ballet 6.5/10 ▼
Leaving this world might be easy for some, and too difficult for others. Physically, for most it would require the dreams of a sci-fi writer come true (if you're an astronaut, please take me!). Mentally, though, it's just a matter of consuming the right amount of the right substance at the right time. "But what about music, what about books, or videogames?" you say. Well, you just need to look up or open your eyes to realize you’re still here with the rest of us, breathing the fractal routine of everyday existence. Escaping from it is certainly a common practice which we possibly will never master, but a special kind of relief comes from those moments when, out of control, we leave this world.
You're in an indeterminate time in the future. A megalopolis surrounds you, its angular, titanic shapes constantly reminding you of gothic architecture; where people of old knelt in awe to worship a god beyond any understanding, people of now walk by and smile, knowing that it is they who are worthy of worship after building the world out of matter insignificant. A weirdly organic-looking rocket stands before you, and a steel person bids you enter. As you sit down inside, you notice the countless buttons, the thousands of parts and their process of assembly, other passengers who speak words you know – everything reveals itself as mechanical, a system constructed upon repetition, particular drones reflecting the nature of the universe in which events are but sparks flying in the infinite void of time. The rocket takes off, and soon enough you feel your machine rip apart the atmosphere, hammer the skies like a siege ram; you look out the window and find yourself "Blacking Out Through Chinese Walls" – the one wall you can look at from the earth while in the heavens, has been broken. Your thoughts come up in the same, constant electronic hums as the rocket fills your ears with the deceivingly free-style drumming of its engines in a seemingly endless jam that mimics the rigorous, expansive insistence of the outer-space landscape.
The stars fill you with relative peace, but you know this time and place is one of suffering and destruction, much like any other - except that now, there's a mathematical precision to the flow of the apocalypse. The "Kill Command (Arc Light Operations)" bursts through the rocket’s vintage speakers. A looping morse-code message makes its intermittent, analog content clear until noisy static takes over and repeats itself in contrast to the drumming, creating an uneasy polyrhythm over the ambient-like hum of space itself, an open bassline: the command has been issued. The rocket slightly changes course and as you look out and see the gray cover of Earth you first breached through, you notice the millions of tiny explosions, the beautiful mini-novas calmly erasing everything and everyone you ever knew. After ten minutes of unyielding annihilation, all that remains is the electronic manipulation of a dead radio transmission as it slowly turns into an echo adrift and at peace in the vast realm of darkness.
You wake up, and find yourself in another megalopolis. The rocket has landed and is now empty – you walk out and see the "Super Futures Axis Neo Tokyo": you can still hear the hum of space within you, now added to the spectral electronic voice of a fascist city born from order, from the coincidence of enhanced temporal projections droning on and on. A tribal quality drives this psychedelic explosion of metallic colors and a sky painted in ochre tones: monotony turned into a ritual, mindless machines live and die in the name of the city; this moaning, roaring manifestation of the pinnacle of progress consumes its inhabitants as they throw their arms up, roll their eyes back, and offer their lives in worship. Their souls, just like the radio transmission, slowly creep down into the sewage, the heart of all cities, and turn into electronic blips that echo away into an abyss that rivals even the one beyond the skies.
As you walk through the colossal structures, you hear a signal that is similar to a frog's croak – an electronically simulated noise that recalls times so ancient there were still other living things around. Someone is looking for you. "The Signals From Your Radar Are Closing In On Me", you think. This threat from a mysterious hunter beats incisively like a hip-hop piece in which urban desolation is an object of kitsch and de-centered parody: the loose, spacey bass drawing the support of the piece turns the feeling into ambience, revealing this terrible parade as something which is always there, and which is deep enough as to 'reward' every level of attention put to it. As you run and jump and teleport out of the radar’s range, the final explosion occurs – fire and speed turn the world into a swirling mass of force and steel; within seconds turned into decades turned into centuries, "The Sun Was Gone But Our Faces Shone". Only burnt ruins remain; an alien, desert electronic sound fills the air with slowness a la Earth. Passing through the tranquil wasteland, it brings to our (now ghostly) attention the spurts of vegetation delicately crushing the aluminum decay in gentle drumbeats: an organic, naturalistic feminine revenge upon the skyward, masculine altars of technology, a return to the horizontal, a return to the world before it was recreated by our presence.
Our trip out of this world ends with the progressive disappearance of sounds, and the relief of escape will probably soon turn into something that will put you on your nerves. Why? Because just like most science fiction, to weave a vision of the future is in the end a reflection upon life in the here and now. Make out of it what you will, but this musical escape is not fruitless, and even though at times it can seem too long for its own good, too uneventful for its own development (krautrock electronics and ambience make for a bit of a difficult pair), it will be rewarding if you keep your imagination constantly in tune and at work – an escape that asks of you to not escape, in a sense. In any case, get in that rocket and have a good journey through this first part of a trilogy about the future, transmitted directly from the Cut Iowa Network. Travel safely!
Tokafi ▼
What is it about Krautrock? What invisible force makes musicians pick up their instruments to try and follow in the footsteps of bands which were obviously deeply rooted in era-specific philosphies and sometimes hardly knew what they were doing? One thing's for sure: Even though love, peace and politics are no longer part of the program, artistic parallels between the golden yesteryears of the German music scene and recent developments in the most diverse corners of the experimental community are certainly becoming more and more obvious with each day. From Drone and Doom to Stoner Rock and improvised Soundscapes, the combined shadows of bands like Can, early Tangerine Dream, Ashra, Faust and Neu! are looming large. While a backwards-oriented copycat mentality appears to be the norm amidst the stagflating pool of retro-worshippers, a select group of artists have used the inspiration from long ago to come up with highly personal statements.
One of them are Cut Iowa Network. Starting with the title of their current full-length "Projector Gunship Held {Ø}", the freewheeling pace of their release schedule (these more than sixty minutes of music arrive a mere two months after their "Junkyard Transmissions" debut) and the format it has been released on (Double Vinyl) to its inclusion into an ambitious tryptich, everything about this album points in the direction of the 70s. There's a maximum of two epic tracks per side, with most pieces consisting of hazy grooves slowly peeling themselves off woozy trance-textures and then drifting gracefully along the horizon, ultimately dissolving into the distant darkness with a silent implosion. An unobtrusive minimalism dominates the development of the music, with intermittantly appearing tones or inverse melodic fields, undulating melancholically before finally fading out, acting as druggy Leitmotifs.
One of the appealing aspects about Cut Iowa Network is how openly they're allowing their audience to perceive and appreciate the individual contributions by their respective members: Tim Evans is responsible for the dense atmospherics of the group, using repetitive Rhodes melodies, psychedelic Guitar lines, surreal tape loops and displaced sound effects to build up a tight web of outwardly unconnected but, as closer inspection and full immersion reveal, seminally interrelated elements, while Adam Barringer's Bass provides an organic rhythmical metronome as well as a warm, peaceful and almost textural low-end vibration. It is Drummer Steve d'Enton, however, who consitutes the gravitational heart of the band. It is as if his partners were playing both with and against him: d'Enton's ultra-reduced, postrocking Jazz-propulsion constitutes a concrete lens through which his trio-partners' cosmic allusions are spectrally broken into humanly visible colours. Space, it emerges, is not a barren vacuume for Cut Iowa Network, but a starry-eyed wonderland: Had Douglas Adams lived longer, he would surely have included this band in the next volume of his "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".