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MONTGOMERY, GEN KEN - Drilling Holes in the Wall

Format: CD Label & Cat.Number: Monochrome Vision (mv17) Release Year: 2007 Note: material dating 1988-1991, three previously unreleased tracks. edition of 500 Price (incl. 19% VAT): €13.00 More Info "Archive materials from one of the most mysterious musicians in electronic underground, dating from 1988 to 1991. Each piece composed by Gen Ken Montgomery is the result of domestic alchemy, transforming some ugliest environmental sounds into artistic images of impressive beauty. His instruments are just prepared toy synth, but also from time to time laminator, icebreaker, radiator, film projector and so on. These recordings were made in Conrad Schnizler studio in West Berlin, and also live on stage there, in time of Germany reunion. Gen Ken Montgomery has been active in the experimental, electronic and noise scenes since the early 80s. Montgomery was the founder of Generations Unlimited and an original co-founder of Pogus Productions, respected experimental music labels. In 1989, he founded Generator, the first sound art gallery in New York City, where he created a home for sound artists and noise makers who were part of the thriving international cassette culture of the 80s. Since 1996 he has published recordings by sound artists in collaboration with Scott Konzelmann (Chop Shop) releasing them through Generator Sound Art." [label info] "Gen Ken Montgomery’s ‘Drilling Holes in the Wall’ is less an ambient record than it is an opus among the work of an experimental sound artist – being two divergent concepts – the latter more among artists of the ilk of Daniel Menche, who choose to create using a circus of instrumentation to perform certain plays before moving on to not just new locale, but new tools for performance sculpting. This retrospective of work is a troupe of electronic pulses, glitches, groans, explosions, susurrations, and endless other sonic perturbations. Suppurating at first, “Drilling Holes in the Wall” bloats with unhealthy ichors pressing the sores with throbbing ululations that are lanced with synaptic lacerations of noise, using sound to sonically cut and carve away tumorous flesh. Every digital strike is never the same with each collop dissected bringing new electronic whimpers unexpected; the infinitesimal filigree of surgical strikes of sound is like the marginalia of some robotic surgeon. Sound fuses, splatters, roars, and blazes contorted shapes in a linear-spatial sculpture. There is no empathy here, nothing to relate to human experience. Gen Ken Montgomery’s first track is more Opus No. 1, a matrix of half an hour of disassembly, reassembly and alien interdiction upon frequencies we recognise. It comes as great surprise to find the liner notes disclose a recording date of 1990 as it could easily sit in this milieu. Two years prior to that and the next two tracks – the latter of which and its two succeeding ones being unreleased - divulge more montage of digitally modelled scintilla, though here in more unified form, if only by sinewy electrical strands of frazzled computer nightmares of the surreal kind. Unidentifiable and humanly unpronounceable vespers are strobed and shuffled to the pulpit for recitation but there is no quantifiable bourn to address, only to witness and wonder. The last two tracks are the shortest but of the familiar distortive and displacing concurrence sound forms previously expressed. They scurry and quiver across the mottled surface of Gen Ken Montgomery’s odd musical conglomerate. The incision of human vocals in the last track is a bizarre feeding of radio station into tesla coils that seems a poor accompaniment to the unearthly welding going about it, and before it. Nonetheless, if you enjoy chewed electronics unlike anything you have previously heard, Gen Ken Montgomery is for you." [Heathen Harvest] www.monochromevision.ru