Drone Records

PBK - Descent

Format: CD-R

Label & Cat.Number: Attenuation Circuit ACR 1024

Release Year: 2012

Note: re-issue of very first MC from 1988, space-ambience based on analog synths & loops & also using more noise-driven experimental collages... feat DAVID PRESCOTT (GENERATIONS UNLIMITED) & MINOY

Price (incl. 19% VAT): €8.00

More Info

"Among the artists from the late-80s experimental tape underground who inspired the music of EMERGE and the founding of Attenuation Circuit, PBK is one of the most important. Therefore, we are extremely proud to present in a digital format for the first time his first solo release “Descent” from 1988, which the artist aptly describes as “dramatic atmospheric space-drone with plenty of analog synthesizer, via Dave Prescott, who once ran the Generations Unlimited label, releasing works by Conrad Schnitzler, Morphogenesis, etc. Prescott owned one of the largest modular synths ever assembled and puts it to striking use on this tape. Combined with PBK's Moogs, loops and drones, and howls of anguish provided by the irrepressible Minóy, all echoing around in the strange space of a Radio Shack mixer's spring reverb.”
“Minoy’s bedroom isolationist approach produced something that seemed otherworldly, spiritual and more like paintings, which was my own background. I took Minoy’s approach as my own model,” PBK says about their late-80s collaborations. This eminently emotional yet perfectly poised masterpiece of “noise ambient”, as PBK came to call his approach to music, is stunning proof that the international tape underground brought forth truly new sounds in electronics that are second to nothing but the most revered academic work by the likes of Stockhausen or Xenakis, and certainly opened up these ways of exploration to larger numbers of people. As fellow composer and Sound of Pigs tape label activist Al Margolis/If, Bwana says about the late Minòy (1951 – 2010): “i heard Minoy’s work before i had ever heard Stockhausen’s Hymnen – so that my take on hearing Hymnen was that it fit in this continuum …not the other way around!!!”
[label info]

www.wix.com/attenuationcircuit/attenuation-circuit

"Phillip B Klingler: that's what PBK stands for. No secret but just in case you didn't know this and that might happen, since PBK might not be a household name these days. Unlike the late 80s when he rose to small fame in the underworld of home-brew cassette releases. He never went 'away' or in hibernation, but perhaps was not always as visible in this twenty-five year career. I am not sure if this re-issue of one of his earliest cassette releases is part of a longer campaign to re-issue earlier works, or perhaps part of an anniversary of some kind, but its great to hear it again after so many years. 'Descent' is perhaps his first true solo release, and sees him take inspiration from Minoy and David Prescott, rather than Stockhausen of Xenakis (I am using the press text, thank you). At David Prescott's he taped a whole bunch of synth sounds and spread these out over the four tracks of his machine and then started to mix them, adding more synthesizer sounds, tape loops and such like, and the result is one of the earliest instances of 'ambient' meeting 'industrial'. It has that spacious character of ambient music, like being in a stream of sounds (as in a stream of consciousness) but at the same time has an angular character, a certain aspect of being nasty, that remote, desolate, empty industrial waste land image that makes it 'industrial'. Composing is perhaps not the sort of thing that applies here, but rather a surrealist take on mixing odd tracks of sounds together in two long form pieces of music. Intuitive playing and mixing, a surrealist approach to the art of composing, that is what PBK is best known for and here he does a great job at it. An early work, but what a fine piece." [FdW/Vital Weekly]