Drone Records

SHIFTS - Branches

Format: mCD-R

Label & Cat.Number: Taalem alm 35

Release Year: 2006

Note: great poly-drone one-tracker by Frans de Waards project; designed to be listened to endlessly

Price (incl. 19% VAT): €5.00

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A quiet powerful one-tracker (almost 20 min.), pure mechanized overtones and shifting poly-waves. Great for microsound-listening.

"Since 1995 Shifts is one of the various projects of Frans de Waard, besides Freiband, and membership of Beequeen, Kapotte Muziek, Goem, Wander and his recent new project with Roel Meelkop, Zebra. All of the work is based on guitar sounds. In the first phase various guitars were played with objects and effects, then, the next phase were computer treatments of the previous phase (the 'Vertonen' series, 22 pieces in total). After that a return to simplicity again; 'Branches' is one of three pieces ('trees' and 'leaves' to be released on LP by entr'acte) based on four stringed, detuned acoustic guitar and motor objects. Loud and drone this could have been a next step, but might very well the final works on Shifts. Previously material has been released on Korm Plastics, Fourth Dimension, Kraak, Elsie & Jack, Meme and other labels." [label info]

"Derrida's idea that the "semantic horizon which habitually governs the notion of communication is exceeded or punctured by the intervention of writing." which "..does not give rise to a hermeneutic deciphering".. is key to understanding the difficulty of locating the 'drone' within the idea of music which is "western" - i.e. teleological, which is written contra the arguments given in S.E.C. And though we have passed through such a teleological epoch we are only now in the light of post modernism reconsidering the alternatives, i.e. 'turtles all the way down'.. the eternal return of the same. and alternative mythologies - Buddhist, Jain, Hindu .. even Wagnerian prior to Parsifal... And so this 'music' is open to the critique of those who wish to enforce a teleology upon us. (And the usual ploy of leveling ethnocentric critiques on musics which are not part of this great tradition of the west! - and its teleological meta-narrative - i.e. Christian / Jewish / Islamic / Marxist).
This piece avoids the latter critique, its very Conrad-esq beginning locates it within modern western culture despite its use of the de-tuned string instrument. Its development, and that's a very dangerous word to use here, is something subtle - it does not so much hide the development but points towards a cyclic anti hermeneutic work - and this is perhaps my only 'valid' point of criticism of this otherwise excellent work, and maybe not that valid - but given a piece of music (normally) has to be temporally located this provides an obvious challenge to the drone work - (unless repeat play is used) - maybe via an mp3 disk this temporality could be extended but never breached, but this is not a significant philosophical challenge to the drone work as its not surprising that our technology supports the western idea of a teleological universe even though there is a likely alternative - eight track tape as the anti-Christ!" (jliat)

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