Andrew Chalk, Ralf Wehowsky & Eric Lanzi — Yang-tul
The first piece Wycha was composed by Chalk using material supplied by Wehowsky and consists principally of layered drones and textures slowly phasing and panning across the stereo field. Over its near twenty-two minute duration various unidentifiable sounds bubble furtively in the background while never fully coming into the open. At times they could be the sound of a distant foundry and at others the growling and scratching of some ferocious beast. As an attempt to conjure the atmosphere of exotic dread implicit in the album's theme it functions well although in all honesty I would have liked to have had a little more going on. The central rumbling drone continues throughout with little or no change and there is an ever present sound of phase modulation which somewhat undoes the otherwise organic quality to the composition.
The second piece Chalawy is only slightly shorter than the first and was put together by Wehowsky with materials from the other two collaborators. Here elements of found sounds and misused percussion vie for attention over queasy organ and brass drones. Half way through the clanking of wood and metal is surrounded by tortured screams and groans vaguely reminiscent of Nurse With Wound's classic A Short Dip in the Glory Hole, albeit here they swirl about the mix as if seeping in from the walls of some remote log cabin. Quite creepy stuff. After a couple of minutes of this the spirits depart and the scratching and rumbling drones carry on their work. Just before the piece comes to an end they make a return for an encore before again fading back into the walls.
Both pieces here are characteristic of a type of post-industrial organic sounding music that was common around the turn of the millennium. Artist like Colin Potter, Jonathan Coleclough, Christoph Heeman and the three artists involved in this record produced many intriguing examples of music that straddled the borders of ambient, new-age, drone and modern composition and played technological intervention off against chance, environmental and seemingly mundane sources. As a result of this aesthetic most of this work - including Yang-tul has aged well. However as a style it has never to my ears got beyond the level of "hmm interesting" and twenty years later it's difficult to pick out any real stand-out examples of the form. As such the reasons for choosing this record for a re-release instead of say Coleclough and Chalk's Sumac from 1997 are not clear. It's a nice, somewhat chilly example of dark drone based music which never yields to cliché, but in end the most I can say is hmm interesting.