Various Artists — Zelphabet volume A
It’s clever and intriguing idea for compilation set that I see offer up some fabulous sonic moments. Opening up this first disk we have Achim Wollscheid(who I guess could have been on either the A or W compilations) with a piece called 3 Transformations for Xylophone which is pretty much as it’s title describes. It starts off with playful and unaffected groups of often quite crowned Xylophone hits, as the piece progresses it slowly grows and spurts electronic treatments making the piece more hectic and noisy- though never losing it’s playful vibe- it’s a nice opener to Volume A and the whole set of compilations.
Next we have AMK piece Flux Owls for evermore which it’s built around looped and stuck vinyl crackle and easy listening, and spoken word elements- it’s ok for what it is but does really do a tremendous amount for me and gets rather tiresome after it’s 15 minutes running time. Next is Arcane Device’s Seventeen Ambigous Figures which is a shifting collection of electronic tones, pitchers and drones which move nicely from sounding pressing, surrounding, noisy, alien, creepy, more active ambient and structure- less electroinca, managing to keeps ones interest through out.
Lastly we have Asmus Tietchen's D3 which has a great feeling of growing strange-ness. It's built around to begin with chopped up small sonic sounds, with a slowly growing ambient unfold of underneath which gives the feeling of been inside a womb. As the track goes on new weird cut-up and stuck textures of sounds are adding over the shifting ambient drift- sometime sounding like fire crackle, other times like strange snorting and gurgling beast. The track really gives a very effective and strange sonic landscape to get lost in.
So all in all an impressive start to this set of compilations, I only have one slight criticism it would have been nice to have a bit more info about each tracks origin and possible a small write up about each artists. Never the less very worth checking out,to find out more go to here.