Aaron Dilloway and C. Spencer Yeh The Squid

[Hanson; 2008]

Rating: 3.5/5

Styles: tape music, drone, non-music, musique concrète
Others: Pierre Schaeffer, Tony Conrad, Taj Mahal Travellers, AMM

From Cincinnati, C. Spencer Yeh (Burning Star Core) teams up here with the contact-mic-chewing tape guru from Ann Arbor, Aaron Dilloway, a founding member of heavyweights Wolf Eyes up until his departure and ensuing Nepalese sabbatical in 2005. Since then, Dillo’s solo career has gone viral, with a steady stream of solo and collaborative releases popping up seemingly monthly. The former wolf is very heavy into tape mode on this collab, serving up similar wizardry to that of last year’s Infinite Lucifer, on which he righteously retrofit Bobby Beausoleil’s soundtrack to the Kenneth Anger film Lucifer Rising. The Squid lists Dilloway on tape loops, tape delay, and bowed tape. Seems each Dillo release is teaming with more and more analog hiss, never-ending vocal loops, and an overall enthusiasm for the tape medium not seen since the works of Pierre Schaeffer.

Yeh’s primary instrument is the violin, and his style has been compared to other fiddle-fuckers like Conrad, Flynt, and Takehisa Kosugi (Taj Mahal Travellers, Group Ongaku). Kosugi’s cosmic, flanged, phased, and delayed violin made him an early hero of the Fluxus movement and Japanese experimental music, and ultimately it’s he who Yeh’s playing resonates with most on The Squid, with f/x and sweep echo chosen over the raw acoustic droneage of Conrad or Flynt. Yeh also works with electronics and voice here, two mediums he’s been honing as of late (see Burning Star Core's Voice & Electronics Live CD-R on Dronedisco and Ten Vocal Loops c30 on Epicene).

First track "Ahab" hoists the anchor and sets the ship adrift. Yeh starts things off with a seafaring violin drone that gives off a woozy vibe, like a ship rocking from side to side amidst the rolling wake of the morning sea. The track transmutes itself through overlapping undulations, replicating a noxious bout of motion sickness. Before long, sea legs are regained and the search for Leviathan can begin. Fragments of Yeh’s voice yell out in angst, as other disembodied vocals eke out of Dilloway’s tapes in hypnotic loops. A single fin crests the ocean’s surface, and the fight is on. As screams shout out and waves crash, the beast is finally subdued. Before long, the gulls descend and feed on the defeated, floating belly up.

Later, "The Hydra" serves up a soundtrack to another epic battle with a different multi-headed sea-beast. The least murky of the four tracks and my personal favorite, Yeh is at his most classically influenced here. An indulgent echo reverberates the sweet tones massively, like the acoustic interplay in the void between a canyon -- calming like a Satie piece, with still enough of an edge of nervous angst. The screeching tape towards the end signals another blow to the creatures of the deep.

Scanning my memory banks, I’m hard pressed to think of another collaboration with tape and violin as its primary constituents, but the results of that interplay is nonetheless intriguing. Parallels in mechanics could be drawn from the dragging of a horse hair bow across metal strings to a strip of tape passing through the tape head. Both are symbiotic relationships that require an activation point, and both seem to offer a resonance with the ebbs and flows of the human brainwave, perfect for those long vision quests out on the open seas.

1. Ahab
2. Ink Sac
3. The Hydra
4. False Speech I-III

Most Read



Etc.