CD Reviews

VARIOUS and JÓHANN JÓHANNSSON
By Bernardo Rondeau

VARIOUS
The World Is Gone
(XL)
3 out of 5

Shrouded in secrecy – or, more specifically, weirdly fantastic black-and-white sketches of topless ladies engaged in bizarre activities with a gamut of animals (a hippo, an elk, a leopard, etc.) that suggest the sketchbook erotica of an acid-gobbling wildlife preservist – England’s Various quietly trickled out a series of 7-inch and 12-inch singles in 2005. True to their loudly mysterious name, the audio content of these vinyl platters rowdily ranged from plunderphonic cut-ups, barbed folky mellifluence and fidgety dub. Though less sampledelic than these short, scattered releases, the group’s debut full-length is no less striking.

Allegedly studio engineers by day, the sounds conjured by Various are vividly tweaked. Inhabiting the downtempo end of the dubstep spectrum, Various in some ways invoke what could have become of Massive Attack had they not disappeared in bong smoke only to later resurface sporting a blanched Thom Yorke moan and textures so steely that every nuance promptly slid off leaving a cold, shiny bareness. Various conjure the ghosts of trip-hop, or maybe it’s more like its corpses, slightly zombified and grime-caked. The majority of The World is Gone hiccups and stutters to dubstep’s trademark lopsided, trotting throb, though here the bass is largely erased or twittered into a crunchy treble slither. Modulators spew stray galactic sparks and gush white-hot steam. A male voice intones methamphetamine rants or coos in an fx-soaked drone. More melodious, a female singer intones passively. Seemingly recorded in a metal cube, The World is Gone is fascinatingly hollow, letting moogy pings and synthtwiddles bounce around and explode with a deep wake of reverb. Masked and anonymous, may Various long live this productively in the shadows.

JÓHANN JÓHANNSSON
IBM 1401 – A User’s Manual
(4AD)
3 out of 5

For his debut on the none-more-ethereal 4AD record label (ok, maybe Kranky takes that mantle), Iceland’s Jóhann Jóhannsson has opted for a five-part suite based on the sounds generated by the composer’s own father back in 1964 on the ancient PC that the album is also named after. Though also an accompaniment for the work of choreographer Érna Omarsdottir (performed in 40 European cities), IBM 1401 – A User’s Manual plays wonderfully all on its lonesome.

A simulation’s simulation, the swooning strings of the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra lap over the computer’s faintly affective melodies on the opening “Part 1 – IBM 1401 Processing Unit.” Its sad and simple refrain washed away by cool eddies of bowed color, the little song from this refrigerator-sized data cruncher becomes a spectral referent around which Jóhannsson weaves his weightless symphony.

The disc seems to follow a slowly ascending trajectory. Gravity slowly fades. A phantom soprano floats upwards and chimes twinkle like the brushed-past chandelier in Tarkovsky’s Solaris. “Part 2 – IBM 1403 Printer” finds an echo-soaked, British-accented voice instructing matter-of-factly on maintenance for the big machine. But set against the long, cold tolls of a small bell and weak ring-modulator frequencies, the speaker’s dry directions take the inflection of a gentle ode on the fragility of this hulk of a machine. Considering the association Jóhannsson makes between the 1403 and his father, this conflation is in fact rather touching. In enumerating its gears and tubes, the anonymous lecturer is in fact describing the veins and arteries of a creature that will, inevitably, cease operating. On the closing “Part 5 – The Sun’s Gone Dim and the Sky’s Turned Black,” the computer at last sings. Or, more specifically, Jóhann Jóhannsson, through a vocoder, intones a gently diffuse ballad in the style he has ably inherited.