Review: ILIOS 'Kenrimono' LP (PAN) and NICHOLAS SZCZEPANIK 'Sundries' CDr

As promised, we're planning to post reviews here of stuff we think is worth checking out.

ILIOS 'Kenrimono' LP

At the end of Alfred Hitchcocks 'Strangers on a Train' comes a disturbing and compellingly beautiful scene where in the two leading characters wrestle aboard a carousel, wich due to a technical malfunction, goes berserk and starts spinning faster and faster out of control. Meanwhile the typical merry-go-round music is accelerated and becomes a rather frightening piece, especially since now the shrieks and cries of bystanders and riders are piercing right through it.
When I started spinning the A side of ILIOS 'Kenrimono' LP, this image almost instantly sprung to mind. But instead of this being a climactic end of a spun out story, here the carousel seems to be stuck in time, turning away in a loop that doesn't seem to have neither beginning nor end, depriving us of an ending to tie up all loose ends thus becoming something more eternal.
While in that whirlpool of noise, the organ keeps being scooped up to the surface.
Definitely one of the better releases of last year, this one comes in a great looking silkscreened pvc sleeve, like all of PAN's releases. Check it out!

www.pan-act.com

NICHOLAS SZCZEPANIK 'Sundries'

I think it's been two years since I got this CDr, but over the course of 2010 I have gotten back to it regularly and it finally started to click with me. All of the tracks on 'Sundries' apparantly were made on a very old, barely operable turntable. What comes out of this isn't as much a mad scientist trying out different things, but more like a shrink dissecting a patient.
Needle scratches surface, layers are being scraped and peeled off. The turntable is being flayed and turned inside out, the sounds that come from this are like tiny fragments that are being cut off and examined.
What's so great about this recording is that the turntable doesn't come across as much as the instrument, but more as a living thing who's being interrogated and coerced into some sort of confession. Thus the whole thing feels like a weird form of punishment or more like a retrieval of information. The element 'playing with' as opposed to 'playing' the turntable feels like something a kid would do on a rainy sunday afternoon, not knowing how to actually work this thing, but fucking with it (while mom and dad aren't paying attention). Somehow 'Sundries' seems to hint at distant memories that are being partially retrieved by this technical device, like it was a silent witness to something. But given the rather ominous atmosphere of the work here, it might not be an all too pleasant memory either. Highly recommended.

www.myspace.com/naszczepanik