PNL
Dans La Légende

Allen Ravenstine's turbulent futurism behind the synthesizer was a key ingredient in American post-punk innovators Pere Ubu's distinctive sound. Just as Brian Eno's malevolent modulations had adulterated the glam-rock swagger of Roxy Music before him, Ravenstine's corrosive tones oozed through his band's songs like radioactive seepage, illuminating their otherwise guitar-driven landscapes with a strange chemical glow.In addition to playing with them from 1975-1989, he also co-owned the Plaza, a historic apartment complex in Central Cleveland where Pere Ubu members lived and created alongside a vibrant community of other artists. Music took a backseat for Ravenstine afer leaving the group, among other things he obtained his pilot's license and wrote a novel. The invitation to spar with fellow synthesist Robert Wheeler in 2012 for Waveshaper Media's acclaimed synth documentary I Dream Of Wires reignited his dormant sonic interests. Since then, he's unleashed a handful of recordings.The analog abstraction for which he became known remains a significant part of Ravenstine's current sound palette, but recent years have seen him turn increasingly toward outlandish eclecticism as his foundation. 2018's celebrated Waiting for the Bomb (RER Megacorp) bounded freely between disparate styles and instrumentation, all the while managing to convey a cohesive (albeit of-kilter) identity.Ravenstine is now launching his much-anticipated follow-upon Waveshaper—a series of four EPs collectively entitled The Tyranny of Fiction. Materializing as a pair of LPs with one EP per side, or as two double CD sets, these works continue to chronicle the approach unveiled on their predecessor. The cheeky series title hints at a tension that's fundamental to these recordings. Ravenstine's use of genre suggests it's almost a literary device to him—unsurprising, given his forays into the realm prose. Styles will ofen allude to underlying thematic or narrative elements. However, friction begins to arise when this is juxtaposed with his surreal sense of orchestration. He takes pure electronic sound, nuggets of real -world recordings, live instrumentation and the latter's sampled counterparts and stirs them all together vigorously. This makes for decidedly unfaithful reproductions of the various musical idioms his composition cite, leaving the listener to contend with constant dissonance—every feature of the music feels at once completely familiar and utterly inscrutable.Even within the brief span of each installment of The Tyranny of Fiction, Ravenstine gleefully embraces a panoply of modalities. ElectronMusic, the first of the bunch, uses ornery ambient music as its jumping-of point, embarking on excursions into hyperreal chamber music, and swarming sci-fi synthesizer. Shore Leave announces itself with a spartan piano miniature decorated with a sof trickling sound before a meandering into cubist exotica, sinister new age music, and what sound like 21st century nocturnes. A host of other mongrel styles spill forth over the course of Nautilus. Each track weaves its own wayward travelogue amidst stray bits of audio verité and wafting musical fragrances—by turns tropical and foreboding. Rue De Poisson Noir takes cues from its fragmentary companion, slithering between cinematic intrigue, of-brand jazz, avant-garde mischief, and fried electro without batting an eye. At various points throughout, Ravenstine's fried citationality might recall a young generation of Ohioan oddballs, Orange Milk Records. Like many acts on the innovative electronic music imprint, Ravenstine's colorful, innuendo-rich music is restless, playful, inquisitive and most of all evocative—never resorting to irony or other such ploys.

A1 128 / A2 130 / B1 127 / B2 130

WREKIN HAVOCPlaying With FireAccording to the mildly amusing back story that accompanies this debut release from the Wrekin' Havoc crew, the crew of crate diggers turned re-editors behind the series make their wares in a cave in deepest wales, armed with just a computer and a pile of Balearic-minded wax. Whatever the real story, there's plenty to savour on their first outing. Opener 'Oh La Lover' is a tasteful tweak of an obscure, slap bass-sporting, mid-tempo French disco number from the early '80s, while 'Love Shock' breathes new life into an electrofunk era slab of Gallic rap/synth-pop fusion. On the reverse, the cave dwellers first play around with a boogie-era, drum machine-propelled cosmic disco number ('We're Truckin'), before delivering a saucer-eyed delight in the shape of the luscious 'Catch Me If You Can'.

Bokeh Versons lasso a dusky set of surf guitar-meets-bossa nova-in-dub styles from Martin Werner’s Répéter - think John Wayne lost in a Brazilian desert with Mike Cooper and Sun Araw‘Bad Twang’ follows on from 2017’s ‘In Fine Style’ LP with a more conceptual lean, employing his self-taught surf guitar tekkers with a DIY conflation of compatible styles whose sum outweighs their components. His conception of cowboy exotica or rancher dub practically imagines the soundtrack to a Tarantino or Jodorowsky flick set in some parched, purgatorial landscape where various genres criss-cross the desert in heat hazy licks and languorous grooves, shimmering like elusive fata morganas.

The ‘Abroad EP’ catalogues a period of time spent travelling Japan in the spring of 2019. Throughout the course of the month-long trip, Rudy carried around a portable recorder, capturing various sounds that caught his ear. That collection of found sounds would eventually become the foundation for the EP, each track utilizing a handful of different recordings ranging from bird calls in Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park, to windchimes in the coastal town of Kawazu. The EP took a full year of patient, daily work to complete, during which time Rudy invited a diverse group of collaborators in to help finish the songs. Throughout the recording process, harp, saxophone, and violin parts were added to create a unique blend of organic and electronic sounds.