What happens when the Terminator triumphs
If you think about a dystopian world after the machines have triumphed and you imagine that programs mutate like genes, you'd eventually get machines that made music for art’s sake. Music that expresses the conflicted engine of a machine, to run perfectly and to serve the designated purpose or to have the freedom to grind gears to perform manoeuvres that it wasn't made to do. I’m using the machine metaphor because although this is the work of a man, Nigel Truswell, it doesn’t deal with recognizable human musical concepts like rhythm or melody; indeed it makes Cabaret Voltaire seem like Santa Claus.
Of course it is all about experimentation and abstraction. I’m trying to liken this to something like free jazz or cubism but they take something recognizable and rebuild it - these sounds bring to mind machines, there are no recognizable jumping off points, just washes and clashes, metallic sounds with some occasional recognizable shimmers of keyboards, where they sound like the dawning of something after the industrial noise eventually drops leaving something almost identifiable as music, almost. It is like spending forty five minutes in the belly of a mechanical beast as it struggles to comprehend consciousness; these metallic birth pangs are a step too far for me.
Aperture is the new label set up by Andrea Parker, with the aim of “breaking with convention with experimental releases based around concepts, soundscapes and mystery”. Well, we get plenty of all of that here on Oberman Knocks’s album, 13th Smallest.
Extreme musical experimentation quite often sounds as if it comes direct from the incidental score of an art film. This is a false impression, essentially — but what is true is that there is a kind of musical uniformity to many of these albums. Of course the same is probably said of mainstream song focused albums, by experimental types (“They all sound the same to me”, they probably say). And it its pointless to look for ‘songs’ or ‘tunes’ here. They are hardly the point.
13th Smallest, in keeping with this sensibility, does sound like a movie soundscape. The question to ask here is: what kind of movie? Well, were probably looking at either a black and white Japanese dystopian industrial sci fi nightmare, or an existential paradie about a lonely man in Prague. Of course, you have to provide the images yourself. DIY mind movies - the way forward!
Exciting new prospects from Andrea Parkers newly minted Aperture Imprint, dispensing its first CD release with Oberman Knocks' 13th Smallest. Born as a label for conceptual and experimental electronics, Aperture promises great things with this debut album of frozen soundscapes and post industrial textures from Oberman who has previously released on Static Caravan as Alkin Engineering. Moving stealthily into the kind of abstracted forms and stoic structures usually inhabited by Autechre or the Skam label, opener Bronic is a creepy introduction to his world, with obtuse rhythm mechanics forming complex patterns to a backdrop of overcast drones and pressurised atmospherics. Working with a surprisingly limited setup of well chosen software, minidisc and a cheap microphone, Oberman crafts an impressively gnarled beast on Motor Sepple Freak distinctly reminiscent of Ae’s Chiastic Slide period, with the haunting addition of mangled vocals or on Indomine Rhittiger Plans By Four an uncanny knack for lop sided rhythm construction to match his peers. Lackey Remand churns up silicon with a fierce attitude, sending lumpen kicks docking with precise metallic surfaces and spacious arrangements, or slowing down to quasi industrial dubstep tempos on Anterbine On Hote. For the furthest reaching dance-floors, Holtzen Anger Mire could serve some purpose, finding a regular rhythm and passing it through ever encroaching walls of deconstructed digital tones for an intense floor experience. Needless to say, it's an engrossing listen from start to finish, placing the listener in an entirely artificial environment utterly devoid of any immediate emotional warmth or conventional sonic imagery. Ears attuned to Autechre, Ben Frost or the DigiJap sound of NHK or Atak records will probably find a new hero here. Highly Recommended!
This debut signing to Andrea Parker's new Aperture label is a glorious and terrifying attack on the senses. Coming on like a colossal samurai battle in outer space, 13th Smallest is perfect listening for those who actively enjoy scaring seven shades of guano out of themselves. The spectral scrape of metal against metal is underpinned by haunting parasomniac dis-chords and hilt-drawn glitchy evilness. Possibly only Autechre and Scott Walker's most recent outings can match this in the darkness stakes. As good as any thriller movie, just make sure you don’t eat any cheese before going to bed after hearing this unless you fancy giving yourself an acute attack of the horrors.
Get 3 songs: Bronic, Walker's Ret-Ret Hive, Beckerton First Draft. Dig it?
Dig deeper: Suicide, Akira Yamaoka, Richard Devine.
Sheffield-born and now South London-based, electronic producer Nigel Truswell has previously released tracks as Alkin Engineering and WG Machines on a slew of labels, including the esteemed Static Caravan imprint, Unlabel and October Man Recordings. This debut album as Oberman Knocks represents the first release on Andrea Parker's Aperture label, and certainly kicks things off nicely for a label apparently dedicated to the more experimental, abstract regions of electronic music.
Perhaps the most apt description of the ten tracks collected here would be dark IDM, with much of the sonic palette here being constructed around dark drones, contorted, digitally-processed industrial breakbeats and the occasional fragment of cut-up, unintelligibly yelled vocals – indeed, Truswell apparently restricts himself to a comparatively stripped-back studio set-up, using only a minidisc recorder, cheap mic and three pieces of software.
While the Sheffield-based comparison is an all too easy one, the most obvious influential touchstone here is frequently Autechre at their most atonal, austere and nasty, with the skittering, steel-plate edged complex breakbeats and detuned synthetic drones of opener Bronic and Lackey Remand calling to mind the more confrontational edges of the duo’s Confield / Draft 7.30 period. Perhaps most noticeably however, it’s the unrelentingly dark nature of these seemingly airless tracks that perhaps strikes the attention most – with the gasped, strangled vocal fragments seeming to grab for oxygen amidst the unsettling textures, and further adding to the doomy sense of atmosphere generated. File under ‘uneasy listening’; 13th Smallest is likely to appeal most to fans of dark noise-laden IDM along the lines of the Ad Noiseam and Tympanik Audio labels.
Strange things afoot have been happening in our gaff since the arrival of this the debut release for the latest Nigel Truswell incarnation Oberman Knocks. Swiftly placing it in our laptop to be read by i-Tunes the track recognition starting jumping around hopping to and fro as though dancing on hot coals all the time refusing to settle to play. Quickly relocating to the hi-fi within ten seconds of its entrance the lights blew (all four spots). Still, refusing to be deterred by the strange co-incidental happenings we hastened to the trusted CD player, with fingers and other bits about our personage crossed we solemnly soldiered on. Success. Two minutes of joyful though decidedly darkly foreboding sounds consumed our listening space until the fuse in the kettle blew plunging the surroundings in still sombre darkness. Better wait until daylight we thought.
Its perhaps stranger still when you consider the bizarre co-incidence that on picking up this release for a listen that being aired on the same night on terrestrial TV was the classic Hammer film Quatermass and the Pit, (a film born within an era still clearly affected by the atrocities of the Nazis and laid impotent amid a terrifying period of mistrust and suspicion forged by the cold war) so ahead of Its time in terms of its subject matter – that being the treatment of selective breeding, racial purging and the manipulation of the human psyche by a dormant collective consciousness as a weapon of intolerance, fear and paranoia (see note at foot).
With that in mind its easy to see our immediate inclination being drawn to comparisons with Mount Vernon Arts Lab's Séance at Hob's Lane, the atmosphere oblique, the poke somewhat jarred and the lasting presence one of awkward alienated austerity.
Of course Truswell is no stranger to these pages, operating under the guise of Alkin Engineering whose debut split 7 inch for Static Caravan with Vector Lovers had us all a fond swoon, since then there's been releases via Uniabel, Octoberman and Shima some of which having found their way much to the untold love of our hifi.
These days based in London, Oberman Knocks provides the inaugural outing for Parker's Aperture imprint whose release remit it seems is the promise of experimental conceptual sound-scapes with a tinge of mystery by the shed load.
Not strictly due out until early next year 13th Smallest superbly lays the groundwork for the label’s promised vision, comprising 10 tracks Truswell crafts a deliciously aural landscape, doused amid chilling drone voids and untamed rhythmic pulses and patterns, it's a bleak and solemn affair strangely dislocated and refusing to be easily categorised or shuffled off with an attached easy to file label. If anything 13th Smallest is very much calibrated with distinct industrial edge that should appeal by and large to fans of Clock DVA (though admirers of Throbbing Gristle will do well to tune into Motor Sepple Freak) albeit irrefutably tempered by a warped drum ‘n’ bass mutant dialect that owes much to the craftsmanship of both Wagon Christ and Muslim Gauze (as on Lackey Remand to which whose eerie resonations could easily find themselves a kindred spirit or two on Beta Lactam Ring's more leftfield advances as evidenced on their excellent Black Series) and scarred with a distressed dub-tronic hybrid (best viewed on the minimalist abstractia of: Indomine Rhitiger Plans by Four).
Cultivated by strange alien communications breaching the ether, the set opens to the foreboding grimness of the unsettlingly claustrophobic Bronic – a chilling dystopian collage tethered and scratched by cascading white noise blisters punctured by hulking leviathan like mechanical pulses and chattering glitch manipulations. The moods not all fraught and doom struck both Beckerton First Draft and Holtzen Anger Mire briefly lighten the tension to revisit old school Alkin Engineering pastures and into the bargain gets to sounding not unlike a lunatic firework show on the latter and on the former a deliriously lightly toned dreamy cosmic cortege teased and tousled by playful beats, though they only acts as a brief rest bite given that the wide screen glacial opines of Walker's Ret Ret Hive that they book end swiftly turns the temperature down to sub Zero levels. Turton Hacks wraps up the set in fine form and to these discernible ears easily translates itself much like some bastard off spring conceived through a union between Autechre and any number of the explorers who’ve passed through the doors of Tigerbeat6 – most notably Kid 606 and Pimmon.
Disquietingly absorbing stuff.
Tracks: Lackey Remand, Turton Hacks, Beckerton First Draft
When Frodo puts on that ring and is welcomed by nightmarish visions and swirling white noise, screeching and seemingly whispering “I'm gonna cut you up, little man”, it’s both frightening and annoying, especially if your TV's too loud. So it’s best to listen to Oberman Knocks’ experimental debut of odd, dark sounds at an introductory low volume, with all the lights on. And that’s only if you're into avant-garde, paranoid soundscapes in the first place. If you're not, run for the hills (not Mount Doom). Perhaps the 10 track names of 13th Smallest mean the world to creator Nigel Truswell, but they'll no doubt seem irrelevant to most as each song relentlessly infects the next with dark, off beat noises from somewhere not of this world. One for the art students.
if the internet did not exist and | was able to listen to music with just me, a turntable, a CD player, a McIntosh amp, and dope speakers, | would say very good records for 2008 were:
TVOTR: Dear Science
Santogold x Diplo Mixtape
NIN: The Slip
Mgmt: Oraclular Spectacular
School Of Seven Bells: A/pinisms
Oberman Knocks: 13th Smallest
it’s a rare opportunity missed if you don’t listen to albums like these. Albums that, though few and far between, always cause more press raucous than when Paris Hilton steps out of a car. | refer of course to an LP that hasn’t the slightest regard for insignificant aspects of music such as rhythm, melody, chorus, verse and other such concepts. Instead, it rouses the question some love to ask and others steer well clear of: is it art?
Oberman Knocks’ debut is a concept. Produced by three software tools, a shoddy minidisc recorder and an Argos mic, the music is about the joy of production, the process of soundscaping that is now at our fingertips. This sounds ridiculously pretentious, but its saving grace is the music. Its mechanical, apocalyptic, a hollow concrete echo which makes Autechre sound like the Cbeebies soundtrack. Whether art or not, if the robots that inevitably take over the world had ghetto blasters...
But surely this sterile dystopian music is horrific to listen to? Well, you never wanted to see those Paris Hilton pictures but you probably had a look. It’s the sheer controversy, the courage that Parker and Mr Knocks has to call this music that gets you curious, and therein lies its stardom.
4/5
Oberman Knocks do not make fresh music. They feel like a genre zombie, bearing down heavily, creating swampy and oppressive electronic music for headphones and dark walks. 13th Smallest is full of sharp corners and punctures, and is tough to stick with.
Oberman Knocks is the latest nom-de-guerre of London-based artist (and Spinal Tap name-alike) Nigel Truswell, who has also recorded as Alkin Engineering and WG Machines. Here, he’s come up with something new for the inaugural release on DJ/electronicist Andrea Parker's new label Aperture — an imprint that aims to specialise in “experimental releases based around concepts, soundscapes and mystery”. So, here's the concept: night-time, neon-lights, broken glass underfoot, a gang of hoodies chucking breeze-blocks off a multi-storey car-park, cackling as they total expensive cars down at street level.
Using a few bits of basic software, a minidisc recorder and a cheap mic, Truswell constructs a cavernous, alienating, inner-city terrain full of industrial drones, gritty textures and crunching, off-kilter beats employed not so much for rhythm as for a murderous physicality. The result is like riding a darkened elevator too fast to the top of a nameless tower block: claustrophobic, disorientating and exhilarating.
| had absolutely no idea what to expect from this Touchin’ Bass offshoot label, but | figured it would eschew the more obviously electro vibes. And it appears | was right. Coming on a much more classic electronica style, mixed with some scrunched out, experimental vibes, this is an album that’s pretty out there in some respects, yet brings to mind the work of Aphex Twin or Mike Paradinas. Full of strange sound design and quirky arrangements mixed with some serious rhythm programming, you'll find there's never a dull moment here and it's absolutely packed full of intriguing tracks. Generally existing on the darker side of electronic music this is one for fans of Skam and Warp | reckon. Really good stuff.
How about some scattered beats? How about some mysteriously warped vocal samples and persistent atmospheric stops and starts? How about Andrea Parkers new label adventure? Yep it's been a while since we heard what Parker was up to.
Miami bass Investigations, this lady has shown us the darkside of electronic experimentation. Now her path mysteriously unravels In a new unchartered direction, as always, keeping ahead of mainstream trends. Here on offer Is the first release on Aperture and It defies easy categorisation falling somewhere between dubstep wariorism and Warp’s sci fi oscillations.
And what of Oberman Knocks? Real name: Nigel Trusweil. Origin: Sheffield. Occupation: Graphic designer. Mission: using three pieces of software, a minidisc recorder and a cheap mic, to creatively dodged the painstaking technical talk of the usual electronic artist. Result: he has delved into an unconscious realm of concrete jungles and back street laboratories to produce haunting, deep rumbling, sounds where each irregularity unveils a new area of soundscape. Nigel has been identified as being under the influence of Mira Calix and Autechre’s techno manglings.
With song titles like Indomine Rhitiger Plans By Four and Holtzen Anger Mire you can begin to imagine what to expect. Just when you think a groove is building up, the bottom drops out and the musical configuration resets and flows into another space like on Beckerton First Draft. And there are no lyrics here, no vocal harmonies but cybernetic mutterings and mutations like on Motor Sepple Freak – the music on offer here wouldn't be out of place as a backdrop to an early Cronenberg remake.
This is a complete antithesis to the status quo and refreshingly so. Push the ‘venture forth’ button and experience a strange new world.
Not just poor but self centred and arrogant.
‘Oberman Knocks’ is Sheffield born experimentalist Nigel Truswell and through relocation to the capital he has furthered this project to the point of release with 13th Smallest. The first album to be taken off the Aperture label it is considered a dark and haunting ambient experience throughout. The word I will use for it is simpler, pretentious. Diversification is of highest importance to arts future and you can create this kind of music and thrive, Aphex Twin et al, but there simply isn’t any consistency in quality here nor is there any hook to really hold onto and subsequently enjoy. So devout of sentiment the album becomes further and further on it goes it only adds to its numerous throwaway attributes.
The soundtrack to nothing, a statement towards no theme and ultimately an album which is simply boring and without use. Using experimentation to challenge the listener is one of the few ways music can continue to grow once genres merge and ideas dry but 13th Smallest sheds no new light at all. The sort of album heralded by elitists it is fundamentally not good enough to be considered as any sort of reasonable art. I rarely get annoyed at albums but with one so obviously full of its own hype, self-centred worth, misguided experimentation and constant flaws it is difficult to think of better ways to waste forty-seven minutes then this substandard work.
The alias of Sheffield graphic designer Nigel Truswell, this is the first album on a new label devoted to experimental soundscape releases.
Deliberately recorded in a highly lo-fi manner with the mistakes kept in, it fails, as interesting textures sound fuzzy when they should soar and menace.
Some bleak moods are made all the more paranoid when they're indistinct, but a proper polish will be worth it.
5/10
Oberman Knocks inaugurates Andrea Parker's Aperture with an album that definitely lives up to the label's stated aim—to issue convention-breaking, experimental releases based around concepts, soundscapes, and mystery—because 13th Smallest is almost unlike anything I've heard before. The material on the ten-track debut album from Sheffield-born and Walworth, South London-based Nigel Truswell (initially known under the names Alkin Engineering and WG Machines) rolls forth like some mutant, skyscraper-tall behemoth that indifferently lays waste to whatever lies in its path. Working from the ground up, Truswell typically establishes a crushing bottom end of convulsive rhythms and then builds layer upon layer of industrial noise and voice fragments until a hallucinatory swarm results. Buried within the density, faint traces of hip-hop and funk rhythms may be glimpsed (Truswell reportedly has been influenced by both, as well as the music of Motown, Warp, Skam, and Ninja Tune) but they're so mangled in the tracks’ final form they end up bearing little clear relationship to any kind of conventional rhythm structure.
Tracks such as Bronic and Motor Sepple Freak depict writhing snakes' nests of groaning industrial rhythms, pummelling noise, and garbled vocals. One could easily be convinced that Truswell used artillery fire and other war-related sounds as primary source material for Holtzen Anger Mire when the piece lurches over decimated ground like an indestructible tank. The album does start to sound slightly less bewildering by about the halfway mark as one becomes more acclimatized to its radically alien sound; even so, a pummelling workout like Anterbine on Hote might begin coherently enough but soon enough turns just as dizzying and disorienting as its precursors. Nevertheless, listen carefully and you'll discover that Truswell’s doing on 13th Smallest something rather analogous to what Autechre did on Chiastic Slide, LP5, and EP7: twisting the listener's hearing inside out until what at first sounds bewildering eventually starts to seem almost visionary. (It’s worth noting that it was Warp artists Mira Calix and Autechre’s Sean Booth who first encouraged Truswell to start producing his own music.) Challenging? Yes. Worth the effort? Definitely.
The first signing to Andrea Parker’s new label, Oberman Knocks is the nom de plume of Sheffield musician and graphic design artist Nigel Truswell. In the tradition of his home city, he makes a point of eschewing the finer developments in state of the art technology, achieving his effects on minimal software, a cheap microphone and a minidisc recorder. Opener Bronic has a dirty, hectic churn about it that reminds of early live recordings of Robert Rental & The Normal, while on Motor Sepple Freak, human voices emerge as if being fried alive in the roiling mix (Being Boiled by The Human League was the first record Truswell ever bought). Elsewhere, you’re reminded of old 80s Space Invaders and Robot Wars reenacted with old toys in empty skips — for those who complain of the clinical or sterile nature of electronica, this is a junkyard of evocative and combative pleasures.
Like an ice-cold Autechre starved of natural light and oxygen, Oberman Knocks dispenses incredibly dense and suffocating soundscapes, where sounds are shredded and pulverised, beats constantly falter or freeze in mid-loop and occasional shards of human voice get caught in the complex set of mechanical cogs that maintain this machine alive.
Released on Andrea Parker's new Aperture imprint, set up to release conceptual experimental works, 13th Smallest is the debut album from Sheffield-born, south-London based Nigel Truswell, who has previously recorded as Alkin Engineering and WG Machines and released music on Static Caravan, Unlabel and October Man Recordings amongst others. Truswell lists influences ranging from funk, Motown and hip-hop to labels such as Warp, Skam or Ninja Tune. The dense atmospherics in which the ten tracks of this album are steeped in certainly evoke the starker, darker side of Autechre (think the industrial undertones of Tri Repetae blended with the organic formations of Chiastic Slide and drastically slowed down and twisted), brushed with isolationist hues reminiscent of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2 and dense electronics worthy of Bola or Freeform. The Autechre connection hangs over Oberman Knocks even more as it is apparently after receiving encouragement from Sean Booth and Mira Calix’s Chantal Passamonte that Truswell began making music.
There is very little to hang on to other than the haunting electronic sound waves and chaotic beats here. Melodies come in short supply, and rarely materialise beyond a few lines at a time before vanishing entirely, and the sonic structure doesn't vary much from one track to the next. Working with a rather rudimentary set up consisting of three pieces of software, a minidisc recorder and a cheap microphone, Truswell creates impressive textures, which he weaves into dark slabs of mechanical-sounding electronica and develops over the course of the whole album. Right from the onset of Bronic to the last moments of Turton Hacks, Truswell relentlessly dredges the same groove, yet he manages to constantly bring something fresh and new to his soundscapes, whether it is the distant shouts of Motor Sepple Freak, the comparatively spartan glow of Indomine Rhittiger Plans By Four and Walker's Ret-Ret Hive, which sound like a deconstructed Burial played at a tenth of the speed through a contaminated sound system, the haunting drone that appears to tie Lackey Remand together, or the aural beauty of Beckerton’s First Draft. With very little to work from, and a constrained environment, Truswell develops surprisingly evocative and cinematic compositions, and manages to succeeds in creating a convincing narrative throughout.
13th Smallest may not be a record to put in every hands, and its dark seismic beats and claustrophobic soundscapes may disconcert, but Nigel Truswell has certainly created with this first album a strong and memorable piece, which, if it's anything to go by, promises much not only for Oberman Knocks’ future, but also for that of Aperture.
This is a very strange body of work. If you're into those ‘file under’ comparisons, you'd better make a new category, unless you've already got an ‘avant-garde post-music electronica’ section. Rejecting any traditional notion of time signature, harmony or song structure, 13th Smallest is a collection of ominous synth moans, irregular beats and scattered clicks and bumps, building and emerging from the darkness like an evil robot. The result, though, is a rewarding and interesting album, worth a listen if you yearn for something different. Listening to it is an unsettling and occasionally frightening experience: it doesn't sound like it was made by a human. It's like the creakings and clunkings of the hull of a massive spacecraft, a Phillip Glass symphony played in a scrapyard, an android Aphex Twin on 33 instead of 45. You've probably realised by now, but there will never be an Oberman Knocks Week on X Factor.
Experimental music is all about just that — experimentation.
It’s about thinking outside the square, approaching sound as art, as more than just instruments, words, and music. Oberman Knocks, a.k.a Sheffield-born Nigel Truswell, has grasped this idea, and the result is 13th Smallest, a release that will confuse, confront, and take listeners well out of their comfort zones.
This is sound that is intended more to be played at art installations than on radio. Produced with only a few pieces of software alongside a minidisc player and a cheap microphone, Oberman Knocks has emerged with a haunting, sterile record perfect for horror movie soundtracks, and while apparently influenced by funk and hip-hop as much as anything else, it sounds at times like the cutting room floor of a Bloc Party album, where snippets of vocal, keyboard and synthesizers litter your headspace.
Take five big leaps out of the square, turn around, close your eyes, and let Oberman Knocks reduce you and all the noise in your world to dust.