Review: Jeph Jerman + Tim Olive – Pancakes
Unsettled materials and overblown capture, with each piece recorded by one participant and mixed by the other.
Released on Buried In Slag And Debris.
It’s a tidy premise: two 15-minute tracks, each recorded by one participant and mixed by the other. Of course, it’s impossible to know whose sensibilities are poking through at any given moment. Both sides are blown-out documentations of unsettled materials, with Jerman using percussion, metal objects and prepared turntables while Olive opts for magnetic pickups, metal objects and circuits. Yet the flavour of the over-blowing is different on each side; “Pancakes 1” has a distortion that fizzes particularly in the upper frequencies, latching onto whistling feedback, denting the stretches of clattering, cupboard-rummage attack. In contrast, “Pancakes 2” sounds like it’s writhing out of a small radio, with textural collisions squished into a hapless speaker that can’t physically accommodate them. Is the recordist or the mixer responsible for this buckled fidelity? Perhaps a blend of both? As the name suggests, Pancakes delights in this very ambiguity: the mangling of materials, of roles, of discernible sound sources into two congealed and ungainly pucks.
Both pieces swerve between states of feverish activity and buzzing lull. The whole thing commences with the clatter of searching for something important and having limited time to do it: hard surfaces are swirled together by manic hands, with the squeak of flimsy metal appendages detectable amidst the flurry. Around the midway mark, we hear groans that presumably emanate from prepared turntables forced against their own rotation, the resultant snarls sounding akin to agitated sleep-murmuring. Yet there are also the lengthy passages of feedback, during which all is melted into a liminal sweeping across the high frequencies. Frantic panting becomes an endlessly held breath, and time ceases to pass. The second piece runs in vague structural parallel to the first, with a lumpy heave of clang and feedback (sometimes reminiscent of a pulped guitar solo) eventually vacating to reveal a magma-flow of overdriven rumble. It feels like being dragged through the base of an air vent by a giant magnet, flattened against the metal flooring and then flattened further still, as if subjecting the listener to the same vigorous processing as undergone by the audio itself.
