Grip Of Inertia Reviewed

The fine folks at The Esoterrorist have given a review of the latest Jake Vida release, grip of inertia.

Here’ the LINK.

Canadian noise artist Jake Vida has returned from a 4.5-year stint with a new brutal onslaught of harsh, intense noise à la mid-90′s Merzbow in his digital release Grip of Inertia (Pointless Blank Records).  The last we’d heard from the Ontario artist was in 2007 on a couple of CD-r’s and a cassette compilation, and while the break in output hasn’t really been explained, Inertia definitely proves itself worth the wait by the first track alone.  Vida wastes no time in getting straight to business in the first hyperactive track “Habitual 1,” which churns and grinds metallic blasts reminiscent of rubbing sandpaper on a microphone ran through 4 different distortions (which I am certain has been done).  The assault is constant with no room for breathers and successfully remains active and elaborate, rather than repetitious or tedious.

Inertia was recorded live in the studio by Vida and plays through in a raw, straight-forward approach, not unlike in the origins of harsh noise composition and improvisation, giving this a truly “noise roots” feel.  The simplicity to such a gigantic explosion of acerbity is definitely a refreshing treat that brings a smile to the face.  The (non-)music’s dynamism isn’t lost in the attack, either.  There are plenty of recognizable details and samples that heighten these pieces above their influences to which they respectfully pay their homage.

The record so far is being exclusively released via Bandcamp, with the price for download optional to the consumer.  Recommended!

Digital Downloads VS Physical Sales

 When I first got into the noise scene around 2004, I had the hope and dream that I could do this for a living. Create a label and sell music to people, seemed simple enough. I ran Pointless Blank Rec (PBR) for a couple years with very little success. My sales were always depressing, regardless of the release. Sometimes a small name  would sell like hot cakes, and the bigger names would sit on my shelf collecting dust. I couldn’t see much rhyme or reason to the sale stats. My frustration grew, and turned into anger towards much of the scene. I grew very bitter seeing tons of labels with slapped together art with mediocre noise selling out 100 copies in a couple days, when I struggled to move 10.

I thought perhaps it was a traffic issue. The noise scenes memory tends to be only as long as the front page of the forum. That once your announcement topic hit page 2, your sales stopped. So I created a site, pointlessblank.com, with the misguided idea of running an online noise zine. This did not help with sales, but did help with traffic. So traffic wasn’t the issue. I grew lazy, and the site died.

I would like to believe it was not the music or ascetic of PBR releases. I stand by all of my releases as being very good, except for some of the early Jake Vida releases which were less than stellar. I also always get lots of compliments regarding the cover art, still to this day.

I think a portion of PBR’s lack of success was shipping. If you don’t know, I live in Canada. We have very expensive postage rates here. To the point I often thought to rent a PO BOX in Buffalo to make monthly runs. For example, when I released the Kakerlak – bathtub rendezvous cdr, it cost me on average $8 to mail it to the States. You can see that really doesn’t leave much room for profit, in fact I often lost money. This also was an issue finding distributors. Really hard to convince someone to take 10 copies of something with a MSRP of $10, with a 50% discount with a cost of $30 to ship it. A $70 investment for the distro, with only a potential profit of $20.

I came to the realization that there just wasn’t enough margin with CDR releases to make any money. People will scoff at a $15 CDR, which is where I really needed it to come out on top. This is when I started making and selling shirts. These had a larger margin where the shipping wouldn’t eat up all my hard work. Setting this up took a lot of time and money. Built a couple presses which didn’t offer the registration I really needed. In the end bought a two colour press and flash dryer. The shirts sold well and gave me some hope. People still seemed bummed out about the high prices. In retrospect, I should of found a partner in the states to manage all sales and shipping (doing some more shirts soon, any takers?). This would of helped keep the prices lower.

Or in the end, it could be that people just didn’t dig what I was doing. Or that the scene is so small that it can’t support and offer a living income.

Once I gave up on the idea selling music for a living, I started Art As Intent (A2I) and stopped PBR. If I could not sell my music, and that profit was no longer a factor, why not just give it away for free? When I did The Rita shirts, I released 3 CDRs to give away free with the orders. This was also a way to snuff out some complaints about the high shirt costs from customers.

It worked really well, people appreciated it very much. Shipping was still killing me though. Even on the shirts, my margins were really small. Would cost me around $10-$15 to ship a shirt if I recall correctly. So I decided to say screw it all and asked myself, “What can I do to avoid these postage rates?” The  answer was DIGITAL.

If your ultimate goal is to have you music heard and you’re no longer concerned with making money, then digital really is the way to go. If I can compare and relate digital downloads to physical sales of things I’ve released, the difference is huge. When before I found it hard to sell 10 CDRs, I now have a 100 downloads. Not everything has that many downloads, some are really low. For example Jake Vida-Grip Of Inertia has a whopping (and depressing) 14 downloads (not counting streaming), though 5 years ago, I would of been floored to  have 14 orders. While Flesh Coffin’s album, Night Work, has over 100 downloads, plus the 20 hard copies I gave away for free. In this regard, by changing my goal, my label has never been more successful.

There are large stigmas that many people have concerning download only releases. Most review outlets in our small scene wont review them, some don’t regard them real releases, etc. I don’t agree with them, however I do understand them. Some of these are hard to overcome in a scene obsessed with packaging. In fact some of my most successful PBR releases were the ones with elaborate packaging.

It really clicked for me when I misread a Marshall McLuhan quote, “The message is the medium” as “The message is the message”. This led me down a train of thought that gave birth to the main ideas and concepts behind A2I today. Content above all else. Music as music, not a multimedia art piece. The pure sound as the art, without some physical fetish or materialistic desire altering the listening experience.

Getting  money out of the picture has really helped me see things better, reground me to why I  love noise so much, and erase my frustration with not getting heard. Releasing and creating music seems so much more pure and right to me now than it ever did.

New Jake Vida album – Grip Of Inertia (A2I 11)

New album is finished, trying out bandcamp for this release. It’s pay what you want for the download. I’ve set it up so it will also accept a zero amount, so you can still get it for free.

http://artasintent.bandcamp.com/album/grip-of-inertia

The return of Jake Vida, first new recorded material in over 4 1/2 years. Heavily influenced by 90s era Merzbow, Jake Vida sets out to find what made him fall in love with noise in the first place. Recorded live in studio September 18 to December 12 2011. Cover art by Jake Vida.

-

 

Brandal & Remlap – Selective Timestream reviewed by Heathen Harvest

http://heathenharvest.org/2011/12/01/brandal-remlap-selective-timestream/

For the experienced bud smoker, the most comfortable stretch of intoxication is the first two hours after the smoke has cleared. I suggest a two-hour track for such a time when you seriously need to think some thoughts, such as this one. This is mighty hefty entry, the fruits of the labor of Canadian Noisemaker Jake Vida and Andreas Brandal of Flesh Coffin fame, a collaboration that sees the two men exploring some very serious depths, but coming back with something as serious as the violent nature of the bile they decided to call “Selective Timestream”.

I don’t know what the hell was being thought or considered in the selection of the image that was chosen to include in the free zip folder you can get directly from Pointless Blank/Art As Intent. It’s a collage of aerial shots of various different landscapes. It looks like an uncut postcard sheet. But the sound… man… heavy.

The type of noise we get here sounds decidedly analog, there is a bit of discernible synthesis in there, but it serves as a lead into or refresher to the many long stretches of soulless rumblings, high-statics, sometimes paired up, often times lone beasts within the one beast that is the entire track.

The makeup of the material used to make this huge piece remain a mystery to me, but I could swear that the more interesting bits are some menacingly processed vocals. These appear toward the 40 minute mark, and are hopelessly cryptic in their mangled glory, if they indeed ARE vocals… When you get into the second hour, things become a little different, but if you have not been discouraged/bored/distracted, then there are some much needed tone changes, some of the best being the left/right panning of some more synth-sounding hits, sounding almost percussive, some filter sweeps, and even what I suspect is a sort of duelling-banjos moment between the Andreas and Jake. One burst of noise comes at one level, the other interrupts, both hit it at once, there are a couple of awkward silences, but the thing never wavers.

You have to be quite entranced to take this in one entire sitting. I don’t know what is the correct mindset exactly, but the sheer volume of this work is certainly not for weaklings. This is for all intensive purposes, a really fucked up journey. One I personally was happy to take. This would actually be pretty killer on a road trip, preferably along some really empty and maddening bit of desert. On another personal note: if you can experience this work the whole way through, you will return a much more empowered person. Believe you me, the most torturous thing about this free release is not the noise itself, but the shit that will no doubt come at you from within your own mind. Be forewarned!

Rating: 4/5

Can download the album here http://pointlessblank.wordpress.com/2011/08/09/a2i-9-brandal-remlap-selective-timestream/

Jake Vida Returning

A2I #10 REMLAP & WEREWOLF JERUSALEM-COLLABORATION

REMLAP & WEREWOLF JERUSALEM-COLLABORATION
Another out-of-print PBR release.

HERE FOR FREE DOWNLOAD: http://www.mediafire.com/?lzxmgrr06ono9z1

Info via crucial blast, who still have some copies, HERE TO BUY:

Here’s a raging collaboration between Werewolf Jerusalem and Remlap, both heavy hitters in the field of harsh noise obliteration. There seems to be a nonstop stream of Werewolf Jerusalem releases coming out lately, but hell, we not even close to tiring of Richard Ramirez’s blackened static drone project. And teamed up with the Canadian harsh noise outfit Remlap, they deliver another monolithic drone-noise slab that thoroughly blotted out our brains.
The disc features two tracks, each one coming in at just a little over half an hour. The first is a colossal wall of churning low end black static roar, pierced by shards of feedback every few minutes that scream out of the maelstrom. For the most part, it’s a swirling, impenetrable wall of black crunch until the last few minutes, when it suddenly goes quiet, the roar abruptly replaced by a muted, washed out distant rush of static, like the sound of far off waves crashing on a shore, slowly fading into obliveon. The second track is a murkier, more bass-heavy wall, at first almost totally stripped of higher frequencies, a boiling black ocean of sonic magma filled with garbled vokills and blasts of foul septic hiss, suddenly surging into crushing volume six minutes in, erupting into a monstrous level of sonic violence with the higher frequencies suddenly screaming through. It gets pretty fucking vicious for awhile, then descends into minimal crackle and hiss at the end.
This powerful dose of blast-trace was limited to just fifty copies and is now sold out from the label; we nabbed the last available copies, so HNW fanatics need to move quickly. The pro-pressed disc comes in a black and white Xerox cover and is housed in a 6″x9″ plastic zip lock sleeve.

 

A2I #9 BRANDAL & REMLAP – SELECTIVE TIMESTREAM

BRANDAL & REMLAP – SELECTIVE TIMESTREAM
A collaborative effort between Remalp (Jake Vida) and Andreas Brandal (Flesh Coffin). One 2 hour track. A very wide range of sounds, I don’t wish to flavour the listening experience any more, so I will skip the abstract descriptions. Best experienced in a quiet room through head-phones.

The file was too large for mediafire which I usually use. So I tried another site. Please let me know if there’s any issues downloading the file.

Added 2nd download link incase of problems.

New link: http://www.fileserve.com/file/2Tgx7ZM/Brandal_&_Remlap_-_Selective_Timestream.zip
Mirror 1: http://www.filedropper.com/a2i9brandalremlap-selectivetimestream
Mirror 2: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=G0KOJED3
Stream: http://soundcloud.com/artasintent/selective-timestream

Pirate’s Life Part 01: Bore-Dry Ice and Drillbits

While doing some vanity searching online, I came across a couple mp3 blogs that have uploaded some older out of print Pointless Blank Rec releases. Thought I’d share some of them.

Part 01 is Bore’s Dry Ice and Drillbits CDR, which was released in 2007, though work on it began over a year before that. Bore is now better known as Infirmary, and before both of these as Directbrainstimulation, aka DBS. This release started out as a split between me (as JV) and DBS. It took on many forms over a couple months. Was going to be a CD, then a tape, a collab, then shifted to just a solo Bore release. I am not sure why I pulled out of it as a split. Then there were maybe 2-3 versions of the final tracks. Even alternate artwork done by Tisbor (which I can’t find unfortunately) and a remix track from nxfxtxex. Once said and done, probably enough material from both of us for a couple releases.

Here is the blog post with download link.

 

A2I #8 REMLAP-ARCANE PATHS OF AVERSION

Released back in 2007 on PBR, was a reworking of the “Love Is Always Love” material. Was into this concept of using the output of one recording session as the source material for the next and was also in a weird place in my head at the time, overly turned inward. The density, stark artwork, and ambiguous title, all a result of both these factors. Both the sound and mind in a degrading loop inward. Oddly enough, the setup used for this recording was the same set up used for all the Ten Arrows era material. Released side by side with the Fossils/Sleeping Police/Jake Vida split, the JV track on that being titled optimistically as “Turning Points” (available in JV collections 1) in stark opposition to APoA.

Free download mp3 vbr:
http://www.mediafire.com/?u3o444yhhqw6x8n

 

A2I #7 JAKE VIDA-COLLECTIONS 1

A2I #7 JAKE VIDA-COLLECTIONS 1
Collecting the JV track from the split tape with Love Letters on Loveless Tapes from 2006. The Terror Stricken EP on Cloud Valley from 2007, with remix track by Scott Johnson of Fossils fame. And lastly the JV track from the 3 way split with Sleeping Police and Fossils, which was originally released in three different versions, one version each from Pointless Blank, Knife in the Toaster, and Middle James Co.
http://www.mediafire.com/?eza71ax7eep3k5z

More of these soon.