Take the mask of a story and place it on another face. But lets do it on a meta scale with the brutal dystopic story of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and place it in Dubai and make it a metaphor for globalisation. Such could be the basis of the concept for Nettle’s El Resplandor: The Shining in Dubai which combines acoustic instruments, electronics, traditional and classical from both western and middle-Eastern sources. It is an album that also combines differing strategic approaches, avant garde, compositional, improvised, programming of a Max/MSP plugin called Sufi, sampling and quite heavy studio editing in a digital environment. Nettle is the band vehicle of Jace Clayton, aka dj/Rupture, who is no newcomer to cross cultural engagement and the album is open to descriptions that evoke the hybrid, global culture inclinations, translation and displacement of narratives into disparate settings creating vividly. The ideas of cultural integrity, in the generic frames of folk, indigenous or any other formulation of claim of origins are made highly problematic as the fusion breaches the divides between classical, popular, technological, acoustic, live, studio and numerous other focal points for positing integrity of either the individual within culture or specific cultures as indicative of the identity of the artist or the work. But this sort of quasi intellectual babble could go on for quite a bit…
However Nettle in this incarnation is composed of the following elements, Jennifer Jones and Brent Arnold on cello, Abdelhak Rahal on violin, Khalid Bennaji on guembri, Lindsay Cuff on vocals, Andy Moor on guitar and Clayton on electronics. It is the digital processing that makes the sound environment vividly interesting beyond the radically open frame of the mix of ideas. The Sufi plugin that was developed for live performances by the group no doubt will open up for the technically minded and when it eventually does become available as a free set of audio tools it shall no doubt find a willing audience for dissemination. The album opens with the title track as an ethereal invocation, consisting of voice alone, as if opening a brief space reflective as slightly otherworldly. Then it moves to cello and guembri track ‘Radio Flower’ with it’s distortions, feedback and sonic glitches and static understated. ‘There is a hole in the middle of the world filled with languages that don’t have names’ takes the instruments and diffuses them via effects, sampling, atonal distortion into atypical drones. ‘Espina’ takes more classical and folk approaches from the instruments and combines electronics specifically a slightly plonking elastic bass and wobbly synth line. ‘Empty quarters’ is solo instruments distorted and interrupted by electronics in skittish mode with the rudiments of hip-hop beats poking through the frame. ‘Simoon (wasp wind)’ moves the mode into blown out free improvised noise which seems as if it contains improvisation but the effect could be in the construct and the vocals as wayward samples tricked out with guitar tipping them into an effects melange. ‘Red Masque Ticker’ is an ultra minimal piece that bears listening to with headphones just to check if there is anything really going on. The back to a reprise of the title track with ‘El Resplendoe:In the Marsh’, vocals layered and studio tricks are minimally and discretely omnipresent. ‘Shining One’ moves back to a ponderous bass and acoustic instruments in a melancholy almost folk acoustic track with a errant electronic bass. ‘Kahlid’s song’ which closes the album holds an eastern jazz feel, as the guembri solos with atmospheric enhancement in the recording, only to be joined by wailing cellos and guitar sculpting the air before closure on guembri.
Clayton has certainly advanced on this album, tooled up on the software front and broken with the mould of sampling cross cultural wizz to include adventures in genre smashing and integration and raising the conceptual foundations of the work to a level that can work beyond the boundaries of the DJ school in its strict sense.
Innerversitysound
