Reviews

Aural Aggravation

Experimental and underground music, particularly of the electronic persuasion is a broad field, but, it would seem, a small world.

During lockdown, the Nim Brut label hosted a series of virtual gigs, where performers would submit sets accompanied by visuals, and the resulting streams were varied and eclectic, in the best possible way, presenting the full breadth of the melting pot of a diverse and disparate milieu. As is so often the case with events of this ilk, everyone was not lonely accommodating, but welcoming toward one another, celebrating the differences in style and approach.

Feast 5, back in August of 2021, was a belter, and not only because as half of …(Something) Ruined I got to unleash new brutal noise in a safe environment, but got to do so alongside some remarkable artists, notably Omnibael, who have featured a number of times here. Also on the bill was a performance so brief as to barely be an interlude, something I described as a ‘shifting wave of glitchronic ambience’ courtesy of Neuro… No Neuro, of whom I knew nothing, until today, when on the arrival of Faces & Fragments in my inbox, I learn that NNN is ‘a moniker of the electronic musician Kirk Markarian, an avid synthesist, drummer, abstract painter, and graphic designer residing on the alluvial plain of the Sonoran Desert, in dry and dusty Tucson, Arizona’.

The title is a fitting summary of the album, both its input and outputs, and the lived experience of listening to the thirteen pieces, which are as much collages as compositions.

As the liner notes explain, ‘Each track illuminates fragments of memory and speech, as they wander out of focus in the growing aperture of time.’

As such, each piece is formed, sculpted and layered, from an array of sounds and sources, snippets, and scatterings, fleeting and ephemeral; chiming notes ring out over soft washes, sporadic glops and plops, like drops of water falling in a cave, overlaid with brief fragments of voices. On ‘Everybody is Out to Get You’, those voices slow, distort, blur, into a nightmarish nagging. It drags on the psyche, against a skittering, jarring backdrop what warps and tugs unsettlingly, and makes for awkward, queasy listening.

Neuro… No Neuro’s own comments on the album’s formulation and function bring us closer to the heart of the state of confusion it creates, explaining, “Each track shares the ‘fragments’ of speech/memory, the growing aperture of time and loss of thought. While forming sentences via type has not declined (because there is time available), speech and recollection are steadily decaying into simplified phrases and poor playback for quick address.’

As William Burroughs said, the function of writing is to ‘make us aware of what we know and don’t know we know’, and this was particularly pertinent in the context of the cut-up texts he produced, essentially collages of other texts designed to recreate the real-time experience of memory and sensory awareness, and the simultaneity of events. We do not live in linear time; we experience multiple sensations simultaneously; thoughts, sounds, conversations, things happening around us all occur on the same timeline, in layers, and our memories record these experiences. This is the sensation that Neuro… No Neuro recreates with Faces & Fragments, from the stop start jittering of ‘Slice of Mind’, to the trickling sedation of ‘And the Energy Goes Back to the Ground’.

The faces blur into anonymity after a while; people look alike and are strange or strangely familiar, and things can get confusing after a while. Faces & Fragments may not – and probably doesn’t sound just like your internal monologue or the soundtrack to your life, but structurally, the resemblances are clear once you step back and reflect. Our thoughts are a jumble of intrusions and overlaps, with memories and recollections triggered by the most random associations and events, sometimes with seemingly no trigger at all, and all flitting through at the same time as you’re watching TV or scrolling through social media shit on your phone as messages and emails ping in and there are conversations and the radio or TV is dribbling away while dinner’s bubbling away in the oven. Life never stops: it happens constantly and all at once, overlapping, overwhelming. Faces & Fragments is a slice of life. Christopher Nosnibor.

Link to original review > HERE

Monolith Cocktail

Transducing an organized bauble of fizzled, blurred and decaying memories and recollections into a crisper hallucination of mostly clean tubular icicles, crystal bulb arpeggiator, primal pops and liquids, and a general cosmic oddness, the arid-plane based Tuscon, Arizona synthesist, drummer and artist Kirk Markarian delivers an electronic mirage with his new album, Faces & Fragments.  

Under the binary Neuro…No Neuro alias Kirk, we’re told, ‘illuminates fragments of memory and speech, as they wander out of focus in the growing aperture of time’.  This translates into 12 tracks – the final track and thirteenth, ‘And The Energy Goes Back To The Ground’, is the one exception (relatively a sci-fi ambient etude with orbiting synthesised waves) – of gate-clipped and interrupted Mouse On Mars bleeps, Sakamoto’s most far-out early 80s experiments on his new computer, cult library music, a futuristic scoring Vangelis and slurred, slowed down voices from inside the machine.

Fragments then of fuzzy hive buzzes, cartoon sounds and sub-bass grumbles flicker in and out of Kirk’s mind. A trip switch makes sure that the flow is, although mostly liquefied and spongy in sonic shaping, constantly stopped: Just as one detuned loop, Forbidden Planet power source, blob-y collection of notes, clicks and retro computer calculus appears it’s soon cut off. A strangely disrupted soundtrack appears like a futuristic dream from a broken feed. Kirk does however shine, illuminate with certain clarity on the most clean if weird of radiating abstract electronic navigations.

It’s as much down to his painter’s eye as it is his ear that these electronic episodes prompt the ‘synesthete’ in me: a mix of pastel-shaded pink oblongs and washed-out red cylinders and round bottomed shapes if you must know; not unlike Kirk’s album artwork itself. Colours, shapes, memory chips have never sounded quite so interesting.

Link to original review > HERE

Igloo Magazine

A practical and physiol release into the ether from alluvial Sonoran plainsman Neuro… No Neuro (aka Kirk Markarian.) An invaluable luminesce is created in specific increments blurring the lines between vocabulary and time or loss of thought through neurological flux and context wandering in and out the focal aperture.

Faces & Fragments examines Arcadian emissions reverberating into the breathless right away in the opening “Always Empty Up There,” creating and finishing ophthalmic sentences with clerical specification in “Everybody Is Out to Get You.” “Forgetting to Remember” transfers the shrine into personal favorite track “Listless Wander,” while other highlights, including the expansive breadth “Opening Up About It,” offers unpredictabilities along the way to a limpid environment in the final “And The Energy Goes Back To The Ground.”

Indeed, those who listen closely to Neuro… No Neuro’s ruminative plateaus featured on Faces & Fragments understand the omniscience as the artistry within each track shares its lush fragmented elements absorbed in such preciously decayed increments.

Link to original review > HERE

Beach Sloth

Neuro…No Neuro features a degree of surrealism on the soothing wash of “Faces & Fragments”. Melodic fragments, disjointed rhythms, and ambient interludes emerge all the time. None of these overstay their welcome. The mixture of the sound recalls Markus Popp’s one-off work of So. While there is a bit of a disjointed quality about the work, this anchors it within the emotional. Layers intermingle to create a tapestry of sound. Beyond the glitch effects there is a love of the layered approach, of the classic tenor for these machines that have souls.

An uncanny valley aspect informs the opener “Always Empty Up There” where nods to vaporwave emerge. Keys filter ever downwards on the strangely tragic “Dump The Mental Pan”. Various effects bounce off each other with “Forgetting To Remember” where a semblance of a groove is established, featuring wonderful low-end elements. Unexpected blooms on “Listless Wander” help to give it a sense of uncertainty. Like circling down a drain comes the magical “Opening Up About It”. “Persona(Ae)” serves as the true highlight of the album, filled with such heart and soul to it. Anxiety reigns supreme on the unstable “Side Effects Of Avoiding Convulsions”. Lush chords hit with a tenderness on “Take A Step Outside Of Yourself”. Going full circle “And The Energy Goes Back To The Ground” ends things with a fractured take on easy-listening music.

“Faces & Fragments” shows off Neuro…No Neuro’s uncanny ability to create a series of sounds akin to pure poetry.

Link to original review > HERE

Rockerilla