Fred Frith / Bob Ostertag / Phil Minton ‎– 'Voice Of America' (Rift)

The melting radio pictured on the cover is a pretty accurate image for the sounds heard in the grooves - a mishmash of tape manipulations, found recordings, and radio static blended seamlessly with guitar, synth, homemade instruments and some vocals. It's two concert recordings, the first side being a duo of Frith and Ostertag and the flip adding Minton. The tone is, as you can imagine, pretty far from the more structured tonal material Frith was doing around the same time on Cheap at Half Price and very much descended from the modernist quilt of Cage's Variations IV. This isn't music for everyone, and even improv-heads might struggle to understand the interplay here, at least on the first side where warm, thick bands of the manipulated source material are often indistinguishable from the 'instruments' at play, though it doesn't matter much to me. This is highly politicised material (of course!), stemming from the Rock in Opposition thing I guess, because Ostertag made most of the recordings in Nicaragua and blends them in with recordings of Let's Make a Deal, and some chatter from Merlin Olson of the L.A. Rams. I know this because the liner notes delineate all of the source material and even 'lyrics', which is an impressive feat for an album of field/found recordings. The b-side, as a trio with Minton, is more sparse and 'classically' improvisational, at least in a Derek Bailey kind of way. It starts and stops in fits and feels more like the disjointed series of challenges that it is, at least compared to side one's thematic cohesion. Minton does some traditional voice work at the end but otherwise is happy to assimilate into Frith and Ostertag's cacophony. Frith only plays 'homemade instruments' here and they are skiffle-band sounding, with resonating thumps and plucks, suggesting maybe a wooden box with nails sticking out of it. Voice of America was, I believe, the name of a CIA-backed radio station, and this propagandistic element is turned inside-out through the extremely musical avant-garde, a technique which retains inspiration even thirty-three years later.

Cassis Cornuta - '25 jaar de gebraden zwaan zingt' (Ultra Eczema)

The low countries are full of weird obscure electronic musicians whose early experiments have been seeing the light of day in recent times - for more, see the Edmund de Deyster record, when we get there, also on Ultra Eczema. Cassis Cornuta is a synth/electronics goofball who is still active in the Antwerp underground, though these recordings were made in 1985 for a radio show which is still running. Cornuta, whose real name is Daniel de Wereldvermaarde, mines some Anton Bruhin territory though with a significantly less refined approach. There's rhythms made from the difference between turntable needle and dictaphone static, with bursts of space between them to provide a curious momentum. The tracks are all untitled and flow together well - the middle of side one is probably the most feisty bit, where there's various objects bashing together to be heard, and they all are given their own voice. It's a no-style style, a celebration of cheap mass-produced consumer electronics and the pure, childlike experimental approach of shoving fingers and toys between the gears. There's nothing digital about this type of electronic music - it's a pure product of the early 80s, the Pride of the 80s Radio Hut magic. Some of the murky bumps on side two start to resemble a steel drum, though the resemblance to anything human is superficial. It's a good listen - difficult and harsh but not annoyingly so, and Cornuta resists the temptation to mix everything into a thick soup. If anything, this music is very democratising, in that it welcomes the listener to experiment, maybe even generating sounds from the very equipment on which the record is being listened to. This isn't to say Cornuta is an idiot savant or naive; there's a real beauty in what's here - a strong sense of curation, of not just selecting sounds but expressing himself through the tension. I've seen Cornuta live and he was more invested in analogue synths and complicated electronics, but this pause-button madness is much more charming of a clamor.