brittle feebling by Bruckmann/Djll/Heule/Nishi-Smith
Brittle Feebling prickles and bleats, an abrasive delicacy. Fricative rasp and withheld breath seethe together in a discomfiting cuddle. Perfectly respectable instruments born of classicisms both Euro and Nippon are recast, glanced at askance, as the misbegotten miscreants of Imperialisms they (also) are.
"Good, tough improv--spiky and uncomfortable here, almost--almost--calm and expansive there, active and needle-sharp while allowing air into the room." - Brian Olewnick
"...a free-play prime example of fruitist Art Brut, full of scratches, smudges, dark spots, moaning, scratching, mostly unidentifiable and anyway indescribable sounds. Served as a puff cake decorated with barbed wire, which you can easily translate with Fiddlesticks... There is hardly a sound that has not come under a steam roller, that has not leaked miserably, that no mortar or meat grinder has tampered with, that gets away unsplit, unswashed." - Rigo Dittmann / Bad Alchemy (via Google Translate)
"...every moment has serious weight; all the breaths, squeaks, taps, and wheezes feel monumental in the context of such overwhelming sparseness." Marc Masters / The Best Experimental Music on Bandcamp: October 2020
"An impressive array of extended breathing, bowing and percussive techniques, healthy curiosity as well as a strong sense of deep listening are a given in this acoustic, delicate yet abrasive sonic meeting... This meeting is focused on fricative rasp and withheld breath, and always aims at expanding its timbral palette and exposing new sonorities..." - Eyal Hareuveni / Salt Peanuts
"you should only tune in if you enjoy mysterious and slow-moving action sports, performed to ceremonial rules that no-one understands." - Ed Pinsent / The Sound Projector
"a small orchestra dedicated to deconstruction" - Mario Biserni / Sands-Zine (via Google Translate)
"...in this 'mayhem' there is also control and conversation between the players. It is acoustic noise and at the same, it is not. All of that makes this quite a captivating disc!" Frans de Waard / Vital Weekly
"Four exceptionally listening and responsive musicians with a totally open mind... The neighbor on the floor above my writing point, called and wondered if it was me who played music or if it was her heat pump that had started making hitherto unknown sounds." - Tor Hammerø (via Google Translate)
"Its like entering an unknown living room and sitting down on the couch, awkwardly because everyone is just kind of...sitting there....and then suddenly they all turn and their faces are all zombified and bestial and you run out and into the kitchen and then can't get out so you open a door and run down into the cellar (thinking it leads out of course) but instead it leads to Plato's cave, and here are the four of you chained to the wall, and this is what it sounds like." - Jorge Boehringer
Credits
Kyle Bruckmann: oboe/English horn
Tom Djll: trumpet
Jacob Felix Heule: floor tom
Kanoko Nishi-Smith: koto
recorded May 12 and June 24, 2018 in Berkeley, California
recorded, mixed, and mastered by Jacob Felix Heule
drawings and layout by Theresa Currie
License
CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. See the Creative Commons website for details.
Jacob Felix Heule is an improvising percussionist with a special interest in friction techniques. His music is shaped by intuition, listening, and following where the sounds lead. He embraces limited instrumentation - usually playing just a single drum - as a commitment to exploring the depth of his instruments.