Its first quarter presents a trio of forays in suspense.
Bassline squares up like an epic psych-funk grinder, with a moody guitar line traversed by ticking drum patterns and faint electric crackle. In no time the guitar is staggering and stammering under the duress of echo and distortion, and over-run with percussive electronics and the first of the voices massing in the music’s head. The mood has quickly become more trepidatious. We’re deeper underground; it’s gloomier, wetter.
Shred propulsively ratchets up the tension and menace. Glazily tentative xylophone is played against slashing, nervy cello. The voices are more strangulated and sick now. Flutes and chimes evoke the same kind of beautiful, contaminated efflorescence which is pictured on the LP’s front cover.
Voice Of The Spider makes easier progress across this cavernous, shadowy, dripping terrain, with funky pads and Nasty, eighties, No Wave electric bass; woozy chimes, non-plussed keys, singing-in-tongues.

Pink Mist marks an arrival, or unbottling, with annunciatory church-organ and choral voices from the off, and a newly relaxed, head-nodding kosmische rhythm.

Mandarin is a short, beat-less and voice-free interlude for piano and bass. It’s reflective and nostalgic, ambivalent and inconclusive, with a lovely snatch of melody. A bridge half-way.

Would You Like A Vampire is a triumphant, mesmerizing go at New Folk, with strummed acoustic guitar, descant song, and jazzily restless drum programming (including a tasty bass-bin trembler). Amazingly, Conrad Standish is joined at the mic by none other than Bridget St John. Together they sing ‘Earth is Paradise’ so repeatedly and tremulously — and the song is cut off so abruptly at the end — it seems as if the verb is teetering on the past tense, and hymn fading into valediction and catastrophe.

Similarly Storm Rips Banana Tree begins idyllically enough, with a CS-&-Kreme-style raga… before something like an immense, obliterative drill starts up. Harpsichord and organ — by James Rushford — and flutes, and clapping, distant chanting and insectile percussion steadily leaven the dread, till finally all that is left is lapping water.
It’s an epic, deeply immersive, compelling, thought-provoking, twenty-minute finale… the coup de grâce.

In improvisation there are no mistakes, only missed opportunities. Groupshow found their first opportunity in the routines of live performance and they used this opportunity to break with these routines. The trio consisting of Jan Jelinek, Hanno Leichtmann and Andrew Pekler came together in the context of Kosmischer Pitch, playing live versions of the music from Jelinek’s 2005 studio album of that name. During this project, the musical interaction between the three participants quickly emancipated itself from the original programme, departing from fixed roles and finding a distinct form in constant change.

Groupshow sessions – rehearsal, concert or recording – are always improvised. The interplay of the various sound sources, converging from the directions of “electronics”, “percussion” and “guitar”, does not follow the Krautrock wave logic of crescendo and morendo. Jelinek, Leichtmann and Pekler have established a method of transparent density in which links and breaks are not concealed but remain audible. The music works through attraction and repulsion, with a loosely organized structure that always leaves enough room for the next intervention.

The principle here, repeated even in the smallest units, is that of duration. Groupshow think of their music in terms of an installation: no starting point, no dramaturgy, and ideally no end. Concerts take place not raised up on a podium, but in the middle of the room on a level with the audience, who only enter the space with the musicians and instruments once their interaction is already underway. In 2008, Groupshow used this approach to create a live soundtrack for Andy Warhol’s film Empire, over the full length of eight hours and five minutes.

Recordings in general and the “Greatest Hits” format in particular are another key aspect of this ongoing work on a collectively modulated continuum. The ten tracks on this first vinyl album by Groupshow, recorded between 2005 and 2018, document the ephemeral capturing of opportunities that were not missed. Extracts and essences of an endless movement of searching. The sprawling form of the whole, suspended in succinct, separate units.
To paraphrase Lao Tzu and Roland Barthes, one might say: Once their work is done, they are no longer attached to it. And because they’re not attached to it, it will remain. (Arno Raffeiner, 2023)

DALL-E 2 is a deep learning model developed by OpenAI to generate digital images from natural language descriptions, called “prompts”. DALL-E was revealed by OpenAI in a blog post in January 2021, and uses a version of GPT-3[1] modified to generate images. In April 2022, OpenAI announced DALL-E 2, a successor designed to generate more realistic images at higher resolutions that “can combine concepts, attributes, and styles”.

Union of Antwerp synthesist David Edren and Tokyo minimalist Hiroki Takahashi is a fit so natural as to feel preordained. Both traffic in subtle shades of contemplative electronics, marked by patience, space, and poetic restraint. And both have rich histories of curation and collaboration – Edren in the duo Spirit & Form alongside Bent Von Bent, and Takahashi as proprietor of the Kankyō record shop, as well as one fourth of cosmic ambient quartet UNKNOWN ME. Mutual fans of one another’s work, they began sharing stems in the latter half of 2020, which slowly blossomed into a collection of multi-hued compositions inspired by notions of connectivity and impermanence, translated for east and west: Flow | 流れ.

Opener “Dusk Decorum | 黄昏 礼節” maps the mood of what’s to come, elegantly pirouetting and percolating through an expanding vista of looming stars and half-light horizons. Takahashi describes Edren’s arrangements as evoking “a strange feel, something we haven’t heard much of before.” The sensation is one of “in-betweenness,” a restless current whispering beneath the beauty, like seasons seen in time-lapse footage: flickering but infinite, transience turned permanent. Takahashi’s signature sculpture garden tones plot spiral patterns over which Edren cascades dazzling pointillist synthesizer coloration. The pieces veer between delicate and dilated, micro and macro, their aperture forever softly in flux.

From the oscillating orchestral lullaby of “Stalactime | 鍾乳石時計” to the sweeping, sparkling dream sequence closer, “Shift Register | シフトレジスタ,” the album achieves the elusive goal of being more than the sum of its parts. This is music of rare air, elevated and amorphous, shimmering just out of reach. Though Edren and Takahashi have yet to cohabitate the same room in person (a fact that should be rectified soon by an astute festival booker), their palettes and poise are perfectly paired, twin fragilities woven into seven radiant and regenerative vibrational states. The cover design of a beatific, beaded leaf rippling on the surface of a hidden pond aptly captures the record’s muted majesty. Takahashi’s quiet pride is justified: “We are very happy with this time-consuming and carefully crafted work.”