- When I spoke to him last year, Vlek's David Maurissen mentioned a forthcoming record made with "broken harddrives." The artist was Yann Leguay and Headcrash is the record. Leguay uses hard disks like miniature turntables: the magnetic disc as platter, the read-write arm as ersatz tone arm, manipulated through electrical current sent via "open source software and Arduino." A teaser video shows how he runs four of these "turntables" simultaneously. The sound they produce, picked up by magnetic sensors and lightly treated, is a subtle but ravishing mixture of gossamer drone, rhythmic glitch, crackle, rumble and hiss. This is pretty far-out stuff, even for a label that has been pushing further out lately. But it remains unmistakably Vlek in its quirkiness and humble character.
The two sides are culled from a performance called Quad Core, recorded in Brussels in summer 2016. Their meandering structures have a live feel. The A-side begins and ends with the record's most gorgeous sounds: the harddrives whirring up to speed and then returning to stasis, a whining choir of rising and then falling tones. There's something like a linear structure in between. First, those whining tones form dense, ascending clusters, then a chugging beat enters, as if we're hearing the machines' heartbeat. High frequency chirrups and squeals unsettle the mood, before a loping glitch-rhythm gives the closing minutes some furtive movement.
The B-side is less coherent, but it samples more widely from Leguay's sound palette. Sparse cracklescapes give way to rich, translucent drones, as do moments of bustling rhythm to stretches of nondescript rumble and hiss. As is common for Vlek, the record sleeve is almost as interesting as the music. It's made from polystyrene tracing paper, folded and bearing one of Maurissen's letterpress designs. An insert shows "building plans found in a cellar" of the Brussels arts space HS63. With Vlek, you never quite forget where the music came from.
TracklistA IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
B Uncaught TypeError