Releases of the Day: Gábor Lázárr's "Ils. 6" & Stine Janvind Motland's "In Labour"

Gábor Lázár's Ils. 6

I heard these album yesterday completely randomly. My friend Nick Zettel posted Jeremy Bible's "Top 10 & Beyond" and I gave it a read and was completely overwhelmed. His #1 record of the year Ils. 6 by Gábor Lázár was an exercise in the vein of "Variations on a Theme," where an artist picks a theme and puts different spins on it: like an artist would choose one note and play it with different instruments or at different lengths. Ils. 6 does this with electronica notes and rhythms. I think of it as a sort of sampling that you might hear on a mixing board when a DJ will repeatedly hit one sample button over and over again to get the effect of a stuttering entry point: the full sample rarely plays out, which is good and bad. It leaves mystery and provides an affect of rhythm.

Gábor Lázár does this with rhythm. Technically there's a pitch because everything has a pitch, but the pitch over a period of time loses its meaning, like when you say a word over and over again - eventually the phonetics are there alone and the meaning has seeped away into the ether. It's a stop-and-go meditation and an absolutely delight of a thinkpiece.

Stine Janvind Motland's In Labour

Bible's second album of the year In Labour by Stine Janvind Motland is one of the most bizarre listens I've ever experienced. It's a combination of site-specific background noise and human-made mouth sounds. These sounds could be sucking, or wailing, or slurping, or plucking. It runs the gamut and sounds like a nightmare. It's surreal, but brings up things that perhaps we've thought before. I'm at this concert but did I leave the teapot on? I can hear it crying in the distance. And where the hell are my pants?

The first song is totally disturbing. Something about a wet sound makes me uncomfortable and I can't be alone. The wet signifies the inside of a person or a thing and it's this physical internalization projected onto an external backdrop that makes for a rewarding, albeit uncanny listen.

Below are samples of each.