Sasha Frere-Jones
Scraps of sound, stoned marching around: the experimental duo’s debut is an inviting blend of chaos and intimacy.
High Tide, by Able Noise, World of Echo
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Able Noise formed in The Hague—a place that should be busier than it is—and call themselves an “experimental baritone guitar and drum duo,” though there are many more instruments than that on their utterly glorious (yes—please put that on a sticker and wave it at your nan) debut album, High Tide. Their friends in Athens and London added violin and saxophone and clarinet, but at the core of this album is this kind of blossoming argument between Alex Andropoulos, he/him Greek Scottish on drums and vocals, and George Knegtel, she/her Dutch on baritone guitar and vocals. The tactic here, appropriate for two people who met as art students, is to let a mosaic emerge over time, scraps of sound floating together into patterns. This is rock music only insofar as the chosen instruments show up more in rock than, say, acid house, as High Tide could have started as any music before it was taped back together with the help of various recording processes. For all the atomization and fragmentation, High Tide is an inviting pile of leaves, and has been a reliable cushion for weeks.
George Knegtel and Alex Andropoulos of Able Noise. Courtesy Able Noise.
Whether or not they intended it to be so, this music speaks to a moment when formal dissolution really kicked in: the lo-fi irruption. Lo-fi presented the formal break that punk had promised years earlier, when it called for a new way but still sounded like loud Chuck Berry. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, acts like New Zealand’s the Dead C, Olympia, WA’s Beat Happening, and Japan’s Hanatarash crushed up rock aesthetics and made their negations more complete. Studio elements became more obtrusive, while strategies like abject failure and pure refusal entered the picture. Rock started absolutely dissolving, and that spiritual remit stretched back into the mainstream—Kurt Cobain famously loved Beat Happening and had a sticker of their label, K Records, on his guitar.
High Tide rips to and fro through time and space. The album opener, which has been out for two years, is called “To Appease,” in which the means of production hop right into view. Alex and George recorded the right and left channels on portable digital recorders (fairly high-fidelity units) and then mixed them down for use on a Sony cassette tape Walkman. George plays two chords on the original, which then becomes five when the band uses the pitch knob to speed the tape up and slow it down. The feeling is of a stoned march, two people dragging themselves into quiet battle, the ground lurching up and down as they go. George sings in a steady, breathy alto, like the words are a verse right out of the hymnal: “If the child we sacrificed to the sea didn’t work, I think we’re in trouble.” The song melts when a human thumb drags the tape motor almost to a stop, the music wobbling down to a murmur.
Alex Andropoulos and George Knegtel of Able Noise. Courtesy Able Noise.
The duo allow themselves to make the world anew with every track. There is almost nothing you would call a “backbeat” here, despite all the drumming: no rocking, all rolling. As for the idea or the constant narrative of a band, as such, also a no. Very little of this could be reproduced live, and that is no real distraction. I may have mentioned, but if not, this is an album whose main character is “pretty,” none of which is suggested by what I am saying here. For “Garden,” the guitar “has each string recorded separately in order for us to pan it in a way that it would create a spinning sensation,” Alex told me. A drone heard way in the back is actually a “buzz roll” played on the snare by Alex, with microphones picking up the harmonics around the drum. George pushes even further in her fragility, sounding more than a little like My Bloody Valentine’s Bilinda Butcher: “Could it be the garden is looking fine? Don’t we say all of the time work is the way to agree?”
The eight minutes of “Providence” show the full glory of a recording artist who takes both of those words seriously. The track opens with a kitchen oven from The Hague clicking for almost a minute, and then Alex begins reciting a lyric that follows a lightly pitched melody while also sounding like speech. Drums enter, very slowly, but as notes rather than rhythm values. All five drums were mic’d and sent into separate amps, each of those slowly feeding back in controlled ways. As Alex explained, “Just to tune each amp specifically to what each drum needed to ring out. George was on the faders, opening up each drum feedback, while I was drumming.” The lyrics proceed and a sort of meditative plan takes shape: “As the view sinks away, these thoughts won’t matter.” Drums begin sounding like drums, and an alien huffing enters, which is a pump organ being pumped without any keys being pressed. All of the drums are tuned to the guitar, which doesn’t enter until six minutes in. The drums were recorded in a studio in Athens called Antart, an old movie theater that was used for recording foley and film scores in the ’60s and ’70s, now a cinema museum. Why not take montage back to its roots?
George Knegtel and Alex Andropoulos of Able Noise. Courtesy Able Noise.
The album feels entirely chaotic while being—verifiably, as you can see—planned. The primacy here is on ideas rather than personality or some particular beat pattern or formal through line. As Alex described it, High Tide is “very audibly, hugely edited, hugely, hugely collaged,” and that material fluctuation makes the consistency of their thinking more pronounced. Please please please give us more theory-damaged ambitious art-school rock like this, o mute and deadened world. High Tide is its own kind of direct and simple, cracked apart and intimate like a late lunch with mutually finished sentences and long looks over the sea of the sidewalk.
Sasha Frere-Jones is a musician and writer from New York. His memoir, Earlier, was recently published by Semiotext(e).