UnFolkUs is a quartet (guitar, clarinet/sax, percussions and metal objects)
that plays improvised music.
UnFolkUs (Unit Circle Rekkids, 1998) is a collection of ten pieces
that are extremely disturbing. Mostly, they are spare scores
(Trashcan the longest) in which very little of notice happens.
It is the texture, not the story.
Clap For Jesus is a notable exception, a childish experiment for
metallic percussion.
Bill Horist's second solo album,
Songs From The Nerve Wheel (Unit Circle Rekkids, 2000),
is another set of solo guitar improvisations that sound like anything but
solo guitar improvisations.
Inhibitat
is seven minutes of wildly dissonant, interstellar radio signals, that end
with what sound like bagpipes.
The album's most cogent moments are a couple of deconstructed blues,
the Hendrix-ian Gravity's Backwash and
The Architct Of Downfall,
but mostly Horist is too busy indulging in the eerie sounds of his guitar
and, while Old Man Smithereens creates enough landscape and suspense,
most tracks are little more than personal notes for the artist.
His technique remains monumentally revolutionary but art is not just technique.
Horist is also featured on several collaborations, including
Renderhorse (Soundgasm, 2000) and
Zahir (Endless, 2000).
Horist also plays in several avantgarde ensembles, including
Fuselage, Fin, Incubus Octet, and Tablet.
Interstellar Chemistry (Beta-lactam Ring, 2002) is a collaboration with
Zeni Geva's KK Null.
Originally composed as the soundtrack to a multimedia event of 2002,
Lyric/ Suite (Tangenesis, 2002 - Accretions, 2004)
is a 13-movement suite for solo multi-tracked electric guitar.
The hypnotic slow-motion tinkling of Overture is the most linear,
melodic and quiet of the batch. The rest is rather
on the front of the hallucinated post-psychedelic avantgarde.
Scissors begins a journey into the microworld of sounds: the notes are clipped to generate a flow of discontinuous noises a` la Morton Subotnick-esque dadaist pieces.
Time seems to stand still in Dice Dance, each sound dilated and warped,
left unfinished and isolated.
Gesture weds Jimi Hendrix, minimalist repetition and dissonant chamber music.
Entropy is the longer and more complex exercise, indulging in
industrial stridor and mechanical sequences.
Despite the captivating title, this is one of Horist's least interesting albums,
a minor work whose parts are barely sketched.
Covalent Lodge (North Pole, 2010) marked a detour into surreal
acoustic folk-ish songs, such as
the slow-motion psychedelic exotic lullabies In The House Of The Specious Phylum (male vocals)
and Smeared Slate Gales In Oozing Windows (female vocals).
The instrumentals are, however, much more interesting, starting with the
elegant, neoclassical fugue of Requiem For Endless Days.
Everything seems out of focus here. Sometimes this is beneficial:
towards the end the tinkling medieval-sounding dance The Breath-Width Isthmus (Eyvind Kang on viola, plus harp and vibraphone) begins to sound like the
Penguin Cafè Orchestra although it ends
too soon.
The lengthy fantasia Glenn/ Ganges, on the other hand, mutates a bit
sounds like a group of musicians in search of something to play.
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