So to the second disc of the IHM compilation, nicknamed the “lampshade” disc because of the associated, somewhat random artwork.The first disc tends to be called the “rollercoaster” disc for similar reasons. This one opens with a track by someone using the name Bad command or file name. Is it already this late is a fitting title for me to be writing about here at gone midnight, but I can’t say I enjoyed the brief two minute track very much. It basically consists of some kind of (I think) dadaist voice making short vocal sounds behind a series of wrenches of loud screeching feedback and a bed of growling, rasping sounds of a similar nature. Its OK, nothing particularly offensive or anything I had to reach for the volume dial for, but just a little simplistic and neither much of a challenge or anything particularly beautiful.

The second track, by Louie O’Grady, an English musician currently a resident of Cardiff offers much more to the ear. No It’s Not is a curious little piece that seems to blend field recordings with snippets of radio and other strange bits and pieces to create four minutes of dreamlike musical wandering. Wind buffeting a microphone makes up a large part of the sound here, alongside the radio and little glimpses of people talking, recorded either unawares or without any worry about what would be captured. Half of the way through the piece a voice (that I swear belongs to David Reid though I don’t see how it could be him) passes comment on the amazing smell of some garlic, and female voices, buried back in the soundfield just deeply enough to be unintelligible mutter replies at regular intervals. There are cars passing, seagulls chattering, and right at the end a young voice appears and states “No it’s not… it’s not” just as the track ends. These words were clearly captured by accident but work here as part of this odd yet interesting little composition.

There then follows a longer ten minutes plus piece from Richard Kamerman, one of my favourite of the younger generation of American improvisers right now. Apparently the instrument we hear on Rabbi arrested for observance of an ancient Talmudic ceremony in Tomkins Square(where do they get these titles?) is an analogue synthesiser, but clearly it has been tortured in some horrible way to produce the sounds here on this incredibly powerful, muscular ten minutes of music. It begins really quite beautifully, the most gentle of purring tones whirring over each other softly. A few minutes in and these groans and murmurs grow and build with shivering tension before shifting into more viscous, driven ruptures that rip through the music, steadily growing until they form a small yet violent ball of twisting, ugly sound that seems to turn in on itself and disappear at the end of the track. This is a powerful, actually quite exhausting piece to listen to closely time after time. Maybe the highlight of the whole compilation.

There then followers another solo Englishman, (another couple are still yet to come) this time in the shape of Stephen Cornford, a musical sculptor who has worked with installations as much as improvised music in CD form. Muted Flugel appears to be recordings of a flugel horn recorded in some way as to quite dramatically warp and cloud the sound in natural reverb. I’m not really sure how the piece was recorded, if indeed it is the recording methods used that have caused the sound to mutate in this way, but the end result is quite nice. It is oddly alien and is often reminiscent of other familiar sounds, such as churchbells, but thenwe are regularly reminded that there is a brass instrument at the bottom of everything we are hearing. Maybe the piece is a little too droney and one dimensional, and I didn’t necessarily need eight minutes of it, but overall its a nice listen.

The fifth of the ten tracks on the disc is an untreated recording of a wire fence by Patrick Farmer named Two kinds of light (excerpt).  I’m not sure if the piece was recorded merely by clipping mics to the wire and leaving them to see what happens, or if Farmer in some way “played” the wire so as to cause the natural vibrations that pass through it to bulge and fluctuate here and there, but certainly the sounds we hear slowly grow and develop into a rhythmic pattern of strumming and throbbing glow. Now I really should be amazed that this music (and it really is completely musical) can have originated in simple recordings of a wire fence, but I have heard Patrick’s recordings of this kind before, and been amazed back then, just as Lee Patterson’s similar recordings amazed me when I first heard those too (don’t ask me who thought of it first I have no idea!) As the music seems to evolve into a cloying burst of featureless oscillating tones it seems impossible that these recordings are not processed in any way, but they aren’t. Amazing stuff.

There then follows a track by the compilation’s only female contributor, the American improviser Vanessa Rossetto, whose music I have enjoyed a great deal before and written about in these pages more than once. The piece follows a familiar pattern for her, and is no less interesting as a result. It blends field recordings together in an on/off, one minute its there, the next minute its not manner. We hear birds twittering, the roar of distant and not so distant traffic, someone moving around a small room, perhaps with the window open, zipping up a bag or a coat, opening and closing doors, all on top of each other but arranged in an intelligent and sensitive manner. Rossetto also plays viola, but I am not sure if the instrument appears anywhere here. There are a few scrapes, tinkles and clanks that could have come from it, but they could just as easily have come from any number of other sources. Rossetto’s music is usually better if allowed to stretch out over time I find, so the piece here, peculiarly named Quoits feels a little fleeting and unresolved despite being nine minutes in length, and I find myself wanting to dig her albums out to play, but this is another nice, mature work all the same.

There then follows a three minute long piece called Fibres II credited to Daniel Powell, a new name to me. It consists of a series of eerie cries, maybe human in their original form and heavily processed here, but I might be wrong, that come together in a slightly skewed almost mass-like swell of sound. The resulting music sounds part dreamy ambience, part religious chant and part heaving drone, though the track doesn’t stay around long enough to really fall into the drone bracket. I am imagining Monteverdi passed through a liquidiser, and well, the piece comes as a bit of a shock to the system after the muted murkiness of several of the preceding tracks, a big splash of colour planted by Alastair, the compilation’s curator to wake us up a bit. I can’t say  would want to hear a lot more than three minutes, but its a fun, joyful piece as it is.

The album’s eighth track returns us back into grey territory again, and a piece called Artifact 4 by TWE favourite Philip Julian. I have to say that I really enjoyed this track as well. In essence it is run of the mill stuff, a soft grey rumble continues through the track scattered with little pockets of quietly clattering metallic sounds and shuffles of friction and the lightest of little electronic tones. However the music’s beauty is in its subtlety. Maybe we are used to hearing this kind of structure often, but rarely is it done this well, with such delicately placed precision and featherlike touch. The use of different textures in this way is easy to do badly, but conversely very difficult to get just right, and the impressive thing about this track is the amount of control held over all of the elements at once. A lovely study in muted greys that has a surprise in its tail by ending abruptly with a click. Alastair gets to have his bit of fun straight after this by programming the compilation’s most traditionally musical track right after. Lurk Lab seem to be a drums / sax / keyboards trio (so there are two collaborative tracks on the album, not one as I suggested last night) very much in a free jazz vein. Coming after all of the electronics and electroacoustic adventures through the rest of the disc this wild skronk-out of a track actually works well, forcing me as a listener out of the mindset that the previous music had tucked me into. No rest for the wicked. Kassell 3, as the piece is called is a straight up piece of fiery free jazz, not really my cup of tea, but enjoyable placed here amongst the rest.

And the album then returns to its more sedate soundworld to finish up. Poppy is a piece by Goh Lee Kwang that consists of another very gentle hum of sound that hovers not that much higher than human audibility thresholds, but is interrupted frequently by lots of little, well, pops of interference that click and jab their way into the gentle industrial hum. This is probably the most stripped down and simple track on this disc, if not the entire compilation, and I like it quite a bit, though it does feel a bit like it belongs elsewhere rather than included here at the end of an album. it works well as a nice little advert for Lee’s music though, some of which I enjoy a lot, and brings the disc to an understated yet definite close.

This disc is another winner, perhaps with slightly more tracks that interest me less, but also with a few that really shine and make me want to hear more from the musicians involved as soon as I can. Thanks to all of the musicians, who all contributed for free and to Alastair for his meticulous job in putting it all together. Again, it can be downloaded for nothing here, with lossless versions of the tracks available soon, when Al gets back from the beach. Not a prog rock track in sight either…..