reviews
“Highly recommended collection by this unique and gifted composer.” —The Sound Projector
“...there is a great flow in these pieces. There is never a dull moment on this release...” —Vital Weekly
“The amount of pieces here that would serve well on soundtracks is impressive.” —Freq.org
“Positively amazing.” —Exposé
“...we can add Thomas Dimuzio's “Slew Tew” to the list of compilations where the sum of its parts is greater than the parts themselves.” —Chain DLK
“This retrospective collection by an important electroacoustic pioneer contains some of his most important work.” —Computer Music Journal
The Sound Projector
'A pleasure to hear from Thomas Dimuzio, the uncategorisable American composer and sound artist who has been flourishing since the late 1980s. We very much enjoyed his solo album Headlock, released in the UK on ReR Megacorp, and one I reach for when a good head-clearing blast of imaginative and maximal composed noise is required. There’s also his excellent team-ups with ReR’s head man Chris Cutler, the albums Quake and Dust, which demonstrate imaginative and lively possibilities of twinning improvised percussion with Dimuzio’s robust electro-acoustic music. More recently, I ordered and received the Slew compilation (co-released by ReR and Gench music, Thomas’s own label and the name of his studio), showing our man’s evident skill in working with sampling and digital devices; that was a compilation of previously released tracks, as is today’s new offering Slew Tew (Gench TD3), which brings us more-or-less up to date by covering compilation tracks dated 2003-2017, and originally released on a large number of small independent labels, the majority of which I’d suspect are impossible to find now in any shape or form.
As a testament to the thoroughness of this project, the original cover artworks for these 13 diverse comps are reproduced inside the cover (postage-stamp size) should you care to seek them out; particularly intriguing visually are the albums $100 Guitar Project, and Invisible Superstars Vol. 1. However, Dimuzio is keen to point out that Slew Tew is intended to work as an album – not just a mish-mash of unconnected pieces, and it has been edited to give a real “flow” to the listener. One approach could have been to simply arrange everything in chronological order; not here. Although it’s tricky to explain exactly how this works with such very abstract music, one gets the impression of a logical chain of thought, of influence and coincidence, almost allowing one to perceive the development of ideas, themes, and pathways of exploration over time. In all of these solo pieces, Dimuzio never stints or cheats the listener, always offering that full-on “maximal” sound which I regard as his trademark; which isn’t to say he’s a traditional noise artist, or that he crowds out the spaces in the brain with an excess of drone, clutter, or aural polyfilla. But he is interested in compositional-performance ideas, and has command of his devices to execute his teeming works with optimal results, in particular with his ingenious use of “live sampling and looping techniques”, and also the Buchla synth, which features on the opening tracks.
What results is multi-layered, textured, huge and buzzing swarms of sound, like an updated take on Ligeti’s microtonal pieces scored for large orchestras. The composer is justifiably proud of his ‘Song of the Humpbacks’, originally released on Oceans by S4G Records in 2012; this one is an “immersive surround-sound performance” which combines the sounds of the whales in the San Francisco Exploratorium Science Museum with Dimuzio’s understated yet evocative sounds. This one in particular calls out for playback with a multi-speaker set-up. It also stands out on this record for admitting the sound of the “real world” into the scheme of things, and makes you realise that the preceding twelve tracks have presented a beautifully enclosed, hermetic view of the world, like the dreams of a sorcerer.
Highly recommended collection by this unique and gifted composer.—Ed Pinsent
Vital Weekly
'Slew Tew' is Dimuzio's second compilation of musical pieces he submitted to compilations, recorded between 2003 and 2017. Dimuzio sees this as an album and just a random collection. It is, at seventy-eight minutes, a long album (a double, maybe?) and gives us the solo-side of Dimuzio, which, for all his musique concrète leaning, sounds mostly electronic. It is hard to say if these electronics are modular or laptop-based, but I would think it is all a combination of whatever is working for me. Somehow, Dimuzio doesn't strike me as someone who is fuzzy over what to use and whatnot. Whatever suits the piece he is doing, I would think. This album is a particularly fine showcase of what he is capable of it. Busy, dense pieces of buzzing sounds, slow drones (in 'Abject Light'), heavily processed field recordings, more noisy work sitting right next to quite introspective ambient pieces and as such I can say, yes, this is an album. The order of the pieces is set in such a way that there is a great flow in these pieces. There is never a dull moment on this release, despite the length of the release. —Frans de Waard
Freq.org
Thomas Dimuzio‘s presence in the alternative noise underground over the past thirty years or so is something that is hard to overlook. The ranks of artists with whom he has collaborated and the slew of labels on which his work has appeared are almost endless. The latest two releases from Thomas attempt to give a taster of just how varied and far-reaching his body of work is and serve as good starting points before diving in fully.
The first, Slew Tew, is a single-disc album pulling together pieces that originally appeared on various underground noise compilations going back to 2009. Clearly Thomas has a rich source of material for these kinds of instances and it is these limited-press labels that keep the spirit of the underground alive. Across thirteen tracks, you realise the full extent of what somebody can accomplish with the right assortment of equipment and a vivid imagination. The startling oscillation and machine gun feedback of opener “Scanters” really grabs your attention, the dirty beats accompanying contain the sweat and scent of an unruly dancefloor as 5,000 wild-eyed miscreants look on.
This couldn’t be more different to the kind of sense of sunscorched drama that unfolds in “NG Cycles”, its distant, faint sounds appearing as if viewed from way on high, the drama biding its time, building slowly, idling closer. The way the tension ramps on a lot of these tracks is great, and it keeps the listener glued. “Abject light” is abrasive and intrusive, with nagging voices added, while “Blown Angles Blew Angels” is more industrial, with a rise and fall of pressure and the sensation of hydraulics moving your molars. It is the huge variety of tones at work here that is miraculous. Distant groans and vivid alarms resonate on “Shoil”, while “Fog Rolls” has a sepulchral air, the whole atmosphere blurred by the sensation of incense floating through an abandoned chapel.
The amount of pieces here that would serve well on soundtracks is impressive. “Tire Damage (Car Crash)” really does sound as though you can sense the appearance of lights in the rear-view mirror, edging closer and causing panic, the looseness undermining any feeling of safety. In the same vein, the hiss and crackle of warm undergrowth in “Phyllocephala” conjures up vivid itammagery of bring trapped somewhere with unknown creatures which may or may not cause harm. There is rain and abstract murmurs always increasing the tension as giant winged things attempt to approach you. It is disturbing, but ultimately involving, and that is the thing about the pieces and sounds on Slew Tew. It is not possible to ignore them; they are around you and dragging you on, sweeping you up into their little worlds. —Mr. Olivetti
Exposé
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Dimuzio has been flying under the radar of most listeners since he first arrived on the local music scene in the late 80s. A composer, multi-instrumentalist, experimental electronic musician, sound sculptor, improvisor, collaborator, and mastering engineer, he has been busy honing his craft all these years with little or even less recognition from the music world as a whole, perhaps with the exception of a small cadre of experimental music enthusiasts from around the globe. Early on, his work caught the attention of Chris Cutler and Fred Frith, with whom he’s collaborated numerous times in recordings and live performances, as well as like-minded musicians like David Lee Myers, Wobbly, Dan Burke, Voice of Eye, and many more. When a musician is defined as an electronic musician, the image that typically comes to mind is that of a keyboardist with synthesizers in tow, but with Dimuzio nothing could be further from the truth. His sound sculptures bear little resemblance to any conventional music — typically there is no rhythm, meter or cadence, little melody or key to be found therein, and rather than the convention of a keyboard, his sound sources can include just about anything, from twiddling the knobs on a modular rack synth, field recordings, samples, loops, extreme signal processing, microphones, and intercepted signal feeds from his collaborators, or in some cases even conventional musical instruments being played in unconventional ways. Most of the time it’s nearly impossible to listen to the sounds he’s making and know exactly (or even roughly) how they are being made. Welcome to Dimuzio’s world of experimental sounds. Expect the unexpected.
Finally, many years ago (in 2004 to be exact), Dimuzio released a compilation titled Slew, which was mostly a collection of tracks which he submitted for numerous various artist compilations over the years up to that point in time. But 2004 was a long time ago, so it was time to do it again, so earlier in 2020 Dimuzio released his second compilation of compilation tracks titled Slew Tew, collecting thirteen cuts recorded between 2003 and 2017. Unlike the three discs of Balance, the pieces on Slew Tew are exclusively Dimuzio’s solo — mostly studio creations, not collaborations. The thirteen pieces are nothing if not adventurous, and would probably make for an excellent introduction to his solo studio work. The album’s final cut, “Song of the Humpbacks,” was recorded live at a surround-sound performance at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the source being the calls of humpback whales (using NOAA source recordings further processed through Dimuzio’s electronics). Positively amazing. Both Balance and Slew Tew have been released as CDs on Dimuzio’s Gench Music label and can be ordered as such or downloaded on their respective Bandcamp sites below. —Peter Thelan
Chain DLK
Compilations are always a mixed bag, and a compilation of compilation tracks can be even more so. However, there are those rare occasions where they are not. Zoviet France's Collusion comes to mind, for example, and we can add Thomas Dimuzio's “Slew Tew” to the list of compilations where the sum of its parts is greater than the parts themselves. Thomas Dimuzio has been kicking around the experimental scene for a long, long time, so he has had plenty of time to hone his craft. This disk is a compilation of compilation tracks from 2003 to 2017. What makes this particularly interesting is the fact that they all hold together in a way that's unusual for a set of compilation tracks. Part of this is because Dimuzio's work is intricately crafted and you get the sense that nothing is left to chance. These works could loosely be classified as noise but it's not noisy in the sense that it isn't run through 17 layers of distortion pedals. Rather there's a sense of intensity to it that keeps it interesting. For example, the track “Blow Angles Blew Angels” has a sense of weight to it that's almost palpable. Layers upon layers of tone and drone give it a scent sense of heaviness. Other tracks such as “Scanters” almost has a beat to it and keeps it interesting. Others, such as “NG Cycles (If I Had a Stomach Pump)” is a pulsing track that brings to mind what one would imagine a stomach pump would sound like. But it's not all pure intensity. For example “Fog Rolls” is a beautiful short piece of lush drone. In short, these tracks all hold together and give a good flavor of what Dimuzio's work is like. Because he has quite a discography, if you are looking for a place to start, this would not be a bad place to be begin. —eskaton
Computer Music Journal
In certain circles, San Francisco based composer, improviser, sound designer, and engineer Thomas Dimuzio is a well-known pioneer in experimental electroacoustic techniques. Since the 1980s his work has demonstrated that he is no one-trick pony when it comes to his tools. Dimuzio has used modular synthesizers, modified bicycles, circuit bent toys, field recordings, resonating water pipes, loops, shortwave radios, and intercepted signal feeds from his collaborators to create music in ambient, noise, and post-techno styles. Asa sound designer, he has worked with synthesizer and processor manufacturers including Kurzweil, Lexicon, and OSC to produce custom presets and sample libraries, and has played a key role in Avid's Pro Tools HD recording system. He also owns and runs Gench Studios, where much of his music is created and mastered, as well as albums by Negativland, AMM, Doctor Nerve, GG Allin, Fred Frith, and Nels Cline. It is fair to say that Dimuzio represents the electroacoustic version of an auteur.
On 26 March 2020, in the thick of the global pandemic, Dimuzio released Slew Tew on Bandcamp. There is also a forthcoming, limited edition, compact disc of the same material. All of the works in this collection were previously released on various labels between 2003 and 2017. As such, it serves as a kind of retrospective of Dimuzio's work. Of the 14 pieces, half were recorded live. The other half were created and mixed in the composer's studio. The 14 tracks range in length from 2.5 minutes to a little over 13 minutes. True to form, the composer utilized a Buchla analog synthesizer, field recordings, bottle recycling machine, feedback, piano, and an electric guitar to create the work on Slew Tew.
The first piece from this collection, Scanters, uses the highly processed sounds of a bottle recycling machine to create a texture teeming with repetitive, industrial, machinelike sounds, sounding like a newspaper pressroom. The texture sounds like repetitive simple amplitude modulation combined with extremely short loops. This runs unabated throughout much of the piece, conjuring up a distinct sense of place, albeit with a degree of ambiguity if you did not know what Dimuzio used for his sound source. During the last third of the piece the composer presents a long and effective fadeout. Overall, especially considering its short, 3-minute duration, Scanters comes across as a torso extracted from a longer composition.
Arc of the Fallen Arch, the second piece from this collection, is a good example of a work whose title describes the formal plan for the piece, while at the same time serving poetic function. To create this piece Dimuzio used crisp, distinctive, analog sounds from a Buchla synthesizer. Various layers of material collide, producing a complex, pulsating texture. These sounds, as a collection, gradually move up, and then back down, in pitch, tracing an inverted-U or arch-shaped trajectory. The highest point in this process comes exactly halfway through the piece.
The next piece, titled NG Cycles (If I Had a Stomach Pump), begins with a reversed sample followed by soft, menacing, dissonant resonance formed by a composite piano, pump, and nasogastric tube sound. The piano portion of this fused sound is used again and again during the piece as a formal marker. Each section features what can be described as aperiodic percussive sounds, resembling those found in a churning stomach. These are combined with subtle, squishy sounds likely produced from recycled noise. At about 3:55 another section begins, characterized by low frequency drum, or stretched skin, tones. Identifying whether the piece was taken from a live or studio performance is difficult to determine because it contains processing and spatial aspects of both. Gradually, the piece dissipates, followed by a long fadeout at the end.
Abject Light begins with a slowly evolving crescendo. As it becomes louder, more and more upper partials are added to the composite sound. This time-stretched texture sounds like it could have been produced by convolving voice with pitch materials. After about 6.5 minutes we hear a muffled voice, along with the continuous drone materials. At the 8-minute mark we clearly hear someone say, "I can't breathe," revealing the context for the entire piece. We can think of the title as representing a full, glaring light that is shined onto an object or scene in order to show the desolation or unpleasant aspects of the subject. In this case the subject is timely—racist police violence. The voice we hear is that of Eric Garner, who was choked to death by members of the New York Police Department in the summer of 2014, on the suspicion of illegally selling cigarettes. Abject Light is a powerful piece after one figures out the context. It is "political" in ways far beyond other, more obvious, works that rely upon more overt connections.
The fifth work is titled Elegy of Safety. To create this piece Dimuzio hung a microphone out of a window at the crossroad of Sixth Street and Market Street in San Francisco. The result contains compelling amplification of incidental and background noises, sounding at times like a large waterfall. The noise aspect is significant in this piece. The title itself is close to the name of the industrial noise band called The Illusion of Safety, founded by Dan Burke and members of the Chicago band Dot Dot Dot. Burke is a musician with whom Dimuzio has collaborated on live and recorded material, and had an impact on his own practice. Dimuzio told me that Burke was responsible for him diving "head first into modular synthesis." They both share a predilection for noisy textures, using everything at their disposal to create their music.
Chemtrails (3 Different Ones), harnesses and manipulates feedback within a three-part structural form. Taken from a live recording made in Oakland, it presents slowly evolving, contiguous textures. At times the overall level threatens to distort but somehow never does. Chemtrails is an appropriate name for this piece because it largely uses raw sound and pitchless materials to achieve its effect, which is one in which the composer manages to weave feedback sources into a coherent whole. The term chemtrails has also been used by conspiracy theorists to draw attention to the possibly harmful effects of contrails, what jet airplanes leave in their wake. Producing skywriting contrails is one of the things for which the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels is known.
Following Chemtrails (3 DifferentOnes) is a piece called Blown Angles Blew Angels, a clear pun of the Blue Angels. By the time listeners reach this work (if listening in album order) they will be quite familiar with Dimuzio's go-to compositional and processing techniques. Blown Angles Blew Angels, using field recordings as sources, manages to conjure up similar textures to some of the other previously heard works, such as a continuous, slowly evolving pitchless noise. But in this case, the noises sound like they were created from wind and large engine sounds. Metronomic, pulse-like sounds appear at the end of the piece, resembling a heartbeat monitor.
Shoil presents a variegated approach to feedback processing. At the beginning of the piece it sounds as if the composer used granular synthesis techniques. Following this we encounter another pitchless noise texture, but this one contains the subtle presence of pitched materials in the background, which contribute to an eerie, unsettling sense. The foreground involves a drone that sounds as if it could have been taken from alarm samples. Shoil ends at 4:53" leaving one with the impression that it could have been extended without losing interest.
The ninth piece, Fog Rolls, is one of many pieces that constitutes the $100 Guitar Project, an idea brought into existence by guitarist—composers Nick Didkovsky and Chuck O'Meara. After they initially purchased a $100 guitar, they passed it on to many other guitarists, who subsequently recorded their contributions on a double-album release on Bridge Records (Bridge 938lA/B). Fifty percent of the album's proceeds went to CARE, an organization that combats poverty. Fog Rolls uses the guitar in question to create a piece featuring pitched drones that sound like the strings were activated with an EBow. At times the results resemble the early collaborative work done by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno as found on their albums Evening Star and No Pussyfooting. Perhaps the short duration (2:32) was a requirement of the $100 Guitar Project, but one wishes that Dimuzio had released a longer, more developed version. The intriguing timbres would seem to call for further treatment.
The introduction to Tire Damage (Car Crash) is captivating. We hear extremely high and low frequencies, simultaneously faded in, providing a sense of otherworldliness—distant sounds from another galaxy captured as radio signals. The low frequencies gradually move higher and begin to become unsteady, like a wobbly tire. Perhaps I was overly influenced by the explicit title, but I thought I heard screeching brakes, the voices of the drivers, and maybe even the first responders arriving on the scene. On the other hand I wouldn't be at all surprised if all of the sounds came from an analog, modular synthesizer. Like other acousmatic music there is an unresolved ambiguity regarding source identification.
The eleventh piece in this collection, Phyllocephala (Victor French Mix), contains one of the most diverse arrays of sound. Named after a prolific, spiky Chinese plant, this piece conjures up subterranean, mechanical, and tubular sounds, as well as the sound of flapping wings. The latter resembles what you get when you close-mic a large woodwind instrument, performing rapid key clicks. We also hear vocal and birdsong "chattering" timbres in the vein of Paul Lansky's Smalltalk. Phyllocephala (Victor French Mix) offers us many separate layers sounding at once. It was simultaneously reminiscent of urban and jungle environments.
Optisonic Debris, the only previously unreleased work from this collection, uses photographs, translated into sound, for its source material. Judging from the strict, periodic rhythmic layers, the photographs could have contained geometric figures, lines, or grids. The word "debris" in the title suggests several scenarios. Perhaps, only parts of each photograph were selected for translation, or the process of translation itself produced sonic debris, which then became the piece as it were. Whatever the process of x/y axis assignment was, it certainly produced a richly endowed and varied composition. This is also true with respect to sonic references. For example, around 2 minutes into the piece an arrhythmic, deep, percussive clicking sound is superimposed over the other layers, creating a subtle reference to avant-garde progressive rock music. Unlike many of the other pieces in this collection, the end of this piece fades out quickly, leaving the listener with the impression that it abruptly stops what was a much longer work.
The penultimate piece, Fog Music (excerpt), is an actual torso somewhat in the vein of Karlheinz Stockhausen's 1968 work Kurzwellen. The radio source material contains raw waveforms that move up and down in pitch and space. The sounds of voices are distorted or granularized as if we are listening to a radio through a sonic fog. At the end of the piece we hear a 60-Hz hum that fades out, which is a suggestive sound given the radio as source.
At 13 minutes in length, the last piece, Song of the Humpbacks, is the longest piece on this collection. Humpback whales were recorded at San Francisco's Exploratorium. Many composers have used recordings of humpback whales but Dimuzio's piece manages to underscore connections between whale sounds and brass instruments resembling everything from pedal tones to high-pitched squeals. For much of the piece we also hear a very soft layer of resonance that builds up as more and more whale sounds become present, and is also the last thing we hear. As the piece progresses it becomes clear that the whales are communicating with a varied palette of evocative sounds. The large number of wails and glissandi suggests to me that this piece can be heard as a lament, perhaps about habitat destruction.
This retrospective collection by an important electroacoustic pioneer contains some of his most important work. It will appeal to those who appreciate sound art, noise, and drones, or anyone who appreciates the ingenuous application of a potpourri of devices and tools to create convincing electroacoustic music. —Ross Feller
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