Purple Brut: On Naked Floor
(Coherent States (GR), Lifeless Thoughts Information (NL) and Econore (DE))
Vinyl | CD | DL out there right here
Launched twenty second November 2024
An evocative sound poem to Rotterdam by the celebrated Dutch experimental digital musician, Marijn Verbiesen, aka Purple Brut.
A goodbye to a metropolis often invokes all that that metropolis can imply, or has meant, to somebody. Typically these emotions can translate right into a wider message that we will expertise, too. And, if ever the Rotterdam of the twenty-tens and twenty-twenties was captured in sound and emotion, it’s right here, on Marijn Verbiesen – aka Purple Brut’s – third album, On Naked Floor.
In line with Rotterdam’s often-celebrated “simple” nature, Purple Brut’s report dispels any concept of prettiness or pretension. There are ten tracks, all about three minutes lengthy. All of them invoke Rotterdam ultimately. We really feel we’re slap bang within the centre of the town proper from the off, with the plein-air collage of Abri, the place the street-level sound recordings (and likely many different audio trickeries) seize the fug of inclement climate, the constructing work one recurrently encounters on the town’s streets, and the slides, whirrs and slithers of trams and bikes and other people scurrying previous. Unusual, horn-like clanging and scratching noises add some musical formality to the piece. Inexperienced Gentle is a fuzzy reduce with excessive register blurts, pulley wheel scrapes and skinny bleeps, which collectively sound like a transmission from one other planet. Or a recording of some workmen digging up a highway, but once more. It’s oddly partaking.
The thick, generally bleak sound of this report may have been reduce from the skies glowering above Rotterdam. The town wears its climate like an angle: these massive skies, whether or not blue or gray, all the time discover a method of impinging in your consciousness rather more so than these in Amsterdam, Eindhoven, or Groningen. As an alternative of illuminating a horny scene, as, say, in Amsterdam, in Rotterdam they make the temper. The more and more bombastic structure appears wayward, schizophrenic even, and doomed to lose its battle of will in opposition to what’s seen above, and the massive river that programs by means of the town.
Evening Water is a wierd however efficient nocturnal – a human(?) sigh and a tough tapping beat brilliantly invoke the lengthy neon-lit rows of purposeful housing and broad roads that create the cityscape. Dug Out initially appears like an industrial noticed doing its finest to morph right into a didgeridoo. It modifications abruptly, now sounding like a tree trunk being sawn up and crashing down in a crowded park, solely to finish on a squally be aware, like a balloon expiring. A case of musique concrète, with the gloves off. Following that, Mud is a sweaty and uncomfortable psychedelic dream. I ponder if anybody, on listening to the voice pattern and the operating footsteps on the finish of the monitor, thinks they’ve been transported to facet one in all The Faust Tapes?
Once in a while issues go away their moorings to examine the areas above the excessive rises and thoroughfares, or perhaps method beneath as with Excessive Above. I ponder the place Verbiesen recorded the voice pattern discovered right here? It could possibly be within the Maas Tunnel. Against this, Passage feels street-bound, and the beat, with the bongs of a gong, and different rattling and whistling samples, is “straight outta Moondog Land”.
The break with the town and what it has meant to the artist is spelled out clearly on the monitor, Right here, the place Marijn Verbiesen talks of being formed by Rotterdam – her “third life” – and the modifications and upheavals she’s witnessed alongside the way in which. The deadpan nature of the phrases really feel odd, drowsy, nearly ghostly at occasions. It’s an extremely efficient piece, with tales of waterside revelations and discovering “love in faux phrases however actual intentions” over the hiss and squeak of a handled cassette tape. The honking blare of what I believe is a sampled keyboard wakes all of us out of any reverie Right here had beforehand magicked up. It’s a really brutal swap. Final monitor, Naked, has a repetitive, melancholy really feel that’s not too distant in tone from an outdated Cluster quantity.
In case you’re feeling moody, then I recommend placing this glorious and clever report on.
Extra about Marijn Verbiesen and Purple Brut may be discovered right here. Coherent States (GR) is right here, Lifeless Thoughts Information (NL) is right here and Econore (DE) is right here.
All phrases by Richard Foster. Extra writing by Richard may be discovered at his writer’s archive.
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