Goh Lee Kwang's Hands 推敲琢磨- Review(s)

[Lee Kwang Goh]

0902 Goh Lee Kwang:::: Hands

01 Godot is Coming I
02 Hands III
03 Hands
04 Tape I
05 Tape II
06 Tape III
07 Hands II
08 Godot is Coming II
09 Tap Type

All by Goh Lee Kwang. Composed, Performed, Recorded between 2005 - 2008, Malaysia.

Painting by Melissa Lin
The Real Divide
Louieee Speeding Into The Night
In The Mind Glows A Spark

Audio CD, 6 panels digipak
40 minutes+
Release date: August 2009

Review(s)
The Wire, Sept 2009
On Hands, recorded between 2005 and 2007, Malaysian sound artist Goh Lee Kwang's instrument of choice is an old Roland Jupiter analogue synth, but toy keyboards, saxophones, bass and drums also thrown into the pot and merrily melted down by Max/MSP. Steering carefully between the unbridled hedonism of vintage synth outing - Pauline Oliveros's early work comes to mind - and there ecstatic noodling of latterday neo-psychedelia, the opening "Godot Is Coming I" revels in primitive awfulness of the instrument, mercilessly exploiting its wayward intonation, farty parps, loopy swoops like childlike glee. Electronic music hasn't been this much fun since Vernon Elliott's inspired doodling in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop for Oliver Postgate's Clangers. But it's not all fun and games: the ominous thudding percussion of "Hands III" is intercut with thunderous woofer-unfriendly rumbles and high register shrieks worthy of Kevin Drumm.

It's a display of openminded eclecticism typical of Kwang, whose musical tastes range from the austere static drizzle of Drone with Tim Blechmann to the gnarly no-input mixing board of 2007's Good Vibrations. Here the album title is significant - for all its hi and lo tech wizardry, this is good old hands - on composition, with a fine ear and shrewd sense of pacing and structure, and Kwang's most exciting and varied release since 2002's Nerve Center.
- Dan Warburton -

Vital Weekly 691
So far we have heard Goh Lee Kwang playing no input mixers in a variety of releases, on CD, CDR and MP3, but somehow I think this new release is something a bit different. It says composed, performed, recorded between 2005-2008 on the cover, and it seems, somehow, somewhere to me, that he uses instruments here. Synthesizers perhaps, sound effects may be. I might however be totally wrong about this. You never know for sure when its not told, right. He plays these however in his usual style. Goh Lee Kwang is a man who likes his things to be forceful, present but not necessarily superloud. More direct, in your face. His approach in these nine tracks is that of stutter, stop and play. It seems (again, it seems, I know), he approaches one set of sounds and plays with them. A bit like serious avant-garde electronic music but then fully improvised. MEV solo, if that is something you can imagine - well, I surely can. This is not music that you could play 'just for fun' for a while, but something that requires you full awareness. Otherwise I think one can easily be annoyed by it. But if you set yourself to it, then it unfolds a pleasant sort of rawness. The beauty of power, and the sadness of decay. A very fine work, perhaps the best I heard from him so far.
- Frans de Waard -

The Watchful Ear
... Today I have been listening to a new release by Malaysia’s most prolific of electronic sound sculptors, Goh Lee Kwang. This new disc, named Hands is newly released on Lee’s Herbal label, and is part of another new offshoot series, Herbal Concrete.

Coming after the amount of nineteenth century chamber music I listened to yesterday (I worked my way through seven late Schubert quartets as the evening wore on) Hands presents a real shock to the system. To begin with, the sleeve design is rather lovely, a triptych of three colourful paintings by Melissa Lin. The bright, happy images lure the listener into a false sense of security though, as the music on the disc itself is raw, dirty, and quite primitive in one sense or another. A link to a larger view of the sleeve is here. The opening track Godot is coming I is obviously Beckett inspired. A computer altered (or even generated?) voice fades in steadily, stuttering over something unintelligible. This track feels a bit like a something from the early Sixties experimental concrete schools, the electronics used sound dated, and the piece varies between being conceptually interesting and a little annoying, but it doesn’t last too long. The second track on the album, confusingly called Hands III begins with the sound of a fist tapping regularly and continually on something wooden sounding, maybe just a table. It comes and goes from time to time throughout the track, and is joined by little streams of stuttering, skittery electronic sounds, maybe the product of an analogue synth, but I suspect more likely a digital replica of one. This track is quite nice, a brittle blend of the purely acoustic and human with the unnatural, harsh opposite. A good little study. There follows a track called Hands which follows a similar pattern, but the sound of the tapping hand is replaced by what might be a manipulated recording of something similar, a slowed down, murky, echoey rhythm that is then overlaid with electronic squeals and glitching. The mass of shapes formed between the two parts is nice again here, but I prefer the earlier piece with its more tactile link back to the human input into the music.

Three tracks named Tape follow next, numerically ordered I, II and III. The first of these pieces seems to return tot he concerns of the album’s opening track, taking a sound, that might once have been a voice and wrenching it steadily apart into an increasingly abstract stream of digital splatter. This three and a half minute track seems to be as much about the process used in its creation as the structure of the work in itself. It is admittedly quite original, a kind of aural equivalent of a sculptor taking a semi-abstract piece and twisting it violently, pumping it full of air and throwing it at the walls. Tape II goes in similar directions, a wild, clearly improvised work that reminds me of a Franz Kline canvas, lines thrown across a canvas carefully but with the impression being of complete chaos. Tape III is a further study of similar ideas again. As this piece winds down though the original sounds used give themselves away to be some kind of wind instrument, maybe a jazz related sax or clarinet? For just half a second here and there its as if the sculptor, having twisted and turned the form into all kinds of shapes happened back upon the original shape. Certainly here its clear there is no human voice at the heart of the music.

The seventh track here is the Hands II piece missing from earlier on the disc, and is a slow, longer (around thirteen minutes) work through more grungy, snail paced sounds that curl themselves slowly into view in a kind of low-fi electronics manner. GLK is never afraid to allow non-pretty sounds to take centre stage, and on this piece a heavy growling groan of a sound, similar to deep guitar feedback wrenches right across the piece, gathering momentum slowly until about halfway through the track when I had to reach for the volume dial. It holds its place until the last few minutes when little glimpses of badly obliterated music can be heard behind it, maybe jazz pieces that sound like they were dug up from tenth generation cassette tapes found in a bath of acid. For all of its ugliness and extreme use of harsh sounds I liked this piece quite a bit.

The second last piece on the album is named Godot is Coming II and returns to the sci-fi pinging and belching of the opening piece, though here any trace of a voice is completely removed. For those in the UK of a certain age The Clangers spring to mind, something that in my opinion is never a good thing when it comes to electronic music. Whilst it offset the heavy qualities of the track before it this piece didn’t do much for me, and at four minutes in length it tested my patience a little. The last two and a half minute track is named Tap Type and resembles how some kind of minimal electronica artist might have sounded if he had gone down with the Titanic rather than the brass band. There are repeated rhymic motifs with warped Sun Ra-esque organ sounds and toy keyboards thrown all over the top, but it all sounds blurred and hazy. Its hard to take this piece seriously as it has a kind of novelty feel to it, but while there is humour present right throughout this album the track is not a joke piece.

Certainly Hands is very original and an increasingly mature statement from GLK who is progessively moving away from standard laptop/electronics fare and finding an area of experimental sound that is his own. In places Hands seems to try and do a little too much in one outing, but in places, such as on most of the Tape and Hands pieces there is some interesting and expressive work going on here. Hard to know who to recommend this one to, its natural audience isn’t clear, simply because of its originality, and that can’t be a bad thing at all.
- Richard Pinnell -

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