One
thing I was wrong about when reviewing M. Geddes Gengras’ massive The Empty Space was the assumption that
the whole lot was recorded during one or two live performances. It was not, and
as Ged Gengras himself jokingly noted on his Facebook, if that cassette was a
documentary of one performance, he probably wouldn’t have left the venue alive.
The case is different with Belgium’s synthesist Jurgen de Blonge, who’s been
crafting electronic soundscapes since the 1990’s. Stay Away From the Towers is a documentary of two live performances
conducted in clubs in Belgium and the Netherlands. No edits, no overdubs, no
post-production. Final destination.
The comparison between MGG and Kohn
is not accidental: both tapes are equally massive and stunning – both clock at
around 90 minutes and both take quite liberal cues at the previous eras of
electronic music. While for Ged Gengras it was the raw, glitchy electronics of
Morton Subotnick, Fifty Foot Hose (minus the psych rock element) or even
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jurgen de Blonde looks at the Berlin School era and
progressive electronic masters of the 1970’s and the 1980’s. Each side of the
red, unlabeled tape is a lengthy, ever-changing jam of rhythmic electronics and
snakelike melodies treated with a pinch of outsider synth weirdness. De Blonde
crafts intense cosmic voyages of the best kind: the ones in which the listener
gets truly lost and loses the track of time, where seconds stretch into hours
and hours into seconds, where the change in the ever-flowing rhythm or melody
can be noticed only after several minutes, where one gets zoned out even with
deeply focused listening. Once one gets over the slightly abrasive drones that
de Blonde likes to put in certain places of the recordings, the world of
emotions, images and scenes unfolds as a reward.
One of the best elements of this
cassette (apart from its head-spinning length) is the perfect balance de Blonde
keeps between the Berlin School worship and the more abrasive, abstract
experimentation. The melodic, progressive parts and the reverbed hiss, crackles
and drones are kept in equal proportions, serving as interludes or, in a great
prog fashion, “movements” of one track. I can almost imagine a projection screen
behind Jurgen while giving performances with various animations as he enters
different phases: abstract, psychedelic animations of non-defined shapes or
oscilloscope going haywire during the non-melodic sonic bricolage and fragments
of films like “Fantastic Planet” or “The Holy Mountain” during the melodic,
proggy parts. A great record of two great performances by a somewhat overlooked
European synth wizard.