Space cases

Astronaut and Ernst Karel
By SUSANNA BOLLE  |  December 14, 2007

071214_rare_main
Ernst Karel

Perhaps it’s something in the air, but in the last year or so it seems that Boston’s experimental outer limits has seen an analog-synthesizer renaissance. The city has long been home to a number of innovative synth players, such as instrument designer and noise musician Jessica Rylan and early-electronic-music aficionado and Kranky recording artist Keith Fullerton Whitman. But recently a new bumper crop of analog adherents has appeared on the scene. Armed with the latest modular instruments and/or vintage polysynths, they’re creating everything from abrasive drones to delicate sound works. Two up-and-comers — the neo-cosmic trio Astronaut and solo sound artist Ernst Karel — are performing together (with Whitman on the bill) at P.A.’s Lounge this Tuesday as part of an all-analog extravaganza.

As their name suggests, Astronaut — Dan Lopatin, Andy Plovnick, and Lee Tindall — are all about the far-out sounds of space-age synths. Inspired by the atmospheric electronics of early-’70s German groups like Harmonia and Tangerine Dream, as well as the eerie soundtracks on Andrei Tarkovsky and John Carpenter films, the trio generate hypnotic, roiling noisescapes. Or, as Tindall puts it, “Astronaut is really all about controlling the drone like a beast in the abyss.”

Drawn together by a mutual love of minimalism, noise, and Teutonic electronics, the group formed almost in spite of themselves. “When we all met, there was just this weirdo dynamic,” Tindall explains. “We all took roles in its creation without choice.”

Prior to Astronaut, Lopatin created grainy, ambient music as Dania Shapes, Tindall unleashed solo noise squalls as Lasercoffin, and Plovnick played synthesizer and guitar in the prog-psych group Healing Feeling. Tindall and Lopatin had just started jamming together when Lopatin met Plovnick. And the rest is history (or an analogue thereof). “He had this Crumar analog synth,” Lopatin recalls wistfully. “He hypnotized me with it at one of his shows, and I asked him to join us. It was really haphazard the way it came together. I don’t think any of us really knew we were in a band until after our first show.”

Contrasting with Astronaut’s thick, hazy drones, Ernst Karel’s music is spare and relatively quiet. It’s defined by small, rather than sweeping, gestures. Karel uses a Doepfer modular synthesizer, often in conjunction with meticulously sourced field recordings, to generate a broad constellation of sounds ranging from brittle bursts of noise and static to warm, subtly shaded hums.

A trumpet player by training, Karel began working with modular synthesizers almost 10 years ago. At the time he was living in Chicago (he moved to Boston only last year), where he was active in the city’s thriving experimental-music scene, most notably as half of EKG with Kyle Bruckmann. “At that time, I was really interested in expanding the vocabulary of the trumpet,” he explains. “I had used guitar pedals before then. I was listening to tons of academic music from the ’60s from places like the Siemens Studio in Germany and from Columbia-Princeton Center, and I really loved those sounds. It was at that same time that Doepfer started making affordable analog stuff, so I started buying some modules.”

1  |  2  |   next >
  Topics: Music Features , Entertainment, Science and Technology, Technology,  More more >
| More


Most Popular
ARTICLES BY SUSANNA BOLLE
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   ASSAULT AND BATTERIES  |  February 20, 2009
    After a brief stint in Pittsburgh, guitarist and electronic musician GEOFF MULLEN is back in his native Rhode Island, and the New England music scene is so much the better for it.
  •   SO MUCH IN STORE  |  February 10, 2009
    Australia's the NECKS are the sort of band who thwart classification.
  •   A COMPROVISATIONAL WHAT?  |  February 02, 2009
    Local saxophonist and electronic-musician JORRIT DIJKSTRA combines a variety of styles ranging from jazz to electro-acoustic improv and noise to create his own emotive and often idiosyncratic music.
  •   WINTRY MIX  |  January 26, 2009
    There are so many interesting and unusual musical happenings this week, it's almost more than this little column can bear.
  •   RARE FREQUENCIES: CALLITHUMPIAN CONSORT, THURSTON MOORE AND BILL NACE  |  January 20, 2009
    Although composer JOHN CAGE is best known for 4'33" of silence, he could raise a ruckus when the mood struck.

 See all articles by: SUSANNA BOLLE