Diagram & Moliné
Ley
CD (E125)

“So there we were in Leytonstone, talking about
identity, how the Self imprints itself on musical
performance, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Which, arguably, is what we mean when we talk
about Style. Would circumventing Style be possible,
and if so desirable? Would a new identity impose
itself in the absence of the Self, perhaps the identity
of the Moment, or the Place? So we went out into
the garden with a stereo mic, a bunch of junk
shop guitars, and a trumpet ‘plugged in’ to a bowl
of water via rubber tubing. Now, normally we’re
hooked up to a bunch of tech, trumpet looped and
harmonised, guitar synth’d, all cranked through
amps. This time, attempting to give our Selves
and their attendant Styles the slip, we played un-
plugged. An hour passed in that Leytonstone
garden; it felt like minutes, one of us said, no, no,
it felt like days came the reply. So we listened back,
hoping to hear Leytonstone, but we could still hear
our Selves. We volte-faced, booted up the computer,
spent months, months searching for ways to feed
the garden recording into the software, treating the
soundfile as if it were a punchcard on an old main-
frame machine, hoping that technology would
efface us, to reveal something elemental about the
Place itself, at the Moment of creation. Once we’d
finished developing a series of patches designed to
interface with the source recording, we pressed
Return, sat back, and listened. Ley is what we
heard.”

— Diagram & Moliné, London, 2012

Keith Moliné has been smuggling leftfield praxis
into garage rock for over fifteen years in his
capacity as guitarist with Pere Ubu and David
Thomas. Recently he has been focusing on
developing an idiosyncratic approach to computer
composition, in particular by exploring ways in
which the contradictions and absurdities of his
role as a music journalist might be made integral
to the process of music-making.
keithmoline.wordpress.com

Andy Diagram is a trumpet player who has
developed a sound based around live looping
and harmonisers since the early 1980s. Aside
from playing with Indie legends James, he has
worked with David Thomas since 1996 as one
of the Two Pale Boys (the other Pale Boy being
Moliné). His long-running trumpet/drums duo
Spaceheads emerged in the early 90s from
Improv heroes The Honkies. 
andydiagram.com

Edition of 200 copies






Diagram & Moliné
Excerpt from Magnus (Ley, 2012)


Reviews
—

The album is a stitched-together jumble bag of rags
and oddments, and has a foreboding complexity and
denseness you wouldn’t believe. They started with
recordings of their own improvisations performed
with trumpet and guitar (and tubes, bowls of water
and other miscellaneous items) which were pretty
idiosyncratic to begin with — they did it in the back
garden with no amplification, and tried to enact that
form of disconnect that is so valuable to creators,
to get away from self-consciously ‘creating art’ or
evade the over-familiar patterns of playing. Then
the recordings were subjected to further malarkey
from programs running on Moliné’s computer.
Along with the original recording data, he threw
some ‘wild’ data into the mix, apparently derived
from digital image files and text files. This practice,
by which I mean the repurposing of JPGS, TXT and
other non-audio file formats into something which
an audio editing suite can process or play, seems to
be cropping up quite a few times lately, so maybe
it’s starting to enter the lingua franca of experi-
mental music. On Ley, the process may not be
directly used to generate sounds, but it has been
used to trigger certain digital instruments and
contribute to the overall process. This has resulted
in a listening experience that is extremely chaotic
and unpredictable. I do like the fact that Moliné’s
method has blurred the edges almost completely
between real-time improvising and post-hoc
computer mayhem, and there are sound events
taking place in the fabric of this music that are
almost shockingly unfamiliar and strange. At the
same time, I’m hard pushed to find any logical
train of thought in these compositions; it’s as if
the ‘wild’ elements have taken over for 90%
of the time, and the computer’s errant patterns
of behaviour are guiding everything, making
sonic mincemeat of the material. Put a madman
behind the wheel of a very fast big truck, and
wait for the fun to start. With this two-pronged
approach to randomness, this pair are certainly
trying to take aleatory composition to a new
level, even at the expense of creating a rather
indigestible music.

Ed Pinsent at The Sound Projector
—

In an attempt to circumvent a case of musicians’
block, trumpeter Andy Diagram and guitarist (and
Wire contributor) Keith Moliné resolved to produce
a work devoid of all traces of self or individual style.
Easier said than done, as generations of free impro-
visors and musicians deploying ostensibly random
triggers have found. With admirable anti-logic, the
duo left their effects in the studio and decamped
to Diagram’s garden, where they only played un-
treated acoustic instruments. Feeling that they
could still hear themselves in the resulting record-
ings, they attempted to bring the feel of the
original site to the fore by running the sound files
through custom software patches. When the
smoke cleared, “Ley is what we heard”.

And what we hear on Ley is an of-its-time mix of
computer-generated sound slivers, laptop-sourced
percussives and beats, deep analogue synth drones
and electroacoustic clashes. The pieces range from
the clangorous electronic battles of Leytonstone
Ricochet to gentle synthetic beats á la Matmos or
French toy music composers Pascal Comelade and
Pierre Bastien in Trace.

The cheapo rhythm box and cavalcade of primitive
synthesizer on Improg conjure images of the dark-
bordering-on-sinister work of the DIY cassette scene
in the 1980s, or perhaps early Chris & Cosey record-
ings. On Magnus, tentative, fractured beats are over-
laid with trumpet, synthetic accordion and glocken-
spiel, and crunchy laptop accents; Aquatronique is
a drifting noise collage apparently incorporating every
sound the duo could muster. The completed version
of Ley doesn’t sound remotely like anything in Andy
Diagram’s garden — and shows many signs of an
abandonment of its initial purist goal — but the
tracks succeed, intentionally or not, in creating a
series of vivid virtual spaces or environments, and
that is the recording’s great strength.

Dave Mandl in The Wire