“                    ”[sic] Tim Goldie/

Daniel Beban
Slakes

Triple CD and book (E145)
210×148 mm; 96pp

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Belgium £25 (including postage)

Europe £30 (including postage)

Rest of world £35 (including postage)
 

Digital £15 (mp3/PDF)​

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Edition of 300 copies

Mastered by Rashad Becker

Selected tracks from Slakes

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Slakes by “                    ”[sic] Tim Goldie and Mark Aerial Waller

Daniel Beban is a musician and

sound artist who lives in Wellington,

New Zealand. He performs on a number of instruments in groups including Imbogodom, Sign of the Hag, Little

Wet Horse, Doctor Quirky’s Goodtime Emporium Band, The Mantarays and Slakes. He has recorded and released many albums including two Imbogodom LPs on Thrill Jockey. In 2009 Daniel founded the Frederick Street Sound 

and Light Exploration Society. Fred’s 

was an important centre for creative 

and experimental music and arts in Wellington, holding regular gigs, festivals, exhibitions, workshops, film screenings, recordings, rehearsals. Since the closure
of Fred’s in 2012 the Sound and Light Exploration Society has been putting 

on shows in disused spaces around
Wellington and a new festival called Rising Tides. Daniel builds invented instruments out of found objects.
Recent instruments include the water organ (installed at the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary, Zelandia), the prepared
spinning wheel, the huhu organ and 

the biscuit tin guitar. He was trained as 

a Studio Manager at the BBC World
Service and works as a sound engineer for Radio NZ and BBC World Service.

 

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Reviews

Together these two artists form a power-ful and grandiose free-improvisation drums-and-guitar duo but their musical backgrounds are much wider. Daniel Beban is the author of several sound 

art works and often makes his own instruments, while Tim Goldie has joined many projects as instrumentalist and author. The sound of this album is consistently refined, presenting primitive, hammering polyrhythms alongside dissonant, inflected sequences – all linked together by a series of intense vocals. The approach is at the same 

time noisy and electronic, energising 

and abstract; in the book there are only track titles, black on white in bold capitals,

as if trying to make some connection between the tracks and the sounds contained within. The album reveals an aggression that is pure but not simple —
Everything is emphasised and muscular: this is the celebration of a radical militancy, which we can define musically as Baroque and cryptic: love it or hate it,
you definitely won’t be left indifferent.

Neural
 

Willfully difficult, from the various 

apparati tortured until boiling all the way to Goldie’s apparent psuedonym “ ” [sic]. (Not sure if I got the right number of spaces.) Empty songs, silence for seconds with titles like Docile Scoptophile and Sarcastic Embrace and ironically Rhetorician. Other songs with made-up
words that make Magma look like Sesame Street. You want supremely shrill feedback that will perplex your dog? Try the opening of Duo-Sang and sideways
slices of Passible. (The latter is a killer covering a lot of (rough) territory, I dug the driller/drone 8+ minutes in. Want 

nine seconds of a ticking clock? Listen 

to Humane with a line through it. Try entering that into your ASCII mindset. Field recordings in a vacant field, or perhaps more Ghosts from Bush House at the BBC? Percussion is often great and grating, bowed, struck, clanked, scraped and crashed as on A Region of
Ambiguity... hell call it CD2.35. You want punk noise, wrap Scarfskin around your neck to the venom oozes out your ears... that track has a poetry scream slam
over angry electronics and industrial drums. If you want something soothing, try L’udienza Bemani/Figurine for a brief vibrational gaze inward, then run for your life. The whole thing feels like a puzzle that might solve you before you solve it.

Thurston Hunger (KFJC)


“The book: well you know I would 

delight in this. As (I hope, though always redoubting) I already mentioned, you’re an actual poet, as opposed to (unpublished Dictionary entry) [Wealth of Negations]: POET: (1.) gossip columinst exclusively about him/ herself (2.) distinguishable from prose writers by
virtue of being many times more prosaic. So in the lower-case-plus-biologically-alive category that makes you, Ben Watson, Sean Bonney, Anne Boyer,
Susan Howe... there must be some others but their names escape me now (perhaps because unlike upper-case Poets the lower-case names aren’t always out door-knocking for attention). Hard to separate the the music (please let’s be done with this uppercase ‘Noise’, which I don't recall you ever advocating
anyway) from the writing/physical appearance of the whole thing/ compressed memory of you (& Daniel
Beban on the few occasions I saw you play together) making this stuff: I play it less often than I look at the words but when played it breathes justified world-spite. Lightly and with pathos not bathos (because unlike so much loud ponderous shite it knows the bathysphere and won't stoop to pathetic pleading). Cramped, muttering, twitching but unflinchingly

aligned, m.”

Matthew Hyland
 

A duo which veers haphazardly between the maximal and the minimal. This 197 minute triple CD contains no fewer that 85 tracks, yet just over half of them are no longer than 20 seconds and emit
little more than a faint hum or the

sound of a quietly ticking clock. They’re scattered around a series of energetic, stormy improvised workouts, in which New Zealander Beban meets Goldie’s vocal outbursts and percussive barrages — layered polyrhythms and z’ev-

style primitive ritualistic pounding — 

with swathes of grinding electronic frequencies and gritty feedback swarms. The more interstitial tracks are the 

most rewarding, in particular by Goldie.

Like Mattin, Goldie, who is currently based in London, disrupts certain idiomatic musical forms — primarily
Noise, power electronics and improvisation — with strategies borrowed from performance and conceptual art. Slakes periodically resembles Goldie’s occasional duo with Mattin, Deflag Haemorrhage/Haien Kontra. The raucous live recording which closes the third 

disc has a typically confrontational air. Goldie is an increasingly accomplished improvisor — interspersed throughout Slakes is a series of solo percussion pieces which overflow with both aggression and intelligence. Those aside, the duo’s talents seem to lie as much

in the linguistic as the musical. The book which accompanies Slakes contains neither sleevenotes nor imagery, just the track titles typeset in bold uppercase,
black text on a white background. It’s 

a smart ploy — they conjure fascinating linguistic riddles, splicing together convoluted palindromes, lorem ipsum gibberish, garbled snatches of German and French, political sloganeering and philosophical jargon. Thus two minutes 

of blurry hum on the third disc is

rewarded with the name MYSTAGOGUE [NOT BEING TO BE SEEN] EVAGINATES HYSTERICAL MALINGERER SAMOTARI MEKIVUN 

HA YAAR ZUGRUNDE: THE EMPTY
PLAN, and one of the better duo face-

offs on the second is tagged DEPICT HYPERPARASITIC FUNCTIONARY
COUP DE MAITRE WHAT DID 

YOU WANT THIS BODY THIS EXTERNALISATION. See also NATURALISED VERWINDUNGIST EXECUTABLES/PRION TANDEM
PARALOGUE and my favourite, 

MUTUAL CONCILIATORY GESTURES INTERMINABLY THEATRICALISED.

Nick Cain in The Wire
 

 

Strange and explosive encounter between Tim Goldie (drums) and Daniel Beban (all other instruments). Strange, because it’s elusive — even if it’s marked by the momentum of noise music and 

a thirst for experimentation. Explosive, because energy and electricity are involved, independent of any ruling logic. Excellent, quite simply! Will prove of equal interest to lovers of Whitehouse and Mattin alike.

Metamkine