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Illusion of Safety, Dan Burkes ongoing and ever evolving project since 1983, contributes a fantastic new album to the experimedia catalog. A hand signed and numbered limited edition release,
The Need To Now is one of Burkes more stark and minimal works. While more minimalistic overall,
The Need To Now still embraces Burkes penchant for broad dynamics, building from soft tones, drones, and distant whistling to maddening noise and back down to near silence with just the smallest trace of air space. Music box like tones dance loosely throughout constructed industrial ambient environments. Soft crackling, static and noises fizzle in and out of focus while subtle guitar rises quietly in the distance. Deconstructed voices, samples, rhythms, and instruments arranged into brilliant sound montages in ways reminiscent of the classic GRM school of tape cut ups. A soundtrack for sedated asylum inmates. This masterful work by one of the veteran heroes of avant-garde post-industrial music aims at activating modes of perception, deprogramming reality, and recombining information pointing toward a new reality/environment.
The Need To Now comes packaged in experimedias signature tall slim pack and features the photography of Chris Block. Strictly limited to 150 copies.
myspace.com/illusionofsafety
Your order of the limited edition packaged CD includes immediate bonus downloads of the album in highest quality MP3 and/or lossless FLAC formats so that you may begin to enjoy the album before your package arrives. Download only sales of the full album in FLAC or MP3 are exclusively available
HERE for $5.
REVIEWS
rare frequency
As Illusion of Safety, musician Dan Burke often works at the extremes, shifting from dense, earsplitting noise to brooding, atmospheric soundscapes. This beautifully packaged, limited edition CD on Ohios small Experimedia label finds Burkeat least for the most partin minimalist mode. The pieces are stark and spacious as Burke allows a variety of field recordings, unearthly hums and sharp, metallic tones to hover and drift, creating a quiet, eerie intensity. There are a few disquieting exceptions, such as About When, with its bursts of frenetic drum and guitar snippets sampled from jazz records, and the discs final track, History is Selective, which has an unexpected Gaelic-style vocal interlude. The albums finest moments, however, are its most bleakly austere and unsettling beautiful. Susanna Bolle
Frans De Ward from Vital Weekly 642
My love for Illusion Of Safety can't be a secret, though I am not a follower with no critique. There is a great deal of CDs, vinyl, CDRs and tapes around with their music, and some I rank as 'absolute' master pieces ('Historical', 'Probe', the first two 'Mort Aux Vaches' for instance), and some I found more curious than good, like 'Inside Agitator', but the vast majority of the release are labeled as 'good' or better. These days Illusion Of Safety is no longer a band, but the one man band of Daniel Burke, although former (?) member Chris Block did the photos for the cover. In recent years Burke has settled on a more specific style of sound, which involves electronics, laptop and hand held objects attached with contact microphones. Pre-recorded sound material, mainly snippets from radio, TV an records, the 'field recordings' as well as electronic sounds are mixed with electro-acoustic objects in an extraordinary manner. This is the meeting point of many influences: improvised music, musique concrete, industrial music, microsound even, all in a highly intense set of music. Music that has a soundtrack like character. Why isn't Daniel Burke a famous Hollywood soundtrack composer, I wonder? I can imagine great movies with this music, better than much of the muzak that now comes with 'scary' movies'. The shock tactics that Burke uses, the swift changes in his music, are less present here than before, but add that cinematographic character to the music. It's perhaps also the most present element from the world of industrial music which you can find in his music these days. Never brutally loud - that station is past history luckily enough - but angular at times, flowing easily at others, playing with the notion of silence and loudness, and never strictly confined to laptop techniques, which firmly sets him aside of some many others. The strange thing is, in my opinion, why isn't this a household name, playing all the major festivals there are in this field? Organizers, film makers and listeners: please pay some more respect.
WHITE LINE
A trio of new releases from Experimedia demonstrates that Jeremy Bible & Jason Henry are alive and well, and making great work as usual. Housed in very extravagant fold out packaging with beautifully photographed natural elements such as burnt wood, leaves, mould etc, they more than hint at the quality of the releases contained within. Also included in the trio of releases is a new work from Illusion of Safety, a group that should need no introduction to 40 somethings like myself, who invested a lot of time and energy seeking out IOS releases many years ago in what would arguably have been their heyday. Dan Burkes project resurfaces in the form of The Need to Now , a 7 tracker that does not dissappoint these ears, having not heard their more recent materials, this was a welcome opportunity to experience IOSs distempered sampling, and edgy, tightly wound atmospherics. IOS have distilled their overall sound further since I last heard them, leaving yawning chasms of near silence to add drama and anticipation, allowing their taut, aqueous ambiences to swirl around sharply focussed field recordings and organic elements. Once again, IOS demonstrate a mastery of the medium in a welcome comeback. Next up is Vector, a fine release from Messrs Bible and Henry specialising in stripped bare atmospherica, and discrete washes of near oceanic sound draped with granular surface textures. Pieces like fndt take an oblique approach, where the sounds of what appear to be jungle or forest ambiences are interleaved with oddly out of kilter sonic presences, somewhere between urban gamelan, and ritualistic chanting moving in and out of focus. The overall recording technique is slightly tainted, like oxidised metals, grating and grinding against each other, leaving a trail of dusts and shavings. In fact, the ensuing tracks, flck2? and rtn have a similar feel, creating shimmering, dusty trails, that feel somehow unearthly and disjointed, yet holding the attention all the while.Closing track Imp, once again uses organic sampling to fuel auditory out of body experiences with razor sharp sampling wrapped around an eerie piano or keyboard central theme, a dreamy, hazy closure to the whole proceedings. Next up is Shpwrck from Bible and Henry, with trademark titling pared down to the barely discernible, leaving a measure of interpretation to the auditor. Once again, the pairing fuse heady organic field recording with strange, angular atmospheres, that remind me of some of the early recordings on the UKs EM:T label, back in the dayin the main, these are eerie and spacious works, conjuring dark, but not altogether uncomfortable imagery, infused with the spirit of Dada, being a close cousin of musique concret perhaps, or some of the early works of Pierre Schaefer at times. Pieces like sphotnblp are pure experimentalism, using light and space to perpetrate areas of wondrous tonalism. The duos overall approach is certainly a breath of fresh air, as their canvas is littered with creative and original solutions, defying any obvious genre (always a good thing in my book), and creating a language all of their own. These three releases come with my highest recommendation, and in the words of Bible and Henry excllnt. BGN
