Mem It Was A Very Good Year

Mem It Was A Very Good Year CD A16

The newest Alluvial release is a bit of a departure from many of our past releases. It is perhaps more in line with our Kuwayama-Kijima compact disc from earlier this year. Mem is one Kamil Antosiewicz from Warsaw. Kamil existed in a previous incarnation as one third of the now defunct Polish trio, EA. Mem’s work typically attempts to link sonic anomalies with electronics. His most recent interests include the decontextualisation of sound material. He is currently experimenting with primal structures of non-organic origin, such as white noise and sine waves, and melding them into sounds of organic nature. He works mainly with a PC platform. On “It Was A Very Good Year”, Mem takes source material from perhaps the most popular version of a standard American classic of the same title from the early 1960’s. Mem uses isolated sections of string sounds from a big band orchestra and draws them out into slowly cascading
layers. We hear humming, vibrating, drawn out drones that build very slowly into a massive crescendo of noise that eventually include others sounds from the orchestra. Many of the sounds are manipulated, but nothing outside the original recorded version is added. The piece results in a stunningly beautiful hour with hypnotic qualities that build in giant ebbs and flows. As a point reference, this is reminiscent of some of the best work from Charlemagne Palestine and Vidna Obmana. In addition to his work as a composer, Kamil runs the Salvia Association with Viön, and formerly worked as a music journalist and cyberculture writer-editor for the first Polish internet magazine titled "WWW". Mem and related: www.vion.pl.

$8p.p. in North America, elsewhere see the Alluvial Shop for additional postage rates.

REVIEWS

Frans de Waard (Vital Weekly 390), Netherlands

Let's take a moment to correct the previous issue of Vital Weekly. I wrote that I never heard of Mem, but that was not entirely true. Behind Men is Kamil Antosiewicz, who was at one point a member of EA, a Polish trio, whose releases
were discussed in Vital Weekly before. EA does no longer exist and now Kamil works on his own. For this new CD he took as a sound source, the 1961 song "It Was A Very Good Year" by Elvin Drake, best known though for the interpretation by Frank Sinatra. His version is a like standard for romantic songs, about love, life and death. It's not Mem's idea to pay hommage to old blue eyes, but about the very essence of the piece. Strange to think that only this song is all he uses but maybe the possibilities of the computer sound processing are indeed endless. But still, upon closely listening to this disc, I assume, Mem just a very long time stretch of the entire song and processes those extremely long processing into an one hour sound event. Like with his EA days, Mem still loves to work with drone related material. What happens with a time stretch is that the sounds are much longer and by adding the right
filter one moves into the area of drone and ambient music. While listening, I was thinking, well, that's a rather simple thing to do. But does it matter? Do I really care how this was made? Not really. The disc is just a very nice ambient
record, quietly humming music, vibrant yet minimal. Maybe not the most fascinating innovative recording, but still a good ambient headphone music.

Wire #239 January 2004, UK, (Jim Haynes)

Joseph Lanza's 1996 book Elevator Music offers a benevolent history of the machinations of Muzak. Central to his apprasials and arguments is the idea that the advent of modernity created a necessity within the population at large for some form of mood music. The Muzak Corporation simply filled that empty market with a particularly banal, lowest common denominator commodity. That is not to say that the subcultures of the world do not share this same need. Regardless of their own intentions, minimalists, post-minimalists, and Ambient artists might find their work serving this need for mood music. Consciously or not, It Was A Very Good Year, by Polish dronescaper Mem (aka Kamil Antosiewicz) draws attention to this potential gap between the artist's intent and the audience's use. Mem has stretched the maudlin croon from Frank Sinatra's rendition of "It Was A Very Good Year" into a frozen drone that adeptly reflects the plasticity of Asmus Tietchens as well as the sculpted infinity of Charlemagne Palestine.