Rdeča Raketa - Old Girl, Old Boy (Mosz, 2010)

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Rdeča Raketa is a Vienna-based duo comprised of Maja Osojnik and Matija Scdellander, whose 2010 collaborative cassette, “Old Girl, Old Boy,” combines their admirable and respective training in electronic and improvised music composition. “Old Girl, Old Boy” is a contextual and exploratory digital/acoustic collage that demands: 1) literally putting yourself on the electronic device table to comprehend (or not) the complex fusion of these often abrasive, wacky, yet tremendously skillful sounds; and 2) freeing yourself to be a part of whatever adventure on which the entire 37-minute track might take you. In other words, like the composed improvisation itself, the listening experience simultaneously demands intensive focus as much as it does an ability to go with it, wherever the heck that might be.

The first half or so of this cassette appears to be a cry for help, but I don’t mean this in the sense that anyone or anything needs help. The abstract sounds created by the sub-bass recorder, e-bass, and a mish-mash of indistinguishable electronic trinkets appear to emerge from a deserted electro-acoustic island of sorts. The clicks, bumps, loops, drones, human voices, and bass tones, all underscored for the first ten minutes by a constant state of electronic panic, never seem to reach any grounding or final destination. The first half, in sum, is an uncertain and sparse call composed of choppy SOS signals (sometimes human, sometimes not, but always nature-culture). The first part of the latter half (“half” here is defined simply by time; the piece itself has no obvious starts or stops, never mind halves, quarters, etc.), however, sees these sounds reaching the mainland for the first time, a dark, somewhat hopeful, ambient land/soundscape where the panic subsides, even if temporarily, before a sense of uncertainty takes over again around the 25-minute mark, or around the time when a human joins us again for a few seconds, only to disappear rather unsettlingly.

“Old Girl, Old Boy” is brilliantly disconcerting, and, admittedly, will take a few more listens before I really get what might be going on. Spending more time with this album may or may not be a good thing, though, because those big jungle birds sound really fucking creepy.

Christopher Canning