Music Reviews: Artist Archives
RF
Views Of Distant Towns
Back in June of 2004, Ryan Francesconi’s electronic music, which he records under the moniker RF, was featured by the popular MP3 blog 3hive. 3hive described it as the perfect accompaniment to a Haruki Murakami novel. Francesconi apparently took that comparison to heart, because his latest album, Views Of Distant Towns, is heavily inspired by the works of Murakami, specifically Murakami’s most famous novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
However, and this is no slight on Francesconi, Views Of Distant Towns actually works a little better for me when I think of it as separate from Murakami’s work. One of the things I most “enjoyed” about The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was the amazing, almost nightmarish anxiety that Murakami was able to conjure up at times, as well as the utter alienness of the situations he described that greatly belied his lethargic writing style.
There are a handful of tracks that certainly tap into that darkness, such as the somber “Of Detachment” and especially, “On The Bus That I Had Chosen” with its mournful, elegiac string arrangement and synth treatments. However, Views Of Distant Towns ultimately moves in a different direction, and as a result, it might be the lightest, most accessible album that Francesconi has released yet. That being said, it still captures into the meandering melancholy and sense of longing that characterizes Murakami’s writing.
Even if Views Of Distant Towns is more accessible than RF’s previous albums, 2004’s Falls and 2002’s Interno, don’t expect to find any fewer abstract electronic elements and whatnot. Views Of Distant Towns is still yet another showcase for Francesconi’s amazing and skillful blending of electronic elements — laptop processing, glitches, and other forms of software-based tweaking — with an orchestra of traditional instruments — guitars, bass, dobro, trombone, piano, violin, cello, xylophone, drums, etc.
Unlike so many other similar artists, which just slap whatever they’ve done over something they cobbled together in Fruity Loops, Francesconi tweaks and blends every element until it’s virtually impossible to tell where the electronic ends and the acoustic begins.
Falls
Ryan Francesconi’s (who records under the RF moniker alongside various collaborators) previous album, 2002’s Interno, was a gorgeous blend of acoustic and electronic sounds, a stunning piece of digitally-processed music that was remarkable for both its warm richness and its methodical sense of construction. And with 2004’s Falls, Francesconi continues to develop and deepen his unique sound, consistently managing to strike a fine balance between electronic and acoustic sounds, programmed and improvised composition, and the voices of both his human collaborators and his computer software.
The result is an album that doesn’t just entrance with its beauty but also raises the bar—not just for Francesconi’s future efforts, but also for any electronic music that crosses my path in the immediate future.
The album opens with “Falls (1)” and the haunting coos of vocalists Lily Storm and Moira Smiley. Reminiscent of the otherworldly Lucid, they’re joined by strings and warm electronics that can be heard slowly filtering through the vocals, before sequeing into a much truer, fleshed out form in “Falls (2)”. Soft electronics drizzle and gurgle in the background like a digitized spring shower, courtesy of Francesconi’s software, while the ghostly vocals intertwine with leisurely guitar and violin melodies.
It quickly becomes apparent that Francesconi seems less interested in developing the song per se as he is in exploring the different sonic permutations that arise as the “real” sounds interact with the “artificial” ones. Such exploration soon arrives at the point where it’s impossible to tell where the former ends and the latter begins.
Overall, Falls is a much mellower, sparser, and warmer recording than its predecessor. Clocking in at just over 65 minutes, the disc allows Francesconi plenty of time in which to mold and shape his sounds, be they laptop-generated glitch and glurp (to borrow Robert Rich’s term), subtle beats, violin, trumpet, guitar, gadulka, vocals, or field recordings.
In the case of “Fifth”, the result just seems to hover there, as solemn guitars meander amidst flecks and flurries of various digital flotsam and jetsam. The entire song is content to circle and spiral around the listener, absorbing any new elements (drones, strings, etc.) that Francesconi introduces with nary a ripple or disturbance.
In my Interno review, I noted that many of the songs had a rather elegiac, solemn feel to them. The same is true with Falls, perhaps even moreso. On “Mopmu”, a mournful violin winds its way through shimmering, gamelan-like tones and winded horns. One of the most stunning and evocative songs on the album, it’s also one of the most engaging, as a subtle, glurpy beat arises from the bell-like tones. The same goes for “Aid”, a piece of processed guitar that seems to drift overhead, occasionally joined by gentle vocoder caresses in a manner that suggests a much more pastoral and much less feedback-obsessed Mogwai (think Rock Action, not Young Team).
An on “Imaginary”, fluttering glitchiness and wavering tones shimmer and coalesce all about, evoking the finest of nostalgic summer days. Meanwhile, delicate female vocals drift and sigh, underscored by sparse bass and violin accompaniment. The song abounds in software manipulation, but it only enhances the song’s mood without ever sounding geeky or gimmicky.
Falls slowly winds down over the course of “Winter” and “Spring”. A languid acoustic guitar skirts across a gurgling, bubbling electronic surface as wordless vocals sigh in the background. As “Winter” unfolds, the electronics begin to grow in mass and volume, slowly enveloping the other sounds until they too dissolve into street field recording.
Another acoustic guitar lazily picks its way through “Spring”, along with ghostly vocals and electronics, before it also gives way to a field recording (this time, of a street scene in the midst of a gentle rainstorm). Perhaps not surprisingly, “Spring” has a much warmer and more reflective tone (implied, perhaps, by the album’s cover photo). As such, it feels like the inverse of “Winter”. As the two titles might imply, there’s a sense of thawing, of seasons changing that occurs, and the album ends on a note both nostalgic and content.
While certainly skilled technically (anyone who writes their own music software gets bonus points in my book), Francesconi possesses a nearly preternatural skill for finding unique connections between seemingly disparate sounds, and for bringing out the beauty from even the most mundane of sounds (such as the rather mundane field recordings that close out the album, and which become increasingly enthralling as a result of Francesconi’s subtle digital tweakings).
If you dissect the album track by track, which I’ve perhaps done a bit too much in this review, there are a few moments where the album lags, where some songs don’t seem to develop as strongly as others. However, this is very much an “album”. To truly “get it”, you can’t just listen to it piecemeal, even though there are individual tracks (“Mopmu”, “Imaginary”) that can stand on their own. You’ll need to block off at least 65 minutes of your day, a precious commodity in today’s hustle and bustle, to slow down and absorb this album, and to be absorbed by it. But the rewards are well worth it.
Interno
If there’s one musical “thing” that has really been intriguing me lately, it’s the combination of electronic, acoustic, and organic elements within songs. Yes, a good deal of music these days has some combination of the 3 due to the ease of digital recording these days, use of effects pedals, and prevalence of programming applications, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m referring to music that sets out to consciously combine those different sounds, where glitchwork coexists with acoustic guitars, strings with field recordings, vocals with cut-n-paste techniques.
Sometimes, it’s painfully obvious that the artist has no skill in mixing the different sounds, or just doesn’t go as far the process could be taken. I’ve heard numerous tracks that feature an acoustic guitar and hollow drum machine beat side by side. I realize that some just like the fact that they can DIY on the ol’ 4-track, but I’ve also heard artists who just slap on some wicked programming or environmental samples so as to sound cutting edge, experimental, or whatever.
RF, one of Ryan Francesconi’s several media projects, is quite the opposite. For an album that features a great deal of processing and digitization, there’s an incredible amount of organic warmth that emanates from nearly every track on the album. There are times when I honestly can’t tell where the glitches and computer trickery end and the “real” instruments begin. It certainly helps that many of his electronic sounds, whether they come from analog synths or Francesconi’s own music software, have a “glurpy” nature about them.