Format: CD
Price: £10.00

OUT OF STOCK!

Album:
Marijn
(LAMP005)

Artist:
Machinefabriek

Release Date:
May 26, 2006

Tracklisting:
1. Kreukeltape
2. Somerset
3. Wolkenkrabber
4. Schipbreuk
5. J’espere Ca
6. Lawine

'Marijn' is the eagerly awaited debut full-length from Dutch musician Rutger Zuydervelt. It comes in a timely fashion after a handful of gorgeous hand-made cdr releases have filtered through the cracks on a regular basis over the last few months, the last two releases 'Manchester' and 'Chinese (Un)Popular Song' being the most acclaimed in the series yet! 'Marijn' marks not only Zuydervelt's first album proper, but also a shift in thought, as he drew a line under the experimentations of his previous work to come up with a thoughtful collection of tracks, written together for the purpose of being played in one sitting.

The album begins with crackly slowly decomposing cassette-taped piano, in a similar vein to William Basinski's seminal 'Melancholia' album, yet this is much noisier and more processed - if William Basinski had a cache of effects pedals, this might be what he'd sound like. Quickly following this we have 'Somerset'; a gorgeous piece of menacing but oddly soothing reverberated guitar, reminiscent of the best bits of Earth's wonderful 'Hex' album last year, yet also coming across like Mogwai, back when they used to have true lo-fi attitude or Fennesz with real heart. Throughout the rest of the album, Zuydervelt toys with more extended piano pieces and fuses them with droning feedback maybe best compared to Sunn O))) jamming with Ryuchi Sakamoto! The final piece on the album 'Lawine' is the best example of this; an epic 20 minute work, beginning with a simple piano jam but ending in a cascade of noise that would shake the nerves of even Wolf Eyes. 'Marijn' is a true step forward for the genre, and a testament to Machinefabriek's skill to combine the experimental with the accessible.

REVIEWS:

Pitchfork (Kreukeltape track review)
Aug 2006
For those of us unable to spare five consecutive hours to take in the entirety of ambient drone's Ring cycle, The Disintegration Loops, Machinefabriek kindly serves up the Cliff's Notes. "Kruekeltape" has all the snap-crackle-pop and eerie discord of William Basinski's glorified tape-eating, yet at five minutes you can spin it several times on your morning commute-- making the road to work that much bleaker.

The cacophony of a jack that can't quite find its hole sets the scene for rain-like static and tape hiccups that sound like distant thunder, which eventually coalesce around a sparse, elegiac piano melody draped over looped cello. Notes amble along, shifting increasingly out of pitch until a death knell low-octave chord hits, rattling discordantly into a sandstorm of building tape hiss. This is harrowing, gloom-stricken, bowels-of-the-earth shit, a requiem for something that never had the chance to exist.

Foxy Digitalis
July 2006
After countless self-released 3” CD-Rs (none of which I´ve heard), here´s the first more widely distributed full-length CD by Holland´s Rutger Zuydervelt presenting six tracks of post-industrial ambience. Zuydervelt works with live instruments, mostly piano and guitar, and intense computer processing to create gloomy instrumentals.

Zuydervelt´s tracks develop very slowly and he takes all the time in the world to push them to the level of density his music requires. The album starts with the snaps and crackles of “Kreukeltape”, its treated piano giving the track a distinct deteriorating charme. “Somerset” features Zuydervelt on guitar and has a very physical presence to it, mostly through the noisy digital hiss in the background. In the middle of the CD, there are two relatively disappointing tracks, both of them hinting at Zuydervelt´s talent, but not arriving at their projected destination. “J´espère ca” does just that with Zuydervelt delicately layering feedback and white noise on top of a repeating piano theme.

The magnum opus of “Marijn” is the 18 minute album ender “Lawine” though. Zuydervelt starts looping piano, but soon departs from there and plays a menacing melody followed by a transistory section that leads to the grand finale: A five minute noise orgy that sounds like plugging headphones into the turbine of an Airbus. This is quite a surprise when compared to the overall quiet nature of the remainder of the CD, but it sums up a very dense and satisfying album.

The Wire Magazine
May 2006
The Highly pleasing debut album by Dutch musician Rutger Zuydervelt is eminiscent of Willian Basinski and Harold Budd among others, but has plenty of twists and turns of it's own. 'Kreukeltape' is particulalrly Basinski-esque, but it's as if the music has been amplified and subjected to a still more extreme aging process. Drifting like an electronic Marie Celeste, it manages to convey a substantial sense of absence. Even the minimal piano interventions seem excessive and garrulous, such is the mood Zuydervelt creates here.
On 'Somerset', one imagines a rusty foghorn retrieved from a dead sea and laid to rest with a simple keyboard motif.
'Wolkenkrabber' hovers and sustains over ten minutes, it's ashen bank of cloud broken only by the odd ripple of static and occasional lightning flash. On 'J'Espere Ca', flurries of piano and flotsam remnants of washed up rock guitar merge, stis and work up into a Fennesz-like typhoon of sirty grain.
Over 'Lawine''s 20 minutes, uneasy serenity filings which heave in and obliterate the piece like a plague of ravenous locusts. 'Lawine' showcases the singular talent of Rutger Zuydervelt, his ability to morph from near-absolute sonic stilness to noise jams with slow, barely descernible stealth.

(by David Stubbs)

Indiecult
May 2006
‘Marijn’ is the debut album of Dutch musician Rutger Zuydervelt and the follow up to a string of increasingly acclaimed hand-made CD-R releases. Utilising acoustic and electronic instruments, it straddles its own unique margin of decaying ambient noise, throwing up multitudes of evocative images and parallel earth images- like an Yves Tanguy landscape found buried in the future.

Opening track ‘Kreukeltape’ announces itself with cavernous clicks and cuts, massively amplified plugging and unplugging of guitar, wilting piano and backwards noise and there are certainly shades of decomposition hero William Basinski. But this reference quickly fades as Machinefabriek staggers into territory all of his own sculpting. ‘Somerset’ combines eerie drone, brittle panning textures and glockenspiel with acoustic guitar and rapid submerged bursts of processed noise, which slowly build to overwhelm space. ‘Wolkenrabber’ forms out of stark piano and its shy drones unfurl quietly as digital wind and waves give way to bewildering interruptions of strange sound eventually surrendering to a tightly shimmering guitar loop reminiscent of both Fennesz and Steve Reich. As the noise takes on a menacing air and a disturbing outburst becomes anticipated the sound falters and we’re into the disconcerting and eerie ‘Schipbreuk’.

Throughout the album, Zuydervelt proofs himself a master of atmospherics and control, creating Hitchcockian tension building suspense and pulling back. Drones give way to piano and then to noise and so on and so forth. This threat and promise is finally exorcised on the extraordinary 20 minute ‘Lawine’ where these oscillations range at their most extreme from the stillest of silence to a slowly enveloping noise whilst all the time a simple piano treads tentatively, the eventual collapse into sheet cacophony exhilirating and liberating. For all its noise, these pieces never lose their emotional heart.

A truly remarkable work.

Vital Weekly No523
April 2006
The CDR as testing ground worked pretty well for Machinefabriek, our almost local hero Rutger Zuydervelt. He released about fifteen or so 3"CDR privately, which gained interest from all around. Lampse won the battle to release his first 'real' CD and we can finally hear which direction he chooses. His private releases went in all sorts of directions, from downright noise to almost electronic pop-songs and anything in between. And perhaps of course the next Machinefabriek will be entirely different, you never know for sure with Rutger. But for his debut he made a good choice. Playing around with both musique concrete electro-acoustics, as-well as computer processed sounds, in combination with a real piano, he crafted together six new tracks which play all more or less a melancholically card. All six pieces are in the darker corner of the musical spectrum. Sometimes I thought this was very good micro-sounding material, but Machinefabriek certainly adds much more to the roster. The touching of objects in the opening piece 'Kreukeltape' or the piano playing in the closing 'Lawine', in which the electronically processed sounds slowly take over, which then start to move towards a big crescendo. Both the noise and the popsong are far away, if not completly wiped off the planet. This planet that is. An excellent new start, or perhaps his big bang: I am sure much more delights will follow.

by Frans de Waard