p-words

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Pimmon
Pola Pola
Sydney, Australia¹s Paul Gough came to my attention on the IDM mailing list
after someone posted a glowing review of his work there. This CD-R of his
recent material (some of which will appear on the Waves And Particles CD on
Japanese label Meme) proves that the praise is deserved. Pimmon sounds like
an old-school abstract experimentalist who¹s made a smooth transition to the
digital age. His minimalist music has a hypnotic pull that recalls artists
like Zoviet France and Rapoon, but it also bristles with an edgy energy that
keeps a sense of stasis at bay. Pola Pola reflects Pimmon¹s diversity,
ranging from Oval-esque glitched-up ambience to alternate soundtracks for
the cult-classic film Begotten to chaos-theory music in the vein of Bernard
Parmegiani and his most popular disciples, Autechre. Regardless of this
review¹s name-dropping, Pimmon remains a distinctive artist within a
rarefied tradition of sound exploration. (pimmon@broadcast.net) 4

Dave Segal Managing Editor/Alternative Press
Reviews/BPM/Reissue Redux/Origins Of Cool
Secret Ions on WCSB Thursdays 9-11PM EST www.wcsb.org

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PIMMON - WAVES AND PARTICLES (CD by Meme)

This is Pimmon's, aka Paul Gough, first full length CD. Earlier he released
a beautiful 12" LP on the new ERS label (which sadly enough wasn't reviewed
in Vital Weeky, eternal shame upon ourselves) and there are also released
out or forthcoming on Fat Cat and Static Caravan. According to the rather
uninformative Meme cover, Pimmon uses a personal computer in combination
wwith two old analogue synths. He tapes sounds from the synths and composes
with these sounds on his harddisc. Over the course of his 10 tracks, he
shows a varied pallet of sounds and techniques. There is the obvious noise
bit (as in the short 'Cafu'), and more quiet pieces which places more
interest on the balance. Pimmon mostly uses loops to create his pieces, and
thus a somewhat 'beating' character is added to the pieces. Even when it
would maybe hint at techno music, it never gets anywhere close. At best
some of the pieces are more in the Mego alley, and the majority would be
classified as 'intellectual industrial'. The more noisy variant to RLW,
Meelkop and the like.

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from The Wire issue 192 feb 2000:

pimmon 'vpe' ERS 12/01 LP
mnortham 'many rivers move...' ERS 12/02 LP
87 central 's/t' ERS 12/03 LP
"Three arcs of edgeless fascination, which really deserve individual
treatment...but for the sake of economy we'll say that they have
'a sound' in common. Each explores a beatless plane of immanence
-aural space folded back to little more than a limpid impulse of
shiver and crackle: a low-watt hi-tensible balance between fuzziness
and clarity. Drones multiply out of the encrypted hum, dross glints
with gold. Like Obscure or Mille Plateaux, ERS are definitely on top
of something which demands listening time to itself. Like the Mille
Plateaux crew, these artist use patient studio manipulation to sculpt
sound far from dead matter, like quizzical angels calling from the air.
To engage with each of these tranches/trances of deft experiments is
to attune your day to a silence of truly heightened listening: to win
back live time out of 'dead' sounds. Germinal.      Ian Penman.

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                  Pimmon | v.p.e. ERS 1999 
                  Pimmon | Vovul II Static Caravan 1999 >>>

                  Australian producer Paul Gough has hit a critical mass of sorts. His
                  debut CD is soon to appear on Japanese label Meme, and these two
                  releases -- for Holland's ERS and, bizarrely, Birmingham-based Static
                  Caravan -- will follow shortly after. If records on labels variously
                  dedicated to noise (Meme), post-industrial power electronics (ERS), and
                  indie-pop/electronica (Static Caravan) seem like a stretch, rest assured
                  Pimmon manages to combine these threads in ways that sound
                  neither strained nor unfocused (and that tend to distance his work
                  from other releases in those labels' respective catalogs). The ERS EP
                  features four cuts of minimalist electronics, moving between vaporous
                  digital ambience and thin, pure-tone investigating. "Watch the Step,
                  Mind the Gap" is the EP's longest cut, and its cycles of implied
                  melodies, oscilloscope refrains, and bubbling static issue from a core
                  combining Oval with early Brian Eno. (Gough recognizably switches
                  to analog tape during mixdown, giving his tracks a depth and body
                  absent from much rigorously digital electronic music.) Pimmon's Static
                  Caravan EP is, oddly, a poppier redistribution of these same materials.
                  "Vovul II" is a pour of bassy drones and DSP that somehow manages
                  to be plaintive and forlorn, its subtle shards of treated noise and
                  inferential brass arrangements recalling the work of Fennesz or Sack &
                  Blumm. The flip is a grubbier affair, with distorted rumbles and sheets
                  of Coil-like frequencies playing support to a dopplering
                  emergency-vehicle figure blurred beyond recognition by track's end.
                  Stern stuff. 

                  Rating: 7 and 7.5 | Sean Cooper

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" Waves And Particles " 

                 Meme Record 

                 There are discs that arrive by the back part, without previous
                 praises nor crazy critics, from clandestine seals of peripheral
                 countries for the world of the music, the more kind to which
                 badly we called modern and that is only the old thing or
                 dressed. In this year and for the world of the electronics, the
                 first case was " Pop loops for breakfast " of B. Fleischmann,
                 capital work for more human the Central European
                 electronics, and now it is necessary to return to be astonished
                 and to search carefully in the trunk of the praises to receive
                 this " Waves And Particles ". Published by the Japanese seal
                 Meme, PIMMON is the musical project of the Australian Paul
                 Gough, musician of whom we do not know any other
                 reference different from this excellent work. Totally white
                 cover, the design announces the minimal content of a work
                 that, austere, continues the deconstruccionista sound
                 undertaken by Oval, although without tracks on the use or of
                 same tools (manipulation of the CD). Only one or two
                 subjects they cannot be described as superfluous in an
                 abstract assembly that, although can suck certain stimuli
                 (Zoviet France, Autechre, Faust), it is revealed as a work
                 germinated solely from the creation of a talent without the
                 pair, most original and brave in his assembly and collapses of
                 the noise, the electronics and the ordered chaos. Minimum
                 Minimalismo, a work able to raise passions for which we
                 loved the risk of the moved away electronics more of the
                 club. Downtempo from the sawmill.

Jesus Castillo - Toledo -- Spain

http://www.informativos.net

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