New Music From Sindre Bjerga, Rema-Rema
Sindre Bjerga
Hesitation Marks
(Eh?)
Listening to the new cassette Hesitation Marks from the Norwegian artist Sindre Bjerga, this writer imagines some kind of exploratory team from another planet, sifting through the remnants of human civilization on Earth.
Some technologically advanced detecting device hums and buzzes as it’s used to scan the rubble, where a damaged Walkman cassette player is found, which miraculously still works, but the playback is severely garbled, so that the spoken message on the tape is rendered incomprehensible.
Hesitation Marks documents two live, improvised sets recorded in the Netherlands and Germany in 2017, and Bjerga, a prolific electro-acoustic musician and creator of the Gold Soundz label, doesn’t use conventional instruments, opting to primarily employ a microphone and a portable cassette player, which is manipulated by Bjerga’s fingers to distort the playback speed, warping the output sounds.
To the listener, there seems to be no recipe for what makes certain parts more entrancing and intriguing than others. On one hand, the more dense and complex moments offer more to absorb and process, and at times, a firm tug out of a pit of more subtle, less stimulating passages is welcome. Possibly subconsciously, the listener wants cues to know that the musician is paying attention and constantly adjusting and reacting.
Generally, a sense of mystery works in favor of this material, where the sound seems to exist in the ether beyond earthly materials or human actions; however, there are small joys that come with recognition—like a pop song being aurally deformed—that draw the listener back to reality.
Low fidelity ambient noises, residing within a limited frequency range—whooshes and whirls, with grit and hiss—provide atmospherics while taped voices, like voicemail messages from ghosts, offer an eerie element, which can be both disturbing and slightly comical, particularly because they can’t be understood.
Rema-Rema
Fond Reflections
(4AD)
This writer’s first exposure to Rema-Rema—like most listeners, he ventures to guess—was through the strikingly and unflinchingly bleak 1984 cover of “Fond Affections” recorded by This Mortal Coil, 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell’s dreamy, goth-friendly studio project with a rotating cast of singers and musicians.
Its lyrics are gently devastating and nihilistic to an almost absurd degree, with lines such as “There’s no light at the end of it all / Let’s all sit down and cry.”
It took this critic years to finally hear Rema-Rema’s original version from its sole release, the posthumous 1980 four-song EP Wheel in the Roses (“wheel” being a verb in the title, referring to flowers for the band’s metaphorical funeral), and he was impressed by how it was even colder and more desolate than This Mortal Coil’s cover.
Rema-Rema had a brief existence in 1978-79, and its members went on to more popular acts including Adam and the Ants, The Wolfgang Press, Psychic TV, and Renegade Soundwave. Since Rema-Rema’s family tree is better known than its actual recordings, the new collection Fond Reflections is a good remedy for that.
Both vinyl and CD editions feature 50 minutes of demo recordings, most of which are previously unreleased, but the CD edition is recommended, since it includes a second disc which contains Wheel in the Roses plus three tracks taken from the same studio and live sessions from which the original EP drew.
Both discs begin with the killer one-two punch of “Feedback Song” followed by “Rema-Rema.” “Feedback Song” sports a piercing bass line and squealing guitar tones, amid sinister synth modulations and death march drums, and the demo version is a little more indulgent than the studio version.
“Rema-Rema” grinds with an abrasive bass, Velvet Underground-inspired simple riff and floor-tom/snare beat, and industrial, chiming guitars—it makes perfect sense that the band Big Black covered this track. The unreleased material is welcome but not as revelatory as one might crave; in general, the band offers variations of its primitive repetition, depending heavily on compelling timbres and momentum to carry a song.
Standouts on the demo disc include the intense “Why Ask Why” and a more raw-sounding “Instrumental”, with wilder guitars and an extreme envelope effect on the synth.
The liner notes were written by drummer Dorothy Max Prior (simply known as “Max”), discussing notable events in the band’s history and interesting tidbits; for example, surprisingly, the group was hugely influenced by funk acts like Bootsy Collins and James Brown, and “Instrumental” grew out of an attempt to cover the “Doctor Who” theme song.
Max described “Entry” as “the definitive Rema-Rema song,” which was rejected by both the Charisma and 4AD labels (its provocative lyrics likely being the reason), but this writer would argue that Rema-Rema can’t be adequately summarized in a single song.