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"Built as a sound installation for a sculpture exhibit, Drekka's latest set of rolling drones displays Michael Anderson's deft control of sonic texture." - Marc Masters for Bandcamp "Experimental Highlights" selection / "Beings of ImberIndus" (2019, Somnimage) "Anderson's more recent music is, impressively, every bit as cave-bound and inscrutable as the more youthful, mournful cries heard on this LP, but No Tracks in the Snow is a more than viable point to start digging." - Noel Gardner for The Quietus / "No Tracks in the Snow : 1996-2002" (2019, Dais)
Drekka has released a large body of work on labels such as Auris Apothecary, Dais, Fabrica, Morc, Silber, Somnimage, and Anderson's own label, Bluesanct. Anderson has also recorded and toured as a member of such as projects as Jessica Bailiff, Dylan Ettinger, In Gowan Ring, Lovesliescrushing, Annelies Monseré, Stone Breath, and Turn Pale. Drekka owes something to the soundscapes and non-linear impressionism of Cindytalk or COIL, the industrial gravity of Einstürzende Neubauten or Hafler Trio, and the cinematic collaborations of Edward Artemiev/Andrei Tarkovsky or Simon Fisher Turner/Derek Jarman. But his work is singular, unique, and very personal. Throughout years of performing and recording, Drekka has explored early industrial tape culture, fragile bedroom noise-folk, and expansive cinematic textures. His work and performances touch on themes of silence, memory, and forgetfulness. But rather than obscure himself, as is so often the effect of experimental music, DREKKA functions as a direct line into Anderson's mind and his tenuous cache of memories. These personal aspects and this fragility are clearly on display, rather than being obfuscated by poetic abstractions. While "haunting" and "hypnogogic" are words often used to describe experimental music and art, DREKKA unequivocally occupies and deals in those dark spaces which comprise the tenuous province of memory and dreams. Those are the real ghosts of time and sound. Just as prominent, particularly in the live setting, is a sort of confrontation; a wrestling with frenetic energy that approaches mania or ecstasy. Just as DREKKA's recordings serve not to obscure but to exhibit Michael Anderson's mind, his performances serve to exhibit his person, his body. DREKKA's audiences behold not an anonymous face in the glow of a laptop, but a man riding his flimsy card table strewn with tape players, bells, trinkets, metal, and pedals. They behold a man's spirit riding him, contact microphone in mouth, hands shifting cassettes collected over time and distance. DREKKA's audiences behold a confrontation of spirit, body, memory, and sound.
TIMBER RATTLE is a roving, revolving and ongoing music project that continues to explore the connections between primordial sound, landscape, and the musics that have derived from our relationships to space and place throughout time. This contemplation manifests in a kind of "pyche-pastoral", a music both spatially vast and intimately inward-looking, which seeks to create a celebratory and reflective environment that shares borders with nature and silence. While never straying too far from the mountain-hymns that are at its roots, the songwriting - which simultaneously embodies and considers its own history and geography - is yet suffused with a vocabulary of drone, collected recordings and sound-experimentation. An intuitive exploration of palette, pattern, and scale is the softly shifting foundation for arcane texts and vocals, which inhere as sound and instrument in the sonic celebration of the meeting and interfolding of land and bodies, animals and plants, language, life and death.
I was deep into the "devotional" tag on Bandcamp, and growing weary of digging in the seemingly endless digital crates of kirtan. The sound of rapturous hippies doing Sanskrit sing-a-longs, strumming away on acoustic guitars, and jingling hand drums in a suburban yoga studio is often a far cry - both literally and figuratively - from the sound of Alice Coltrane in the Sai Anantam Ashram. Timber Rattle uses a comparable sonic palette, but the ritual comes across way heavier. The intertwined voices chanting and moaning on their 2013 "phantoms of place" album were just as indecipherable to my ears as Coltrane's devotional singing, or the phonetic recitations heard in Korean Zen temples." - an excerpt from "Ritual de lo Habitual :: Timber Rattle And The Value of Not Knowing", as featured on Aquarium Drunkard (September 2021)
DREKKA + TIMBER RATTLE, Joshua Tree, CA, JAN 2019 // (photo by Carrie Weaver) |
