Introducing… Standard Form’s Rural Route Series

Standard Form, a print shop and publishing-house based out of Toronto, first caught my attention when I spotted eye-catching 3” CD-Rs of Muskox and Feuermusik displayed on the shelves of Soundscapes on College Street. Their foray into music wouldn’t directly impact me until Kyle Bobby Dunn delivered his Rural Route No. 2, an EP I loved but ignorantly failed to understand its title as part of a bigger project. Finally, when Samu Kuukka from Gentleman Losers announced his participation in No. 5, I researched what each of these unassuming Standard Form releases were compiling into; namely, a concept-driven but creatively freewheeling collection of compositional essays detailing a variety of artists’ musical representations of “home”. Each musician was encouraged to take an experimental angle and delve into notions of memory, belonging and how that all relates to private geographies.

I was smitten with it, and in November set out to write up the collected works in all its unfurling, unending glory. With the help of Damian Valles, artist and curator of this series, I’m pleased to shed some additional light on this one-of-a-kind project that’s giving Canada’s electronic-music profile a serious shot in the arm.

Rural Route No. 1 - Damian Valles (Rural Route Series)

Rural Route No. 1

Damian Valles
Standard Form Records.

SCQ Rating: 79%

For a collection borne on the promise of experimental electronics, it's surprising that Rural Routes’ first installment by Canadian composer Damian Valles breaks the whirling ambience with the traditional edge of a patiently picked guitar. Rest easy, though: little about Valles' style can be deemed traditional. From two notes alternating over some background noise arises an interwoven web of serene yet desperate guitar figures, filling in silent cracks and finishing each other’s thoughts. What instinctively sounds like an instrumental mantra from Six Organs of Admittance continues to spawn unassuming flourishes, each anchoring the track’s airy sentiments to encroaching danger without complicating its linear structure. The track’s called ‘Low Population Density’ and its thirteen-minute progression, covering everything from ambience and noise to post-rock and soundscapes, introduces Standard Form’s Rural Route series as a modest tour de force.

The limited CD-R’s subsequent two tracks only register half the time of ‘Low Population Density’ combined but Valles uses their conciseness to embellish upon the woodsy isolation hinted upon over the course of that opening epic. The hostility behind ‘Swale’’s reverb-tinged twang evokes a do-or-die menace deserving of the Wild West, its steps fortified by lone drum-strikes all blunted and caked in mud. Somewhat alleviating the hardships of this country life, ‘Minor Variance’ floats rather than marches, its guitar timbre padded by the swelling of steady, almost plodding rhythms that seem determined to move on instead of fated to fall. For anyone who’s yet to peer into Damian Valles’ rustic universe, Rural Route No. 1 is a fine escape to that borderless country.

Rural Route No. 2 - Kyle Bobby Dunn (Rural Route Series)

Rural Route No.2

Kyle Bobby Dunn
Standard Form Records.

SCQ Rating: 78%

As someone who’d never heard of Kyle Bobby Dunn before 2010, I had the great fortune to discover the composer’s work through A Young Person’s Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn, a double LP that collected Fervency (a 2009 Moodgadget release) with over sixty minutes of unreleased tracks from those same sessions. And yes, I’m aware that by describing Dunn as a composer, I’m putting him in league with some of ambient’s finest tightrope-walkers, like Stars Of the Lid or Brian Eno. I’m comfortable with that, as Rural Route No.2 handily pushes Dunn’s two sonic poles – noise-laced urgency and pristine calm - to new levels of emotional richness.

That may seem like a feat for a release that clocks barely twenty minutes in all, but Dunn has never let limitations diminish his reach. He’s a minimalist, after all, and although both tracks here wander a static purgatory, we listeners receive occasional channels that direct us through Dunn’s devious narrative. If not for the EP’s actual narrative - that of Dunn’s return to a childhood home and all of the pale memories it recalls – first track ‘Dissonant Distances’ could’ve made an excellent title to these faraway recollections. Bathed in soft, industrial tones and at one point honing in on what sounds like a nostalgic radio signal, ‘Dissonant Distances’ would feel sterile if not for its emotional crests. That same ebb and flow runs through ‘Senium III’, only less obstructed by conflicted memories and more at ease with the ghostly beauty of nostalgia.

Overdue to take a Greyhound bus to my own hometown, I let Rural Route No. 2 accompany me when my passenger-seat caught the first of Toronto’s smog-riddled skyline. And in the way these two longform tracks expand then curl, speak up and then cut themselves off, I remembered the city in a scattershot of half-memories that showcase, with impassive precision, how it felt to live there. ‘Senium III’ has that rare ability to beckon buried thoughts and merit them with the appropriate significance. Like nostalgia itself, it's a wonderful place to wallow so long as you don’t live there.

(This review was originally published on Skeleton Crew Quarterly in August 2010.)

Rural Route No. 3 - Martin Clarke (Rural Route Series)

Rural Route No. 3

Martin Clarke
Standard Form Records.

SCQ Rating: 55%

For the same reasons I dislike watching music videos, I avoid reading press-releases. And not only because I fear that their insistent use of hyperbole might worm its way into the vocabulary of my subsequent review; it’s in how they pre-posture our listening experience, evoking open-door metaphors and super-technical descriptions which almost pre-empt any disagreements over quality. That said, in the case of Martin Clarke’s contribution to the Rural Route series, I was chasing down any authoritative press-release I could find, hoping to contextualize the CD-R’s eight self-described “States” beyond their dislocated bouts of sound audible. Clarke’s brief press-release, tellingly, calls the work “semi-abstract non-representational spaces”. At least he’s honest.

Because ‘States 1’ through ‘States 8’ contain ambience without any discernable musical touchstones, however, this press-release reads more like a light-weight theoretical accessory. These field-recordings, capturing a forceful gale and the rattling of nearby clutter on ‘States 2’ or studying claustrophobic insect anatomy on ‘States 4’, fit cleverly into Rural Routes’ loose concept of environments and nostalgia, but their underlying purpose – as a disc to be listened to – feels more academic for sound-artists than any music-lover. The lengthiest track, ‘States 5’, records what sounds like a rusted gate creaking just shy of its latch for five minutes, whereas ‘States 8’ scores what very well could be someone trying to recap a stubborn filter onto a kitchen tap. As faithfully as these tracks display irritable sounds we’d knock politely on our neighbour’s wall in an attempt to cease, there’s no semblance of rhythm or depth behind even the atmospheric earlier numbers that would warrant repeat-listens.

Still, Clarke’s work illustrates a fresh although dry-as-hell perspective of time and memory that’s far removed from the other, more compositional Rural Routes segments, and that “non-representational” aspect broadens Standard Form’s considerable focus on this theme. While inconsequential on its own, its role as Rural Routes’ nihilistic low-end actually benefits the series as a whole.

Rural Route No. 4 - Alex Durlak (Rural Route Series)

Rural Route No. 4

Alex Durlak
Standard Form Records.

SCQ Rating: 72%

You’d be forgiven for thinking ‘Catalyst 1’ sets the establishing shot for an intense soundtrack of urban dystopian instead of a reflective study on one’s homeland. In this case they’re one and the same, as Alex Durlak merges both environments – the visceral and personal – over the course of Rural Route No. 4’s reverberating quarters. Meditating solely on a guitar so heavily processed it sounds like a malfunctioning fridge, Durlak nonetheless paves a robust capacity for emoting here by assembling tension from the cut-up samples of guitar, swarming like locusts, on the shape-shifting ‘Catalyst 1’ and the rhythmic slabs of oscillating feedback that stir up ‘Catalyst 3’.

It’s an adverse landscape, sophisticated and daunting, but Durlak’s instincts as a composer aren’t entirely cold. When the digital waves part midway through ‘Catalyst 4’ to reveal a dissection of its percolating layers, listeners are treated to the warm sterility of memories neutralized; those mental images of personal landmarks overwhelmed by a static disinterest, a defensive nostalgia. The catalysts of Rural Route No. 4 seem motivated by a gritty remembrance, not the knowing resignation that other artists have employed, and it results in Rural Route series’ harshest but no less alluring installment.

Rural Route No. 5 - The Gentleman Losers (Rural Route Series)

Rural Route No. 5

The Gentleman Losers
Standard Form Records.

SCQ Rating: 83%

When The Gentleman Losers signed on to record the fifth installment in Rural Route, a series of conceptual ambient recordings that hark back to a given composer’s snapshot in time, I knew Standard Form had a winner on its hands. Namely because Dustland was hands-down Skeleton Crew Quarterly’s sneakiest record of 2009, one that slowly revealed a world of detailed instrumentation beneath its oppressive plodding layers. No kidding, that sophomore album gets more bemusing by the day, in how it institutes these poignant but stretched plateaus for listeners to find their reflections in, so it’s no surprise that Samu and Ville Kuukka sound right at home amid Rural Route’s ideology of representing a particular time-and-place.

As far as instrumentation goes, it sounds as though the Helsinki-based duo have hardly changed their template. Still boasting an impenetrable hybrid of electronics and warm traditional gear – think down-tempo electronica with a twang – ‘All That Is Solid Melts Into Air’ follows the same meandering paths that dictated Dustland’s frustration-into-admiration clause with browbeaten organs and pedal-steel exploring the terrain of molasses-thick bubble effects which intersperse like a back-beat. Like three different shades of the same idea, that ten-minute main-event flows courtesy of some leafy and watery field recordings – something new, or perhaps simply something more overtly displayed, from the Kuukka Brothers. The following two tracks are more concise and nostalgically loaded, as ‘Valley Green’ taps the call of distant children to a bittersweet descent of guitar and keys while ‘At Dawn I Am the Morning Clouds, At Evening the Falling Rain’ ushers a surge of potent moods through nearly undetectable progressions.

Slipping naturally from the stereo without a cloying template, Rural Route No. 5 develops memories like a roll of undeveloped film passing through different lights. Inhale the good times, the rough spots, and all those indifferent moments with the right music, and none are spared from the potency of the past; a potency that The Gentleman Losers evoke with elegance and wonder.

Rural Route No. 6 - Machinefabriek (Rural Route Series)

Rural Route No. 6

Machinefabriek
Standard Form Records.

SCQ Rating: 85%

No sooner had The Gentleman Losers’ released their lovely contribution to the Rural Route series when Standard Form announced a sixth installment would be forthcoming via Netherlands-based artist Machinefabriek. Unlike the single improvised recordings that Alex Durlak committed and then divided into cohesive tracks, Machinefabriek (Rutger Zuyderveldt) keeps ‘Halfslaap’ unified as an unsliced seventeen-minute piece of multi-dimensional ambience, formless and beautiful.

Inspired by the sensations we experience moments before falling asleep – or “from reality to the dreamworld” - ‘Halfslaap’ floats upon an undulating music-box coda that swells with purpose only to dip beneath any audible level of consciousness. The focus relies on melody only for the first few minutes, establishing its haunting theme before Zuyderveldt goes to work modulating our aural perception with delicate quivers to its frequencies and a gentle blurring of each note’s self-reliance. No differently than how the distinct qualities of a memory wane over time, so too does ‘Halfslaap’ morph as a composition from concrete to vaporous. That this process doesn’t feel dutifully stripped back or phased-out becomes just as important as the melody’s durability itself; Machinefabriek’s gentle submission into forgotten slumber grows ever more nuanced flirting with silence, to the point where its few remaining traces evoke the most powerful nostalgia.

Rural Route No. 6’s a bit of a mind-fuck, to be honest, capable of rendering the most meaningless past memory somehow poignant. It’s also the crowning achievement thus far in this tremendously unpredictable series.