Description
Listening to everything and recording. Ears like umbrellas. Silence. Relay the sounds live on tape, fumble with the mechanism, accidents happen, learn to love them.
Målgrupp’s modus operandi is live reel-to-reel tape recorder sound experimenting. Their collages consist of field recordings and pre-recorded sounds that are relayed and manipulated into rhythms and soundscapes heard from the inside of the wallpaper, dancing down the hallway or balancing on the tension of a bridge. Objects and instruments can be heard in a distant echo of punk music, stripping off everything but the silence, soberly listening to every vibration expressing itself in an unlimited space. All through Målgrupp’s music, one can hear the handicraft behind it, their masterful tape manipulating process could be described as electronic sound sculpturing. On “Rotera” they have made the compositions more minimalistic by working with only two sound sources at a time.
Målgrupp started out in 2008 as a collective with rotating members playing free form industrial punk, inspired by Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle. Since 2016, Julian Murray has been playing solo and their sound has gradually started to include elements of for example art brut and ethnographic recordings, operating in the same musical area as sound explorers like Red Brut, Marja Ahti, Dolphins Into The Future and Beyt Al Tapes.
Murray’s other bands include Diskodrift, Munnen and TV dinner Education. They have also made music scores for film makers Kevin Luna and Peter Larsson.
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Review by Byron Coley in The Wire #455
MÅLGRUPP: Rotera 7″ (Artsy)
Originally an ensemble of varying size, Målgrupp have evolved into a solo project for Finnish musician Julian Murray. The music is made up of altered reel-to-reel recordings of extant sounds, as well as freshly created racket, although it’s not easy to figure out what’s live and what’s Memorex. This single has two pieces of quiet though fully freaked assemblage with sequences of sonic events that feel like Orchid Spangiafora groping around in his subconscious. Rather than being fixed into big structural ideas, things are allowed to clatter around with what feels like their own free will. And there’s a near meditative quality to their shenanigans that is quite soothing.
