See also: Anne Gillis - Aha
Having recently turned out those vital Nikolaus Utermohlen and Mark Glynne & Bart Zweir reissues, Timo van Luijk's La Scie Dorée continues its hot streak with a double serving of Anne Gillis, one old, the other a more recent collaboration with her new label boss and a couple of seasoned pros from the European avant garde. Gillis fans will likely be well attuned to Aha, an early outing originally issued in 1984 operating at some hitherto unexplored intersection between post-industrial electronics, proto-noise abrasion, and the alien sonics of musique-concrete improvisation. What's most striking about Gillis' work is how unmoored her approach appears, left turning from orthodoxy into strange formless territory that's free of the masochistic tendencies of much early experimental industrial music. Is it more feminine? Hard to quantify it as such, but it is noticeably more cerebral than physical, thoughtfully dystopic like a more art-damaged take on Caroline K's 'The Happening World' perhaps? However you view it, 40 years on, it still feels somewhat sui generis. And speaking of which, here we are four decades down the line with Si()six, a collagistic presentation of voice, electronics, found sound and shared instinct that shows Gillis has lost little of her radical edge. We're in psycho-horror sound art territory here, a disassembled and inverted Berberian Sound Studio dragged backwards through the memory vortex. Look close enough and you might just see the claw marks...
