White Vinyl
Marijn Verbiesen's Red Brut project has been in operation for close to a decade now, in exploration of a range of blasted and fragmented sounds across a range of LPs and cassettes for various labels, both known and lesser spotted. Though there's plenty of other output to suggest otherwise, On Bare Ground is presented as the official third album and I'll take that designation as evidence of the confidence Verbiesen has in what she's dispensing here. These songs are said to have emerged following her relocation from Rotterdam to a more remote part of the country, and that movement seems to speak to the interstitial nature of these compositions, febrile, concrète-styled recordings that draw from multiple sound sources in a fever dream haze. This isn't entirely like previous Red Brut material (and there is a lot to reference), but I perhaps found more kinship with Goldblum, the woozy, collaged-out project Verbiesen shares with Lewsberg's Michiel Klein, as well as Klein's own excellent field recording-based solo LP. There's also an underlying Fourth World approach at play, all undefined overlays and tape manipulation ballast, which sometimes overlap with Verbiesen's spoken-word poetry in early Inga Copeland-style displays of obstiance and iconoclasm. This is the kind of music-making that can at first seem inscrutable when really it's actually communicating it's own internal logic. If you're willing to tilt your head to the right angle, the sense makes itself.
