tbtmo27 > Released: 8.2003

ARKITEKCHUR -
Should or The Drawing Boarded Colour Target Future Theater Wars cd

8$ppd N.America, see katalogue for overseas ordering

Post-9/11 paranoia to post-war depression, Arkitekchur's first full-length embodies it. The follow-up to 2001's Of Solids, Climate & Homes ep is a concerned epic with elements of experimental, post-rock & drone, both introspective reassurance and some twisted tv-reality. Black helicopters and the Project for the New American Century. You're not paying attention.

REVIEWS:


Absorb:
one obviously notices first the recording's booklet photographs of gun-toting soldiers, 9-11 carnage, and middle eastern mayhem in this first full-length from arkitekchur (joseph lisciandro). an aerial shot of ground zero and a particularly disturbing photo of a uranium-deformed fetus suggest that the music too might be apocalyptic and perhaps funereal. with its revolutionary aura and song titles like 'how to pray using the mysteries of light theme,' one expects that 'should, or the drawing boarded colour target future theater war(s)' might evoke the impassioned, grandiose style of godspeed you! black emperor. certainly the guitar patterns that ripple across the opening moments of 'rite words' suggest that arkitekchur's music could explode momentarily into some massive godspeed-like crescendo. but, strangely, such expectations are thwarted when the piece instead unfolds in almost drone-like manner for the rest of its fifteen minutes. in fact, a similar discordance reigns throughout as much of the recording's seventy-two minutes hew to an ambient, at times elegiac, guitar-generated sound. yet, in spite of the overall calm, an underlying foreboding permeates the recording. disturbing moments intermittently surface and impute an unsettling tension, the police sergeant reading "your children are not safe anywhere at any time" from the washington sniper letter a case in point. as a whole, the album's compelling with its impact diminished by specific musical weaknesses. 'rite words' offers too little development to maintain interest over its fifteen minutes, and 'how to pray using the mysteries of light theme' suffers a similar fate when stretched out to twenty-three minutes, in spite of its episodic segues through guitar-drum passages and chiming atmospherics. 'should, or the drawing boarded colour target future theater war(s)' ends memorably enough, however, with four minutes of silence ('black sun nuclear winter'd: the project for the new american century') followed by the gentle coda 'anandamide.' given the brooding character of the music leading up to it, how should one interpret the sound of a music box chiming 'you are my sunshine'? are these the dying sounds from a post-apocalyptic landscape, or ironic ballast to the recording's otherwise doom-laden moods? that such questions arise attests to its provocative nature.

Almostcool:
The full length of the title of this release is, Should... Or The Drawing Boarded Colour Target Future Theater War(s). After reading that, you may be thinking to yourself, "jeebus, who in the hell does this group think they are, anyway?" Honestly, I was wondering the same thing, and after seeing song titles like "[Cicadea, Birds &&& Squirrels w/]" and "(For T h y)Dark Blae" (their punctuation), the pretension bells started clanging around my head and I hoped that the release wasn't an exercise in crazy punctuation and vague phrasing that in turn acts as a way to defract shortcomings in the music. Although their music doesn't really have anything in common with them, Arkitekchur has something in common with Godspeed You Black Emperor in that they're a (largely) instrumental band that obviously has a heavy political leaning. The liner notes of the release are packed with pictures of middle-eastern kids holding guns, a girl from Afghanistan who was killed by a bomb blast, and other disturbing imagery. The front of the booklet is a picture of soldiers walking by what is obviously a unique piece of abandoned architechture (in either Afghanistan or Iraq, and the first picture on the inside of the booklet is an overhead shot of Ground Zero in New York. Like GYBE, what the listener gleans from the music is on a purely individual basis. The album is just over 70 minutes of electro-acoustic drone/ambient music that is sometimes haunting and occasionally uplifting. After a found-sound sample, "Rite Words" opens the release with a guitar melody that loops out for a span of nearly 15 minutes. Musically, only a few other subtle bits find their way into the track, as a warm drone and a touch of delay simply don't add enough to the track and it goes on for far too long. Fortunately, the album fairs better in other places. "[Parkechildren w/]" mixes gurgling electronics with the sound of kids playing on squeaky playground equipment while the aforementioned "(For T h y)Dark Blae" follows it up with a warm drone that dissolves into fitfull lowend right before it falls apart. Unfortunately, the combined length of the previous two tracks is just over 2 minutes, and after a couple more solid tracks (including the excellent dark manipulate drone of "Jealousy"), it again drops off into several long tracks. Perhaps part of the point of "How To Pray Using The Mysteries Of Light Theme" is that it does go on for so long, but at 23 minutes it can be a bit of a test. There are definitely some great ideas explored within, as drums that sound like they were recorded in a warehouse mix with a submerged kick drum under guitars that are delayed out to the horizon line while the sounds of a cityscape blend in and give the whole thing a gloomy lo-fi feel of doom. It's thunderous at times, and feels like the last breath of a building about to collapse. "When Everything Runs Dry" works in some of the same ways, letting huge ripples of guitar fold over on top of one another until the whole thing turns into a huge, shuddering beast. In the end, the release is a bit hit-or-miss, and you'd be hard-pressed to even hear it as something political if you took away the surrounding artwork. If you're a fan of heavy ambient music and/or dark dronescapes, you'll most likely find some things to enjoy, but otherwise you might find yourself a bit tested. Rating: 6.25

Aural Innovations:
Arkitekchur is the brainchild of Brooklyn based soundscapest Joseph Lisciandro. Should is an 11 track CD lasting 72 minutes. It flows from start to finish, it is a concept, each track melds into the next, a journey that finds its footing in the realms of atmospheric, ambient styled stuff, a haunting glimpse into the mind of this sonic painter. The majority of tracks are short interludes. They range from seconds to minutes in length, each one building into the next, and then the next, until a track of ample length is found. Track 1 "Rite Words" is an opening guitar piece, for over 16 minutes it stays the same, very repetitive, very sombre, it stirs emotion but it goes nowhere. Once you get the gist you are stuck there. It paves the way for a totally different experience, from track 2 to 8 you have little interludes, this is before the 22-minute epic "Using the Mysteries of Light Theme". This is the longest piece and the atmospheres create enhanced drug visions, changing frequency with each pattern of movement, it evolves Tangerine Dream like, subtle atmospheres, delayed ambience, all the while retracting from its inevitable end, building motion and velocity then lapsing back to mellowness. Ideal for writing I find as I listen, the basis of the track is haunting, and once again you are shoved into it slowly, waiting for the next piece. It is good stuff. "When Everything Runs Dry" is what the aforementioned tracks run into. This is an 11 odd minute piece, guitar drone driven, and static for minutes on end, yet capturing ambience in that film score feel. It drifts around, it breaks the guitar drone mould, and it takes new form as it passes over time. Another good journey piece, very well done. On the whole, Should has a very good sound to it. The production is quality and the tracks are suited for the headphone experience. If you like minimalist structures that evolve slowly, creating a field of vision with sound, then you may like this album. I can see where he his coming from, it is not just something that can be cast off hand as noise. It is a lot more in depth than that.

Aversion:
I had no clue what to expect from this at all. Everything about the disc seems very bizarre, and the music is indeed unusual. The compositions seem to be based around an experimental sort of approach using clean guitars and lots of effects, generally creating repetitive tracks that loop drones or hums, melodies, etc. From 25-second tracks consisting of shuffling sounds, to four-minute pieces with a great sense of ethereal ringing, to more than 15 minutes worth of hypnotic arpeggios… and then there are even some pieces like "Jealousy" that are deeper and more abstract, leaning more towards dark ambient. When samples are used I find them to be fairly effective, because not only is the content of the samples applicable to the message of the music, but they're well integrated into the other textures, not feeling out of place or forced or anything like that. On rare occasion some blistering harsh noise textures will come in, and they're insanely painful and hard on the ears, which is a great contrast to how calm and smooth everything else is. The explosive outbreak at the end of "Discourse" literally left my ears in pain. Some of the songs are longer than necessary (the 23-minute "How to Pray Using the Mysteries of Light Theme", for example), but for the most part everything moves nicely. Portions of the packaging look really cool, while other aspects look really crude and thrown together in a somewhat unprofessional manner - which rubs me the wrong way and honestly made me really apprehensive to even listen to this CD, mainly because the front and back covers look pretty shoddy and suggest nothing of worth. However, the inner booklet is much more well put together. All of the packaging combines photos related to war on some level, and included is a large amount of text, much of which has been lifted from "The Project For the New American Century", indicating that there's a definite message here. I like this far more than the visual presentation had me anticipating. It could be better on a musical level, but what they've got going now is already quite promising. I wouldn't mind hearing the more musical side and the more abstract side fused together more often, as opposed to being somewhat separated into their own compositions, but this is good work. 6/10

de:bug: (translated from German online, obviously not well enough
I do not believe I ever a so politically clear Indietronica CD saw. Not only the Martyrs Monument into Baghdad with American soldiers before it on the Cover, but also the Booklet with uranium-contaminated Foeten, aesthetic interior opinions of 9/11, infants the knarre into the mouth to be itself, and, no, that is not a noise project here that on the faith in Riot or sowas would live sounds, but very clearly structured calm CD with many rather krautig linear sounds of guitar, times very long, times completely briefly and rather consisting of Fieldrecordings of birds, forests and other things of the life. Perhaps very spaciously and very steadily, because stability and steadfastness are something rather against the moments of the still very clearly national-military terror to turn can, because it does not get involved simply in the play that the definition of indications of the reconditions brings occasionally with itself. Absolutely.

Dusted:
In super-repetitive, or (for want of a better word) minimalist music, form is very important. Deciding when to make your short ugly screeching sound change into an ugly screeching drone is crucial. Another crucial decision is how long said transformation should take, because if it happens too quickly or too slowly, the desired effect is irretrievably lost. You have to employ lots of screechy sounds, of course, to hold hostage the listener’s attention. Not to say that there ought to be rules about how to ‘do’ this sort of thing – only that if you’re making long pieces that employ minimal melodic and rhythmic material as well as extreme repetition, it helps to dispel boredom. Sadly, even though the first moments of Should or The Drawing Boarded Colour Target Future Theater Wars, by Brooklyn-based Arkitekchur promise a unique sound world of wide-eyed wonder, it never arrives. When a scratchy voice from a CNN remote broadcast interrupts the exceedingly bland chiming guitar figure that fills most of the first track, you realize that you’ve been waiting for 13 full minutes for the damn song to start. And it’s already over. But hey, it would have made a great intro to a Mogwai record. At times, Should or The Drawing Boarded Colour Target Future Theater Wars presents itself as a block of seemingly homogenous yet subtly varied textures – the auditory equivalent of a Rothko canvas. Careful listening allows the tiniest gestures to jump out. In the 20-minute “how to pray using the mysteries of light theme”, ringing tones hover in and out of the foreground like storm clouds that threaten rain but never deliver, which would be fine if the clouds seemed particularly ominous, but these clouds are about as threatening as a light summer sprinkle. Even a bit of drums here and there can’t enliven the proceedings, mostly because they don’t do anything. They simply announce their presence, then drift back into the mud. Ungodly noise makes an appearance, in the form of TV static at the end of “symbol/language > discourse”, and disappears as quickly as it arrived. There might well be subtlety beneath the trite anti-war statements and post-MBV delay pedal-isms, but without anything to grab the listener (a strong sense of form, noise so jarring that it can’t be ignored, visceral experience of any kind), the piece remains as arresting as a really big, blank canvas with a bit of dirt on it. Even though it doesn’t work nearly as well as the things it evokes (Rhys Chatham, Trevor Wisheart, an early Neu rehearsal tape being heard from the opposite side of an enormous factory floor), there are moments of real brilliance that are difficult to dismiss. For a moment in “how to pray”, the guitars start shimmering and bouncing off the walls as if they were about to break the confines of their own repetition. The whole mix swells, bursting with the promise of release. Then it wanders off somewhere else, and with it goes any potential engagement with the listener. Should or The Drawing Boarded Colour Target Future Theater Wars is ultimately a dull, compromised mishmash of a record that can’t decide whether it wants to appropriate the rigid formalism of early minimalism or the exploratory sprawl of a laptop jam session. If Arkitekchur had gone all the way out in either direction, it might have been as thrillingly vital as “Two Gongs” or “Hallogallo”. Instead, it’s a rather boring affair.

Erasing Clouds:
The fact that Arkitekchur's new CD was recorded from October 2001 to today might give you a clue as to what colored its contents, especially when you see the cover photo of US soldiers walking across the desert in Iraq. Where the last CD by Arkitechur (essentially one Joseph Lisciandro, best I can tell) had the more inward-turned title Of Sounds, Climate and Homes, this one is all about the fear, sadness, confusion and paranoia that comes with war. And while both CDs are filled with instrumental soundscapes, this one is more sweeping and ambitious…fitting for its global themes. "Your children are not safe anywhere at any time," a voice ominously intones at one point, and the music throughout the CD-though calm and measured-carries with it that same sense of fear and impending doom. The music shifts from hyper-atmospheric, ambient mood-pieces into stretches of improvised jazz, with voices and mysterious noises always drifting in and out. Many of the pieces consist mainly of guitar, delicately weaved together, yet Arkitechur also has the ability to make you not know what instrument you're hearing (or not care). It's a beautiful album on one level; it's easy to hear hope and peace in the extended opening guitar piece, for example. Yet even then the music feels more like the moment of calm before the bombs begin to drop than any sort of lasting peace. As the album progresses, recurring percussion begins to resemble the rumble of incoming troops. And ultimately the album stands as a warning more than a dream. Apocalypse can happen if we want it to. The album leaves us with that very message. After an especially brooding (yet still beautiful) and dark instrumental, which includes a guitar sound that resembles a chime calling off the final seconds, there's a few minutes of silence, followed by a music box playing "You are My Sunshine." Is it lying in the rubble somewhere, giving and ironic edge to the ultimate destruction? Perhaps. But as dire as Should's vision is, it's also an exquisite album. Its beauty serves as both a message that peace might be possible and a reminder of how much we have to lose.

Exclaim:
This is an album that rewards listeners with long attention spans and patience for repetition. Should begins with a 15-minute track made of a simple chiming electric guitar chord. Gradually the ear dips beneath the theme (perhaps to escape it) finding a quiet, rich drone of post-delay fallout that subtly shifts and modulates. At the14-minute mark a short taped vocal interjects and then the track ends so curtly it startles, given the lulling effect of the track. With the exception of the found text/noise experiment of “Symbol/Language>Discourse,” most of the album is built upon these kinds of hazy repeating structures of guitar, synthesiser and/or indistinct machine noises. Within the familiarity of repetition, however, lives a native cunning. For example: at the 2:45 point of “When Everything Runs Dry” a phased guitar loop drops out mid-cycle and is replaced by a sharp-toned hand chime. The complement of sounds and broken timekeeping create something sublime in its very inexactness. Likewise, the last track is “You Are My Sunshine” as played on a slowly winding down music box framed by the barely audible background noise of large vehicles idling. That the theme finally ends two notes into its cycle is no accident.

Fac193:
t’s been some time since we’ve heard music from Arkitekchur (2001, and the release of the Of Solids, Climate and Homes mini-album. Should (or its proper title Should, or The Drawing Boarded Color Target Future Theater Wars ) is their first full-length from the tbtmo label and those familiar with the above mentioned mini-album may know what to expect. Or do they? This is Arkitekchur after the mess that was the World Trade Center attack and the subsequent darkening of the global political climate. Lingering and disturbing images of war litter the inside art of Should and the music captured within sounds like the calm before the storm. Echo-laden guitars (what could probably be considered a trademark of the band), murmuring voices and loud bursts of white noise move in and out of the field of hearing like ghosts. If the members of Joy Division all died from radiation poisoning during a band practice, this is the eerie hum their instruments would make in their absence. The pinnacle of this album is “how to pray using the mysteries of light theme”, a twenty-three minute piece that’s artful and emotionally resonant simultaneously, tense without being loud. It is true that from tragedy emerges great art. Arkitekchur are true artists, and Should is a tragic masterpiece that—in a better world—wouldn’t have been necessary. They capture the misery of 21st Century atrocity like no other.

Grooves:
The experimental / instrumental electronic music scene is, for the most part, fairly apolitical. There are exceptions, of course, such as the support shown for the left-wing guerrilla movements in Latin America by the Beta Bodega crew, or the strong anti-corporate and anti-consumerist stance held by Godspeed You Black Emporer! and many of its Constellation compatriots. Likewise, Brooklyn's Joseph Lisciandro wears his political beliefs on his sleeve- quite literally, in fact- as the cover and booklet of this release from his experimental project Arkitekchur features photos and text clippings regarding the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the imperialistic leanings of the current US administration. Strangely enough, I can't help but feel that there seems to be a disconnect between the packaging and the sounds on the album. While the stark photos of killed and maimed Arab children and the post-9/11 devastation at Ground Zero in NYC suggest a sense of anger and aggression, the music on the album instead tends towards quiet and minimal ambient structures. There are points where this minimalism fosters some tension in the listener, but these are strongly outweighed by pieces that are more calming in nature, at least to these ears. As for the political aspects of the music, the most overt message seems to be on "Black Sun Nuclear Winter'd: The Project for the New American Century," a completely silent track that takes its subtitle from an extreme right-wing Washington think tank. But aside from that and a spoken-word sample from the Washington sniper manhunt, there isn't much of a message to be found on the disc itself. It's simply a rather good, slightly dark, and primarily ambient album that should appeal to most experimental music listeners, regardless of their politics.

Mashnote:
So the full title of this album is 'Should, or the drawing boarded Colour target future theater war(s)(s)', but i guess that doesn't give you any more ideas of what it means huh. What is so striking about this release, is the artwork. It's very much inspired by the 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq. The booklet has various pictures & texts included about that,cool! The music seems to be influenced buy that too i guess. It sounds like the stuff you could be hearing in the aftermath of a nuclear war. Very much the feel of a deserted area with some survivors wandering around while you hear public announces through the speakers on the corner of the street. Sometimes eerie, sometimes comforting. With experimentation, drones and some post-rock bits they manage to create this continuous and organic flow of sounds which will appeal to a lot of fans of good & thought-provoking music. Highly recommended!

Opus:
The artwork for this CD consists of all manner of charged and disturbing imagery - American troops walking in front of an Iraqi monument, overhead shots of the World Trade Center devastation, Middle-Eastern children playing with guns, an image of a deformed fetus set next to a photo of Bush and his advisors in front of the White House, military maps depicting nuclear fallout's effects on the U.S. - and the liner notes reference books by Nobel Peace Prize nominees and quote government documents concerning American foreign policy. Taken at face value, the album smells to high heaven of conceptual agitprop so pretentious, conceptual, and epic (the CD is nearly 73 minutes long) that it would make even the entire Constellation Records stable blush. Thankfully, it is nothing of the sort, awkward album and song titles aside. Joseph Lisciandro, the enigma behind Arkitekchur, wisely leaves the blatant and obvious imagery on the CD sleeve. While the occasional Godspeed -esque field recording or vocal sample does surface, and the music threatens to surge forth in a huge climax at times, Arkitekchur keeps the music subtle, thought-provoking, and quite captivating. Indeed, compared to the artwork's violent and horrific imagery, the music is quite subdued by comparison, full of seemingly endless guitar drones, delicate atmospherics, and the occasional bit of percussion. At times, you get the distinct impression that these songs (if you can call these drifting compositions "songs") were composed to counterbalance and even provide relief from the troubling things documented by the artwork. The opening track, "Rite Words" begins with faint rumblings and eerie, disembodied voices, but these soon fade away, revealing a delicate weave of crystalline guitars and fluttering, ethereal electronics in the vein of Aarktica . Over the next 15 minutes, the song continues to build on its repetitive, hypnotic structure, summoning together more and more gorgeous textures until the song gracefully disintegrates. A similar phenomena occurs on the aptly-titled "How To Pray Using The Mysteries Of Light Theme". Running nearly 23 minutes in length, this could be the one song that David Pearce has been trying to write his entire life. Grounded by echoing, clattering drums that strike up an almost tribal timbre, the song becomes nigh-transcendental as waves of shimmering guitar drones and textures dreamily wash over it with an oceanic grace. But there is darkness and anxiety lying just below the surface of Arkitekchur's music, be it in the form of disturbing vocal samples; or the ominous drones, chimes, and other sounds that drift, stalker-like, behind the more pleasant ones ("Rancoqeaux Woods"); or the sudden bursts of noise that erupt without warning, possibly inducing heart attacks among less stalwart listeners. Thankfully, the CD handily avoids becoming pretentious and overwrought during these darker moments. Even in the CD's darkest and most obtuse stretches, such as "Rancoqeaux Woods" or "Jealousy" with its tense, alien atmospheres, Lisciandro shows admirable restraint, successfully weaving together sounds both lovely and disturbing. "Symbol/Language>Discourse" has a sort of abstract beauty to it, even as a man intones "Your children are not safe" and a woman describes some sort of medical procedure amidst blurred tones and bells, and before the song explodes into a blistering wall of static. And the aforementioned "How To Pray Using The Mysteries Of Light Theme", for all of its beauty, still finds rumbles and odd tones occasionally filtering through, heightening the danger and causing you to appreciate the song's lovelier aspects all the more. But perhaps the album's most compelling moment comes during "Anandamide" (which gets its name from a bliss-inducing compound found in both marijuana and chocolate - how's that for subversive?). It almost seems cliched as I describe the song - against a barely-there yet still-ominous backdrop, the delicate tones of a music box emerge playing "You Are My Sunshine". And it does seem rather trite and "obvious". But as the song continues, and the music box slowly winds down until its once-bright melody more resembles a sorrowful dirge, it becomes a surprisingly tense and nerve-wracking listen as you wait for the inevitable end. An experience which proves to be far more sobering and effective at communicating the themes of Arkitekchur's music - brooding themes of anxiety and confusion, hope and longing - than any of the charged imagery that Lisciandro uses as its packaging.

Popnews: [translated from French]
Arkitekchur's members are American and at first glance, don't seem to be proud of it.At the very least, they aren't proud of the society they live in, nor the {egime which governs it, illustrated by the album's inside cover showing the consequences of the United States' obsession with war (armed children, children mutilated as a result of nuclear radiation, etc.). Structured around the "events" - a euphemism in regards to the circulated images - of September 11th, this record is disturbing, at the very least. Beginning with 15 minutes of looping guitar repetitions playing on two notes, the record is comprised of long beaches of instrumentals where any pleasant melody is chased away to make room for heavier environments dominated by all kinds of machines.Occasionally human voices appear, but they are quickly overwhelmed by these omnipresent drones. I tried in vain to imagine something else, find some way to get the footage from the film "11'09"01" of the attacks of September 11th out of my head, in particular one shot which focuses on bodies falling from the tops of the towers.  Following the example of this film, the record unfolds as in slow motion; the apparent lightness of its beginning is followed by a numbing of consciousness, and simultaneously, a sense of anguish and growing oppressiveness. Certainly for some, this record will seem prodigiously tedious because of its long hypnotic scenes;  to those people I would reply, "Should..." isn't a record that you should be allowed to listen to with a distracted ear. Quite to the contrary, it requires you to manage to stay attentive - metaphor of political conscience? - to experience what the record has to express.  And it may be that this record, like the footage mentioned earlier, was made to be listened to more than once... time necessary to send its message. As for its end, one as ironic as possible, a dying music box plays the famous "You Are My Sunshine," an effect unfortunately already used by Therapy? on "Troublegum".

Sonomu:
Interesting debut full album from solo American artist John, aka Arkitekchur, based in Brooklyn, New York. After a short EP in 2001 called "Of Solids, Climate & Homes" of more minimal sounds, in this one he tends to blend a guitar-based Post-Rock of continuous tune with mellow analog sounds. The major impact starts with the front and inner sleeves, imbued with anti-war post-9.11 paranoia messages, hidden signs and straightforward texts. Two American soldiers walking in a futuristic Iraqi desert reveal the front cover of the album; photographs of Ground Zero; the heavy smoke in the dark 9.11 sky; children shooting arm guns; a foetus deformed from uranium; the Bush-Cheney couple fighting for international democracy (sic)...in short, just enough messages and a long extract of the 'Project for new US century' report to state that we are 'not paying attention'. Since the opening track, a constant anxiousness fills your nerve articulated through persisting basic guitar chords on top of a continuous series of steady electronic droning samples. Difficult to avoid thinking of Icebreaker International's great 1999 album 'Distant early warning' (which also had a political message at the heart of it) yet with a touch of French post-rock band Madrid. The musical battleground emerges and steadily persists until the mere end, with a hint of 'nuclear' sounds along the way. The sound does not really 'kick off' at any point and it does feel a bit repetitive because of its constant circular drone. It might become sometimes a little bit monotonous but it is more due to the length of the songs/albums rather than the music itself. It must certainly be the first time I would suggest an album to be shorter in order to be fully enjoyed..quite recommended though for people not fearing repititive drifts.

Splendid:
With little info out there to go on, all I can tell you is that Arkitekchur is a one man project spearheaded by a Brooklynite named Joseph Lisciandro. Everything else must be gleaned from the music and the all-too important packaging that surrounds it. One thing we figure out immediately is that Lisciandro's art is wrapped in political slant; an anything-but-subtle CD insert takes on a post 9-11 world, beginning with the armed marines and the beautiful Middle Eastern monuments that feature on the cover. Within the booklet, we are treated to visions of the World Trade Center towers minutes after implosion, as well as war victim montages, Iraqi cityscapes under siege and a collection of radiation schematics apparently showing the effects of a nuclear attack on US soil. In chronological sequence, the images give pause. They are graphic and produce knot-in-the-stomach dread: surely Should means to bring us on a dark, possibly violent, listening experience to match its visual counterparts. Not necessarily. As a selection of experimental vignettes of post-rock ambience, Should pushes a minimalist agenda on the mellow end of the spectrum while using Alan Licht's noodly alliterations and Godspeed's instrumental introspection as touchstones. Such overwhelmingly meditative sounds are wrought of guitar loops, effects and sampling, and seem like a bit of a contrast, but it all begins to make some sort of sense after a stretch. Long sprawling pieces like Rite Words flood the emotive transmitters with drifting liquid melodies; within the repetitious loopage and subtle drones comes immense sadness. The New York artist takes us back to a terrible day when we watched the incomprehensible unfold, helpless to do anything but witness the WTC towers crumbling one by one, thousands of lives destroyed in an instant. Indeed, Rite Words ends with a garbled newscast, a surreal moment in the days of play-by-play tragedy. It doesn't stop there. "[parkechildren w/]" segues with field recordings of children at play, swing sets creaking in the background. Contemplative drones follow, and then... an insidious quiet din. Where Lisciandro is going with this remains with the artist, but a bystander interprets these fragile and uneasy moments as the 9-11 aftermath and a continuation of the atrocity cycle. More sound bites follow, layered upon different ambient themes, and just when you think Arkitekchur favors understatement over skull bludgeoning sonic onslaughts, he startles you with a terrifying blast of white noise -- gloom morphing into armageddon. And yet there are strains of hope in this music; Lisciandro's guitar pieces produce glimmers of light and can reveal optimism through their pensive and pretty glances. At this point, you scan the booklet and realize that Should is not just a perfect film score to the static documentary within the artwork, but also to individual memories of Mother Earth's last several years. On the level of experimental chillout, Should stands on its own merits. In the context of a political art installation, it's one of the most powerful statements I've heard yet on the post 9-11 world. Neither pointing fingers nor taking a hard and fast position, Arkitekchur merely embodies the sorrow in its wake.

Tric:
Fully titled "Should or the Drawing Boarded Colour Target Future Theater War(s)(s)", this cd was being made during the 9-11 crisis. The layout for this cd contains startling images of dismembered humans, pictures of kids with weapons, and past recovered strategy information used by the US, and it pulls it together with excerpts from books and articles. While conveying a direct message that war and killing is wrong, there are several other statements including how the US government is out of control and that if we don't stay informed things are just going to get worse. The chill music doesn't really match the harsh images, and consists of about (10) 10 to 20-minute relaxed, looped, and delayed guitar tracks soaked in reverb with vocal samples of what seems to be politicians speaking. It differes from his last single which was more on the electronic/laptop style, and I believe most of it was recorded during live shows.

Trouser Press:
Joseph Lisciandro is the sinewy spine of Arkitekchur, a New York / Philadelphia guitar project that erects handsome edifices of gently echoing string pling, adds oblique spoken samples and then sheathes the whole thing in stirring visual political comment. The group's opening salvo, a two-track (one-minute and 20-minutes) EP, is more experimental than successful, a tentative (if occasionally dramatic) collage of guitar, looped effects and voices that evinces too little compositional form to seem deliberate. While not drastically different in conception, the subsequent album is far more ambitious and musical, lifting off gently from the long-ago lands of Glenn Branca and Robert Fripp to achieve something quite marvelous. In ridiculously named tracks that vary from snippets to elongated tableaux, Lisciandro (with a couple of one-track-each contributors) floats a pointillist cloud of hypnotic guitar sound that occasionally unleashes punishing hailstones of dissonance and aggression. From the dreamy wavelike tolling of bells ("In Rancoqueaux Woods") to the ugly drone of machinery ("How to Pray Using the Mysteries of Light Theme") to the simple urgency of time, Arkitekchur adapts the clichéd sound of a traditional rock implement to create a distinctively voiced soundtrack to the early 21st century.

Wavelength:
"You're not paying attention," states Mr. Joseph Lisciandro in the booklet of this abstract and compelling work of non-fiction. He is right. Politics and music have become separate of late, and Joseph seems very passionate about a new dialectic for the 21st Century. The music, imagery and prose are inseparable and the disc (both physically and acoustically) mashes abstract poetry, graphic photographs of war casualties both in the USA and the Middle East, and an excerpt from the frightening Project for the New American Century; a U.S. right wing manifesto of alarming proportions. Wake up. Get this record. File next to: Some protesters, healthy paranoia, The Orb.

The Wire:
Of Arkitekchur all that is known is one name: Joseph Lisciandro, believed to inhabit Brooklyn. But something about this record, the way it's cloaked, the unexpectedness of it, demands your gaze. "You're not paying attention," admonishes a stowaway sentence in the credits. The record/ report is titled Should, Or The Drawing Boarded Colour Target Future Theater War(s). The sleeve is a minor masterpiece of samizdat reportage. Decked with a handheld DV still of US troops in front of the Baghdad Martyrs' Monument, it's crawling with referents and signifiers, from splurges of bad data to coded, erudite free verse in superimposed typography, to a blood-on-hands chunk of the Project for the New American Century's world domination enterprise. Despite the Molesworth-like spelling of the name, Arkitekchur are clearly no illiterates. A powerful sense of injustice pervades the release, its anonymity suggesting orders handed out from the bunker of the revolutionary high command, based on field reports gathered at source. Arkitekchur seem to be a band: much of this CD summons the elegiac qualities of the electric guitar, the brooding hum of petulant amps, the muffled throb of martial toms. If it was begun as an exercise in mood-controlled garage melancholia, it was apparently infected by a mission creep that riffs on information gathered from a trawl of indy media Websites, and the music has flipped through a Derridean trick of the tail into a determined survivalist drone-rock epic. Motifs cycling around for quarter-hour periods on lambent, tolling guitars, something like Godspeed! chastened at a wake, are interspersed with short Ambient interludes ("Cicadea, Birds &&& Squirrels"), incidents from deep within an internal/ external American heartland so recently menaced from within and without. Here, a DC police spokesman reads out the letter from the Washington sniper; there, a vocoder registers a live CNN report on 9/11... All of which exchange text messages with other booklet images of Ground Zero, toddlers with guns, a lead slug piercing an x-rayed ribcage, and most hideously, a deformed foetus resulting from depleted uranium left by weapons fallout. The music never quite spontaneously combusts. It inhabits aftermaths, shellshock, nuclear winters, brooding upon its fate like a boar lurking in the forest.