INNERE FREUDEN by Dan Warburton in Paris Translation
Malaysian-born Goh Lee Kwang's Innere Freuden ("Internal Pleasures") comes with an A5 handout containing the following text: "By using an analog DJ mixer with the line connection of 'output back to input', the electronic signal becomes audioable [sic] NO synth, NO pre-programming, NO on going effects and NO post-overdub." (That's almost as many "no"s as a Lou Reed interview..) Dunno whether Lee's contemplating teaming up with Toshimaru "No Input Mixing Desk" Nakamura, Sachiko "No Samples In The Sampler" M and Otomo "No Records On The Turntable" Yoshihide, but the seven tracks on offer here are every bit as austere and compelling as that trio's recent excellent Good Morning Good Night double on Erstwhile. I admit I still have a soft spot for the more eclectic train wreck electronica of GLK's Nerve Center, but no matter – the vocabulary here is drastically pared down but he still uses to poetic effect. Innere Freuden is by no means an easy listen, but it's a very rewarding one.


INNERE FREUDEN by found on Animal Psi in Animal Psi
Kwang’s solo-effort/alter-ego Innere Freuden presents ‘Internal Pleasures’. Recorded 2004 in the same German performance space as ‘Drone’, this is 7 untitled tracks of sparse electronics conjured from Kwang’s weapon of choice, the prepared stereo DJ mixer. A truly academic outing – yet not without popular implications – the piece revels in the idiosyncrasies of the feeding-back device, from channel-sliding pulsations which create a subconscious percussion (track one), abstract spatterings of cross-sectioned bass and treble feedback (track four), and the skipping of incredibly full bass tones into a tribal rhythm (track five). The subtle claustrophobia of the relatively-static compositions suggests the eternity of the FM3 ‘Buddha Machine’, while in reality, the micro-shifts from start to finish share a progressive sensitivity with Bonus, My Cat Is An Alien on a difficult day, and classically, Oliveros. Unlike the bulk of his contemporaries, Kwang resists impressing us with volume, as even the Daniel Menche swell of static on track two is restricted to a distant decibel. The brilliance of track three – a chorus of statics, stranded within quiet – is the use of negative space to invert silence to rhythm. The organic, wooden pangs of the 18-minute finale are uncanny, as a spooky, exploded-view space horrorship over the crackle of unreduced background noise. Extraordinary.