(F.d.W – vital weekly):
By now the third release by Grisha Shakhnes, of whom I don’t know that much. He worked as Mites and then had his debut LP released by Glistening Examples (see Vital Weekly 880) and then a CD for Organized Music From Thessaloniki, but now he returns to the label who did his debut.
I am not sure if we should regard the title as a stab at the fact that this is released on a CDR rather than a LP or CD. Maybe it refers to other ‘trouble’? I don’t know. On his previous CD it was clear what he was doing: mixing field recordings together, but on his LP there was also a bit of electronics, but on both of these releases Shakhnes shows us certainly a love for all things ‘raw’.
All this trouble for nothing by Grisha Shakhnes
Nothing seems to be recorded with particular refinement, and that’s something I enjoy very much. Not that I don’t like refinement, but so much of what we get to hear these days is very refined and it’s good to have something else every now and then, and Shakhnes does certainly something strange. He tapes his field recordings onto cassettes and then mixes these together with quite some force, but he never gets to be very noisy. It all remains on the ‘decent’ side of things. Drone like in ‘Counterpoint’, which sounds like a motorboat journey across a small lake, or even very quite on ‘March 18, 2015’.
The electronics here emphasize parts, add colouring to the music or simply take care of a lockdown and keep repeating them selves, such as in the minimal ‘Hectic Light (Allemagne-Palestine)’, with a bit of repeating keyboard notes (maybe the title gave that away, I was thinking). In the title piece there is also some treated cello recording. More than on his previous releases it seems that Shakhnes has a lot more variation on this time.
At some forty-plus minutes I’d say this is no trouble at all. It’s a great release.
