& https://swanika.bandcamp.com/
In December 2024, I wrote my first reviews about a label from Aachen, Germany, called Benevolent Pain. In March, I wrote about the same label again, and now, exactly three months later, it’s time again to give them some credit. A new batch of releases was dumped on me, and I enjoy listening to them so much that I almost forgot to write about them. To prevent one massive piece of text, I’ll review them separately, as they all have their own story.
The first one is a pressed CD by Aachener heroes Swanika. Thomas Hein and Sebastian Schweren are the daddies of Swana and Anika in everyday life. The concatenation of their names led to the project they knew they had to do. “Renoised from Japan” is the third full album they are releasing and even before I heard this one, I was already a fan. The first two albums are from 2010 and ’12 titles’, ‘Hotel’ and ‘Volkhoven’. Tracks on these albums play a central role in the “Renoised” album. Ten Japanese artists were asked to remix, manipulate, or ‘do something’ with the Swanika tracks. An experiment to see how the approach of the Japanese noise scene was towards, in this case, Swanika’s music. And there is the interesting thing: yes, Japan isn’t Europe, but what does it mean soundwise?
The ten artists that were addressed, I will not introduce individually. I mean, who hasn’t heard of Noiseconcrete x 3CHI5, Government Alpha, Gutenberg, Shikaku, GC, Tomohiko Sagae, Linekraft, Hiroshi Hasegawa, Contagious Orgasm and Shinkiro? And each of those artists sounds different, yet the atmosphere of the whole album is very consistent. And that is for me remarkable. The quality of the source material must be – at least part – of the reason why. But the weird part is that it’s the source material of two different albums (and a sampler track), yet it still sounds massively coherent. And of course, the noise approach of Hiroshi Hasegawa is entirely different and way louder than the ambient approach of Shinkiro. But it all fits!
And the cherry on top is the choice of artwork. Like the other Swanika albums, this is a monochrome (silver) print on black cardboard. The choice for ‘Karaoke Torii’ is a sound sculpture by Benoît Maubrey from 2016. I don’t know if it’s still active. Still, it’s a collection of speakers in the shape of a Torii, which is ‘a traditional Japanese gate most commonly found at the entrance of or within a Shinto shrine, where it symbolically marks the transition from the mundane to the sacred, and a spot where spirits are welcomed and thought to travel through. (wiki)’ Only Maubrey’s torii is equipped with a Bluetooth receiver so you could play your music and a microphone in case you want to karaoke. I had never heard of this artist before, but something as simple as using a picture on a CD cover makes you want to explore. Now it’s your turn to explore Swanika!
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