Reviews:

(Monsieur Délire) What surprise to find Bryan Day (proprietor of underground labels Public Eyesore and Eh?) on a Creative Sources release! Seeded Plain is an experimental/improvised freak folk duo also featuring Jay Kreimer. Both musicians play home-made instruments. Entry Codes features five tracks in a little over 40 minutes. Chaotic and inspired music that would almost sound psychedelic if it weren’t for the total lack of incense-like scents. Gamelan from a faraway forest, the music animals conscious that they must scare off humans before it is too late. - François Couture

(Dead Angel) The latest release (or one of them, at any rate) from this prolific duo finds improvisational artists Bryan Day and Jay Kreimer using a variety of homemade instruments cobbled together from many unusual sources to create bizarre soundscapes in a live setting. The five tracks here were recorded in Kreimer's own studio from 2009-2010 and they all sound pretty otherworldly; it's hard to imagine (even after having seen them perform) what kind of twisted devices they're employing to construct these puzzling sounds, but there's certainly no shortage of textural sounds littering their largely open sound pieces. Their sound occupies a nebulous space that discourages easy description -- too random to be actual songs, not quite random enough to be pure noise -- and places much of the emphasis on the method by which sounds are obtained more so than the actual sounds themselves. It's an intellectual approach that yields perverse results on disc; the sounds are interesting but disconnected, and there's a strong sense that the presentation was probably more revelatory in its original context, with visual cues to match up with the quirky sounds. Nevertheless, the disc remains an intriguing artifact of improvised sound, even if you have to guess at what they were doing to raise such a clatter. - RKF

(Chain D.L.K.) Well, I'm not sure if this album has some hallucinogenic properties, but while listening Entry Codes through headphones in drowsiness I dreamt about flying over Charing Cross Road during an imaginary contest of Gnawa trance music bands. I definitively should avoid snoozing while listening to such releases as I could commit many valuational errors and saying for instance the unconventional rhythmical codes Bryan Day and Jay Kreimer - the two eccentric craftsmen (an acceptation to the point as they just use some homemade instruments in their sets) - have recorded could be good to enter into a somewhat deviated oniric world, but I should say they activated some auditory remembrances as their rhythmical structure maybe have some points of intersection with Morrocan or Nubyan trance musical tradition with the remarkable difference that they use totally different sonorous objects, while sound in such an amazing way you could envisage the possibility to send some home stuff you don't need anymore to their mail account instead of collecting it in the bins for recyclable materials! If you decide to approach to Seeded Plain's acoustic devilments, I warmly reccomend to dwell upon tone-colour strange and estranging sounds Jay and Bryan manages to obtain by striking and so giving life to their noisy freaks so that the hums and all those rasping noises in Tarpaper Neutrality, the muted tolls and metallic squekings in Vacuum Insert, the metallic garglings and the sinister snoring together with somewhat stunned strokes of hit box-springs in Ciar of Thumbs and Waxwing Lattice as well as the dull wooden rumbling interrupted by a teeming of metallic bumps and plops could be considered as the whimpering of creatures born inside an audio-genetical mad lab! - Vito Camarretta

(Monk Mink Pink Punk) The Futurist art movement proposal to leave all traditional instruments and classical composition behind in order to embrace a style of music more appropriate to the dawning age of cities seems, to me, both interesting and thoroughly laughable at the same time. In fact I always imagine that Luigi Russolo was just playing a big art joke in writing The Art of Noises manifesto, though there is no evidence to support this thought. While obviously a product of its time the idea isn’t entirely laughable, especially in light of the birth of electronic manipulation and musique concrète just 40 years later. Pierre Henry and Luc Ferrari are real composers well versed in various forms of classical and modern composition and they prove that the mixture of the musical and found sound actually can be very beautiful. It’s mostly just a matter of intent. These recent recordings by Bryan Day and Jay Kreimer, from Lincoln, Nebraska, find a slightly uncomfortable middle ground between the art of noises and musical composition. Every sound is produced using homemade instruments like gamelan-esque bowls, prepared guitar, detuned thumb pianos, bowed drum heads, and various metallic percussion. These pieces seem to be performed in real time and if there is any post production I certainly can’t hear it (other than editing or overdubbing, which seems likely considering the amount of actions that only two people would be having to make to produce these often dense soundscapes). The result is neither melodic nor particularly abrasive, and I found that leaving the volume at a level slightly below mid seemed most appropriate. It became a sort of aural alien wallpaper that could be enjoyed and be in the background at the same time. Overall it was quite an enjoyable experience to just let the whole disc go by this way and I plan on repeating it some afternoon when the weather is cool. - Jacob Green

(Revue & Corrigée) Cette réalisation de Bryan Day et Jay Kreimer est issue d’un travail effectué avec des instruments créés par les deux artistes. Comme je ne sais que peu de choses de ces deux musiciens américains, je situe leur activité dans un domaine s’étendant pour les références de John Cage (œuvres pour percussion) par certaines couleurs, à Roger Turner (pour d’autres nuances) et Jean Dubuffet (pour le hasard et le jeu). Métallique, parfois résonnant avec tuyaux et gamelles, parfois pas, lorsqu’il s’agit de ce qui s’apparente à des cordes. Un bouillonnement sonore dynamique nous accompagne d’un bout à l’autre de cet enregistrement. Une basse-cour de tubes et autres ferrailles. Très plaisant. - Dino

Translation by Jay Weiss: Bryan Day and Jay Kreimer produced the music on this CD with instruments these two artists created themselves. Since I know very little about these two American musicians, I place their work in a wide field embracing references to John Cage (percussion works), to Roger Turner (for other nuances) and to Jean Dubuffet (for luck and play). Sometimes resonating with metallic tubes and tin plates, sometimes not, when it has anything to do with cords. A dynamic boiling up accompanies our listening to this recording from beginning to end. There is a background, a farmyard, of tubes and other iron gadgets. Very pleasant.