Words are My Bondage and My Liberation

Jeremy Gluck
I Am Time / I Break Through
(Glass Modern)

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Vaporscan
Subspace Voyager
(Pénte)

Multimedia artist Jeremy Gluck has been defiantly beating his own path in sonic and visual arts for over 40 years. Once of peppy post-punk group the Barracudas and ever since a wildly varied and prolific artistic journey, 2024 sees Gluck taking the time to look back. Two retrospective volumes (with a promised third on the way) have been released this year; each one attempts to wrangle a vast catalogue of collaborations, guises and muses and condense it into a single disc, but each also focuses on a unique side of Gluck’s artistic history.

I Am Time, the first volume, is immediately gratifying. even with a broad range of sounds that cover explosive folk-blues, experimental electronic pieces, and post-punk by turns robust and spindly. The opening run of the folksong-turned-rager “Road of Broken Dreams”, the bluesy drawl of “Sorrow Drive” and through to the crunchy power pop chug of “You Call Me From Too Far Away” are a powerful opening salvo; elsewhere, “Threw This Away” sounds like it would have been right at home on Nuggets, and the totemic, 12-minute post-punk march of “Rich Man’s Burden” brandishes saxophone squalls and the wildest vocals of the whole set.

What becomes apparent from glancing through I Am Time’s track list is Gluck’s zeal for collaboration. Almost all the pieces here see him effortlessly locking in with another artist; some see him as part of a standalone group of musicians (only one piece, the title track with its jittery loops and hypnotising patience, is credited to Gluck in a truly solo capacity). Most notably, post-punk luminary Nikki Sudden’s appearances are definite highlights: check the insistent, snotty “No Sound” and the aforementioned “Sorrow Drive”.

Scattered throughout the record are more experimental pieces that augment the traditional rock band set by adding an electronic flair. “Other Lives” is particularly enjoyable, with a nervous sonic palette of electronica juddering along and overlaid with delicate acoustics and deadpan vocals. The Phase47 (remember that name) collaboration “Travel in Peace” eschews rock entirely; its synthetic thrum and pulse and intense spoken word passages are also the biggest hint as to what’s coming next.

The second volume is a vastly different – and potentially difficult – prospect. I Break Through is primarily a spoken word album culled from 2010 to ’15. Here, the accompanying backing tracks don’t look to overpower or provide melodic hooks. Rather, they couch and amplify Gluck’s words, which themselves are emotively impressionistic, sometimes offering fragmented shards of meaning the listener needs to piece together. The raucous, crowd-pleasing immediacy of I Am Time is firmly out the window now: these pieces are outré, honest and challenging, but if they sink their teeth into you, they’re tough to shake. I Break Through, however, is a compilation that handily lends itself well to dipping in and out of, like a book of good poetry, which makes consuming it a little less daunting.

Collaborations are again a common sight, with most of the music being handled by two names. The songs featuring narcotic krautrock outfit Carbon Manual are the more accessible cuts here, offering hypnotising mantras and middle eastern flavour. The title track’s combination of trippy instrumental backing and floating, vaporous vocals is intoxicating, as are the ribbons of guitar and unadorned thud all over “Ice Sleep”. Lyrically speaking, “Snow” is my favourite of these songs: it brims with naturalistic imagery, talking of “snow sticking like memory” and “strange, pleasant pain”, it’s an affecting rumination on memory, impermanence and loneliness. Also of note is Gluck’s wish for “madness to cover me like an old, soft blanket” cutting through the hazy groove of “When I Am Memory”.

The tracks with Phase47 (there’s that name again) are more accurately described as poetry-sound-art. Their soundscapes of electronica are minimal and hushed, allowing Gluck’s words to take precedence. The deadpan recitation of someone helplessly, methodically filing away the traces of their life on “Plan for a Performance” is powerful, and the whirring, groaning drones underneath add an unsettling heaviness. The same is true for the following “Sand”, where chunky yet minimal synthetic throbs carry Gluck’s fractured words through the aether.

The purely solo pieces here are striking and are highlights of the compilation. “I Found Peace” wields musique concrète influences, disorientating cut-up vocal scraps, touches of haunted piano and vast amounts of negative space. “My Discipline” is even more arresting, featuring a female voice corroded by effects, mangled into glossolalia, and fighting fierce bursts of static. The experience (of both “My Discipline” and of the album at large) is more Tate Modern than 100 Club, more art piece than song. The same is true for two back-to-back spoken word pieces that come later: “Saneworld” is an eerier rumination on evil and madness (“it takes a mad man to kill one man, it takes a sane man to kill 100,000”) that melts in a chorus of haunted scrapes, and “Unterzone’s” hazy stream-of-consciousness broadcasts like a hypnotherapy tape from hell. For the truly committed, the digital version of the album also includes “Don’t Talk to Me About Silence”, a 26-minute leviathan and the apotheosis of Gluck’s fusion of whirring electronics and commanding vocal intonation, and closes with “I Carry In My Me Mother”, on which a tribute to the artist’s mother is carried by woozy, squealing sonics that provide an uneasy, Silent Hill-esque dread. 

Taken together, I Am Time and I Break Through offer an impressive and eye-opening retrospective of a truly original, artistically fearless discography. I Am Time is an easy sell: it’s likely the closest Gluck will have to a greatest hits compilation, and there’s something sonically sticky to be found in each of its post-punk despatches. I Break Through will, naturally, appeal to a narrower band of listeners, but I encourage anyone to dip in to a few of its selections and try and give yourself over to the freewheeling abstraction. My one reservation is that, aside from a short summary provided by the artist, these sets would’ve benefitted from some more comprehensive liner notes. The collaborators are so many, the history so extensive, and the sounds so varied, that a bit of a guiding hand through the content could have added some additional background colour.

Restless creative spirit that he is, 2024 is just as much about Gluck forging ever onwards as it is for regarding his past. In “Don’t Talk to Me About Silence”, he refers to words as both his bondage and liberation: fittingly, his latest project jettisons words altogether. Vaporscan sees him in close collaboration with Steve Pierce and Don Tyler (a.k.a. Phase47 – who, as you can now probably safely say, is a stalwart brother-in-arms with Gluck when it comes to experimentation). Subspace Voyager, their debut release, sees all three artists coming together to create a mesmerising, unified ambient experience: within are six lengthy, minimal and freeform compositions that giving form to the “sound of nothing” that surrounds us, capturing a feeling of vast, unfurling spaciousness.

Subspace centres around the ETHER, described by manufacturer SOMA as an “anti-radio” designed to pick up all the signals, interference and radiation that a typical radio tries to ignore. Gluck amassed a library of field recordings with the ETHER; Pierce and Tyler further developed these recordings by filtering them through additional treatments and augmenting them with modular synthesisers. It’s often hard to pin down exactly what the sounds you end up hearing are, but that’s not really the point. Rather, it’s better to leave them undefined and let them wash over you. This is very much a headphones-listen: it’s slow-moving mood music: patient, contemplative, and unsurprisingly evocative of floating gently through space, trawling through interstellar transmissions.

Opening track “Unseeing” sets the tone. It’s richly atmospheric and cavernous with space, its throbbing electronic pulse underpinning crackling bursts of static and lonely synth tones. The following “Dream Order” is a highlight; undefinable choral sighs pierce through chittering effects and deep wobbly drones like shots of heavenly daylight, breathing colour into the monochrome soundscape. “Substance” initially feels like the most naturalistic, earthbound cut, as its opening field recordings of flowing water offers the listener something tangible to latch onto, before shimmering scrapes of sci-fi sounds begin to dance across the surface.Although it is very much a team effort, Subspace Voyager is yet another display of Gluck’s mercurial creative drive. His three releases of 2024, looking both forwards and backwards, help cement his status as a true original, concerned only with pursuing fresh ideas and challenging himself at every turn. There’s no telling what path he’ll be compelled to go down next, but I’d certainly encourage everyone to try and follow along.