albinobone
Working in Sacramento for a month, I'd gone to Aquarius Records in San Fran a bunch of times. This was one of the things I bought, which I played wholeheartedly as I puttered about in the yard when I got home, hoping that others in the neighborhood would hear and wonder what the hell was going on. Effective. Encased in wood. Rad.
Favorite track: Probe One.
Subscribe
now to receive all the new
music
Illusion of Safety creates,
including this release
and 42 back-catalog releases,
delivered instantly to you via the Bandcamp app for iOS and Android.
You’ll also get access to
subscriber-only
exclusives.
Learn more.
my last remaining sealed copy of the original issue on Staalplaat. Composed by Dan Burke & Jim O'Rourke 1991. The first edition of 500 copies came packaged in a custom made wooden slipcase (13.8 x 13.5 x 0.9 cm), printed in black on the front, sealed with "Kinderspielgeld" (kids toy money). The middle of the box features an italian L500 coin in silver and copper (not necessarily the metal, but the colour) embodied in the wood.
The CD is packaged in a slim paper sleeve that is printed green and black on one side.
Includes unlimited streaming of Probe
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
From Kurt/Perdition: This is the first re-issue of Illusion of Safety’s Probe since its only appearance in 1992. In a limited edition of 500 copies, Perdition Plastics is proud to reintroduce this notable work of contemporary composition.
Veteran provocateurs, Illusion of Safety, examine an audio landscape found between youth and innocence, manufactured entertainment, and suburban complacency. Using a pastiche of field recordings and suggestively composed elements, Dan Burke and Jim O’Rourke strikingly capture ambivalence and their own personal interactions within this environment.
As the constant center of Illusion of Safety since 1983, Dan Burke has consistently edited and evolved more than 20 CDs from ambience to electronica, from sound collage to post-industrial noise. The complexity and restraint found within Probe marked a compelling new direction for Burke and a great many others influenced by his music. Illusion of Safety has been released by such labels as Die Stadt, Experimedia, Silent, Soleilmoon, Staalplaat, Tesco, and Waystyx among others. Collaborations include Cheer-Accident, Thomas Demuzio, Kevin Drumm, Ben Vida, and others. Probe will be of interest to those who enjoy Hafler Trio, Throbbing Gristle, Luc Ferrari, etc.
Probe was one of several early, pinnacle works to foreshadow the unique and prolific audio fingerprint of renowned producer/player, Jim O’Rourke, when still a compositional student in Chicago. O'Rourke began working with Dan Burke's Illusion of Safety project in the early '90s, releasing four albums through Staalplaat, Complaceny, and Tesco, before moving on to form experimental "rock" group Gastr Del Sol with David Grubbs. This release fits neatly into O’Rourke’s recent issuing of forgotten and initial recordings. The initial compositions begun by Burke while O'Rourke was on tour in Europe in 1991, was subsequently completed by both artists over the first few months of 1992, incorporating extensive use of newly available medium of DAT field recordings.
Back before he joined Sonic Youth and became an avant rock elder statesman, Jim O'Rourke played in Illusion of Safety with Dan Burke, who has continued the project since his then-partner went all big time. Here, one of those mid-period releases is reissued and remastered, bringing the 18 year old release on Staalplaat back into the economy, and demonstrating how both artists were on the top of their game compositionally even back then.
A recurring theme throughout these four untitled tracks is a constant shift in dynamics, juxtaposing extremely quiet moments of electronic drift with sharp, caustic blasts of noise, and subtle field recordings. The first piece begins with what sounds like an air conditioner duct drone that eventually shapes into some semblance of rhythm, with sharp sheets of noise and crackles, before immediately transitioning into a massive orchestral blast that is allowed to slowly reverberate off into silence, with only the ghost of a hum far off in the mix. Stuttering pieces of more traditional electronic music and kids talking jovially appear before another orchestral detonation occurs. Finally, towards its closing moments a high register warbling tone becomes more and more obnoxious, eventually dueting with a low frequency thump. This on its own actually wouldn’t be out of place on an early Whitehouse album, but the cut into ostensibly a field recording in a dive bar, complete with Skynyrd's "Simple Man" playing in the background, certainly wouldn’t.
The second, long piece is cut from a similar cloth, opening with almost silence before an explosion of heavy electronics, and then back to quiet drone. The pattern continues, albeit irregularly, bringing in dogs barking, malfunctioning TVs, and vacuum cleaner noises to cut between the extremely quiet electronic menace that continues throughout, eventually putting chiming bells and a droning piano together before ending on a violent, piercing noise outburst. Track three puts jackhammers atop low frequency synth tones, found sound rattling, and analog synth noise, all around a deep pool of silence.
The shorter closing track brings the field recording elements that are sprinkled about into full focus, initially creating a minimal drone from the sounds of passing cars before launching into a traffic jam, replete with angry honking horns and revving engines, but then cuts to a quiet recording of nature, mixing the urban sprawl with the pastoral countryside. But, rather than ending on this overt juxtaposition, the duo instead decide to bring in jabs of industrial drum machine percussion and theme park music to bring things to an end. Considering the previous 50 some minutes of odd combinations and unpredictability, it’s a very fitting conclusion. Illusion of Safety is clearly Dan Burke's baby, and here he shows his strengths in developing both industrial tinged noise along with collage elements, but O’Rourke's touch isn’t one to be ignored either, showing that the duo worked together to develop this sonic environment in which they both lived. Originally an edition of 500 copies, it's great that the label saw fit to introduce it to a whole new audience, many of who have probably heard of IoS, but never listened. Well, here’s a chance to.
ILLUSION OF SAFETY Probe (Perdition Plastics) cd
Arguably the finest Illusion Of Safety record ever made, Probe was the 1992 recording composed by Dan Burke and Jim O'Rourke. The former began Illusion Of Safety a decade earlier with a revolving door personnel policy involving a handful of Chicago malcontents. O'Rourke began working with Burke's project around 1989 or so, when he was still a teenager and studying composition in college. Where many of the Illusion Of Safety albums are full-frontal assaults on the psyche of the listener (especially the groundbreaking album Historical with its raw use of narration from torture documentaries), Probe is a far more subtle and thus effective album marked by the extended use of disturbed silences, predating such sound design techniques that David Lynch mastered in Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway. This use of space is definitely coming from the O'Rourke side of the equation (which according to Burke was 50/50 on Probe), as O'Rourke's early solo album Scend was released at about the same time as Probe with profound similarities. Throughout the subsonic frequencies and unsettled spooky drones, there are numerous punctures of analogue sourced micro-bleeping, errata from shortwave, scrabbling of tactile objects, field recordings of traffic jams, children at play, carnival rides, etc. and jittery digitally sculpted loops. As all of these elements slowly unfurl over several lengthy chapters, Probe truly synthesizes the aesthetics of both Burke and O'Rourke into a cohesive body of work, with Burke's research into the dark and transgressive balanced with O'Rourke's studies into the musique concrete of Luc Ferrari and Michel Chion. Staalplaat first released Probe in a wooden slipcase in an edition of 500 copies. Those quickly went out of print; but fortunately, Perdition Plastics has just reissued this brilliant album, albeit in more conventional packaging.
credits
released June 6, 1993
Burke & O'Rourke: Samples, sequences, field recordings
1993 Staalplaat (initial release of 500 in wooden case with
Itialian coin & sealed with toy money).
Jim and I spent a few months working on this together composing it on my Mac Classic with Opcode Vision software. Armed with our new DAT recorders and a stereo microphones field recordings became a big player here and moving forward. we were star trek next generation fans hence the title
Since 1983, Burke and his many conspirators under the IOS banner have over the course of 40+ releases traversed most every
facet of the avant sound plane, from early industrial pop deconstruction to blindingly minimal sound art to densely surreal found-sound collage, creating uneasy music that is dense and dystopian and yet also beautiful....more
razed abandon is what i love about this project, no holds barred all out frontal delivery of the feelings at hand, no filter, real freedom of expression. blistering and detailed Illusion of Safety
like a trip to another world somewhat opaque in nature, like a cloud surrounding your field of sound and vision, clarity is almost attainable and you float in obtuse syrupy gel Illusion of Safety
fascinating blend of who the fuck knows what! and i mean that in the best possible way. reminds a bit of one of my favorites The Hafler Trio, unknown sounds put together in a concise narrative Illusion of Safety
Less a solo act than a one-man megalith, Khôra builds impressive experimental soundscapes from modular synths, flutes, harps, and more. Bandcamp New & Notable Feb 19, 2020
