Lucky Kitchen 003 " Blip, Bleep. Soundtracks to Imaginary Video Games." CD 1998

The New York Times (USA) by MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
From Pong to Song: Video Games Inspire Artists
No one will ever confuse Donkey Kong with Don Quixote, but in a quest for epic aesthetic adventure and pulse-pounding conceptual excitement, many digital artists and musicians are turning to video games for creative inspiration. At least two exhibits of computer games designed by artists are planned for the first half of this year. And the pervasive cultural influence of Pac-Man, Pong and other arcade classics can be heard in "Blip, Bleep", a compact disk released late last year by the tiny New York label Lucky Kitchen. Audio Clips from "Blip, Bleep: Soundtracks to Imaginary Video Games": --- Each of the 18 tracks on "Blip, Bleep" is a soundtrack to an imaginary video game. The album's diverse contributors have even fabricated descriptions for their made-up diversions. To play "Family Tree Polo," for example, you would "bounce through time in your ambulance" and "save your injury-prone ancestors so you may eventually be born." But if the written game summaries tend to parody the genre, the musical efforts, which range from thumping electronic dance tunes to atmospheric sweeps of synthesizers, are utterly genuine. Especially on the songs that incorporate samples of actual game noises, they reveal the degree to which the arcade's aural ambiance has shaped the sound of modern music. "Those sounds have really invaded what we've come to know," said Keith Whitman, a musician in Somerville, Mass., who spent countless hours with Atari's Wizball in his youth. For "Nuclear Cats Get New Home," recorded under the moniker Blitter vs. Hrvatski, Whitman and his brother sampled the chirps and burps of vintage Commodore 64 games, then used them as the foundation of a deranged drum 'n' bass track. Daniel Raffel, a graduate student at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program who co-founded the Lucky Kitchen label with the Hoboken, N.J., artists Aeron Bergman and Sandra Salinas, said that the sound of the video arcade has left as deep an impression on the digital generation as the bluesman Muddy Waters once did on the Rolling Stones. "This really goes back to the roots of a lot of people," said Raffel, who lovingly recalled the virtues of his Vectrex game console and said that in second grade he dressed up as an Atari computer for Halloween. The intersection of artistry and gaming is not entirely new. For example, "Eve," the 1997 CD-ROM game by the musician Peter Gabriel, contained virtual environments built around the work of four contemporary artists. And one has to wonder if the difficult-to-navigate interfaces of some online art projects were fueled by a gamer's maze-crazed mentality. While artists and musicians explore the world of games, commercial game developers are seeking to have their work recognized as art, as seen in the campaign by game-music composers to establish a Grammy Award category for their genre. But as the not-so-grizzled survivors of Tomb Raider and Duke Nukem come of age and begin to express themselves, it seems natural that video games will figure in their creations. Anne-Marie Schleiner, co-editor of the online-art journal Switch, noted that the game summaries accompanying "Blip, Bleep" often depict mundane activities, as when a character named Trashcandan takes out the garbage and finds there are monsters lurking around the corner. "Our everyday outlook is being infiltrated by video-gaming paradigms," she said. "You're walking down a hallway and you expect to see monsters, and you have this goal in mind. It's this way of looking at the world that you get when you play a lot of video games." Schleiner is curating Cracking the Maze, a virtual exhibit of artist-designed patches and plug-ins -- chunks of code that alter a game's appearance and performance -- that is due to appear on the Switch site in late June. The show will provide examples of programming that can, say, change a game character's gender or the features of a virtual environment's landscape. An exhibit of artist-developed video games will also be presented as part of Synworld: Playwork/Hyperspace, a symposium on simulated environments to be held in Vienna in late May. According to Schleiner, new-media artists' increased interest in video gaming may also have something to do with how costly the creation of three-dimensional environments with virtual-reality technology turned out to be. "In the mid-90's, it was the dream technology that everyone wanted to do, but it required massive capital and investment," she said. "Suddenly, artists realized, we can work with some of the same ideas [in video games] that we were interested in with virtual reality." Beryl Graham, who curated an interactive art exhibit called Serious Games in London in 1997, had a simpler explanation for the appeal of electronic games. "The fact that computer games are capable of inspiring totally obsessive absorption is almost bound to interest artists and cultural theorists," she said. But for Graham, the games present a profound puzzle: "The sound -- just what is it that makes those audio tracks so intensely annoying for anyone but the teen-age player?"Actually, the tunes on "Blip, Bleep" are unlikely to cause much irritation to fans of electronic dance music, who are already accustomed to living their lives to a computer-generated soundtrack. In fact, Raffel reported that the initial pressing of 1,000 disks is close to being sold out, and that the 750 copies with blue-felt covers handsewn by Bergman and Salinas were gone. Raffel solicited recordings for the disk in a few Internet postings, including the Intelligent Dance Music mailing list. Word spread quickly, resulting in about 50 submissions, all from unknown performers. Explaining the large number of responses, Raffel said, "There's the link to things that everyone could relate to: the video games we all played as a kid, which got us into computers, which got us into making music, which got us connected to the Internet, which got us all in contact." Raffel also believes that veteran competitors were rising to a challenge. "I think people might have seen making a track as part of a game," he said.

Lucky Kitchen 004 V/A "Family Audio" 8" lathe cut vinyl. 1998

The WIRE (UK) by David Howell
Family Audio (LK004) presents an intimate series of nine sound documentaries, recorded in various fidelities, of family life from around the globe. On this evidence, the Lucky Kitchen label stands for highly eclectic and quirkily individual electronic activity.

Lucky Kitchen 005 Alejandra and Underwood "theChildren´s Record" CD 1998

Octopus (France) by Christoph Taupin
Ce serait un euphémisme de dire que Lucky Kitchen est le label de musicque électronique le plus humain. Derriére une naiveté toute apparente, ce trio de New Yorkais a produit une poignée de disques-concepts á la démarche fine et pertinente. Daniel Raffel (alias Suetsu), Aeron Bergman (Underwood) et sa femme Alejandra Salinas ont décidé de parler de l´enfance et de l´amour dans leurs dernieres productions. Sur "The Children´s Record", Alejandra et Aeron invitent leurs amis á évoquer leur enfance á travers des chansons ou des enregistrements d´ambiances, de lieux qui ont joué un role essentiel á cette période de leur vie: les 32 titres nous entrainent sur Internet, dans lew rues de New York, au milieu de conversations téléphoniques et dans de nombreuses scénes de la vie quotidienne. Tantot livrées tels quels, tantot reformatées en boucles, les modulations et mélodies par Underwood, font de cet album photo sonore un délice aux croisements des routes de l´anthropologie et de la musique élecronique.

Lucky Kitchen 007 Alejandra Salinas "Home Tapes" 10" white vinyl. 2000

The Wire (UK) by David Howell
Home Tapes is Lucky Kitchen´s Alejandra Salinas´reworking of the home recordings she made in her native Spain when she was nine years old. Recalling the sound design of Jean-Luc Godard´s films, it consists od add background sounds and indigenous music rising and receding between tape hiss and clips of family dialogue and children singing. Reprocessed through the PC. its ambiences and speeches are invested with a sense of intrigue, tuning the ear to the spaces and textures of the Spanish language. the tuneless nature of Lucky Kitchen´s aural documentaries may restrict their audience, but the way they each explores a specific time, space and culture makes them especially relevant in an era of mass human migration (be it real or virtual) and the current media vogue for intrusive home videos and docusoaps.

Planet of Sound (France) by O. Lamm
Vite oublie, on passe au mellieur des remedes: septieme reference de Lucky Kitchen et premiere escapade en solo de Sandra Salinas, ce 10" a la pochette comme d´habitude bricolee et escrite a la main utilise comme point de depart un enregistrement cassette melant interviews familiales (papa, maman) et enregistrements de musique tradicionnelle espagnole a la radio realise par Sandra quand elle avaint neuf ans. sour face A, the document brust est a peine retravaille- un edit respectueux comme seule intervencion- alors que la face B rassemble quatre minatures de manipulations. Une ecoute de lóbjet símposer comme un des bijoux electroniques de cette annee.

Diskono 003 Suetsu and Underwood "The Love Album" CD 1999

The WIRE (UK) by David Howell
For the follow up to their "Family Audio" audio documentary, Lucky Kitchen founders Daniel Raffel and Aeron Bergman have temporarily defected to the Scottish Diskono label. A product of their "obsessive recording habits "_the MiniDisc and tape recorders are always primed_ the Love Album pieces together a series of lo_tech, collaged inventions, with each musical track bookend by dialogue clips on the theme of love and the first flowerings of romance. Despite the CD´s fragmentary nature, the results are compelling and deeply enchanting . The way they shift their lo_fi vocal sampling and looping through a fog of woozy hiss and FX, tape clicks and slow, cavernous beats sometimes recalls Foehn. On "Guitar of Stele", they run vocals and acoustic guitar through a series of speed shifts, chopping up and stretching out the instrument in a more lo_fi echo of Fennesz´s recent Mego 7¨. Processing their tapes and samples through a computer, the duo confuses any neat binary division between analogue/digital. Applying electronics to their field recordings, they have invented a new kind of honest, urban, multicultural folk. The Love Album is crafted with a genuine sense of community: an inventive and intimate tangling together of roots and stories. Emotionally, the feel of music is curiously down. It lacks the giddying gushes and rushes, the indescribable mood-fluxes you´d associate with such a concept. Nevertheless, it works as a refreshingly frayed audio document, a homely patchwork of briefly glimpsed lives and ideas.

Audioview 009 Alejandra and Underwood "Notebook on Cities and Clothes" CD 2000

The WIRE (London, UK) by Ian Penman
The lonesome twine of this male/female duo is pleasantly odd. their use of found vox humanises the wirey places they go and the plug-in textures put an edgy frame around the 'natural' - in sum, a fall of cool rain in the still predominantly dry male domain of improv/electronica; a quietly beguiling 35 minutes fixing such unlikely assignations as spanish deep song with obtuse knitting factory mood set.

Diskono 10 Aeron Bergman "The Shed Record" CD 2000

Sound Projector (UK) by Ed Pinsent
An excellent angle on field-recording composition from the American Lucky Kitchen fellow, some of whose other recent records are reviewed elsewhere. The starting point here is home recordings, made in and around the garden at his grandmother's house - a delightful domestic setting comes over (it always appears to be a sunny day) but it is soon transformed. Right from the start, Bergman inserts his electronic interpolations and radically varies the documentary recordings. The foreign sounds coexist with the natural sounds, often in the same moment. The effect is of an electronic "daydream" invading reality, the protagonist dreamer shifting between his garden and the somnambulist state and back again, all within seconds. Real Alice in Wonderland-time. This distorts and disturbs one's sense of reality in a powerful way. It isn't however, a nightmarish episode - it's rather pleasant. Little cartoon diagrams on the sleeve indicate the playfulness of the work, and the elements used are friendly and familiar: there's birdsong, voices of friends, family and neighbors, playing the piano, dogs barking. The record ends with a friendly young couple giggling and kissing. There's local domestic activities like hammering, opening and closing windows, digging the garden, playing table tennis. Passing visitors are indicated by loud car stereos and airplanes overhead. Bergman can take moments from all of these and instantly process them into concrete sounds, mostly in a gentle way, making the fabric of reality warp and shift into a strange new music. He's capable of louder and more violent work too, generating earth-shattering loud tones out of nothing, summoning up huge sheets of crashing electronic thunder which suddenly drop away, leaving us back in the peaceful garden again. A looping music is made from a single phrase of a girl singing at the piano. A woman singing "Getting to Know You" is fractured in to a series of repeats, so that she appears to take the same pause for breath five times over.
" I think we've got a groundhog problem", remarks a voice to a neighbor, distressed at the holes appearing in the lawn. The record itself might have a Groundhog Day problem, what with the playful way it makes us relive moments over again, opening dramatic shifts in the temporal unity of a quiet summer's day.

Lucky Kitchen 9 and 10 Alejandra and Aeron  "La Rioja" and "Ruinas Encantadas" 2 CDs 2000

The WIRE, (UK) by David Keenan
Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman spent the best part of three years trawling the mountains, bars and backstreets of the La Rioja region of Spain in an attempt to capture a living snapshot of the music and joy of that area. Folklore volume one is a fantastic presentation of real folk and World music minus the museum dust of classification and the inevitably embalming processes of the recording studio. Here Spanish singers record themselves on old battered cassettes and we hear them mutter and struggle with the machine while bursts of feedback explode during tracks and conversations intrude on impassioned solos. There's no attempt to impose any one narrative or to give any real historical or regional context - choral music and mutant marching bands go up against horrible synth pop and weepy ballads and the effect is to truly transport you elsewhere. Haunted folklore sees our duo sonically treating original snatches of these field recordings, soaking them in fuzz and crackle and allowing lone voices to split through the fug as if conjuring ancestors across time.

De:Bug (Germany ) by Bleed (Translated by Kristian Peters).
Alejandra and Aeron. These two names I know a lot, also the sounds of these two picturesque CD's. These must not be a contradiction, although they live from a fund of very old disks, because everything which was once material here has gone through so many processes of handling, that to end - what can be assumed here with history - it looks down to us from the future, with voices of angels that can be compared with sonic clarity and permeability of calculations. It is an experimental assembly, from which one can extract oneself seldom, which makes it much more lovelier however, because each of the tracks opens a new aspect, is it on the minimum processes and the remains of sound travels or of the search for more calmness beyond the sounds, of which one knows that it couldn't exist obviously. A spooky disk for everyone who can get involved in it. Cut up and with frequency ranges, with which even a guinea pig would begin to purr (German schnurren). "la rioja" is the opposite of the very electronic "ruinas encantadas", full of sound of field-recordings in rural places, which you can't find much in these times. ***** (5 stars rating)

Intro (Germany) Translated by babblefish.
The euphoria around Electronica-generation of Manchester after Autechre has laid down in the meantime, the different Imprints turn conceptual in the circle. The Plunderphonics-draft from V/Vm seems to peter out, with the Beta Bodega Coalition from Miami essentially more exciting records appear than with Skam, and from DJ Speedranch I have nothing eternally . The look goes over here to the USA. Beta Bodega, Schematic, Chocolate Industries and Lucky Kitchen fiddle More industriously than the Britishs in the new definition of Electronica. The LK-makers Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman have placed from the beginning on individuality instead of on anonymous white sleeves: They sewed their covers and painted, marked and pasted in loving manual labour. Three youngest, at the same time appeared Releases are packed in beautiful, stamped cardboard and are partly pasted with folklorish painted silk small bands. On their "folklore" series. Tradition of the Audioview-row from the 80s - the cassettes on which the sounds of different large cities were collected as an acoustic fingerprint - use the both the Minidisc recorder as a camera and try so to penetrate into the acoustic tradition of Spain. So " La Rioja " is a journey similar to a radio play by the Rioja-area where the grandmother of Alejandra Salinas comes from . Near own material , Aeron and Alejandra also have up to 30 years old tapes. Their album is a marvelous journey by the famous wine area, which conserves at the same time as maintains.

All Music Guide (USA) by François Couture
Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman spent three years in the region of La Rioja, Spain, recording villagers and performing live electronic music. (Haunted Folklore One: Ruinas Encantadas) was created at the end of the project, from field recordings and material taken from live sessions. The sound sources of this CD are found on another {Lucky Kitchen} release, the ethnomusicological document {Folklore, Vol. 1: La Rioja}. The title "Haunted Folklore" describes the music to perfection. Throughout this electroacoustic suite, real-life elements (singing voices, sheep bells, the rain) appear disembodied, floating above post-modern electronic sounds -- an engaging juxtaposition of ancient and contemporary. These surreal soundscapes of a ghost town end with the disturbing tracks "Manana..." and "Tomorrow..." which feature the word "Manana" sampled from an old song, repeated over and over, asking the same question found in the liner notes to {Folklore, Vol. 1: La Rioja: what will happen of this folklore? The suite reads like a travel diary, as La Rioja is seen here through the subjective eyes of Alejandra and Aeron. It may be less fascinating than Kristoff K.Roll´s Corazón Road (a journey into Central America), but it also is less centered on musique concrete techniques, adopting a more ambient overall sound. Thus this CD is easier to get into. Recommended.

XLR8R (USA) by Philip Sherburne
Truth spills into fiction in the Lucky Kitchen
It's sometimes worth bearing in mind that "electronic music" isn't all bleeps and beats, and "experimental music" (an even more dubious term) ain't all clicks and whirrs. Lucky Kitchen's Alejandra and Aeron, for instance, opted to release field recordings of the folk songs of Spain's La Rioja region, complete with kitchen clatter and street chatter, for Volume One of their "Folklore" series, a fascinating cross between Chris Watson and Alan Lomax. Ruinas Encantadas: Haunted Folklore One goes on to reformulate some of these sounds, along with the clank and hiss of the duo's own recording sessions, into an immeasurably subtle example of nouvelle concrÈte. The duo, who relocated to Alejandra's native La Rioja from New York, where they were married in a Chinatown church in 1997, have a refreshingly off-the-cuff approach to realism: "Since we don't believe objective documentary is possible, we just go for it. When people listen to our La Rioja project, they put mountains of images onto the recordings that probably have little to do with everyday life of La Rioja. That is called evocation, and we think it is a great thing. Later, when we weave computer sounds to these recordings, in Ruinas Encantadas for example, the recording takes on an even more cartoon-like, fantastical, image-provoking, storytelling presence." Their most recent work, a photo essay entitled "Underwater Villages," documents towns in La Rioja submerged by flood and Franco alike, resulting in a series of otherworldly images evoking the off-kilter realism of Gabriel GarcÌa Marquez. Far from the received truths of so much electronic music, Alejandra and Aeron conjure a world that truly has to be seen--and heard--to be believed.

Various Artists I Love Fantasy LUCKY KITCHEN 011 CD 2001

Sound Projector (UK) by Ed Pinsent
Alejandra & Aeron are pretty much the 'executive producers' of this, as they stress the 'folk and legend' aspects of the music on this curious and wonderful release. 'A Society without fantasy is inert' is their bold claim - we need imagination, we need religion, we need utopian images to affect change. All of this music exists 'somewhere between a laser light show and a shooting star', that is to say it's a contemplation of the power of man's artifice, and the frightening power of nature. Here's four short pieces which live up to that claim. Aerospace Soundwise from Chicago emanate a chilling soft, white drone that is like spending an hour on top of a mountain, lost in a blizzard, buried in a snowdrift. Besides evoking the indifferent brutality and cruelty of nature, they remain resolutely electronic - as the amplifier hum will remind you. Evol from Barcelona use their track to relate a shocking tale of 'Animal Justice', in both text and sound, with their samples of dogs barking, growling and whimpering, intercut with violent electronic noises. The samples grow more menacing as the complexity of the electronic processing increases, suggesting a forced change, animals mutating into cyber-monsters. This snarling episode is a vast improvement on their picayune MEGO release, I trow. From Hamburg, we have Felix Kubin with Klangkrieg and Reznieck. They have another curious narrative, involving the Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. The story is about deception, suggesting that the fear of unknown outer space was too much for the Russian scientists, who contrived events to change it into a human story of heroism. But the terrors of outer-space come very much to the fore in this unsettling track - even though it has an endearing (and appropriate) clunky, sci-fi feeling. The album closes with a track from Onkyo musician and sampler heroine Sachiko M. Eschewing a narrative or text, her only printed statement is a short row of numbers. Perhaps this is a vision of digital computer hell, belied by the near-religious purity of her sine-wave drones. The record thus closes in prayer. Contemplate the mathematical geometric perfection of a snowflake (see front cover) as you listen. Concentrate on this music. All four of these intense miniatures should help to loosen the shackles that tie you to the banal trivialities of life, and aid the creative mind to foster new fantasies, new ideas about possibilities for the future. If so, then I Love Fantasy will have been a resounding success. 'Survive awfully boring by drifting away'.