Press
Recent Music Heroes reviews “Heart Removal Kit”
“Ghosts are appearing…ghosts are…ghosts… . The ghosts are powerful phenomena who might exist, or maybe not. Jonathan Siemasko aka Schemawound`s 10-track issue does contain enough surge to do it. First of all, all those electronic build-ups may resemble dance-appealed music but the impression is feint. I can feel it is an instance of post-industrial music by its nature because the core of it consists of darker edges, which emit appealing black matter and ominous vibes and other exquisite relationships between the elaborated sonic parts. Of course, the release consists of diverse rhythms but the intention of those cadences is not to arouse one’s bodily/sexual sensations. The rhythms are profound enough to be somewhat obscure while hiding other layers inside themselves. Even if it happens to be the imagination of mine it is imbued with multivalent shades, which do need many listening times before to get deciphered. For instance, The Wasps In The Walls might remind of an early Einstürzende Neubauten where the mechanical aesthetic intention is united to physiochemical cerebral vibes. On the other hand, at A Resurrection Letter one could hear electro-house patterns, which purpose, with regard to the context, is obviously to confuse one’s opinion about the issue. All in all, the outing makes sense enough because of being sophisticated and thoroughly set out.”
Recent Music Heroes
“Heart Removal Kit” featured in Vuzhmusic – Notable Netlabel Releases of 2016
“In a not entirely surprising move, Schemawound steers his project – already diverse with industrial beat music and lyrical ambient works – into the area of psychedelic techno dub championed by people like Cevin Key & Ryan Moore. That he does it well is also no huge surprise. The production is slick and tight, the grooves are decent, and while melodic development has never been J. Siemasko’s strong point, nothing gets monotonous.”
Vuzhmusic – Notable Netlabel Releases of 2016
Make Your Own Taste reviews “Come On, Ghost.”
“Netaudio fave Schemawound presents a very interesting recording that is an exploration of rhythm, juxtaposing heavy, ominous beats with occasionally very subtle music, to the point where the hip-hoppy beats basically dominate the affair — sort of like if you turned down the music on the Future Sound of London’s Dead Cities album. Fortunately, these are some pretty cool beats. The title track is probably my favourite, quite spooky with ringy piano and a very groovy funk beat, though the groovier “Computer Take Me Somewhere Else”, which combines a subtle beat with electronics that sound like Vangelis’s background noises for the Bradbury Building, is also very cool. Other tracks are heavier and noisier, such as “Exit Bags”, as noisy as a 22nd century dance club. The overall feel is claustrophobic and tense. This is a really good experimental electronica album.”
Make Your Own Taste
Tuning Into The Obscure reviews “Terraform Mars”
“This project as a whole is described as “being free from the restraints of genres” and this is fairly evident while listening to the newest album from Schemawound. This is a fine piece of work, combining field recordings and synthetic elements to create something otherworldly. Calling this ambient or dark ambient or even organic wouldn’t really scratch the surface of what this is. And musically, this fits the title well. It’s the perfect soundtrack one would use while attempting to terraform Mars. The structure here is similar to Herd’s “Tangents” series; many small pieces are woven together to make an elaborate tapestry and you really can’t tell where one ends and the next track begins. In fact, Herd’s music might be the closest thing I could compare this too. It’s dark in spots, noisy in others, calm here, distorted and frightening there… this is a WILD album. (4.8 out of 5).”
Tuning Into The Obscure
ATTN: Magazine reviews “They Want To Make Your Body Move. I Want To Hold You Perfectly Still.”
It’s an intriguing title for sure. Are “they” the DJs that pump unrelenting 4/4 into massive clubs at drunken punters, or perhaps the “system” that quashes opportunities for meditation and contemplation in favour of long days spent in factories and offices? Is the “body” that of a human, or a personification of a sound object? Or is it the commercialised world, which heaves with thousands of noises all blaring at once when Schemawound wishes to listen intently to just one sound in isolation?
The album is, according to Siemasko himself, “an exploration of small events magnified”; patient evocations of solitary ideas, gently rotated and reshaped. Each piece is treated like an object, lingering long enough for each detail of the sound to be examined and known; the noise verges on coming into material being, fighting against sound’s momentary existence to outstay its welcome in the now, thus bringing it into intimate contact with its listener/beholder. To adopt one possible interpretation of the album’s title, Schemawound transforms sound’s status as a verb – a motion, a happening – and gifts it the sense of shape and density necessary to make it a noun, an object.
Devised entirely in Supercollider (a program for real-time audio synthesis), these object nonetheless taking on mysterious and abstract forms. “Fall Asleep Walking” shudders gently like the sound of two muffled helicopter blades spinning at different speeds; it tilts giddily between pitches and volumes, teasing the listener’s sense of orientation and causing the horizon to see-saw and sway. Meanwhile, “The Same Color As Your Skin” (the initial version of which appeared in ATTN’s own SIGNALVOID compilation) sounds like watching a bird collapse out of the sky in slow motion, with a ghostly drone melting through a steady downward glissando. Like watching a candle flicker and dance, movement occurs within the sonic object; the body does not transform, but merely flexes its many limbs to conjure new shapes.
But the album is not without its narrative turns, and uses these fixations of state to bring a real sense of drama to the album’s track transitions. One of the most engrossing transformations occurs as the thin bubble jets and metallic hiss of “The Crawl” promptly replace the aforementioned drone descent of “The Same Color As Your Skin”, as if burrowing beneath the earth to reveal an underground stream of high-pressure water flow and surreal hallucinations. Aside from a couple of pauses for breath, the record is largely seamless, with each sound event sprouting its very form from the decay of the track previous – it’s an album that beckons intense and continuous concentration, with the listener forever clutching at the sound object that convulses and changes within their hands.
Sethmol Productions reviews “They Want to Make Your Body Move. I Want to Hold You Perfectly Still”
Schemawound is the brain child of J. Siemasko and employs a variety of electronic genres. Ranging from ambient, glitch and IDM to noise and industrial, his works has broken the genre rules. They stand alone as being completely unique, impossible to categorize. This has given him the freedom to expand his sonic horizons with every new release. Being confined to the strict criteria of a specific can often be a creative hellhole where you end up creating the same songs over and over again. Schemawound’s newest release They Want to Make Your Body Move. I Want to Hold You Perfectly Still breaks free from the musical canon, fusing genres together while simultaneously inventing new definitions for what we perceive to be music.
Grains of synthesis sprinkle on the ceramic counter as a lightly jarring ambiance pulsates through a fuzzy television screen in a beige waiting room. Meticulous drones crawl across the hospital floor. A completely clean and sanitized noise slithers through the air vents, wafting into the nearby surgical suites. The room becomes a foggy chamber, encasing you in fragments of sound ricocheting back and forth. Subterranean vibrations and high-pitched chimes descend from above like a flying saucer coming to take away our dead. The whole experience plays trick with your mind as time, perception and intonation morph into something new and frightening.
The songs fluidly blend into each other, seamlessly bound together by an intricate stream of ligaments and tendons. You don’t know where to begin or end; you simply continue. Life goes on and as one thing ends you drift into the next one without even realizing. The concise rigidity to this album is due to the fact that it was composed entirely from code on a computer program. The technical aspects are awe-inspiring. Such fastidious generation takes hours of precise calculation and detailed analysis. The end result is an avantgarde robotic composition that is devoid of emotion.
There is very little human expression; it all sounds so cold. The bleak empty cavity is instead filled with a revealing creativity. Siemasko has shown us the computer’s soul without its heart. It’s a very stark display. The entire ensemble has a very otherworldly quality making it strange and intriguing. The computer, though artificially powered, is still a living being. It’s thoughts might be programmed but it still has spiritual vibrations. This is a glimpse at the capabilities of metaphysical computer music. Deeper exploration will reveal entire new dimensions of music and sound to our senses.
Rating: 3.5 stars
CTIndie reviews “Hospitalsongs”
With the ever-increasing number of bedroom electronic music producers prodding their way through local scenes and beyond, the question inevitably becomes, what must one do to rise above the cult of mediocrity? With his latest release entitled HospitalSongs, Naugatuck producer Jon Siemasko, known as Schemawound, has proven that the answer lies in constant experimentation.
HospitalSongs is a collaboration of six years’ worth of recordings described in the liner notes as “an attempt to recapture the muse that had escaped (Siemasko).” What would originally be just an exceptional ambient electronic work transforms into more of a tale of recovery; a trip into the mind of a once troubled individual.After a disconcerting opener of feedback and glitchy noise, Schemawound shows off his ability to put together quite the catchy beat on “The Operating Theater”, with driving lo-fi drum samples carrying the tune. Lo-fi percussion remains a pressing recurrence throughout the album. The distorted backings employed on nearly every track, along with melodious feedback, coincide perfectly with assorted synths to create a comprehensive array of atmospheres and a stimulating listen. The track “Number from Synthesisia”, for instance, is undeniably jumpy and totally danceable, as an uptempo drum beat rocks out behind a quirky synth melody. On the other end of the spectrum, we have “Further Analysis Required”, which relies heavily on a repeating explosion-esque sample as a beat, providing a much more calm and ambient feel to the tune.
The album is constantly evolving, both in mood and through the addition of unexpected instrumentation at pivotal points. The track “Wet Hands”, for example, uses a near-authentic brass sound for its principal melody, which is a drastic change from the straight synthesized sound HospitalSongs would have you expect. When used in conjunction with the pseudo-tribal drum beat behind it, the track takes the album somewhere completely new, and it works exceptionally well. What’s more is that the dissonant melody only adds to the chills HospitalSongs should be giving you already.
There is no doubt that HospitalSongsis to be enjoyed as a single entity, rather than individual tracks, especially since each track runs seamlessly into its successor. While each track definitely has something special to offer, the only way to become truly immersed in the strange, eerie atmosphere that is HospitalSongs is to listen to it all the way through. Help yourself to a free download of HospitalSongs from Schemawound’s bandcamp.