Burning Star Core and New Monuments

Burning Star Core, the project of Ohio-based violinist Spencer Yeh, achieved a unique balance of droning ambience, musique concrete and psychedelic freak-out, a standard first set by the two 16-minute meditations of the mini-album A Brighter Summer Day (Thin Wrist, 2002).

The EP Amelia (2003) contains the eleven-minute The Point Of Departure Is Not To Return that begins with a simple synthesizer melody repeated over and over again but slowly builds up a polyphonic swarm of mirror images.

The EP Amplified Body Sound (2003) contains the ten-minute The Act Of Sitting With One's Own Ass, an almost comic take on electronic music with cartoonish metamorphoses and funny manipulations of voices.

The mini-album Inside the Shadow (2005 - Hospital, 2010) contains three of their best pieces, in particular the nine-minute drone sonata Inside the Shadow, whose timbre keep moving and shifting until it hatching all sorts of percussive turbulence.

The mini-album The Very Heart Of The World (Thin Wrist, 2005) experimented with percussion instruments, notably in the 14-minute Come Back Through Me.

The mini-album Everyday World Of Bodies (Ultra Eczema, 2006) was scored for voice, electronics and found objects. The first side (Shoot Me Out The Sky, Swimsuit 2006, Beneath 2 World) indulges in amateurish musique concrete, mixing electronic sounds, natural sounds and human voice. The second side is even more childish and naive, except that, out of the blue, it delivers the piano vignette In Love With A Promise, that could be by the Penguin Cafè Orchestra.

The mini-album Three Sisters Who Share An Eye (No Fun, 2006), containing just two 15-minute improvisations, was the most extreme of the early works.

The double-disc Mes Soldats Stupides '96 - '04 (Cenotaph, 2005) collects rarities.

Hototogisu + Burning Star Core (2006) contains five noise improvisations, in particular #2, which is 14 minutes of free-form strumming and droning.

Operator Dead Post Abandoned (No Quarter, 2007) inaugurated a quartet with Yeh on violin and electronics, Trevor Tremaine on percussion, Mike Shiflet on computer and Robert Beatty on electronics; and the music attained a loud and transcendental fusion of free-jazz, acid-rock and digital soundsculpting over spastic percussive frenzy. The abrasive rhythmic pattern that opens the 19-minute When The Tripods Came (one of the great glorious electroacoustic symphonies of the time) sounds like an amplified distorted ticking clock, like a remix of Pink Floyd's Time. It quickly escalates into an industrial bacchanal with electronics and guitars that blurt out like free-jazz horns, its metronomy pierced by stormy drones for a breathtaking finale. The 17-minute Operator Dead Post Abandoned opens with a dense chaotic whirlwind of drones and drumming, and doesn't get any more linear or friendly. The cacophonous avalanche somehow coalesces into a breeze of melodic galactic glissandoes. Me & My Arrow is a hypnotic ear-piercing nightmare and slowly grows into a sort of paralyzed raga when the percussion set a tempo. The thundering fanfare The Emergency Networks Are Taking Over is nine minutes of wall of drumming with layers of manic distortion.

Blood Lightning (No Fun, 2007), boasting an unusually "clean" sound, contains the eleven-minute The Universe Is Designed To Break Your Heart, which is basically two pieces in one: first pulsing melodramatic droning minimalism, then atonal free-form electroacoustic music.

The ten-cassette box-set Ghosts Of Niagara (2008) documents collaborations between Burning Star Core and Prurient, notably the apocalyptic five-minute wall of noise of Syrup Slave.

Challenger (Hospital Productions, 2008) marked a return to solo electronic/computer performances, and this time incorporating field recordings. It also marked a new stance by Yeh, one that belonged more with the high-brow avantgarde than with the droning crowd. The result approximated both the cosmic music of the 1970s and the most progressive of Eno's ambient works.

Papercuts Theater (No Quarter, 2010) documents live performances from 1997-2008.

Yeh was an eclectic violinist whose eclectic career continued with eclectic collaborations at the border of free jazz and electronic music such as: Jazz Hands (2002) with drummer Larry Marotta; The Lower Ones (2004) with John Olson of Wolf Eyes; Workbench & Yeh (2004) with Mike "Workbench" Bernstein of the Double Leopards; Nolan / Yeh Duo (2005) with drummer Pete Nolan of the Magik Markers; Roach=Animal (2005), credited to Dirty Dynamite Gang, with electronic musician Jessica Rylan and John Olson; A Rock in the Snow (2006) and Slow Blind Avalanche (2006) with saxophonist Paul Flaherty and drummer Chris Corsano; Rylan/ Yeh (2006) with electronic musician Jessica Rylan; Marino's Dream (2006), credited to the Clams, with James Ferraro, Kathy O'Dell, Shane Mackenzie and Zac Davis; The Squid (2007) and False Speech (2007) with electronic musician Aaron Dilloway of Wolf Eyes; Live in Nottingham (2007) and New York / Atlanta (2008) with John Wiese; Burning Graveyard Lights (2007), with Ben Hall (percussion), Hans Buetow (cello), John Olson (saxophone) and Mike Connelly of Wolf Eyes, an extension of the Graveyards (Hall, Buetow, Olson); Bite Your Tongue (2009), credited to Storm of Corpses, with John Rich (clarinet), Jon Lorenz (tenor saxophone), Tony Dryer (electric upright bass), Jacob Heule (electronics), Jay Korber (drums) and Ryan Jewell (drums); Object Lessons (2009), a "spoken-musical rendition" of visual artist Justin Lieberman's installation; Musculus Trapezius (2010) with Tony Conrad on harpsichord and violin and Michael Duch on double bass; Northern Resonance I (2011) and Northern Resonance III/II (2010) with Norwegian harmonium player Jon Wesseltoft; Lunar Roulette (2011), credited to Sych, with Wally Shoup (alto saxophone), Chris Corsano (drums) and Bill Horist (electric guitar); Cold / Burn (2012) with Argentine electronic musician Anla Courtis, Okkyung Lee on cello and Jon Wesseltoft on harmonium; Dragonfly Breath (2013) with saxophonist Paul Flaherty, trombonist Steve Swell and drummer Weasel Walter; NCAT (2013) with cellist Audrey Chen, pianist Todd Carter and trumpeter Nat Wooley; Wake Up Awesome (2013) with Okkyung Lee and Norwegian electronic musician Lasse Marhaug; Schlager (2016) with saxophonist Ken Vandermark; Tashi Dorji/ C. Spencer Yeh/ Michael Zerang (2019) with Bhutanese-born guitarist Tashi Dorji and percussionist Michael Zerang; etc.

Yeh's solo recordings include: Au Revoir et Bonne Nuit (2006), which contains six untitled improvisations, Nothin' But a Heartache (2006), the 30-minute piece of Solo Violin 1-10 (2007), Solo Voice & Electronics (2009), which contains the four-movement Memories of Murder and the six-movement Always Been a Storm, The Strangler (2009), which contains the 16-minute Escape Artist and the 13-minute The Stranger, 1975 (2011), which was recorded between 2005 and 2009, Transitions (2012), a collection of ten shorter pieces, Solo Voice I�X (2015), entirely devoted to his singing, The RCA Mark II (2017), a collection of 12 brief vignettes.

The Monuments, later renamed New Monuments, were Spencer Yeh, Borbetomagus' tenor saxophonist Don Dietrich and Yeh's trusted percussionist Ben Hall. The New Monuments (Important, 2009) contains All Our Cathedrals Are Unfinished (nine minutes of loud unbridled cacophony), Ram Ventilators (ten minutes of even more abrasive anarchy), and Village Of Empty Nests (twenty minutes of nuclear radiations and then of slightly better organized free-jazz improvisation, but still with both saxophone and violin aiming for the most ear-splitting noises). Their second album, Long Pig (Bocian, 2015), contains the eleven-minute Product Contains Bones (deranged musical equivalent of a carpet bombing), the 15-minute Chains (that opens relatively low-key and then indulges in the usual mayhem of pummeling distortion but gives the drumming more space), the eleven-minute Gravity Forge (obliquely propulsive because of some insistent droning and more cohesive drumming) and the ten-minute Mermaid's Purse (the ultimate grating shattering chaos). Their third album, New Earth (Pleasure Of The Text, 2018), gathers five lengthy improvisations: Old Monuments (16:33), a little too self-indulgent and unedited (it seems to run out of energy after nine minutes), White Hair Bleeds Orange (9:13), based on an intriguing sound effect of the violin but weakly supported by drumming and sax, Jolly Copulators (11:55), which is possibly the standout, a percussive tornado and a demonic repertory of incandescent distortion, Voting With One's Body (13:20), a vortex of relentless exhausting tension, and Signal (14:21), a relatively more restrained and even pensive jam. Language Is The Skin (Torn Light, 2022), their fourth album, seems to be the most erudite one: the trio shuns the radical wall of noise and dwells on unusual registers and effects. If the outcome is still extreme in the eight-minute Reincarnation Is Hard To Do, the eleven-minute Lamprey Embouchure is a different beast altogether: an agonizing sax solo that leads to a frenzied jam grounded in chaotic drumming. And the 19-minute Blush is one strenuous, grueling sax solo in a relatively spare soundscape.