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As former members of the ambient/industrial project Maeror Tri, the duo now known as Troum developed and refined their combination of booming atmospheres and subtle soundscapes. As Troum, they continue their trek into spaciousness, creating drones of sweeping drama and roar.
The album consists of a variety of pieces that have been attempted or performed over the past seven years, appearing here in their most finished states (as finished as the artists can ever be satisfied with, that is). Opening with "Elation," the stage is set with low end tones and higher frequency ringing, crawling along at a slow pace and enshrouded in a tangible amount of reverb. The following "Useque Sumus Lux" keeps the sub-30hz frequencies pegged out, but throwing in rhythmic loops and a wider palette of noises. The piece is a running contrast of loud synths and raw rhythms, yet gentle and delicate ambient pastiches.
Both "Eolet" and "Ecstatic Forlornness" keep the rhythms in place, though the former is more buried and primitive in nature, while the latter is much more commanding and clattering. "Ecstatic Forlornness" is based on heavy elements and a lot of flanging and filtering, but the transitions between effects are almost too direct and jarring, never allowing the piece to hit its stride. The cover of Savage Republic’s "Procession" is similar, but more old school organic in nature. The echoing production is still present, but the allowance of more traditional rhythms and noticeable, although highly obscured, vocals give it more of an early 1980s feeling rather than oblique compositions.
"Dhanu-H" and the closing "Crescere" eschew the rhythms for symphonic, sweeping elements of dramatic flair. Both could be the score to a psychological drama, though the latter’s slow build from near silence into rawer textures and musical loops might be a bit too jarring to work in that capacity. Half of the first pressing of this disc includes a bonus second CD, consisting of the 33 minute track "Abhuna," which continues the dramatic ambience. Using all of the time allotted to it, the piece builds from nothing into a slow, sparse piece of glacial drift and reversed tones, reaching a warm and inviting conclusion instead of the expected raw and dark ending moments. While the second disc isn’t as impressive as the main album tracks, it does not detract from the experience either.
This set comes packaged in the traditionally beautiful Beta Lactam way, a heavy mini-gatefold jacket adorned with designs by Stephen O’Malley that compliment the subtle, yet complex sounds contained within very well. Considering it is more of a compilation of tracks rather than an album in the traditional sense, the pieces work extremely well together to form a coherent whole.
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A new compilation from Soundway is always cause for excitement and this follow-up to 2006's excellent Panama! is no exception. I have no doubt that this album will finally cement Panama’s deserved reputation as the funkiest, sexiest isthmus around (tough luck, Suez!).
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A new compilation from Soundway is always cause for excitement and this follow-up to 2006's excellent Panama! is no exception. I have no doubt that this album will finally cement Panama’s deserved reputation as the funkiest, sexiest isthmus around (tough luck, Suez!).
As with its predecessor, Panama!2 compiles a stylistically varied assemblage of tracks from Panama's golden age that have never been released outside the country. This was no simple task (it took compiler Roberto Ernesto Gyemant two years of research and travel), as this period was characterized by rapid evolution and eclectic assimilation of disparate influences. Due to its unique location and diverse population (owing to the enormous influx of canal workers in earlier generations), traditional Panamanian music was buffeted by influences from American soul and funk, Cuban rumba, Columbian vallenato, calypso, and a host of African, Caribbean, and Latin American styles. Unsurprisingly, this convoluted cross-pollination often yielded impressive and infectiously dance-able results.
Gyemant has assembled a very solid collection and there are a number of attention-grabbing tracks here. The opening "La Murga De Panama" (by Papi Brandao) combines smoldering latin percussion with clean, elegant guitar work and a melancholy accordian, while Sir Jabonsky's bouncy, lurching calypso piece "Juck Juck Pt. 1" betrays a strong ska/reggae influence. I especially enjoyed the sultry, latinized funk of The Duncan Brothers, who appear here twice (on "Dreams" and as the backing band for Lord Cobra's amusingly over-the-top vocals on the Motown-tinged "Love Letters"). Those cats sure know how to kick a sensous jam (and the lengthy accompanying photo-filled booklet makes it clear that they know how to rock matching powder blue suits as well.).
Of course, there are a handful of tracks here that I didn't particularly like (as I have a strong personal aversion to anything that sounds like Santana or seems especially frenetic and busy), but Panama!2 is generally an extremely enjoyable and eclectic compilation of ideal summer music. Gyemant has undeniably created a vibrant and informative document (his track descriptions are especially colorful and charming) of a time when Panama was most definitely the place to be. (There has been an unsettling recent flurry of world music compilations that seem quite intent on pointedly illustrating that I was born into a particularly dull time and place. I do not like this trend.)
samples
- Papi Brandao y Su Conjunto Aires Tablenos – "La Murga De Panama"
- Sir Jablonsky – "Juck Juck Pt. 1"
- Lord Cobra y Los Hnos. Duncan – "Love Letters"
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This is fifth release in Honest Jon's uniformly rewarding plunge into the EMI Hayes Archive of vintage recordings. While the previous albums have all been exotic, haunting, or unique, The World Is Shaking is the first that can be considered sensuous and fun. Here the normally disparate worlds of musicology and awesome parties unexpectedly intersect.
Honest Jon’s Records
The World is Shaking documents a particularly fertile, unique, and influential period in The Congo's musical evolution that ultimately birthed Congolese rumba and Soukous (which completely dominated African music for nearly two decades). The music here was shaped by three massive factors: the growing excitement of the independence/anti-colonialism movement, the new nightlife that resulted from people flocking to the cities for well-paying factory jobs, and the recent influx of imported records of latin music, American jazz, and European torch singers. The Congolese were particularly enamored with Louis Armstrong and Italian heartthrob Tino Rossi.
Needless to say, many previously traditional Congolese musicians began appropriating these new cosmopolitan sounds by whatever means they had at their disposal. This resulted in some unexpected instrumentation: the brilliantly absurd "Tika Koseka" is centered around several buzzing kazoos, while "Bino Boton, Bosele" is built upon a thumb piano motif. Naturally, the distinctly non-African guitar is rampant throughout the album (and violins and banjos are not uncommon either), but the twenty-one tracks here are invariably anchored by infectious and sexy Latin/African percussion (regardless of instrumentation).
The highlights are many, but I was most struck by the mournful opening track (Laurent Lomande's "Maboka Marie"). Notably, many of the tracks included here feature rather downcast and lovelorn vocals, but the sadness is poignant rather than tiresome due to the relentless sultry heat of the underlying rhythm. Also, even the tracks that aren't conventionally great (such as perhaps Adikwa Depala's "Yoka Ngal") radiate such awkward wide-eyed enthusiasm that it is nearly impossible to avoid being charmed.
The World Is Shaking is definitely one of the best world music compilations that will come out this year. This is raw, inspired, and vital music (dangerous too: many of the lyrics deal with sex, death, drugs, pimps, and heartbreak). Also of note, this lovingly assembled collection is augmented by notes and rare photographs from Rumba on the River author Gary Stewart. Highly recommended.
samples:
- Laurent Lomande – "Maboka Marie"
- Vincent Kuli – "Yaka Ko Tala"
- Adikwa Depala – "Yoka Ngal"
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Pelican's newest release and their first for Southern Lord is a quick, three song 12" that swings gracefully through the tropes of heavy instrumental rock. Ephemeral is dusty and straightforward. It is free of noodling and epic run-on sentences and it hides a handful of riffs that give away the band's metal roots.
There is now an entire industry comprised of bands working metal's gloom and doom ambience without resorting to sketchy pentagrams and bloody axes on their album covers. For a long time, it was hard to find records this heavy without the trappings of metal's old scrawled-on-trapper-keeper aesthetic. There are plenty of bands still milking that too, but I'm glad that acts like Pelican can make heavy rock music without screeching vocals.
Ephemeral is perhaps little more than a prelude to a full length for Southern Lord, but it's a handy package of three great pieces that bring plenty of gutteral chug without the need for fancy pants orchestration or weepy synthesizer patches. What I love most about the record are those moments where the band slips into riff mode. The hard driving but steady rhythm that inspires simple head nodding through most of the songs gives way to full tilt devil horn pumping for mere seconds and it's in those moments that I'm glad that Pelican have not left the metal behind.
I grew up wanting to like metal because of its visceral attitude and combative disposition. I quickly found that most metal was too silly to take with a straight face, and that those bands who ground out slow, instrumental doom were perfect for shoe-gazing but not much else. Pelican sits happily inbetween—not quite beholden to the doom and drone, but not so enamored with acrobatic guitar solos as to seem trite and self-absorbed. Ephemeral features two new tracks and a cover of the Earth song "The Geometry of Murder" on which Earth songwriter Dylan Carlson sits in. I'm amped for the full length.
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This is an aptly titled and blessed-out slab of shimmering pastoral ambiance by this Tokyo-based composer. Saunter is inspired by the unfamiliarity and heightened awareness of moving to a new home (and the philosophical underpinnings of traditional monochromatic Chinese landscape paintings, of course).
Chihei has an anachronistic aversion to electronic instrumentation (although clearly not to heavy sound processing). Saunter is constructed largely from almost unrecognizable piano but there are occasional contributions from vibraphones and field recordings as well. The opening “Treads Echoing Far Away From Sea Coast” is built around what sounds like backwards, heavily reverbed piano and texturally calls to mind Harold Budd. However, Hatakeyama’s compositions are much more abstract than Budd’s: there is very little in the way of rhythm or structured chord progressions here. Each song on Saunter is essentially a melodically static, soft-focus cloud of shimmering drones and swells. They are surprisingly vibrant clouds though: clear notes continually burst forth from the quavering aural fog and demand attention like a splash of color across a black and white photograph. That said, “Treads” is a very representative microcosm, as the rest of the album falls very firmly in the same vein, Occasionally, however, other elements (such as the acoustic guitars in “A Stone Inside The Box” and the closer “Landscape On a Hill”) find their way into the mix. Generally, the album is a series of endlessly drifting, blurry, impressionist swaths of sound.
Hatakeyama has undeniably crafted an intriguing and enjoyable album and has done many unusual things with space, structure, and instrumentation. Saunter is too polite and tranquil for me, however, to take in large doses. I suspect that Hatakeyama will always be an artist that I respect, but not an artist that I actually listen to regularly (unless I somehow achieve a Zen-like calm and supernaturally heightened appreciation of nuance).
samples:
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After several years of relying on a computer as his primary compositional tool, Gregg Kowalsky took a page from the mischievous intellectuals of the Oulipo and embraced voluntary artistic constraint as a means of liberating himself from the oft-crippling burden of unlimited possibility. Tape Chants is the result.
This release, Kowalsky’s second for Kranky, is actually the third release in the Tape Chants series. However, the other two were released on smaller labels and are long out of print, so this will be most people’s first exposure to Gregg’s ingenious and inspired analog vision. The premise is quite simple: Tape Chants uses tape loops as the primary source of material. When performing live, Kowalsky sets up a number of cassette players around the room (all tuned to one another and playing separate loops), then manipulates their volume to create a shifting psychoacoustic installation that each audience member hears slightly differently.
The first real track on the album, “I-IV,” begins with a two wavering drones (one high and one low) that are gradually enhanced by other swelling tones, a distant melodic shimmer, and some sort of weird crackling or scraping. It hypnotically ebbs and flows in this vein for about 20 minutes, although some heartbeat-like percussion drifts in for while. It is extremely difficult to tell which instruments most of the sounds originate from, as all of the loops blend together into a formless, quavering soup. Each piece is constructed with tuned sine waves as the foundation and they are generally the most conspicuous element. Kowalsky also employs gongs, percussion, a shruti box, feedback, and some field recordings, but they are generally used both sparingly and subtly.
All of the pieces on Tape Chants are very similar in tone. Or rather, the absence of tone, as Kowalsky seems very intent on omitting any sharp edges or melodic movement. The most notable exception to this aesthetic is the extremely brief “V,” which takes a rather foreboding tone with a slow motion gong ominously keeping time over a dark, throbbing bass drone. “IX” departs from the floating, weirdly amniotic stasis as well, as its crackling static drone is colored by some murky minor key piano chords. Generally, however, the more successful tracks are the lengthier ones (regardless of their atmosphere): Kowalsky is quite skilled at what he does, so it is easy to become enveloped when he allows a piece to stretch out. The submerged-sounding sadness of “X-XI” stands out as particularly excellent though, partially because there is more textural variation than usual.
My opinion of this album is a bit complex. On one hand, Kowalsky has made a solid, creative, and immersive drone album. The subtle interplay between the shifting, quivering loops is often quite mesmerizing (particularly when listened to at a suitably high volume). However, drone music constructed from sine waves is inherently rather faceless and exclusively cerebral. I suspect both of these issues become moot, however, when Kowalsky performs Tape Chants live (I will find out next week). While a CD may not be the perfect medium for appreciating this experiment, it makes for an engrossing listen nonetheless.
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Brood is the second album born from a fruitful collaboration between Phil Western and Mark Spybey, who, until this project was hatched, hadn't worked together since their shared time in Download. Fans of that electronic supergroup will find much to enjoy with the music presented here, though it certainly isn't a rehash. Tightly sequenced psychedelia and ritualistic rhythms meet with brooding, subsurface vocals and a sound palette that ranges from far Eastern inflections to the claustrophobically industrial.
In some cases musical projects where the musicians exchange sounds through the mail or over the Internet are lacking in a feeling of immediacy; not so with Beehatch. The sense of organic development within these songs is quite palpable. These artists are so at home in the studio, their mere separation by an ocean becomes irrelevant. Connecting over the fiber optic, joined together in a union of the third mind, they forge seamless electronic soundscapes despite the physical distance separating them.
“Edison Medicine” opens the disc in a surrealistic bubble bath of inane mechanical rumbling, hiss and slurred voices that eventually give way to the bright melodic arpeggiations of “I Forgot to Mention,” a piece that ebbs, swirls, and flows like insect swarms watched from a distance. “Du Du Horn” is a short piece in which a voice says, “we dream together,” ushering us into a cyclonic fanfare of regurgitated horns, twittering drums, and partially digested voices. The overall mood of these songs is one of darkness: the kind conducive to a bad psychedelic trip. Snippets of ecstatic beats, showing hints of pop sensibility, emerge briefly here and there, only to disappear moments later, leaving an unsettled feeling of dislocation in their wake, an experience intensified when listening on headphones.
Joining forces, Mark Spybey and Phil Western have created a psychotronic world of alternately menacing and amusing surreality. This is partially due to the density of layers contained within each song, stacking sound on top of sound. A dozen or more listens on and I’m still noticing new things: subtly attenuated pieces of broken melody, the spacey oscillations of mutant synthesizers, havoc wreaked with warble and buzz, samples that might have otherwise decayed if they hadn’t been given a place to live. This is the albums strength.
samples:
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Jason Kahn
"Vanishing Point"
23five CD
The American sound-artist Jason Kahn is an exacting technician when it comes to the principles of noise. However, his application of noise in composition is not that of Merzbow or Masonna, with teeth-gnashing explosions of distortion, feedback, and volume; rather, Kahn’s psychoacoustic techniques employ the specific frequencies of white, pink, brown, and blue noise in works that reflect the ideals of minimalism. These are sounds that regularly occur through the constant vibration of machinery; and Kahn is more than happy to appropriate such events through field recording. He also generates complementary noises through systems that involve the rattling architecture of a drum kit or through his trusted analog synthesizer.
Vanishing Point is a 47 minute composition, which Kahn has dedicated to his daughter who died shortly before Kahn began working on this piece in 2007. For all of the phenomenological studies and stoic mesmerism attributed to much of his catalogue, Vanishing Point is a subtle and hypnotic elegy for rattling metals, timbral vibration, gossamer static, hissing field recordings, and those aforementioned colored noises. Soon into the piece, Kahn introduces a flickered ghost of melody whose luminous tones manifest ever so slightly against his contrails of noise. The upper register hiss and statics of these layered noises slowly drop in pitch and frequency over the duration of the piece, revealing subharmonic rumblings and an oceanic current that tugs at the agitated textures of Kahn’s surface noises. This glacial, minimalist shift renders Vanishing Point elegant and meditative.
In Kahn’s own words, “At first I thought of the title in reference to Louise’s passing, that point where she vanished from our lives, but on further reflection I came to see the compostion as dealing with other vanishing points. I address the idea of one’s sense of time vanishing, being immersed in sound and entering a place of timelessness. There is also the idea of boundaries between electronic and acoustic sound vanishing, as in this piece I draw on both sources. And finally, in the sense of aural perspective extending to the point where we imagine it ending, as the compostion stretches on towards its vista, slowly vanishing.”
http://jasonkahn.net
http://23five.org
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On her second album on the Hymen label, Tonikom’s Rachel Maloney continues to refine her blend of danceable electronic abstraction with elements of ambient and even slightly poppy approaches that can work just as well for the dance floor as for close attentive listening.
The track that opens the album, the sprawling "Temporarius Delerium" is some 11 plus minutes of slow development: a dramatic opening of processed loops, deep bass pulses and angelic layered voices starkly contrast the second half of sharp breakbeats and darker synth pulses that come later, mixing the beautiful with the raw. The beat leans into that distorted overdriven sound that is consistent with other Hymen/Ant-Zen artists, but never goes too far, instead tastefully mixing the dissonant textures with more conventional rhythms.
The female choir sounds from this long opening reappear on "Of Those Great Walls," where they are looped in a spacious mix with warm synths and clicking rhythms. "Fluorescence" has a similar vast mix, though utilizing more raw mechanical beats with the slow and warm synth tracks. Both "Peripheral Movement" and "Watching From Here" lean more into the techno world, with the former opening with an 808 rhythm right out of "Planet Rock" and backwards keyboard tones while the latter focuses on reverb drenched piano pieces. Both have a steady and pounding beat to them, yet there is a wide variety of sounds between the rhythms that are just as compelling.
A few of the tracks, at least to these ears, drift into instrumental techno pop with the occasional industrial edge to keep things interesting. "In The Far" opens with twinkling ringtone like melodies before segueing into a solid 4/4 kick rhythm and slower electro bass sequences. The structure of the track is reminiscent of some very well done techno pop tracks that are as catchy as they are technically impressive. The lush synths and mechanical polyrhythms of "The Source (Album Edit)" and "Breaking Down", when mixed with the concrete rhythms and dialog samples, come across as being not far removed from 1990s industrial with a hint of pop sensibilities. Since the Tonikom Myspace lists Front Line Assembly as an influence, I’m going to assume that it is no accident that I was reminded of some of that band’s late '90s output.
Conceptually the disc closes somewhat like it started: "Look But Never Touch" is the only beat-less track here, mixing dark synths with an almost music box type melody, contrasting the natural and beautiful again with the synthetic and dark. While it could definitely be an album to shake your ass to, it thankfully lacks the dull repetition and simplicity of so many techno records, yet it never lurches into the "lets see how random we can make our beats" territory of many so-called IDM bands. It straddles that narrow line, and it does so quite well.
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Back from a long hiatus after a single critically acclaimed release (Trace Elements, on Colin Newman’s Swim~ label), Paul Thomsen Kirk reappears from his Hiroshima based enclave with a new, lavishly packaged album that blends electronic atmospheres, old school industrial textures, dubby bass, and breakbeats with compelling virtuosity.
My first sampling of this disc reminded me of the mid 1990s ambient/isolationist dub scene that produced a number of short lived but excellent projects that peaked too early: Techno Animal’s Re-Entry and Scorn’s Evanescence rank within my all time favorite albums, yet soon after their releases the former began to lean too heavily on various distortion plugins and the latter became content to simply layer a hip-hop beat over basic abstract sounds. My comparison isn’t to say Unconfirmed Reports sounds dated, because it doesn’t, instead it takes the best elements of that period and sustains them with enough modern technique and technology to sound fresh. The mostly dense, chaotic mixes somewhat parallel the likes of Meat Beat Manifesto or the Bomb Squad’s production work with Public Enemy, but replacing the funk elements in both with dark industrial bleakness.
Album opener "Friend for Hire" uses the dub scene’s love of deep reverbed bass to keep the dark atmospherics going, but layers a variety of synth tracks on top and a rhythm right off of the best electro records keep the song flowing, and though it does lock into a minimalist repetition, there is enough change and variation to keep it from growing stagnant. The following "Pragmatism" is more dynamic, but still retains a definite structure, letting fragments of electric guitar and voice samples into the otherwise synthetic sounds. To me it sounds like it could have been a stand-out track on either of the landmark Macro Dub Infection compilations that surveyed dub influenced electronica of the day.
While the elements are notable throughout, the traditionalist industrial vibe comes to the surface on "Cypher" and "The Sand Collector." The former takes synths that sound like feedback (or feedback that sounds like synths) into raw clipping territory, and replaces any drums with a precise bass sequence and heavily processed voices. Structurally and atmospherically it feels a lot like early Cabaret Voltaire (think Mix Up or before). "The Sand Collector" cranks up the distortion on the synths and rhythms to push it precariously close to harsh noise territory, but exercises enough restraint to remain in control. While "Cypher" was Cabaret Voltaire, this could be a 21st century take on SPK’s Information Overload Unit or Leichenschrei due to the raw, yet rhythmic elements. The feedback loop that is prevalent throughout the track actually sounds a whole lot like it could be a sample from "Ground Zero: Infinity Dose," but that could be just coincidence.
Other tracks aren’t as bleak, with "SSRI" throwing jazzy breakbeats and a hip-hop bass line together with slightly surf guitar. There is still the industrial/mechanical din in the distance, but is more upbeat and lighter in comparison to some of the aforementioned tracks. "Portable Pariah" has a more spacious mix and even with the noisy loops and textures, feels more airy and open, allowing greater access to the synths and the catchy beats. The closing "A Prior Disengagement" acts as an amalgamation of the entire disc, showcasing blown speaker hip-hop beats with almost acid synth sequences and shrieking noises and fragments of voice communication, combining the more musical elements of the album with the more harsh ones.
Unconfirmed Reports successfully extracts some of the best elements of 1990s electronic music and puts them in a modern, though dark, context. The disc comes lavishly packaged in an oversized envelope with large inserts, hand-cut newspaper clippings, and a bonus DVD-R of short films to three of the tracks, all of which combine the music with treated video of Japan that emphasizes the sense of alienation and disconnect that the music demonstrates.
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