27 January 2013

Administrator

Albums and Singles

The Crying Princess compiles rare Burmese 78rpm records gathered by Robert Millis and Sublime Frequencies co-founder Alan Bishop during various trips to Burma (Myanmar) and continues the tradition of amazing music from this Southeast Asian nation released by SF (Princess Nicotine, Guitars From the Golden Triangle, Music of Nat Pwe). Spanning the years 1909 to 1960 these unique and ridiculously rare records feature early sides by Po Sein (one of the giants of early Burmese music and theater), vocal and harp music from 1929, "modern songs with electric guitar," and unique Burmese pop songs with piano, all from 78rpm sources. This limited edition LP comes enclosed in a beautiful tip-on jacket with two-sided insert featuring liner notes by compiler Robert Millis.

More information here.

21 January 2013

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Markus Mehr is often compared to and grouped in with ambient composers like Tim Hecker and Fennesz for his use of timbre, bass, and unusual sound sources. But his collected works—In, On, Lava, Hubble, and now, Off—display an artistry and forethought that are more unique than he gets credit for. He recognizes the power and emotion that can be conjured from a focused process and an immaculately dense sound. But he came to that conclusion independently, not as an imitator.

Hidden Shoal

Off builds in intensity slowly over the course of its 42 minutes. Mostly, this consists of a steady drone of white noise and menacing bass rumbles. Above that, there are piano chords, hissing synths and non-sequitur electronic noise scattered around. I am always drawn to the contrasts of light and dark that seem inherent; the frigid atmospheres and distant whirrs, where subtle textures leave me unsettled and the pleasant moments stay grounded by their dissonant counterparts.

At the halfway mark, Mehr abandons a cacophony of wind and buzzing that has built up, leaving the piano and whirling drones alone for a few brief seconds. It feels like emerging from a tunnel only to find that I am driving into the path of a tornado. As it builds up into a storm of guitar feedback and reverb, I have forgotten about where the piece has begun, entranced instead by a tonal shift into some kind of hellish union of choir voices and endless noise. This slips in and out of focus as Off continues to evolve, often resolving nicely but easily tempted to return to a strange abyss.

Markus Mehr has crafted a sharply clever piece of music. It a evokes a presence that is rarely found; a balance between the ugly and the pretty where both can exist at once. I continue to be impressed by what Mehr is capable of.

sample

20 January 2013

Duncan Edwards

Albums and Singles

These seven lengthy grooves are sure to please disco fans and their refreshing quality can be appreciated by those others who, like me, tend to view the genre with a mixture of amusement and terror. Sadly, behind the ecstatic sounds of 24 Hours in a Disco is the tale of a talented artist who was cursed by addiction and doomed by fame.

Soundway

Kiki Gyan was a high school dropout who became a millionaire before he was eighteen. Acclaimed for his solo and session work, he toured with Osibisa, performed for the Queen of England, and island-hopped on "champagne-soaked luxury liners." Gyan’s wealth frittered away and his years of drug abuse even led to psychiatric care. He was discovered dead, after 30 minutes on a toilet, an hour shy of his 47th birthday.

On record, though, the beat will always go on. As with Kraftwerk and others, incremental changes can seem huge in the course of a long song. Gyan's tunes have unrelenting pace and pure narrow vision which kept me feeling sharp on a long late-night drive recently, although several times my speed crept up rather high! Sound and rhythm indeed have the power to hypnotize: blinding us to the dangers of speed traps and much worse!

20 January 2013

Administrator

Albums and Singles

This recently reissued epic from 1996 was one of Stars of the Lid's first major statements, but it is not without its flaws, as Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride were still at a stage in which their ambient influences were readily apparent.  Despite the occasional lack of distinctiveness, this remains a solid effort and benefits from a darkness and tension that is often absent from their more recent works.  More importantly, The Ballasted Orchestra contains the two-part "Music for Twin Peaks, Episode #30," which is a serious contender for the most perfect 20-minutes of music that Stars of the Lid ever recorded.

Kranky

This double-album was Stars of Lid's first recording for Kranky, as the first two were originally on Sedimental.  Much like its predecessor, Gravitational Pull vs. The Desire for Aquatic Life, its a bit of a transitional effort: Wiltzie and McBride continued to distance themselves from the noisier and sample-centric aspects of their early work, but the warmer, more pristine and orchestral sound that they ultimately became known for had yet to quite take shape.  As a result, SOTL take some curious stylistic turns with The Ballasted Orchestra .  In particular, the cold and cavernous opening, "Central Texas," shares quite a bit more common ground with Lustmord or Steve Roach's The Magnificent Void than with late-period SOTL.Once the duo segues into the lengthier "Sun Drugs," the sound becomes more normalized, as they form a blurred and queasy haze through the work of some recognizable guitars.  In fact, "Sun Drugs" turned out to be a very clear precursor of what was ultimately to come from the duo, as it displays almost superhuman restraint, floating and undulating in near-stasis until it swells to a warmly humming and languorous crescendo of sorts.

The very brief "Down II," on the other hand, fleetingly returns to the days of Music for Nitrous Oxide, combining simple backwards guitar with hiss-heavy samples and chattering voices.  With the following "Taphead," however, the album begins to cohere into something special, as the duo combine hallucinatory, vaguely dissonant swells of guitar with menacing dark ambient rumble and hiss to forge a rather nightmarish foray into deep space.  It is certainly a likable piece, but the three songs that follow it begin to approach perfection, beginning with "Fucked Up (3:57AM)." Curiously, the piece seems almost like a warmer, less space-y reprise of "Taphead," but with all of the non-distinctively Star of the Lid elements removed to leave only gently swaying, glacially evolving audio heaven.

The first part of "Music for Twin Peaks Episode #30" (no such episode exists, incidentally) is even better still and is my own personal favorite Stars of the Lid piece of all-time.  Much like "Fucked Up," it is built upon endlessly repeating guitar swells, but all traces of dissonance are gone: it is just 8 perfect minutes of warm, lush chords billowing up from a bed of buzzing drone.  The second part is radically different, but no less stunning and makes the album's strongest case for Wiltzie and McBride being significantly more than just two guys that make great ambient/minimal neo-classical music.  Notably, there is hardly any conventional music to be found at all in it, as it is almost entirely based upon hiss and quiet guitar noise.  The magic lies in the fact that that hiss and guitar noise manages to maintain a deliciously simmering tension for over 13-minutes, a feat that it accomplishes so beautifully that even a single picked note seems powerful and meaningful in its midst.

The Ballasted Orchestra winds down with its longest piece, the 18-minute "The Artificial Pine Arch Song," but the album is essentially over for me after the second half of "Music for Twin Peaks."  "Pine Arch" serves an important purpose sequence-wise though: even though it is too edgeless and pastoral to interest me much, it provides a necessary come-down after the tension of the previous piece.  The album would feel weirdly truncated and unresolved if it did not exist, but it is not anything particularly special when decontextualized from its role as the album's dénouement.

Notably, the current reissue as a double LP differs slightly from both the original double-LP and the CD versions of the album.  For one, it restores the 6-minute "24 Inch Cymbal" that is absent from the CD/digital version.Also, the new reissue omits the brief untitled piece that originally concluded the first vinyl version.  I suspect that all of that is only of interest to completists though, as the three-song stretch of "Fucked Up" and "Twin Peaks" essentially eclipses the entire rest of the album.  The Ballasted Orchestra is certainly a fine effort and ranks among Stars' better works, but only "Music for Twin Peaks" is truly vital, absolutely-do-not-miss listening.

• Fucked Up (3:57AM)
• Music For Twin Peaks Episode #30, Part 1
• Music For Twin Peaks Episode #30, Part 2

 

 

20 January 2013

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Sublime Frequencies' first new compilation after a long dormant spell is quite an ambitious one, as compiler Carl Hamm spent almost 8 years researching this project.  That effort shows, as his liner notes could probably be stretched into a book with minimal effort.  As for the music: anyone expecting the titular "psychedelic rock" or even anything particularly outré is likely to be disappointed by 85% of the material, but the Malaysian interpretation of '60s Western rock and pop is otherwise quite enjoyable and catchy (though not as endearingly wonky as some of the Thai pop that SF has previously unearthed).

Sublime Frequencies

As near as I can tell, this is the first ever major Western compilation of Malaysian rock, but Malaysia's story is quite similar to that of Thailand: Cliff Richard and the Shadows played a gig in Singapore and an entire generation immediately bought electric guitars and started playing every party and talent show they could possibly find.  Of course, The Beatles also managed to insinuate their way into the national consciousness,  as the short-lived Pop Yeh Yeh genre retroactively got its name from the chorus of "She Loves You."  The phenomenon only lasted about five years, beginning when Malaysian musicians started to actually write songs in Malay rather than English and began dissipating around 1970 due to the influences of Bollywood, Indonesian music, and (later) disco.  Pop Yeh Yeh was huge while it lasted though, as its major figures were fixtures in the nation's gossip and culture magazines, a fact that is extremely surreal given that most of them were still maintaining day jobs like normal, non-rocking people.

Most of the songs sound a lot like a surf-damaged early Beatles with female vocals: short, formulaic pop structures, strong melodies, and quite a bit of cool twanging guitar riffage.  Most of the exceptions originate later in the '60s, as quite a few groups added an organ.  While that may seem synonymous with '60s psychedelia, it is mostly just employed to play chord progressions or simple melodic lines (I guess no one could find Iron Butterfly records in Singapore, which is probably for the best: there is absolutely no excess or self-indulgence to be found on this collection at least). The few real nods to psychedelia come from A. Halim, Salim I, Nur Azila, and M. Said, all of whom seem to have invested in fuzz and wah-wah pedals.  Of those artists, A. Halim & De'Fictions probably boast the most searing guitar solos, but it is M. Said & Le Ramaja who seem most categorically intent on kicking out the jams.

Most of the musical highlights, however, tend to be fairly straightforward pop with strong melodies and clean, surf-y lead guitar, like Roziah Lateef & The Jayhawkers' "Aku Kecewa."  There are two particularly strong aberrations though: Siti Zaiton & The Twilites' "Rindu" features some fairly wild sax playing, while Zaliha Hamid and Orkes Zindegi's "Bertemasha (Party Time!)" completely steals the show with its exuberantly yodeled chorus (must have been quite a party).  In general, however, there is not anything especially brilliant or revelatory here, just a solid batch of likable pop songs.

Hamm helpfully provides translations of the lyrics, which greatly enhanced my enjoyment of some songs. For example, M. Said's raucous barn-burner is about a "joyful party" and features lines like "It's a joyful party, a celebration!  Greeted gloriously." and "Wow!  Dance!"  I was even more impressed by Nur Azila's foray into psychedelia, as it contains the profoundly un-psychedelic couplet "Take a look at your prospective son-in-law, I'm in love with a responsible man."  Carl's liner notes, while quite scholarly, also contain some fascinating trivia.J. Sham of J. Sham and the Wanderers, for example, is a cat-breeding enthusiast and was once president of the Malaysian Cat Club!I was also amused to learn that Sham's contribution to the collection is written as a letter rather than a song, as he was learning about Surrealism in art class at the time.

Along with simply being the only real Malay rock compilation available outside of Malaysia, the greatest achievement of Pop Yeh Yeh is definitely Hamm's exhaustive, picture-heavy liner notes.  While they can be somewhat dry or seemingly repetitive at times (many of the artists have very similar stories), they are as definitive and well-researched as anything put out by Soundways, Folkways, or Dust-to-Digital and provide as effective a crash-course in Malaysian rock and youth culture as could possibly be expected (especially coming from a non-Malaysian).

• Roziah Lateef and The Jayhawkers, "Aku Kechewa"
• Siti Zaiton and The Twilites, "Rindu"
• Zaleha Hamid and Orkes Zindegi, "Bertemasha"

 

15 January 2013

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Mark Templeton - Jealous Heart

Mark Templeton presents Jealous Heart, an album which reimagines the story of his sound in an approach that is both staid and deeply emotional, reorienting what is offered and what is held back through a myriad of smeared stringed instruments,fragmented horn phrases, tape loops, and foundsound-driven explorations.

Templeton’s music is always difficult to truly classify, which is part of its charm. It is way too dense and detailed to qualify as ambient in a traditional sense – instead developing itself into a highly organized, spacious clutter. It is electro-acoustic music that hearkens to tape machines and misused instruments of yesteryear, viewed whole-heartedly through the prism of ultramodernity, of an awareness of what has transpired in-between.

Filled with subtly processed horns that recall a jazz club under the sea, a speakeasy of a future past blanketed in a detailed haze that allows one to find an individual path through it – a precise murkiness, where objects coalesce in the background while the focus stays predominantly on the
instrumental underpinnings of each track. At times the album holds a sense of longing, of days past or imagined to be, but cloaked in hopefulness, of a consistent sense of working through an idea, an experience, a sound source – wringing something constructive out of it and re-forming it into something better.

Warm and textured is a given with Templeton’s work. This album is similarly so, but with a layer of knowingness, an awareness that warmth is not enough. There is a pervasive sense of age, a feeling of it being an older
object than it actually is, almost as if it was found on a forgotten shelf, yet
had sensibilities that won’t exist until tomorrow. The landscape becomes one where the album manages to be constantly moving while presenting the listener with a sense of stillness, a balancing act that is incredibly difficult to get right.

release date: March 18, 2013
label: Under The Spire Recordings
catalog #: Spire 051
format: LP / digital
physical + digital distribution: Morr Music/ANOST (EU) / Experimedia (USA)

Available to pre-order: www.underthespire.co.uk

14 January 2013

Administrator

Albums and Singles

This sound art project of John Kolodij has only a few works out to date, but the proficiency heard on Sanguine Futures indicate that of a much more prolific artist. Working with John Twells (Xela, Type Records) and a guest appearance by trumpeter Greg Kelley, this work is as atmospheric and engaging as it is unsettling.

Bathetic

The distinction between field recordings and processed instrumentation is never clear, as both come together to form something greater."The Northern Sky, Ablaze," for instance, meshes buzzing field recordings with a raw noise roar, with far off clatters conjuring images of some dangerous monstrosity lurking off in the distance. However, as it transitions into "River Runs Like Jewels," what sounds like strings and guitar lead to a melodic, at times delicate passage of music, with the environs left open and spacious, allowing the tones to breathe rather than be restrained by some unidentifiable darkness.

This same pairing comes across on the other side of the LP, where the dark hum and textural crackles of "Sleep Like the Dead" lurch menacingly.Eventually this becomes a scraping, grinding mess punctuated by metronome-like thud that simultaneously makes the piece more noisy and more musically inclined. A buried kernel of processed guitar amid a frigid, still atmosphere ushers in the transition to "La Chasse-Galerie." This eventually flows into a battle between dissonant noise and an understated melody.Eventually the noise wins out, encompassing everything before retreating, leaving a delicately beautiful passage to end the piece. "Methodist Bells," the album closer, feels like cold night fall: ambience and field recorded crickets give way to calming piano, bringing the chaos to order.

John Kolodij introduces a variety of moods and atmospheres to Sanguine Futures, at times pensive and reflective, at others dark and malignant.Never does it feel disjointed or schizophrenic. The transition from one mood to the next may, at times, be abrupt, but feels natural and appropriate, making for a strong, if sometimes exhausting work.Sanguine Futures transcends many different moods and styles, but Kolodij knows exactly where he is going the whole time.

samples:

• The Northern Sky, Ablaze
• La Chasse-Galerie
• Methodist Bells

 

14 January 2013

Administrator

Albums and Singles

This double album by the prolific Reto Mäder (Ural Umbo, Sum of R) has a surprisingly personal feel to it, given its dark and murky pedigree. Even during the moments where he works heavily with dissonance and abstract, disembodied noise, it is all tied together with a natural beauty that belies its seemingly dark nature.

Utech

Although spread over two discs, sonically there does not seem to be any significant divide between the material on each, Two Angles sounds more like two distinct parts of a singular whole.Processed and natural sounds exist together, like on "Betwixt," where a frozen guitar squall and acoustic strings are contrasted with a soaring white noise roar.

One of the significant strengths of this album is how well Mäder works in building and structuring his compositions:brittle digital noise and repetitive piano patterns open "Orka's Dream" and evolve from a gentle mid-section, offset by menacing, deep thuds in the distance.Tension builds with the jarring, dissonant strings but everything eventually relents, ending the track on a calming note. "Because of the Slow Shutter Speed" pairs some up front dissonant electronic buzzing with tubular bells, balancing the natural sounds with the dark, unidentifiable ones, all of which is eventually destroyed by an electric guitar outburst.

"Show Me the Shadow of the Sun" makes for one of the exceptions to this careful sense of structure, however.Ringing bells, harmonium like expanses and weird rhythmic outbursts result in a piece that comes across as less song-like and more collage-based, and while it works for what it is, it does not have the same impact as the more deliberate, composed moments.

The best moments are the warmest and the most beautiful. Tense repetitive guitar and piano stabs of "May 30, 2012" transitions well into the gentle synth layers of "Bees and Ghosts." Here, gentle synth layers slither about before reaching a bombastic musical climax. Mäder leads off "Samsa" with overdriven guitar and a lo-fi crust covering everything, but soon reforms the song as a wonderful piece of abstract chamber music.It has a personal, intimate feeling, even though the source of the sounds is extremely hard to pin down.

Mäder's work usually focuses on more sinister sounds and moods, but here it is not as prominent.Instead, he works more with rich, beautiful melodies and gentle tones instead of just raw noises and ugly sounds.The result is a complex, diverse work that stands out as distinctly singular even amongst his multitude of diverse side projects.

• Betwixt
• Bees and Ghosts
• Samsa

 

13 January 2013

Administrator

Albums and Singles

To be frank, I am somewhat astonished that I like this album so much, as the combination of muted house beats and synth-based ambient music seemed like it could not be anything but lethally boring at this point, as the ship has definitely sailed on that particular niche.  However, it is impossible to overstate the importance of skilled execution.  In the wrong hands, great ideas are doomed, while the right artist can turn something seemingly dubious into something wonderful.  In this case, Tim Gray, recording as Ethernet, is the right artist.  It is hard to isolate exactly where all of his talents lie, but the most obvious one is that Tim is a truly excellent producer.

Kranky

This second Ethernet album for Kranky is a curious continuation of an ongoing quest to détourné dance music rhythms into hypnotic, inward-reaching ambiance.  There are many, many ways for such an experiment to go badly awry, but Tim Gray deftly sidesteps nearly all potential perils to find a near-perfect balance between minimal techno and lush, softly hissing dreamscapes.

Gray's production genius is evident from the first notes of "Monarch," as the warm synth tones gently blur together and undulate like a thick mist.  The actual music seems deceptively simple, as the song is essentially built upon a few swelling chords, a slowly throbbing bass, and a fragmented, delay-heavy melody, but Tim transforms those components into something that feels alive, oceanic, and utterly absorbing.  This is the sort of song that warrants descriptors like "amniotic" and "womblike" and the remaining five pieces do not stray far from that template at all.

Ethernet's other area of expertise is a bit more vague, but it definitely originates from his in-depth studies of meditation, trances, and brainwaves: this is actually quite a hypnotic album.  Most of that is probably due to the slow-motion pulse of the kick drum, but it goes much deeper than that, as the omnipresent hiss and swelling, swaying chords seem to effectively mimic relaxed inhalation and exhalation. Aside from the production, that feat of illusion might be this album's greatest strength, as everything is so fluid and organic-sounding that it is very easy to forget that this is a laboriously constructed, multi-layered work that was painstakingly perfected a man in a room somewhere.  Instead, it sounds  like something spontaneous that just flowed out of my speakers.

I am a bit conflicted about most apparent flaws of Opus 2, as they could just as easily be interpreted as challenges that Gray managed to overcome.  Naturally, I was not thrilled to hear a four-on-the-floor thump in every single song and the rare appearance of cymbals was a bit distracting, but that omnipresent pulse seemed absolutely necessary in maintaining the album's dreamlike reverie and continuity.  I will say that I found the beat most effective when it was stealthily buried, as it is in "Cubed Suns,"but is hard to imagine the album working as effectively without that constant throb.  Also, some of the individual songs can drag a bit (particularly the lengthy "Pleroma") or get too pastoral in places, but they generally work well within the context of the entire album and there is enough unpredictability and dissonance to mostly keep things fairly compelling.  I suspect this album could have been massive if it had been released in the late '90s, but it is still a surprisingly enjoyable anomaly in 2012 that fits quite comfortably within the Kranky aesthetic (Loscil being the closest kindred spirit).

• Monarch
• Cubed Suns
• Dog Star

 

13 January 2013

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Koen Holtkamp and Brandon Anderegg return with yet another meticulously constructed suite of warm, partially acoustic soundcapes. Not much that will surprise longtime fans (though a pair of live pieces are atypically harsh), but a few of these pieces are quite beautiful. This, of course, is exactly what I would expect from a new Mountains album.

Thrill Jockey

"Sand" begins Centralia on an absolutely perfect note, as a lazily repeating chiming note is gradually joined by low tones and warm waves of oscillating synthesizers.  Sadly, the spell does not last forever and it loses me a bit by the middle, as it eventually morphs into a burbling neo-kosmische analog synth workout.  That is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is not nearly as beautiful as the song's opening (or its droning, cello-centric ending).  Also, the recent synth revival avalanche has made it nearly impossible for me to enjoy anything that sounds '70s and space-y.  Thankfully straight-up synth worship is not generally what Mountains are about: Holtkamp and Anderegg are at their best when they balance their electronics with organic instrumentation like acoustic guitars, strings, and piano.  When they stick to that, the results are often quite impressive, as they are on the album highlight "Identical Ship," which elegantly marries rolling acoustic arpeggios, twinkling piano, and oscillating, hissing synthesizers.

In general, it tends to be the more guitar-heavy pieces that stand out, such as the darkly rustic "Tilt" or the gently shimmering "Living Lens."  However, there are a couple of anomalous live pieces featuring additional musicians that also make an impression of sorts.  The shorter of the two, "Liana," is something of a standard issue burbling and twinkling kosmische homage that ends with some unexpectedly jarring distortion-heavy guitar.  The considerably longer "Propeller" offers a similarly heavy climax after much synth noodling, but its distorted crescendo feels much more cathartic and well-earned.

Unfortunately, while I love some individual pieces, Centralia can be quite frustrating as an album.  With few exceptions, nearly every song boasts at least one motif that I wholeheartedly enjoy.  The tragedy is that that motif is always fleeting and that Mountains have an exasperating compulsion to steer every song into bubbly, candy-colored synth-based artificiality.This drives me insane, as Koen and Brandon can be so great when get the contrast between spaciness and earthiness just right.  They can even be great when their synths are employed to evoke an actual human mood, but too often the mood they seem to be aiming for is "very synthy" or "cloyingly cheery." I suspect people with less deeply ingrained hostility towards retro analog psychedelia may find a lot more to love about this album than I did, but "Sand" and "Identical Ship" are well-worth hearing in any case.

• Sand
• Living Lens
• Propeller