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12 July 2009

Albums and Singles

The Sinking of the Titanic is a piece of music that is a lot more than notes arranged in a certain order. It is the perfect marriage of conceptual art, music and raw emotion. In this reissue of a 1990 performance (originally on Les Disques du Crépuscule), the conceptual side of the piece come to the fore as Gavin Bryars and his ensemble perform in a water tower and push the piece for the first time well beyond the constraints of previous performances.

05 July 2009

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Albums and Singles

A reissue of a legendary private press Brazilian psych record, this disc represents a welcome document of this too rarely heard classic. With a mellow fusing of psych, folk and plain great songwriting, the album provides a number of instantly memorable sides with subtle and pleasing idiosyncrasies keeping them afloat.

Shadoks

While the album will certainly not be a revelation to those already attuned to the likes of Os Mutantes, Gilberto Gil or Lula Cortes, it is a valuable document of the era's ripe musical scene. The opening title track's simple melody and stripped back production blend Byrds-like fluidity with a distinctly Brazilian sound. The song seems well aware of its strengths and, conversely, its limitations, making for a wholly mature sound whose restraint is as notable as its flavor.

At just under a half hour in length, the album has little time to waste, so each of the eight songs stick closely to the qualities of the opener, representing concise, almost sketch-like frameworks whose material alludes to an even grander potential. Yet the bedroom intimacy of songs like "Quem Me Viu Por Ai?" have a charm all its own, calm, relaxed, and distinctly summery.

Elsewhere the group does display some edge, albeit in a highly sun-splotched manner. The wah'd guitar line of "Meu Sol" hints at the underlying culture from which this album was born, but again it keeps its cards close to its chest. "Quero Voce, Voce" sprawls out a bit, drawing the pop elements out and combing them into a subtly psychedelic, tempo-shifting feel-good romp.

The understated mastery of form is again apparent on "Medu," eschewing the tpyically busy ornamentation of the time for sparsely accompanied, yet equally colorful and playful, melodic lines whose emotional depth is sincere without being cheesy, exciting without being intimidating. The snake charm line backing "Arcozelo" provides grim, prog-rock shadows to the otherwise buoyant backing band.

Considering the widespread love of Brazilian music from this era, it is little surprise that an album originally limited to 500 copies would fly under the radar. And while many releases are far more psychedelic or adventurous or overtly exciting, few are as consistent in material and realization. The closing "Valsa Para Fabrici," with its opening mournful guitar line, flute whisps and stuttering bird-like synthesizer, is as restrained as anything Mutantes ever released, but in this context the result is as surprising as much of that group's output, moving into gliding, surf's up guitar before simmering along into near circus theme fare. Again, the excitement here is in its material, not necessarilly its construction, and with material this good how can you blame them?

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05 July 2009

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Since establishing their own small-run label to release their work, the duo behind Sutcliffe Jugend and Bodychoke have become extremely prolific, releasing multiple projects this year alone. While to some this could seem excessive and overindulgent, each release from Kevin Tomkins and Paul Taylor (as well as joint releases) have taken entirely different directions. These two releases are both vastly different: Loss is mostly just vocals and guitar (recorded over the span of two days), while Vocal Sound Collage is exactly what the title indicates.

Between Silences

Loss opens with "Dignity for a Dying Man," a 15-minute piece of noisy chaos over gliding violin loops and low register murky guitar. The combination of the noisier guitar and scatter-shot sound collage with Tomkins’ snarling, disgusted vocals give the track a rambling, manic feel, though the looped violin keeps it somewhat reigned in. The violin also appears on "I Cannot Loose the Thing I Never Had" and also provides a more gentle counter-balance to the rawer noise collage elements, but its calmer opening, paired with gentle guitar, starkly contrasts the industrial collage that ends the song.

The backward loops and wheezing sounds of "See Her Disappear" make it perhaps the most dissonant piece here. Never really reaching into the land of noise, it instead cradles a creepy sense of isolation, from the random looped sounds and nasal vocals that appear feel like the sonic equivalent of a madman’s ranting. "Fucking Loss" and "Double Dare" go the other direction, being equally traditional guitar playing and fuzzed out chaos, the latter’s soft vocals and random violent guitar outbursts give a good sense of the alternating depression and rage that comes with any form of loss.

Kevin Tomkins’ vocals, especially in the late 1990s incarnation of Sutcliffe Jugend, have always worked best while in a rage: the SJ material managed to be disturbing and sound truly deranged even when the lyrics occasionally delved into near self-parody territory, and his screaming in Bodychoke complimented his more quiet passages well. Here it is a bit more of a mixed bag, considering most of the pieces are built upon dramatic, disgusted snarling, which is sometimes TOO over the top. Occasionally he channels a bit of Nick Cave with his angst, but never quite reaching the same levels of technicality, instead moments feel more like the angry ramblings of a shut-in. Which, given the concept and motivation behind the album, works well in that capacity.

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The other album is split down the middle into two distinct parts. The first four pieces date from 2003 and 2004 of collaged vocal noises. The first of the four layers cut up fragments of voice that sound like they’re speaking an alien language over drawn out and pitch shifted ambient passages of voice. The second segment mixes frog-like guttural groans and falsetto like gibberish singing, not far removed from some of Mike Patton’s work or Yamatsuka Eye’s vocal spasms with Naked City. There is a more musical quality here, with occasional bits of jazzy scat singing and lighter moments that resemble an army of gnomes running around a field.

The third segment’s deep grows and breathing are pegged out volume wise to the point of overdriven distortion and the rhythmic elements and processing makes it feel like a capella power electronics, only eventually lightened at the end by layered chanting and more vast open soundscapes. The tracks that follow, "Attic Songs," all were recorded in one day in November 2008, take on a different quality that feel less like sound collage, and more like traditional music with voice as all instruments.

"Gentle Teather" takes buzzing loops of voice fragments and places actual soft vocals on top, the actual words counterbalancing the random phonemes and syllables nicely. "Shock and Tease" musically takes a rhythm made simply from repeating the track title over and over, but has a lighter, open quality to it. "River Fog" makes Tomkins’ voice sound like electronic percussion and droning synths that are rhythmically sequenced, with vocals on top giving it a much more "song" like quality that the first half of the disc doesn’t show.

The closing "The Third State" is the only track that incorporates other elements: Tomkins adds clarinet while his long time musical partner Paul Taylor works a vocoder and the result is a piece of marching like rhythms and clarinet squeaks that give a lighter, almost jaunty feel while the others had a more pronounced element of darkness to them.

While the Between Silences label has been releasing a lot of material from these two, it doesn’t feel excessive or overly indulgent. Each work has been distinct and extremely different from one release to the next so any attempt to combine albums would easily result in a great deal of disparate and unrelated sounds alongside each other. While I would assume many people are frustrated that these aren’t all manic, angry rants against women and prostitutes over hellish feedback, I find this greater openness and experimentation far more engaging and multifaceted than just the harsh noise they do so well.

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05 July 2009

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Albums and Singles

Along with the likes of label mates (and fellow Chicagoans) Locrian, The Golden Sores have taken a modernized approach to drone, away from the traditional academia of La Monte Young and the like, but also diverging from the metal leanings of Sunn O))) into its own realm of ambience and electronic sensibilities.

Bloodlust!

Like Locrian, The Golden Sores lean heavily on synthesizers and electronics, though the two projects are quite unique in their own way. For the most part, even with the occasionally harsher moments of this disc, it never leads into metal riffing, and when it does begin to encroach on harsher sounds, there is usually a softer ambient underpinning that keeps the dissonance reigned in.

Opener "Double Gyres" begins with organ-like opening tones that slowly drift on, an opaque wall of sound that stays static as shrill guitar feedback cuts around. The guitar tone and texture is extremely raw, but not overly harsh or aggressive, but instead provides a great counterpoint to the otherwise peaceful electronic ambience. "The Awful Rowing Toward God" is similar in its presentation with the jagged guitar shrikes, though here with lower end buzzing amp noise and a simple, but buoyant bassline that keeps the song drifting along, occasionally resembling the more electronic dub oriented Main tracks, though here the guitar slides into raw noise territory about midway though before retreating back to a more purely ambient coda.

Living up to its title, "Klonopin" is a more subdued affair. There is the cutting guitar buzz here, but it is more mellow and a bit lower in the mix. It never fully disappears or becomes ignored, but it definitely allows for more of the ambient textures to shine through, and is at its core a more subdued work than the previous two, but never falling into overly boring or mundane territory. "Ondine" also keeps the fuzzed out guitar noise reigned in, focusing instead on slower gentle notes and slow-motion sheets of sound.

The closer, "A Vision," distills much of the album down for an appropriate conclusion, combining the brittle guitar shriek with drifting synthetic ambience, though here it remains a relatively sparse mix that, while not harsh, instead has a cold, dark sense of isolation about it. The guitar swells to a buzz-saw level of noise before retreating, closing the album on a somber, restrained note.

This duo has created one of those kind of works that manages to maintain that tenuous balance between reflective ambient soundscapes and grinding, coarse guitar noise in a way that never feels like an unnecessary contrast, but instead mutually inclusive extremes that captivate for both the whisper and the roar that appear.

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05 July 2009

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Between his roles as both filmmaker and Fonal Records head, Sami Sanpakkila has somehow managed to find time to produce this, his fifth album of solo material under the Es moniker. Citing Pekka Streng's "Kesamaa" as its impetus makes sense considering the immediately nostalgic summer feel of the record, though Es' eyes are set on a much more distant and ethereal horizon than Streng's song-based structures.

Fonal

The title of the record alone alludes to this intended effect, translating to "The Children of the Summerland." While this is certainly the case however, this is far from a naïve foray into elven territory. Indeed, much of the disc's strength lies in the ample inhabitance of less desirable realms, evoking a balance between tender forest traipsing and, simultaneously, a sense of the deeper mystery just behind the foliage.

The album opens on a glistening and undulatory note with "Ennen Oli Huonommin," whose backing drone grasps at the fluttering bussle of notes emitted atop. The track has the same toying playfulness of labelmate Tomutonttu's output, albeit with a real sense of direction. This forward thrust continues on the brief "Kesa Ja Hymyilevat Huulet," a mix of tinkertoy Casios and a lofty, folkloric vocal line, clarifying the album's role as a collection of songs, albeit highly abstracted, even distracted ones.

The centerpiece of the disc lies in the back-to-back efforts of "Sateet Sun Sielusta" and the album's title track, the most extended efforts here and the ones on which Sanpakkila's constructions are able to fully blossom. The former opens with a brief piano excursion whose increasing density mounts into a full blown meteor shower of trickling lines and hovering drones. Reaching far beyond the skies of many of his contemporaries, the piece is a truly momentous one whose forward thrust continues the consistent sense of trajectory runnning throughout the album.

Following in its wake is the 21-plus minute title track, whose opening vocal lines sway atop a writhing lullaby line before building into a veritable orchestra filling memories of sand castles past. The immense reach of the work is staggering, but never without a sense of intimacy or proximity; this is a series of small moments conjoined by their inherent connections, not a vast singularity too overpowering to remain relatable.

The album's closing track, "Haamut Sun Sydamesta," has a chorus of voices bounding between speakers, rendered foreign by their proximity to the psychedelic mash-up atop them, which I suppose is the idea here. A singer-songwriter album at heart, each piece takes its own path, unfolding without bounds to become a true achievement and one of the most beautiful records of summer.

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05 July 2009

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Albums and Singles

Cocteau Twins founder and indie guitar demi-god Robin Guthrie has always been both reliable and respectable (musically, anyway), but seldom surprising. The pleasant and elegant dreampop instrumentals of Angel Falls do not waver from this trend. However, they don't indicate any declining quality in his singular soundscape wizardry either.

Darla

The most glib and simplistic (yet extremely accurate) way to describe Angel Falls is “this sounds exactly like some of the better Cocteau Twins songs, but with Liz Fraser’s vocals replaced with guitars.” Of course, I was never a particularly huge Fraser fan, so that is perfectly fine with me. However, the absence of a vocalist does have some negative consequences: pop instrumentals are kind of a hard sell. I suppose perhaps a vocalist humanizes music and creates a stronger connection with the listener, or maybe the presence of lyrics just adds more information and variation to the melody (which makes multiple listens more rewarding), or maybe there is some intangible third possibility that has not even occurred to me yet. I suspect it is a riddle that I will never truly solve. Regardless, I hope this EP finds a suitably receptive audience somehow, as this is some great summer music. It would also be great music to soundtrack a shoegazer barbeque, an alternative prom, a montage of bittersweet romantic memories, or an epic heroin binge. To his credit, Guthrie has presciently and decisively filled those niches before most of the world was even aware that they existed.

Angel Falls consists of four short songs, all of which are quite enjoyable and adhere very closely to the sound that Guthrie is known for: layers of chiming arpeggios and hazy heavily chorused chords, melodic bass lines, and an atmosphere of blissful melancholy. “Camera Lucida” kicks off the EP with all of these elements in maximum abundance and gradually builds from a gentle ringing melody into something that approaches a rock song, while the following track (“Love Never Dies a Natural Death”) is a sleepy gem of slow-motion, quavering beauty. The somewhat darker closing track (“Delicate”) is probably the best piece on the album, as it shimmers, glistens, quivers, and chimes with an elegant, spidery beauty and spacey bliss that one can only get from the guitar of Robin Guthrie. The whole thing is over in less than twenty minutes, which makes this EP a very effective teaser for Guthrie's upcoming new album: rather than overstaying its welcome, Angel Falls left me wishing it hadn't ended so soon.

While I certainly enjoyed Angel Falls quite a bit, it is nevertheless a clear example of why Guthrie has always been a bit of a puzzle to me: it has been over twenty-five years since the Cocteau Twins' debut album was released and there has been very little deviation from that original formula since. It seems strange to me that someone who heavily influenced My Bloody Valentine and played such an integral role in defining the whole shoegazer genre would be so reluctant to expand his very narrow sonic palette. I wonder if Guthrie is in a creative rut or if he just a victim of his own prolific output: it is hard to imagine Kevin Shields being as revered as he is if Loveless had been followed by half a dozen more albums in roughly the same vein. Then again, perhaps Guthrie just has a very specific vision of how he wants to sound and has spent his entire adult life trying to perfect it. Or maybe his more adventurous impulses are vented in his filmmaking and soundtrack work. Or maybe he has been saving up all of his wild and brilliant ideas for next Violet Indiana album (if it ever comes out). Yet another possibility is that I need to stop overanalyzing his creative arc and just be happy that he is sitting in France quietly amassing a large body of great songs- it’s hard to say. Regardless, a new release from Guthrie is always welcome and 2009 is packed full of them: he has a new full-length (Carousel) dropping in August and another EP (Songs to Help My Children Sleep) slated for October.

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05 July 2009

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Helen Scarsdale founder, sound installation artist, and mega-collaborator extraordinaire Jim Haynes claims that his work involves the process of rusting. More specifically, the sounds he makes connote the suffocating grip of decay and the passage of time. On Sever Haynes marries that focus to the creation of dystopian worlds and crippled environments, creating a convincing and uncomfortable environment of his own as he proceeds.

Intransitive

In the case of Sever, the elegance of Haynes' noise can be traced to its deceptive simplicity. On the surface this record is a grinding, crunchy, and faded environmental recording rescued from brittle tapes discovered by Haynes. Each of the four pieces that compose Sever appear to reveal the natural world reclaiming what it had lost with the advent of science and industry. It's as though someone took a small microphone and tape recorder into the guts of industrial factories and abandoned machine shops and captured their internal breakdown. Beneath this veneer, however, is a cinematic and carefully constructed experience. The convincing nature of Haynes' noise belies the fact that Sever is a patient and incredibly well-structured record. More than just a collection of unnerving ambience, it is a psychologically heavy record with plenty of gloom and despair to go around.

Haynes' compositional style has the power to convince; he creates a believable world and then populates it with familiar events. Upon hearing objects move in the stereo field, the sense that objects should also be moving in the room is accomplished. Similarly, the crunch of leaves, the tumbling of dust and rock on pavement, and the sound of wind through trees is manifested by Haynes' various techniques. Whether or not he actually used samples of such events is ultimately unimportant. Haynes is adept at making his noise seem very real, very organic, and very familiar. All the while Haynes siguides his army of samples and loops with a near-invisible hand. He utilizes a broad range of dynamics to create verses and crescendos of noise. Using erratic rhythms, fractured hiss, and the whir of electricity, Haynes weaves together a stage upon which the rest of the album sits. The rustle of industrial and organic detritus is sometimes contrasted against this background, along with radio static, thundering metal, and even the melodic ring of bells. They all provide a measure of unpredictability and dynamic variety, and they also amplify the record's uneasy creepiness.

And that brings me to the psychological power of Sever. While the narrative of decay and time run a red thread through this record, there's also a feeling of dread and expectancy coursing through it. Haynes' environments have an emptiness attached to them, as though they are waiting for something or someone to come along and fill them up. As a result, a great deal of anticipation and tense nervousness finds its way onto this record. Perhaps Sever's focus on decay is the source of this discomfort. Or perhaps the music renders the void of decomposition and death too effectively; either way, a loneliness and an increasing sense of helplessness builds up over the record's 52 minutes. After realizing it was there, I expected Haynes to somehow eradicate or cure it. Instead, he leaves it to hover over the room in silence after the record ends. Nothing is fulfilled and there's no sense of completion; only a bleak heaviness remains when the music stops. It is neither pleasant nor comfortable, but it is powerful and unique and entirely worth experiencing.

The first 100 copies of Sever come with a bonus CDr titled Severed. This CDr contains a recording of a sound installation that was used, in part, to develop the record.

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05 July 2009

John Kealy

Albums and Singles

This decidedly un-Nadja release is a stunning surprise by a pair of artists that I thought I had completely figured out. This single-sided LP by Aidan Baker and Leah Buckareff nods more to Angelo Badalamenti than to the usual avant rock gods. Gone are the waves of crushing riffs and in their place is some well placed suspense and elegant, soundtrack-like motifs.

Vendetta Records

With Nadja, I have a tendency now to sit back and wait to see what others think of a release before charging in. As much as I like them, there’s only so much of their slowed down shoegaze that I need. However, their oddball releases invariably are worth getting and Clinging to the Edge of the Sky is no exception to that rule. Baker’s drumming and Buckareff’s bass sketch out a brooding backdrop for Baker’s Twin Peaks-infused guitar; the music here sits more comfortably beside Bohren & Der Club of Gore rather than with Nadja’s usual musical companions like My Bloody Valentine and Boris.

Unfortunately, at one side of an LP the amount of music leaves me starving for more. I’m not a fan of etched LPs as unlike a picture disc, you never put the etching side up on the record player so rarely do they get much attention. It would be nice if Nadja explored this style a little more or at least bring some of this noir shading to their usual sound. As it stands, Clinging to the Edge of the Sky is a brilliant, if brief, anomaly in their catalogue.

05 July 2009

John Kealy

Albums and Singles

The latest instalment in Blast First Petit's ongoing 10" series in honor of Alan Vega’s 70th birthday sees Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley team up with Pan Sonic’s Mika Vainio for a killer Suicide cover. Also included is a rare outing by Head of David’s Stephen Burroughs and a new live track by Alan Vega himself.

Blast First Petit

Sunn O))) and Pan Sonic’s version of “Che” from Suicide’s classic self-titled album is a surprisingly straight cover of the song. Based on Sunn O)))’s previous “covers” like their reinvention of Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” on Flight of the Behemoth, I was expecting an almost unrecognizable mass of guitar noise but they have kept “Che” in an instantly familiar form. Joe Preston does a mean vocal as Sunn O))) create a powerful guitar-led interpretation of the original’s organ riff. Vainio adds a layer of electronic grit to the piece, finishing off an already perfect cover.

On the flip side is an unreleased original from Vega, “Thirteen Crosses,” which was recorded live last year. I have never had a huge interest in Vega aside from the older Suicide material and this song is not begging me to investigate his recent work further. The snarls by numbers piece could be by any number of Suicide imitators and as such is a letdown considering this is actually Vega himself doing it. This is followed by an acoustic rendition of “Goodbye Darling” by Burroughs. Although not a stellar performance, it is a competent and slightly unsettling take on this song with more echoes of Michael Gira than of Alan Vega.

Hardcore fans of Suicide have probably already got their hands on this EP but I would call this essential listening for Sunn O))) lovers as this is one of their better excursions outside of their full lengths.