We have finally cleared out the backlog of great music and present some new episodes.
Episode 711 features music from The Jesus and Mary Chain, Zola Jesus, Duster, Sangre Nueva, Dialect, The Bug, Cleared, Mount Eerie, Mulatu Astatke & Hoodna Orchestra, Hayden Pedigo, Bistro Boy, and Ibukun Sunday.
Episode 712 has tunes by Mazza Vision, Waveskania, Black Pus, Sam Gendel, Benny Bock, and Hans Kjorstad, Katharina Grosse, Carina Khorkhordina, Tintin Patrone, Billy Roisz, and Stefan Schneider, His Name Is Alive, artificial memory trace, mclusky, Justin Walter, mastroKristo, Başak Günak, and William Basinski.
Episode 713 brings you sounds from Mouse On Mars, Leavs, Lawrence English, Mo Dotti, Wendy Eisenberg, Envy, Ben Lukas Boysen, Cindytalk, Mercury Rev, White Poppy, Anadol & Marie Klock, and Galaxie 500.
Skolavordustigur Street in Reykjavík photo by Jon (your Podcast DJ).
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After a brief introductory song that sets the languid tone, the second throws out a hook with a luxurious bass line, reeling me in. At this point bootgazing becomes the order of the day. On their seventh release the duo easily straddles starry eyed left-field pop and drones as expansive as America's western plains.
The first disc of this double album is enchanted and imagistic, evoking memories of dust flickering in the air like warm snow as shafts of light pour through the windowpanes. The songs are generally slow, though never sluggish. The events of the album proceed according to the logic of a surrealist film, creating non-linear moods as opposed to strict narrative. Yet the landscape is recognizable: it's a place on the western side of the Mississippi where buffalo roam the wild and where vaqueros rassle steeds.
There is nothing country about this album although there is plenty of melancholy, beer-crying twang. This is exhibited best on "Wilderness Eyes," which also features supple vocals and round splashes of tambourine and snare which keep the pace from falling completely into the wilderness of analog synth tones that are prominent throughout the twelve songs. I enjoy it when the singing is showcased, especially on "Sleep Deep," whose propulsive bass line recalls favorite moments from groups like Wire or Gang of Four. The instrumental songs which dominate the album investigate the use of keyboards as if they were banjos, the amplified sonority of slide guitars, random snippets of AM truck stop radio, all drizzled with syrupy synthesizer sweetness akin to cherry pie had at a late night diner. This is a great soundtrack for a road trip: a rural voyage into the land of low dunes and tall grass. It is warm and smooth enough to comfortably allow the drift of ones own thoughts, while still retaining enough kick and bite to propel me down the highway on a lonely night.
The second disc, "Requiem For An Encyclopedia," recalls the infinite libraries and labyrinths of Jorge Luis Borges. The twelve tracks correspond to the twelve volumes of an encyclopedia, the first piece being "Volume A-E", the second "Volume C-D" all the way down to "Volume W-Z". Listeners are also encouraged to approach this disc as a curious mind approaching an encyclopedia, to open it up at random and read the articles in any order. As an encyclopedia it is not meant to be tackled straight through, A to Z, but as a reference to be returned to again and again. Composed of short loops ranging from 36 seconds to just under two minutes it is best left to play on shuffle for hours on end. Truly soothing and vibrant it sweeps from low end to high end with lush and lulling simplicity. There is a recurring flute or woodwind sound that swirls around with the synthesizer like a humming bird darting back and forth, hovering and zigzagging around fruits and flowers. And it is as pleasant to listen to as a humming bird is to watch.
Frank Baugh has been beguiling me with his warm and wobbly soundscapes for a couple of years now, but this is his first "proper" album.  I wasn't quite sure what to expect, as I have only heard a fraction of his vast catalog of limited-edition tapes and CD-Rs, making it very difficult to follow his chronological evolution. Also, I was secretly hoping that he was holding back some truly staggering material for his auspicious vinyl debut. After hearing it, I don’t think Fields and String eclipses his past work, takes things to another level, or delivers any major surprises, but it certainly reaffirms what myself and Frank's small-but-devoted following already knew: he makes some uniquely beautiful music.
Describing Sparkling Wide Pressure's sound is not an easy undertaking, as Baugh's work superficially has a lot in common structurally with ambient and drone music, but his objectives are far more ambitious.Frank's work seems intent on making a strong emotional connection, evoking adjectives like "bittersweet," and "nostalgia-soaked" while remaining steadfastly subtle and sublime and eschewing almost everything conventionally song-like.When he is at his best, Baugh's collages capture the feel of half-remembered memories and the innocence of youth, teasingly obscured by flickers, tape decay, and hiss.In fact, one of Frank's common sound sources makes the prefect metaphor for the entire Sparking Wide Pressure aesthetic: forgotten, time-ravaged home videos.
"Clear Pathway" begins the four-song album with a murky drone burbling with a chorus of awesomely mangled, wrong-speed voices.It is definitely a very striking piece, especially once the slow, off-kilter beat kicks in, but Baugh's somewhat invasive guitar playing ruins the spell a little bit for me.It isn't that he is a bad or unimaginative guitarist, but the mere fact that there is a "riff" transforms the piece from something mesmerizingly warped and hallucinatory into a very deranged jam. The side closes with longer, slightly more structured "Jeremy Moves," which bolsters an '80s film soundtrack-sounding synth bed with whimsical flurries of chimes, before slowly escalating in weirdness with slow motion train noises, snatches of voices, and strangled guitar ruin. It ultimately ends up being the best song on the album, as its somewhat unpromising opening motif is quickly (and permanently) buried beneath an avalanche of rhythmic, melancholy mindfuckery that unfolds until the very end.
The second side opens with the jangling, aggressively lo-fi guitar of "Summoning," which calls to mind a slightly more tuneful Jandek.As with most Sparkling Wide Pressure songs, however, the song gradually and seamlessly drifts into something else. In this case, something that sounds like a damaged tape of some synthesizer-based krautrock.Thankfully, it shifts gears yet again and gets noticeably better, morphing into rumbling washes of warm sounds and a haze of tortured flutes and echoes that fragilely holds together for the rest of the song's duration.The album's final piece, "Completely Inside," is also its most brief, clocking in at a mere five minutes.At first, it seems like relatively standard-issue Sparkling Wide Pressure, shimmering and quavering disorientingly beneath a shambling guitar solo.Unexpectly, however, its final minute drifts into a brilliant outro that resembles Popol Vuh's beautiful and haunting Aguirre: The Wrath of God theme.It is both exasperating and endearing that Baugh can just toss out something absolutely perfect with no warning like that, then end the song without elaborating any further.Of course, that unpredictability is what keeps me eternally curious about each new release, as I never know quite when (or if) inspiration will strike.
I am a little sad to say that Fields and String is not Frank Baugh's masterpiece, but it is a likable, unique, and solid album strewn with many excellent passages anyway.I definitely had unfairly high expectations, as I have been occasionally floored by his work in the past and expect each new effort to be better than the last.It doesn’t work like that and I have probably heard so many Sparkling Wide Pressure tapes that their impact is hopelessly and permanently blunted for me now.Regardless, this is probably a fine introduction for anyone unfamiliar with Baugh's work (particularly the second half of "Jeremy Moves").Also, it is a bit more widely available and high-profile than anything else he has done, so it will definitely be his most popular album by default.That suits me perfectly fine. I suspect that whichever Sparkling Wide Pressure album a person hears first is destined to be their favorite.
Samples:
(This is a vinyl-only release, so no mp3 samples are available.The entire album can currently be streamed here though.)
Pietro Grossi began his musical career as a celebrated cellist, but became fascinated by electronic music's potential in the late '50s and threw himself into it whole-heartedly.In 1963, he founded the S 2F M (Studio di Fonologia Musicale di Firenze) in Florence, which became both an educational center and a place for like-minded iconoclasts to record their spectacularly uncommercial music.That interest soon expanded into the composition of computer-based music in 1967, an ambition that later blossomed into the research and creation of very early music software.All of those activities made Pietro quite instrumental in the advancement of the music that he loved, even if his own recordings have fallen into relative obscurity.Pietro was not content with just being a cellist, professor, composer, and software designer though–he was also a rather unconventional and rigorous theorist and his ideas and ideals provided the foundation for many of the compositions included here.
The first half of this double-disc set is a bit of a broad-stroke overview of '60s Italian electronic music.Of the nine pieces, only the first three are by Grossi and all are excerpts from lengthier, highly conceptual pieces.The first two do not hold up particularly well today, but they were certainly quite forward-thinking and adventurous for their time, being among the earliest forays into sound installation, ambient music, and phase-shifting.The third piece, despite working with the same primitive technology, is markedly more complicated and rewarding however.As with all Grossi pieces, there is a very cerebral underpinning: "OM" is comprised of several overlapping and oscillating electronic permutations of patterns from Bach's "Musical Offering" performed by Grossi and his students.(Spoiler alert- it does not sound at all like Bach.)
The rest of the disc is rounded out by solo works of Grossi's students, colleagues, other composers who recorded at S 2F M, and two pieces recorded at Italy's other two electronic music centers (NPS and SMET).Obviously, given the time period, there is a very limited sonic palette available: nearly every piece is built upon slow-moving and sparse analog electronic tones.Despite that handicap, several of the pieces manage to achieve an impressive depth and complexity through discordant harmonies and quivering oscillation.Vittorio Gelmetti's soundtrack for Michelangelo Antonioni's "Red Desert" and SMET's "EL 25" are probably the most unsettling and accomplished of the lot, but NPS's "Interferenze 2 (1967)" is also quite striking–its final 30 seconds are essentially Merzbow.
The second disc is devoted entirely to Grossi, however, and focuses on his computer-based work.The sequencing is truly bizarre, but it is bizarre for a reason: Pietro had a firm belief that his works should remain "open," which meant that he encouraged other composers to elaborate upon them and envisioned music as a collective experience.Those ideas of flux and interactivity provide the structure for everything here: 22 pieces spanning from 1970 to 1985 are included and it is suggested that the listener use the "shuffle" function to "create infinite variations."Also, several of the pieces are themselves variations and permutations upon works by other composers (Scarlatti's "Sonata 119" and Bach's "The Art of The Fugue").
As a whole, I found the second disc to be somewhat exhausting and markedly less rewarding than the first, but several individual pieces were quite good.Notably, the material is often quite a bit more complicated than Grossi's work from the '60s, which turns out to be both a blessing and a curse (Pietro was maybe a bit too fascinated with his newfound ability to string together inhuman clusters of dissonant bleeps).I actually preferred the cold, ominous ambience of the eight "Sound Life" pieces to everything else here, which are not too far removed from Grossi's pre-computer work.They would have been perfect as the soundtrack for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Unfortunately, the rest of the album is mixed bag: I did not like the digitized Bach interludes at all, many pieces sound quite similar to one another, and I did not quite understand the value of the two silent pieces.Maybe I should have utilized the "shuffle" function more.There are a few other likable pieces scattered about though, ranging from an approximation of an especially spirited game of Asteroids (one version of "Create") to an approximation of that same Asteroids machine having an absolutely apoplectic freak-out ("Monodia").The "'80s arcade game"-style pieces also share quite a bit of textural and structural similarity to recent noise music at times (or to several Raster-Noton artists, as a Dusted critic insightfully pointed out before me).
I had an extremely difficult time formulating a firm opinion of Combinatoria, as it is equal parts flawed and fascinating.As a history lesson and an introduction to very obscure music and ideas, it is fairly successful.As a listening experience, it left a lot to be desired, as many pieces now sound dated, ridiculous, repetitive, or painfully shrill.However, there were also a handful of rather stunning works.Obviously, the more dated-sounding pieces are unavoidable victims of electronic music's four decades of further evolution beyond these recording sessions, but I would have much preferred a more discerning and brief selection of his major works.This retrospective definitely piqued my interest about both the man and his work, but Combinatoria is too uneven, frustrating, and overwhelming to be a definitive overview.
Peter Christopherson has announced through the Threshold House Web site a 16 DVD box collecting live performances, loops used on the tour, background projections, and even bits of Coil's infamous constumes. Advance orders will be taken starting March 8th, 2010.
"The long wait for you, and the massive, massive amount of work for me, is almost over!
All but 4 of the concerts are authored (from literally hundreds of hours of camera-work by countless people, more forward looking than I), the boxes decided upon and ordered, 16 dvd wallets designed, 101 postcards showing every aspect of the Coil tours (well every legal aspect) assembled from numerous sources, and a series of 5000 cloth bags sewn from the very fabric that Coil's costumes were orginally tailored... Not to mention nearly four hours of "Coil Recontruction Kit" released under a Creative Commons License from which you can set up your own Coil Karaoke Booth, or even resample loops, backings or reuse footage from all of the Projections that Coil ever used on stage, for whatever nefarious, perverse, fetishistic (but non-commercial) purposes you see fit...
We will be opening the PRE-ORDER facility as previously menetioned, on Monday 6th of March, by which time there will be lots of photos and a full description of the box contents, both here and in the store.
As previously promised, the pre-order facility will not be limited by quantity but by time. You will have four weeks to order, from the moment the facility becomes available.
Those paying by Paypal or debit card will be charged on order, those by credit card will not be charged till the box actually ships.
Also as promised, those brave and generous souls who ordered the Patrons edition will receive UNIQUE parts limited to the original 200 in quantity, beginning in April. Those ordering the forthcoming Pre-Order edition, though receiving slightly different editorial contents, and paying a slightly less "discounted" price, will still get all the goodies mentioned above. The standard edition when it becomes available will have the same dvd contents but not quite such lavish (not to mention heavy and expensive!) presentation.
Thank you so much to everyone for their patience."
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The update also includes information about Christopherson's new website, Sacred-Profane, and the possibility of a regular podcast titled "Evenings with Unkle Sleazy."
“Is that goo or tears coming from your eyes?” Is that noise or music coming from my speakers? This incredible overview of Smegma’s early work is a bounty of strange sounds, haunting atmospheres and some of the weirdest music put on tape. Across 6 LPs and a DVD, Smegma’s formative years spill out like maggots from a freshly disturbed corpse. Yet each of the maggots grows and becomes one of a plethora of magnificent, bizarre chimeras. This is gloriously wild stuff.
The first LP collects their Glamour Girl 1941 album and the Pigface Chant and Flashcards 7” singles. To say that these recordings were revolutionary does not even come close, even today they have lost none of their impact despite so many artists like Nurse With Wound, Merzbow and Wolf Eyes building on different aspects of their work. Glamour Girl 1941 begins with the jazzy “Deference,” Smegma sounding like a particularly unwieldy artist on the Impulse Records roster. Based on this first piece, it is impossible to tell what would come but from “1980 A.R.” onwards, the tone for the rest Smegma’s career is set. The rest of Glamour Girl 1941 introduces the outsider vocals, the warped found sounds, the free noise and the unhinged temperament which has prevented them from ever becoming close to being accepted by the mainstream.
Throughout this stunning album (which takes up most of the first LP) they develop an approach to free improvisation which sounds a world away from what Derek Bailey and pals were up to around the same time on the other side of the Atlantic. Equally, their contemporaries outside the Los Angeles Free Music Society scene like Frank Zappa and The Residents were all charting completely different areas in the realm of oddity. Smegma’s music is all about unnatural collisions and sometimes these collisions explode like two atoms in a reactor. In fact there must be radiation involved somewhere as only that can explain their mutant sounds.
The second LP includes the album Pigs for Leper and a bunch of oddities from other sonic depositories. Compared to the first LP in this set, this is more of a mish-mash of solo material than traditional Smegma compositions (whatever “traditional” might mean), wilder improvisations rub shoulders with music that could almost be described as beautiful such as Ju Suk Reet Meate’s rumbling “Mr. Potatohead’s Flotation Ex” (before it goes all Texas Chainsaw Massacre that is). However, the centre of gravity around which the Pigs for Leper album, and by extension the rest of this LP, hangs is “Bubs Medley.” A ferocious collage of some of the most inhospitable sounds and riotous vocals captured on vinyl, “Bubs Medley” is the sort of music that will lose friends at parties but gain a friend-for-life with that weird guy in the greasy jacket who keeps touching himself inappropriately and spits when he speaks.
Smegma’s musical range is cast wholly into the light on the double live cassette Spontaneous Sound which is collected here on the third, fourth and half of the fifth LPs in the box. They spread their wings by beginning with a truly hilarious set of drug fuelled country songs before launching into some ferocious jams that sound like The Velvet Underground if Mo Tucker played all the instruments; “Get Away” pounds with the same urgency as some of The Velvet Underground’s finest live jams. Elsewhere, “I Used to be a Rock’n Roll Star” sees Smegma take a not very funny joke, push it to the point of extreme annoyance and then go even further to make something genuinely and absurdly great out of it.
The remainder of the LPs collect compilation appearances from Smegma from the appropriate time period. Having all these obscure recordings all collected into one place is a blessing. Granted that some of the pieces are not as stellar as the previously discussed material but there are diamonds in the rough. “Grass Glob Ball War” and “Dancing Hairpiece” in particular standing out as being fantastic examples of Smegma in full swing, both pieces showing decidedly different sides to their chaotic improvisation. I would wager that what I am discounting now as being less than exciting pieces may prove to be far better than I give them credit for. They may only be dim in comparison to the rest of I Am Artist because of the fatigue of listening to so much Smegma in one week; I imagine I will find a lot more in these rarities in the coming weeks that my tired ears are missing now.
Finally, also included is a DVD which features their 1983 VHS First Ten Years along with a couple of short bonus videos. The video footage is definitely not essential and much of it looks quite dated now, cheesy early '80s computer visuals and crude video effects not helping in any way. The music, however, comes across as the vibrant and exciting noise that it was. Yet for so many years their music has existed for me as an abstract document and seeing Smegma perform is a demystifying experience; none of them are ogres or aliens but normal looking Americans, albeit badly dressed. The shorter films, “NWAW 1978” and “Clockwork Joe’s 1980,” stand up better compared to the main feature but again. The whirlwoodwind that is “Clockwork Joe’s” above all justifies the inclusion of this DVD but unfortunately is all too brief.
Like last year’s Nurse With Wound Flawed Existence box set, Vinyl On Demand have packed loads of music onto the LPs, many of the records going up to around 30 minutes a side. However, as with Flawed Existence the LPs sound great despite the amount of music packed onto them. The vinyl is thick, pressed to the highest standards and the box itself is as attractive and as sturdy as everything else from this great label. “Hopefully it won’t sound like anything you’ve heard before.” (It doesn’t.)
This box set is currently vinyl only, so unfortunately there are no sound samples at this point in time, apologies!
Scott Morgan is something of an anomaly in the field of ambient music for having a simple and clear purpose: releasing a consistent stream of reliably good albums. He has no clear avant-garde pretensions, nor any reliance on high-concept philosophical underpinnings or improvisation. He just turns out dense, composed, and immersive washes of sound, year after year. Anyone that has heard Loscil before probably has a pretty good idea of what Endless Falls sounds like, but there is an unexpected surprise at the end that may signal a bold new direction.
Loscil’s fifth album takes its theme from rain; a natural choice given the reputation Morgan’s hometown of Vancouver has for precipitation.It generally fits the tone of the album too, as it is impossible to describe Endless Falls without relying on endless water metaphors.However, while the feel of the album certainly approximates the soothing sadness of a rainstorm, the girth and complexity of the album seems much more evocative of deep, dark waters and slow-moving currents.This is not an album of floating, wispy, inconsequential sounds—Endless Falls is both massive and deliberate.Scott makes everything sound simple and effortlessly flowing, but that illusion is built upon a very meticulous layering of many constantly shifting tracks.
Scott Morgan has a strong intuition for pace, sequencing, and variety.He also understands how far he can push his sound without breaking its hypnotic spell.It is a treacherous path to navigate, as a too-memorable melody or a too-prominent beat can easily derail an ambient piece into the realm of song (which would be distracting), while doing too little results in a boring album.This is not boring album.As expected, the most memorable works on Endless Falls are those that push the envelope of the Loscil sound to its farthest possible edge, such as the shambling, crackling "Dub For Cascadia," which betrays a heavy influence from electronic dub artists such as Pole."Lake Orchard," on the other hand, bolsters its spacey shimmer with an insistent throb, but forgoes percussion.In fact, percussion of any kind only appears again in very odd and subtle ways (like the rhythmic pops and clicks in "Shallow Water Blackout" or the chimes/bells in "Showers of Ink").While that is not inherently odd for an ambient album, Endless Falls is markedly less rhythmic and dub-influenced than its immediate predecessor (Plume).Also, Scott’s day job is playing drums for Destroyer.
Morgan continues his fairly recent trend of enlisting a small group of talented collaborators to flesh out his sound, though pianist Jason Zumpano is the only familiar face from earlier albums.In particular, the inclusion of violinist Kim Koch was an especially inspired idea, as her melancholy scraping and bowing provides a very effective textural foil to Morgan’s watery shimmer on the opening title track.That said, the big news is that Destroyer frontman Dan Bejar turned up to provide a quietly intense and enigmatic spoken-word monologue for the closing "The Making of Grief Point," the first ever appearance of vocals on a Loscil album.Notably, it almost did not make the final cut, as Morgan was trepidatious about "changing the listening perspective from abstract, ambient music into foreground, conscious listening."His concern is certainly understandable, as Bejar’s strangely halting, stream-of-consciousness rambling ("the answer to the making of Grief Point is picnic baskets filled with blood") easily steals the show.However, it is simply too great a track to leave on the cutting room floor and actually allows Morgan to have his cake and eat it too: Endless Falls is an excellent ambient album, but it is appended by a creepily memorable "single" that easily stands with Destroyer’s best work.
This compiles 14 rare tracks from innocent, energetic and progressive 1960s and early 1970s Cambodia; a time which Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (with plenty of help from Western friends) would attempt to obliterate.
Dengue Fever Presents: Electric Cambodia blends Western guitar pop and Eastern traditional folk music. The whole album swells with joyous lively life-affirming twanging and spirited wailing in vivid contrast to the somber fact that several of the artists, such as Pan Ron, Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea, were victims of the Year Zero genocide in Cambodia.
The singing on some of these pieces is extraordinary. I particularly like Ros Sereysothea on “Cold Sky,” “I Will Starve Myself To Death,” and “Flowers In The Pond.” Her voice is simultaneously cool and yet slightly raunchy, albeit suggestive of a raunchiness which perspires rather than sweats. Pan Ron is devastating on “I Want To Be Your Lover.” There is also “Snaeha,” a Khmer version of Sonny and Cher’s “Bang Bang,” which is hard to hear without either detecting (or projecting) traces of Morricone. Similarly, “I Want To Shout” is inspired by the Isley Brothers’ early hit “Shout” most famously covered elsewhere by miniature sex-bomb, Lulu.
Western influence is easily spotted; indeed an alarming hint of Santana rears its head once or twice along with surf and garage sounds. Other passages are gloriously otherworldly, though, and tracks which may at first sound like a band fronted by a duck with an effects pedal and a gargling hyena quickly become familiar and affecting. Most of the accompaniment is pleasantly sparse allowing both instrument and voice to enjoy plenty of space. “Hope To See You” has an early psychedelic feel with shuffling drum, wobbling guitar to the fore and minimal organ adding depth. The title of that piece is poignant as is the credit to Unknown Artist. The album also has one Pan Ron track missing its title but otherwise all has been identified by the elder sister of Dengue Fever’s Chlom Nimol.
Electric Cambodia demonstrates that the will and innocence of people cannot be destroyed. Totalitarian regimes may grind bones, burn flesh and hair, drain blood, and demand silence, yet something will always remain. And, of course, the story of what happened to some of these artists and millions of other people isn’t as simple as Henry “Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?” Kissinger would have us believe.
Pol Pot was a murderous individual and his Khmer Rouge regime did many evil things, but as John Pilger has written “Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge would be historical nonentities—and a great many people would be alive today—had Washington not helped bring them to power and the governments of the United States, Britain, China and Thailand not supported them, armed them, sustained them and restored them.”Cambodia suffered a US land invasion in 1970 and from 1969-1973 was secretly bombed at the behest of Nixon and Kissinger killing approximately three quarters of a million people. “Phosphorous and cluster bombs, napalm and dump bombs that left vast craters were dropped on a neutral country of peasant people and straw huts.” According to declassified documents, these acts gave the Khmer Rouge it’s best recruiting tool and platform for the revolution which began on April 17, 1975. Just after sunrise on that day, Pol Pot’s notorious Year Zero began a repugnant and still scarcely believable era of “purification,” slavery, and extermination that claimed at the very least another two million lives.
Unfortunately, the Cambodian Holocaust has a third stage. In January 1979, tired of attacks across their border, the Vietnamese liberated Cambodia and the bloodshed and suffering should have ended there. But “Commie” liberators were too much for the US and its allies to bear. Vietnam had already ousted the US from their country and this was a time when the domino theory of countries falling under Communist influence was prevalent. As Pilger reports “The Khmer Rouge were restored in Thailand by the Reagan administration, assisted by the Thatcher government, who invented a "coalition" to provide the cover for America's continuing war against Vietnam.” Reagan’s administration swiftly began backing Pol Pot in exile. The US and the UK used the United Nations to construct a blockade making Cambodia the only Third World country so isolated. The special relationship between Reagan and Thatcher also extended to having the CIA and the SAS train the Khmer Rouge in Thailand and Malaysia.
John Pilger’s writing for the Daily Mirror and an ATV documentary he made with David Munro brought forth an unsolicited response from ordinary people in Britain. Single mothers gave their meager savings, workers sent their weekly wages and £20M was raised for aid. Reports suggests that those actions defied the blockade, supporting orphanages, restocking hospitals and schools, restoring clean water and clothing.
Proceeds from Dengue Fever Presents: Electric Cambodia will benefit Cambodian Living Arts which is devoted to traditional and forward looking performing arts and creative expression. The album was compiled by Dengue Fever from cassette mix-tapes circulated from friend to friend. As someone who used to make and send compilation tapes it is impossible to imagine the widespread murder of those friends and of the artists whose music we shared. Also of note is S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, a documentary by the Paris-based Khmer director Rithy Panh, whose parents died in the terror. The film brings together victims and “the ordinary and obscure journeymen of the genocide" (as Panh calls them) the torturers and murderers.
On their debut collaboration, percussionist Steven Hess (Haptic) and Reto Mader (Sum of R) create brilliant film score-ish compositions that, on the surface, are as dark and bleak as any that can be imagined, but the structure and instrumentation used give far more depth and variation to what otherwise could be mundane and trite. The result is a diverse set of pieces that prove there are a wide gradient of shades of gray.
While there is definitely a horror movie feel to the pieces on this disc, most of them would work just as well within any dark, drama framework given their lush, somewhat obscure construction and tense atmospheres. The opening “The Lights Would Stop Flickering” is the perfect introduction, with its slow, bowed cymbal backing and broken church organ crawl, together mimicking a funeral march even when delicate chimes arrive.
“Voices From The Room Below” follows a similar path, mixing indecipherable sound squeals into an abstract dark cloud of murkiness, with gentle wind chimes and distant, indecipherable voices appearing to add to the feeling of disorientation. Similarly, “Pendulum Impact Test” allow somber melodies to resonate through empty halls, with pieces of what may be voices arising occasionally before everything is engulfed by a beautiful noisy squall of warbling sound.
Some of the tracks actually allow the instrumentation to shine through rather than keeping it within a dark mire: “Theme of the Paranormal Feedback” mixes a queasy organ and a raw viola scrape drone (think John Cale on “Black Angel’s Death Song”) representing both gentle and harsh ends of sound, all of which is met with clattering metal percussion before everything soars into a dramatic, almost symphonic ecstasy of sound as the track winds to a close. “Don’t Eat Carrots, My Little Ghost Horse” focuses on largely untouched guitar playing, mixed with amplifier hum and ghostly ambient textures that swirl around below.
Tracks like “Forlata Jag” embrace the horror movie ambience, with its minor key organ progressions and noisy swells, but the track is pushed along by traditional drumming (I assume by Hess) that feels a bit less abstract than the aforementioned tracks, but still nothing easily categorized. Between the drums and the somber, depressing sound, there is perhaps a bit of Goblin influence, though not directly. The long “Stumbling Upon Blood and Mercury” opens with static guitar noise and feedback, but is soon bolstered by a tortured guitar squeal and somber, marching drums that plod along painfully. The closing “Mathieu 2004-2009” is structurally similar, opening with a sense of menace via restrained reverberated drone and deep resonating tones that are later met with drumming, all of which reaches dramatic zeniths before ending in subtle shimmers of sound.
While most definitely “dark” in its overall approach, that is too simplistic of a label in my eyes. The complex layering of instrumentation and mostly somber sounds do create a mood, but when tracks like “Theme of the Paranormal Feedback” and “Mathieu 2004-2009” launch into dramatic sweeping pastiches, the sound is far less bleak and much more nuanced in approach. It is an engrossing debut from these two established artists.
On this combination CDR and 7" single, Crumer continues to demonstrate why he’s so highly regarded in the noise scene. The 7” channels the best elements of the junk metal and maxed out overdrive pedal style, while the CD takes a slow, droning direction to nicely contrast the cut up harsh stuff.
On the vomit swirl colored vinyl, "Exile Pursuing Abyss" begins with a scraping/grinding metal loop that builds in complexity, found sounds of junk being layered atop one another before launching into pure workroom chaos, with tools and metal buckets being thrown about in a fit of rage before the electronics kick in. There’s what sounds like an occasional digital stutter, but for the most part there’s a purely analog vibe here. No way in hell this could be labeled anything but "harsh," but it stays away from the impulse to just peg everything into the red: there is a great deal of activity going on here that repeated listenings can reveal.
The flip side, "Old Country Buffet Incident" opens with a similar junk metal grind, but quickly segues into electronic noise. Here the sound is more cut and paste, with lots of quick cuts and edits, with layers building upon each other and then tearing apart, all with the interspersed rapid-fire machine gun type drum machine beat. In the latter half, the overdriven noise is met with distant pure tonal drone to create a great dichotomy.
On the CD is a single 77 minute track, "A Personal Hell," that goes for the more "sustained noise experience," developing from a slow reverberated crawl into shimmering electronic drones interspersed with basic analog noise. The sound swells up into low end scraping noise that is allowed to slowly decay and collapse, leaving basic echoes and ringing tones to linger in the frozen air, just to get noisy again. It works far better as a drone piece, because it lacks the dynamic range of the 7" single, but still makes for a nice blast of cold sonic air.
Between the two formats, Crumer covers the variations and nuances of the noise scene expertly. Personally I favor the material on the 7" record, which is as active and diverse as any of the best noise releases, but the long piece on the CD is no slouch either. While I didn’t try it out in time for this review, I can imagine there’s a world of sound and variation that can be found by playing both the vinyl and the CD at the same time, which I think I’m going to go do now…
Towards the end of his career, Soleilmoon put in a request to the late Bryn Jones to put together some material that was conventional enough to allow some crossover into the electronic and dance scenes. This wasn’t an absurd request, because at this time his work more than flirted with dance and hip-hop beats, but often it was just as likely to slide into harsh, abrasive textures. The proposed 12" requested by the label was delivered as a 90 minute DAT, all of which is reproduced here. It is two discs of the most ass shaking, head-nodding material he ever did that conjures images of burka clad women shaking their asses, Miami bass style.
The original DAT was cut up and released as a 12" single of the same name (consisting of tracks 1, 5, 8, and 13), with two more being added to the release of Hussein Mahmood Jeeb Tehar Gass, but here it is being released in its entirety for the first time. Unsurprisingly, the material doesn’t sound like a conscious attempt by Jones to make headway into the clubs, but more an emphasis on the conventional elements of his sound; it’s unmistakably Muslimgauze.
The overall vibe of the album fits with the time it was released: the emphasis on hip-hop breakbeats goes along with the ambient dub and illbient scenes that were winding down at the time. However, while those two subgenres of subgenres were focused on mixing rhythms with otherwise sparse instrumentation, Jones is still more than happy to layer the tracks with various loops, albeit with a bit more restraint than usual. "Uzi Mahmood 3" for example is based on underlying raw vinyl surface noise, with subtle Middle Eastern singing and horns low in the mix, but slow, echo chamber hell reverberated dub beats up front. The emphasis is definitely on the beats, but not at the expense of other elements of the track.
Listening to both discs as a whole, it does seem pretty obvious that Jones hadn’t intended for this to be released unedited, because he recycles a lot of elements from track to track that, if spread across multiple albums or singles, wouldn’t be as notable, but back to back, it becomes obvious. Loops of record scratching, reggae organ stabs, and radar blip-like rhythms are recurring motifs throughout. For example, both "Uzi Mahmood 5" and "Uzi Mahmood 10" use the reggae organ stab sound, though the former is overtly dub influenced, while the latter goes the hip-hop route with loud, big drums and record scratching.
"Uzi Mahmood 1" fully embraces the hip-hop elements of the Muslimgauze sound, using the same record scratching over a slow Dr. Dre-esque beat and massive ass-shaking sub bass. The long "Uzi Mahmood 9" (and its alternate mix, "Uzi Mahmood 13") lifts a beat that could have been pulled off any early 1990s "positive" hip-hop album, but mixed with Jones penchant for erratic stop/start rhythms and layered abstraction, it takes on an entirely different character.
"Uzi Mahmood 7" is a slightly different beat, with a more subdued mix, pared down to the barest essentials and a very analog, blip-centric rhythm is far more electro than anything I’ve heard him do before. Also a bit out of left-field, "Uzi Mahmood 11" uses a raw drum ‘n bass inspired rhythm (albeit slower than others in the genre), that makes it stand out more than the other tracks here, as well as the other beat-centric releases out there.
Considering I have always favored the hip-hop rhythms of Muslimgauze compared to his more overtly Middle Eastern tracks, I definitely am pretty fond of what’s here. The tracks occasionally go on a little too long and get repetitive: I’m guessing the label usually edited them down on the traditional albums released, but perhaps it was Jones’ commentary on dance music, they are still rather solid. Muslimgauze releases have been far more harsh and abrasive compared to this one, but never does it descend into boring Starbucks "world music" faux ethnicity.
As I grow older and more culturally saturated with each passing year, my capacities for surprise and wonder have become nearly non-existent. Nevertheless, 2006’s Ys completely floored me and has been very firmly entrenched as one of my favorite albums ever since. Given the stunning beauty and imagination of that album and the enormous progression that it displayed from The Milk-Eyed Mender, my expectations for its follow-up were impossibly, crazily high. Unsurprisingly, they were not met. Have One On Me is an enjoyable and accessible album, but it is a decidedly anticlimactic one.
I have long maintained that triple albums are never, ever a good idea at all under any circumstances. Nevertheless, I was uncharacteristically optimistic when I heard that Joanna Newsom was planning to release one. Her singular aptitude for epic song-forms and compelling narrative lyrics, coupled with the fact that it has possibly been in the works for four long years, seemed to indicate that the groundwork for a truly staggering and ambitious opus was in place. As it turns out, I was at least half-right, as the sprawling Have One On Me is inarguably ambitious in scope: Newsom wrote a lot of songs (for her, anyway) and has made quite a few significant changes to her sound. There is no overarching concept uniting all of the songs together though, aside from the fact that the lyrics invariably address the very Newsom-esque themes of doomed love, dangerous escapes, horses, spiders, and redemption. Also, whereas Ys was a very focused, coherent, and perfectly sequenced artistic statement, the 18 songs here seem to be the more diffuse, searching sound of Newsom trying to figure out where to go next.
The most immediately striking quality about the album is that Joanna’s vocals are generally much more restrained and conventionally melodic than they have been in the past: there are even some hints of a newfound influence from early gospel/traditional spirituals. This will probably come as a great relief to anyone that has previously found her singing to be annoying, but I find it to be a bit of a mixed blessing. Another notable change is that nearly all overtly autobiographical vestiges have departed from her lyrics. Instead, the songs are all self-contained, mysterious and oft-fanciful vignettes culled from an unpredictable array of times and places. Then again, maybe she has just become better at transforming her life into art. As always, her words remain wonderfully evocative and clever and her colorful vocabulary does not seem to have atrophied at all either (not many people could toss out a phrase like “faultlessly etiolated fishbelly-face”).
I suspect that this is an album that will take a while to make its full impact, due to the sheer volume of material present. Also, the densely narrative lyrics seem pregnant with the promise of secrets and beauty that may take a while to fully flower in my consciousness (that is my hope, anyway). Nevertheless, there are a number of excellent, instantly gratifying songs strewn throughout the three beautifully packaged records. My two favorites (at the moment, anyway) are the sparse, lilting “’81” and the languorously soulful “Baby Birch,” the rousing outro of which notably boasts the album’s most successful incorporation of drums. For the most part, it is the more stripped-down songs that are the most striking (such as the similarly excellent, but impossible sad, one-two punch of “Jackrabbits” and “Go Long”). The pieces that adrenalize Newsom’s sound with brass or a groove (such as “Good Intentions Paving Company” and “You and Me, Bess”) leave me pretty cold though. Thankfully, they are in the minority.
Nevertheless, this album is ultimately a bit of a disappointment. The main reason is that the songs blur together a bit. This is largely due to the 2-hour-plus running time and the fact that almost all of the songs are built around very similar central components, but there are some other key contributing factors as well. For one, Ryan Francesconi’s arrangements are a bit too straightforward and safe for my taste (though the end of “Does Not Suffice” gets a little wild). While there are some occasional unexpected flourishes and unconventional instrumentation (such as Bulgarian tambura, kaval, vielle, and rebec), the arrangements largely serve only to beef up what Newsom is playing. I realize that this is the whole purpose of accompaniment, but it often has the unintended effect of softening Newsom’s edges and making the songs seem less intimate. While Van Dyke Parks’ work on Ys was quite polarizing and viewed by some as too intrusive, I personally loved it and thought it was essential, unpredictable, and an appropriately quirky and elevating foil for Newsom’s odd songs. No one will claim that the accompaniment on Have One On Me is intrusive, but it does not achieve much more than adding density and subtle color.
My other main issue with the album is, quite unexpectedly, Joanna’s singing. From a musicianship and melody-writing standpoint, her vocals have probably never been better. Unfortunately, I do not love Joanna Newsom for her ability to hit, sustain, and flow effortlessly between notes, I love her for her oft-brilliant lyrics and her idiosyncratic passion. The increased emphasis on actual singing comes at the expense of enunciation and greatly downplays the role of her words. Also, her characteristic tendency to yelp and squawk like a feral kitten or precocious child is now largely absent. While it was admittedly an acquired taste, her wild, raw vocals played a crucial role in the blunt emotional power of early classics like “Peach, Plumb, Pear” and “Cosmia.” This new batch of songs sounds very assured, nuanced, and pleasant, but simply does not pack the wallop of Newsom’s alternately fragile and cathartic past work.
That said, Have One On Me is a still very good album. I wanted it to be a brilliant one though. There are some great songs and excellent lyrics, but there is a real and tragic dearth of gut-level emotional power. Fortunately, there is no indication that a creative downslide has begun in any way (though the unfortunate spectre of “maturity” may have crept into the picture a bit). Instead, Newsom is merely experiencing the inevitable growing pains of trying to evolve upon near-perfection without repeating herself.