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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Charlemagne Palestine's monolithic 71 minute organ riff is a sensual, pleasure inducing drone. The crisply sparkling sonority creates a sense of drift, a foreword carrying motion propelled by colliding tones. Buoyed by slow changes that create illusions of movement, the experience of listening to Schlingen-Blangen is one of floating between parallel worlds of harmony and noise.
Schlingen-Blangen evolved out of a number of events Charlemagne held in L.A. in 1970 and ’71 that he called “Meditative Sound Environments.” In these performances he would sustain a chord on an organ in a Unitarian church by inserting pieces of cardboard between the keys and letting it play all night, adjusting the stops here and there to make only slight changes. In this recording, dated from 1988 and made in the church of a small Dutch village called Farmsum Delftzijl on the North Sea, the same approach is used. An initial chord and its timbre was chosen and then left to sing for the duration of the recording.
If this was the kind of organ music played during church I might be persuaded to attend. There is a sacred feel to it and it has certainly done more for my spiritual well being than most sermons ever have. While meditative, it isn’t exactly calm, though it has a calming effect. It demands attention and gets it by pushing aside the chattering thoughts of the trivial everyday mind. While it does change, it makes an impression of constancy because Charlemagne never gives the organ a chance to breathe. The organ is continually exhaling a propulsive blast of oscillating timbre, filling up space, seeping into everything. It starts abruptly and ends abruptly. In between there is a quick arc of sinuous consonance, meted by an ennervating discord, and finally, release. The raw physicality of the work stimulates the senses of the body while the mind trying to probe it intellectually remains embroiled in paradox; these are the twin joys of the piece.
One of the first images I remember associating with Coil is the sticker that asked, "When you listen to Coil do you think of music?" After listening to Gold is the Metal many times, my answer remains a strong "no." In a discography filled with bizarre and bewildering recordings, this collection of odds and ends still stands out as one of Coil's most difficult and oblique.
I don't think I've ever been more confused or disappointed by Coil than when I first heard "The Broken Wheel." After hearing the original on a mix tape, I was expecting to get more of the driving rhythms and blaring sound effects that characterized the original, but what I heard instead was a perverse and playful recreation that annihilated both and made good on the title's promise. Where I wanted a steady beat, I got a number of false starts and where I hoped there would be layers of sound, there was only fragmented portions of melody and miscellaneous noise. I was even more put off by the absence of John Balance's voice, which is replaced by a comically exaggerated exchange between two very eager and unusual lovers. After falling in love with the songs on Horse Rotorvator, all of Gold is the Metal came as a great shock. And ten years after hearing it for the first time, I'm still a little confounded by its twists and turns. It helps to keep in mind that the record is a reflection of Coil's cutting room floor: unused loops, awkward allusions, failed variations, and sketches make up most of its content. The rest is filled by unused songs that were intended for some record or another or simply forgotten amid the chaos of samples and demos that John and Peter left in their wake. Not every song is a success, nor is every experiment all that interesting, but Gold is the Metal does yield several pleasures, not the least of which is the aforementioned version of "The Wheel."
Besides defying expectations and obliterating conventions, with Gold is the Metal Coil provides plenty of insight into how they wrote and produced their music. Samples used in both "The Anal Staircase" and "Penetralia" appear on songs that are otherwise unrelated to either, and ideas eventually fleshed out on "Ravenous" and "Slur" make an appearance only to be swallowed up in unexpected tangents and unfamiliar noise. "Cardinal Points" features a string arrangement by Bill McGee intended for Clive Barker's Hellraiser. On its own it is a complete and gorgeous slice of orchestral soundtrack work, but there are enough similarities between it and "Ostia (The Death of Pasolini)" or even "Chaostrophy" that I'm inclined to think of it as a precursor or distant cousin to those songs. Throughout the record there are familiar references and unmistakable semblances that call to mind a multitude of their other recordings. That networking quality has the added effect of deepening and exaggerating Coil's already daunting and seemingly bottomless discography. Some of these recordings are probably just early versions of other songs in disguise and it is likely that even more unreleased versions of the same thing exist somewhere. There are also several original and unfamiliar songs tucked away among the familiar. A couple point backwards toward Scatology, like the absolutely stellar "For Us They Will." Others point in the direction of Love's Secret Domain by way of The Dark Age of Love, like "Aqua Regalia" and "Paradisiac."
These mixes are a good reminder that Coil's acid-soaked follow-up to Horse Rotorvator was originally a kind of sequel to that album, with big Fairlight horn sections and apocalyptic gusts of noise. How it transformed into Coil's "dance" record is all the more mystifying after listening to Gold is the Metal. With blatant bouts of nonsense and fun-house melodies vying for center stage, it is a small miracle that portions of the record actually sound continuous or work together at all. In general, the transitions and changes in style from song to song are quite severe and highlight that this is just a collection of outtakes. By casting their net so wide, Coil broke up their already damaged record into even more unnatural shapes, which sometimes causes me to question the integrity of the entire project. I can understand wanting to collect unreleased songs in one place, but each of the Unnatural History releases is more cohesive than this is and they compile music that spans decades too.
That has always been my biggest complaint about Gold is the Metal: unlike most B-side and remix compilations, it includes a lot of warts and unfinished sketches, which can make the whole thing sound like a sketch instead of a complete or finished statement. None of their later records, not even collections like Stolen and Contaminated Songs, are as dense and inscrutable as this. The liner notes to the CD version of the album include a proclamation describing some of the songs as "disappointments" and "discarded shards." If that's truly the case, I have to wonder why such failures were included at all. Demos and outlines might interest dedicated fans and close listeners, but for everyone else they're distracting and only serve to muddy already dark waters. The CD pressings also intensify the disorder by mangling the last three songs on the album. Two extra songs are added, one from The Unreleased Themes for Hellraiser and the other from either of the 7" singles for "Keelhauler" or "The Wheel." Both manage to fit in with the rest of the misfits (if only because nearly anything would fit if one pushed hard enough), but neither are indexed correctly. Thanks to this goof up "The First Five Minutes After Violent Death" also starts at the wrong time. Without reference to Coil's website or to the original LP, one might be left wondering why two completely different sounding songs are squished together on one track.
Typically, such mistakes and inconsistencies would be enough to frustrate me into submission, but I find myself returning to Gold is the Metal now and again. This is due in part to the album's fractured gems and genuinely enjoyable failures (the insertion of "Greensleeves" into "...Of Free Enterprise" and "Aqua Regalia" comes immediately to mind), and in part to its proximity to Scatology, Horse Rotorvator, and Love's Secret Domain. It both shines a light on the best albums from Coil's first decade and manifests some of the spirit inherent in each of them. For that reason, Gold is the Metal can't help but be appealing to a Coil fan. But with so many playful passages and intentional mistakes writhing about on the same record, it also can't help but be one of the most idiosyncratic and trying records in my or anyone else's collection.
This has always been a hard record for me to understand. It's not a typical long-playing album but it feels like more than just a collection of four singles. The botched track listing on my CD didn't help matters. As a product of remix culture, it's a far-reaching experiment that runs the gamut from funky breaks to outright noise.
Storm the Studio was released on the cusp of the DJ record/remix fetish of the 1990s. By the early '90s it wasn't unusual to see maxi-singles with seven or eight mostly superfluous remixes of the same song cluttering up record bins. Every once in a while an act came along that brought together an interesting group of remix collaborators, but for the most part the remix boom was just an excuse to repackage the 7-inch edit and the 7-inch radio edit and the 12-inch instrumental of the same song for completists. Even though Storm the Studio only has four songs listed on the sleeve, it's about as far from a remix 12" as possible, and that's one of the reasons that the record is so enigmatic. There's a thread that ties "God O.D." parts 1-4 together, but taken out of context, the end of part 4 is completely unrecognizable as a descendent of part 1. And so it goes with "Re-Animator"—part 1 is the funky club track with vocals and by part 4, we're into psychedelic dub territory with a half-time rhythm layers of tape noise, reverberating voices, and feedback. Sometimes a bass line or a sample repeats, other times, it doesn't. Most of the record works through free association to connect the dots.
"Strap Down" (the only song on the record to feature less than four parts) starts off with machine gun drums and looped insanity that sounds like a marching band fighting with a circus over a break beat. A few minutes of bass bursts, "Danger" samples, the words "strap down," and rhythm changes later and the song gives way to part 2 that is an entirely different animal. At seven minutes, the breakneck pace of "Strap Down part 2" is a bit of an endurance challenge, but the song never gets boring. In fact, it kind of turns into a third song at the six minute mark with the apt promise of "annihilating rhythm." That break is all a part of "Strap Down part 2," however on my vinyl copy of the album, there are three tracks for "Strap Down," a fact that is corroborated with the remastered reissue. It's understandable that I've been lost all these years. "Strap Down part 3"? That's a song I've just discovered, and just heard for the first time even though I've been listening to Storm the Studio for two decades!
To confuse things further, half of the "I Got the Fear" parts repeat the words "Re-Animator" or "reanimate," turning the record into a kind of mobius strip of samples and themes. If Jack Dangers isn't literally sampling himself here, he is quite figuratively doing it by recycling his own ideas from one track to the next without any regard for which sounds or ideas belong to which songs. I think that this is why this record never made sense to me. It can't be approached as a traditional album or as pair of singles. The track titles seem intentionally misleading and sometimes we have to take the composer's word for the fact that the parts are related at all. In retrospect, it feels very much like a deconstruction of the DJ culture, but it predates a lot of that nonsense so that explanation doesn't really fit. Besides, Meat Beat released a remix disc in 1991 cheekily titled Version Galore.
One possible explanation for all of this is that the boys in the band were just having a laugh. Some artists call every piece of work they produce "Untitled," so why not give the tracks names that don't signify anything? If these were just straightforward pop songs, all of that ambiguity would come off like New Order, but because the album is constantly folding in on itself from different directions, somehow getting lost in it makes a certain amount of sense. It doesn't help a DJ to remember which cut to play, but maybe that is even part of the charm—part of the point. More long-lost versions of "I Got the Fear" and "Re-Animator" showed up on later releases (Original Fire and the Brainwaves compilation respectively,) so whatever was going on, it's clear that the basic foundation of Storm the Studio was fertile ground. With its disparate styles and memorable lead ins, Storm the Studio is the perfect DJ tool except for the fact that it's almost impossible to know what the record is going to sound like wherever you drop the needle. I love that this record takes so many strange turns, even if I've never known quite how to navigate through them.
Ida is a perfect example of pop music in its finest form. At the heartof the group are three multi-talented singer/songwriters, who, whentogether make some of the most beautiful harmonies and memorable songs. Polyvinyl
Since 2002's The Braille Night, the main members of Ida havefollowed numerous pursuits: Dan has recorded with wife and Ida partnerElizabeth Mitchell as Nanang Tatang, with close friend Tara Jane O'Neiland solo; Elizabeth has made significant waves and a bunch ofpint-sized fans with her children's recordings; and Karla has squeezeda few releases out as K. The trio regrouped from 2003-2004 (this timewithout drummer and brother Miggy) to record this album and while Ihave enjoyed their extracurricular endeavors, nothing compares to thethree-part harmonies and collaborative songcraft they exhibit togetheras Ida.
Months after hearing this record for the first time and seeing themlive in one of the most fantastic settings, I'm finding myselfcontinuously coming back to the music (consider that the true strength of an album). Songs like Dan's high registerprettiness in "The Morning" is the formula many fans would probablyagree make for some of Ida's most memorable tunes, like "Beast of theBelated" from the Losing True EP. Karla's heart-aching honesty on songs"What Can I Do," and "Honeyslide" echo the beauty and pain of KarenCarpenter, while the full-voiced three-part harmonies on "599," andmore subdued melodies on the album's opener and closer "Laurel Blues,"and "Forgive" are pure bliss. With the absence of drummer Miggy, it'snot surprising that a number of the tracks are left without drums butwith the new lineup—which features a new drummer/percussionist andviolinist—the live show has plenty of beat, variety, and 'tude fromsong to song.
Ida have never been gimmicky or trendy, and that can be seen as botha benefit and a curse as they'll probably never win the revolving doorof vicious young critics in the independent music world nor therecognition from mainstream pop, but their fans are solid and won'tever seem to outgrow the band.
With their live shows, Mouse On Mars defy any and all accusations andprejudiced expectations of electronic music in performance. However, asa musical token, this live collection is more of a "greatest hitsrevisited" than an essential live archive.
What makes Mouse On Mars so unique and brilliant live is their usage oflive instrumentation in the electronic music frame. Live drums andvocals are provided by Dodo, set between the banks of keyboards andsequencers of Jan and Andi, with Andi taking up bass guitar a largeportion of the time. Often with video projections displayed behindthem, they make their set a true show: something to be expected fromgoing to see a conventional live band as opposed to somebody simplystaring at a computer screen. All their live highlights are captured onLive 04, with hits like "DiskDusk," and "Actionist Respoke,"which can always get a crowd electrified and moving alongside classicoldies like "Frosch," which echo the days of (relevant) Orbital, to thebrilliant tracks "Mine Is Yours," and "Wipe That Sound" from lastyear's Radical Connector.
The recordings are meticulously produced, using the best qualitycontrol to get the right balance of the various sounds that all go intoa live Mouse On Mars set. The disc is compiled from different shows andstrung together as a full live recording, but it's honestly nosubstitute for actually being there. I can't stress enough that a MouseOn Mars show needs to be experienced in person for every current (andpotential) fan of the band. I'll conceed that having this document ishelpful for the group to sell in person when people always wander overto the merch table afterwards and want to take a memory of the showhome with them, but on its own, while I love Mouse On Mars live, and love these songs, I prefer the original studiorecordings.
This CD/DVD set of Henry Jacobs'work has a lot to offer for anyone who decides to crack it openand spend a few hours exploring. The CD does amarvelous job of illustrating the breadth and variety of Jacobs' soundart, contained in 39 digestible little nuggets while the included DVD is also a fantastichistorical artifact, collecting all three episodes of a surrealtelevision show assembled in a free-associative manner.
Henry Jacobs was part of an explosively creative confluence of artistsand cultural pioneers that also included Ken Nordine, Alan Watts, LennyBruce and Allen Ginsburg, among others. This was San Francisco of the1950s and '60s, and Henry Jacobs was an avid sound recordist and musicalimproviser, and was in a unique position to document this scene. Jacobsalso hosted several radio shows, curated a number of experimentallabels releasing musique concrete records, and expanded his archive ofhis own sound art, field recordings, ethnic music loops and bizarrecomedy skits. This CD is drawn partially from Henry Jacobs' pastreleases (some of which have resurfaced on the Locust Music label), butlargely from a considerable stash of reel-to-reel tapes and 45sdiscovered hidden beneath a Mill Valley house a few years ago. The Wide Weird World of Henry Jacobs CDis a 54-minute journey through Jacobs' archive, selected and edited byJack Dangers, who is reportedly a big Henry Jacobs fan. This fantasticarchival package from Important Records also includes a DVD containingall three episodes of The Fine Art of Goofing Off, an experimental animated program that aired on San Francisco public television in 1972.
The CD serves two purposes, it seems. The first is for people who havenever heard the work of Henry Jacobs. The disc is brilliantlysequenced and never boring, cycling through a kaleidescopic array ofsound bites that are alternately funny, charmingly nostalgic, bizarre,psychedelic or inexplicable. From the odd verbal tennis of Jacobs andKen "Word Jazz" Nordine on tracks like "Cigarette Yoga," to asoft-spoken public radio DJ introducing the listening audience to the"new sounds of musique concrete," to the spooky psychedelic brainshivers of "Telephone Therapy," or the numerous excerpted bits of thewacky "Laughing String" sketch, listeners unfamiliar with Jacobs' workare in for a treat. Unlike more familiar works of tape collage fromthis period, Jacobs in unconcerned with formalism or overworking hissources too much. Instead, he seems to favor a more free-form approach,with an ear tuned towards less academic pursuits, and a musicalsensibility that seems to have been informed by exotica and cartoonsoundtracks, the radio landscape and early television. Because Jacobsexperienced the tail end of the beatnik movement, which quicklytransformed into proto-psychedelia, many of the sketches feel dated,satirizing then-current beatnik, mod and hipster cliches. That's alsopart of what makes the album feel charmingly analog and retro, notunlike the experience of listening to classic Firesign Theatre LPs, andoften just as hilarious.
The second purpose this CD serves is for Henry Jacobs enthusiasts,who will delight in hearing never-before-released recordings from thesame time period of his best work. Though this CD unquestionably fillsa void for new material from Jacobs, it also creates a lot ofquestions. Like, for instance, what happened to the rest of thematerial in that reportedly huge archive of tapes and LPs? Though itsgreat to hear this record, and the editing and sequencing arewonderful, I can't help but be really curious about what was left onthe cutting room floor. I suppose what we as listeners get from The Wide Weird Worldis not truly archival, but rather a highly subjective trip throughJacobs' discarded tape library. And while this doesn't reflectnegatively in any way on the people who put this collection together,I'd really like to hear the rest of the material, too. Releases likethis make me wish that the full, unexpurgated tapes will one day bereleased; I'd imagine that the entire library could fit on a couple ofDVDs, using the MP3 format.
Putting concerns like this aside, Wide Weird World is a greatset, and a great value as well. The TV programs on the included DVD were produced by Henry Jacobs,animator Bob McClay and producer Chris Koch. Strange audio cues ofvarious interviews and spoken-word bits set different primitiveanimations into motion, using a stream-of-consciousness editing styleto meditate, albeit very abstractly, on the subject of leisure andleisurely activities. Stop-motion claymation, experimental filmtechniques, Terry Gilliam-style cutouts, subliminal imagejuxtapositions and psychedelic animations complement an eclecticsoundtrack of music, jarring sound effects, and a series of narratorsruminating on leisure, delivering anecdotes and reading from funny"social engineering" pamphlets. It's undeniably reminiscent of earlyepisodes of Sesame Street in its attempt to marry the surreal andpsychedelic to family-friendly, educational programming. However, ittakes this concept several steps further out than Sesame Street or mosttelevision shows ever would or could, making it a very interestingshort-lived exploration of the more esoteric potentialities of themedium. I also have a feeling that the guys in Boards of Canada wouldreally cream their pants over these programs, as they share the oddlynostalgic patina and whimsicality of the '70s public educational filmworks that the duo adores so much.
Although the members of XXL insist that the project be considered a new band, and not a one-offcollaboration, I can't help but suspect that this might be the onlytime XXL will be heard from. This brief album, though strong musically, feelslike the product of a specific place and time, inexorably tied to thefortnight of drinking, reveling and recording during which it wasproduced.
When James Stewart and Carolee McElroy make music together, they arecalled Xiu Xiu. When Fabrizio Palumbo, Marco Schiavo, Paolo Dellapianaand Roberto Clemente make music together, they are called Larsen. Whenall six of these musicians get together, they are known as XXL.
When a collaborative album between Xiu Xiu and Larsen was firstannounced, I thought it sounded like a very strange idea. I was a fanof both bands, but they existed in completely different mentalcategories for me. For me, Xiu Xiu represents a chillingly damageddistillation of emo and goth taken to its logical conclusion:aggravated, percussive, gamelan primitivism with the painfully emotive,embarassingly close-to-the-bone vocals of Jamie Stewart erupting fromits wounded, distorted core. Xiu Xiu is prickly and repellant, andoften laughably overwrought, but for those who cared to look closer,the music was frequently capable of a delicate human beauty andsincerity rarely glimpsed in underground music. In stark contrast,Larsen represented all that was shadowy and European, a band nowinfamous for the story of the way in which they recruited M. Gira toproduce their debut album. Larsen is made up of technically proficient,accomplished musicians with a conversant musical vocabulary,assimilating the history of Italian instrumental rock from Morricone toGoblin, adding a sense of gloom and bombast borrowed from Swans and MyBloody Valentine, and gluing it all together with a dynamic sense ofgroup amalgamation that recalls the best work of Tortoise. How in theworld could these two bands, so entirely different in their respectiveapproaches, ever see eye-to-eye long enough to record a coherent album?
Ciautistico answers that question, featuring ninecompositions that connect the dots between the XX and the L sides ofthe equation, highlighting the common ground that was always there, andcreating unique new alloys out of seemingly irreconcilable differences.The weird thing about Ciautistico is that it sounds almostexactly how I might have expected a collaboration between Xiu Xiu andLarsen to sound, if I'd actually thought about it instead of gettingcaught up in what a bizarre idea it was. Imagine if those sparserpassages in many Xiu Xiu songs—the ones where only the odd gamelancrash, xylophone note or errant tortured whisper can be heard in themidst of awkward silence—were suddenly filled in with lush guitars,melodic keyboards and precise drumming. That's what XXL sounds like.Imagine if one of the meatier Larsen songs suddenly had anall-too-human presence at its center, a raging man-child intent onspilling his guts in the most straightforwardly cryptic way possible.That's what XXL sounds like. Imagine if all of this emotive intensityand compositional pomp were broken up with moments of unexpectedlevity, or a cover of an Adam and the Ants song. That's also what XXLsounds like.
As any fan of Xiu Xiu must necessarily be, I am a bit of amasochist. However, for those who don't usually wish to subjectthemselves to Xiu Xiu's willfully difficult music, Ciautisticomay be an easy entry into James Stewart's world. A song like theopening track "Paw Paw" radiates with all of the usual pain anddelicacy of a Xiu Xiu track, but the members of Larsen help to flesh itout and turn it into an eminently listenable rock song, unlocking thehidden pop hook that lies at the heart of many of Xiu Xiu's bestcompositions. After listening to this, go back and listen to "Suha" or"Support Our Troops" and see if it doesn't suddenly make a lot moresense. "Minne Mouseistic" is something else completely, a sparse trackwith creepy drones, disembodied sound effects and random snatches ofmelody, none of which ever coalesce into a real song, just a bunch offragments left to litter the album like crumpled up poems littering thebottom of a dusty old drawer. Ditto for "Ciao Ciautistico," adeliciously resonant techno beat decorated with gamelan chimes thatdisappears before it can go anywhere, and is all the more enticing forits frustrating brevity. "(Pokey I'm Your) Gnocchi" highlights an areaof mutual interest between XX and L—namely, the fact that they bothare big fans of M. Gira and Swans, and it shows here more than anywhereelse on the album. "Distorted Duck" sounds like a typical Larsencomposition until halfway through, when a digital mallard quacks,fragmenting the track into something wholly other, music that is atonce majestic and ridiculous. XXL's cover of Adam and the Ants'excellent "Prince Charming" is truly something to behold, J.S. and theband capturing the essential absurdity of the original, but slicingthrough to discover something vicious and pathetic at its center.
Foran album recorded so quickly, under such ephemeral circumstances, Ciautistico contains a surprising amount of ideas and innovation, and each band seems stronger and more versatile because of its existence.
I have long had a theory that cold and miserable climates produce the best art and music, but the Canadian underground (aside from Skinny Puppy) has never played a serious role in my record collection. Nevertheless, there is a small but flourishing scene of people there making appropriately hostile and abrasive music, and this debut release from the fledgling Prairie Fire Tapes label is an ear-shredding first step towards making the rest of the world notice it.
The two artists on this split cassette both traffic in post-Merzbow white noise sculpting, but they somehow manage to sound wildly different. Chris Jacques’ White Dog project fills the first side with “Samsara,” which sounds like a slow-motion earthquake. The piece is built upon a deep subterranean rumble, but Jacques slowly engulfs the low roar with wave after wave of static. The washes are quite muted though, creating an atmosphere of barely stifled turbulence. It is a restrained piece, but an effective one, though it seems like some of its power may have been lost in the transition from performance to cassette. I expect that when it is experienced at an appropriate volume in a live setting, the shuddering low end would be a transcendently engulfing and innard-rattling force.
The second half of this 32-minute tape belongs to Cole Peters' Gomeisa, a performance that the tape’s description promises to be “as subtle as a car bombing at a pre-school.” While perhaps unnecessarily colorful, it is an apt characterization. “Blood Letting” begins with a thick electronic buzz, before quickly imploding into a deafening roar of harsh static chaos periodically punctuated by squawks of piercing feedback. This won’t be unfamiliar territory to anyone that has heard Venereology, but it is impressively, viscerally violent. Peters harnesses the brutal cascade quite skillfully throughout, pausing periodically for brief teasing oases of calm amidst the menacing maelstrom of ugliness. While seemingly a small thing, it is precisely such an understanding of dynamics that separates vibrant noise works from boring ones. "Blood Letting" is not one of the boring ones.
As far as noise tapes go, this is quite a satisfying one. Neither White Dog nor Gomeisa stray very far from already heavily covered stylistic ground, but both artists set about their work in a very focused and bluntly powerful way. Trends come and go, but sheer crushing force will always be able to find a receptive audience somehow. Heaviness has an undeniable and timeless appeal.
(Note- despite my best remastering efforts, the mp3 samples below sound much murkier than the actual tape.)
The late Fela Kuti was such a larger-than-life cultural supernova that it is very easy to forget that a host of other excellent Afrobeat bands spawned in his wake. Of course, the comparative obscurity cloaking the rest of that scene was also not helped by the fact that virtually none of Nigeria’s other hot bands from that period ever had their albums released outside of their native country (or even reissued once the boom had ended). On this, the fourth installment of Soundway’s Nigeria Special series, indefatigable curator Miles Claret sets out to redress that injustice (and assemble another great album in the process).
Of course, a completely Fela-free Afrobeat compilation would be both impossible and undesirable, so this album appropriately kicks off with the single version of his “Who’re You?” from 1971. While a different incarnation appears on Fela’s London Scene, this is the first ever reissue of the original 45 version. It is far from my favorite Fela track, but it is a rare and somewhat seminal one and has the added important distinction of being under nine minutes long. That relative brevity was an early casualty in Kuti’s career, as his brilliance was always tempered by a tendency towards wildly bloated, self-indulgent vamps that were often two (or even three) times as long.
Thankfully, none of the artists included embraced that trait (aside from perhaps Eric Showboy Akaeze). That said, tightly structured songs were clearly still pretty anathema to the whole Afrobeat aesthetic—all of the tracks here are essentially built upon a single complex, polyrhythmic groove with intermittent soloing. The vocals (while spirited) are largely inconsequential to the success of the songs, as it is the groove that is king. From this perspective, the album’s clear highlight is “Mind Your Business” by Saxon Lee and The Shadows International, who exhibit a cool restraint lacking in many of their peers. The components of the song are pretty skeletal, but the simple organ figure and minimal beat flow beautifully and insistently. Lee and his band get just about everything else right too, as the organ and brass solos are great throughout. The following track (by Bongos Ikwue and The Groovies) is also pretty spectacular, as its funky guitars and exuberant lurching drums provide an infectious bed for the song’s catchy call-and-response vocals. The percussion gets quite wild and adventurous at times too.
Of course, no compilation is flawless and Nigeria Afrobeat Special is no exception. There are a handful of songs that are over-cluttered or a bit heavy-handed with the drums and brass arrangements, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Aside from the two standouts mentioned above (which occur early on), the album only grows stronger as it progresses (bolstered by excellent work by Segun Bucknor’s Revolution and Fela’s chief rival, Orlando Julius). The successes are largely the bands that realized that there was no way to better Fela (and his inimitable drummer Tony Allen) at their own game and that their best bet was to bring something new to the table. That “something new” varies a lot here, as these bands all strove to find ingenious solutions to the same problem. The Afrobeat formula is twisted in many interesting ways here, ranging from “more song-like” to “swaggeringly jazzy” to simply “just more laid back.” That variety certainly enhances the album’s listenability. Nigeria Afrobeat Special succeeds admirably in its objective of providing a much-needed overview of an especially vibrant and fertile stage in African music evolution, but it is (equally importantly) a strong album scattered with a handful of should-be classics. (This album is also available as a triple-LP, featuring five bonus tracks not covered here)
20 years ago I got my first taste of Meat Beat Manifesto in the form of Armed Audio Warfare. In the early 1990s, I knew DJs and collectors who had some of the early Sweatbox singles, but for most of my friends the Meat Beat odyssey began with this disc that served as the group's sort-of debut album. The history behind Armed Audio Warfare's release and subsequent reissues is full of mishaps and misspellings, track-listing gaffs and questions about what might have been. Now, 20 years later, I'm going back over the MBM discography to remember why it worked so well for me back in the day, and how it holds up now.
Armed Audio Warfare starts with a stomper in "Genocide" that never felt too out of place in any good industrial dance DJ set circa 1990. It is a menacing, straight ahead rhythm, nearly frantic shouted vocals and a noisy gated hook that's catchy but far from melodic. If "Genocide" is a little funkier than the work of Meat Beat's US label mates at the time, it still manages to groove in that stiff way that most WaxTrax! records grooved. But hidden within that four-on-the-floor stop are hints of something else—a backbeat, a kind of swing that the album picks up in "Repulsion" and gives itself over to completely by the time "Reanimator" rolls around.
Sampled and looped grooves were nothing new in 1990, but something about the way that Meat Beat Manifesto gleefully re-sourced and abused sounds from a hodgepodge of pop culture sources was unique. The Bomb Squad's production on Public Enemy's 1988 record It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back took sampling on a hip hop record to places where it hadn't gone before; The Dust Brothers produced a sampladelic masterpiece for the Beastie Boys with Paul's Boutique and Pop Will Eat Itself were mining cartoons, commercials, and funk 45's for This is the Day... This is the Hour... This is This! in 1989. Even as MBM's contemporaries were turning the sampler into an instrument of unparalleled flexibility, Armed Audio Warfare anticipated the capabilities of the sampler and the engineer in the studio to twist, distort, and recycle not only sounds but also ideas on a record. This was the hip hop aesthetic in the hands of true collage artists—a strange and infectious combination of experimental technique and self-aware groove.
One of the things that I find most striking about Armed Audio Warfare so many years after its original release is the amount of dissonance and noise that carries on across the record. This no-doubt helped to ingratiate the album with fans of heavier dance music at the time, but most of these tracks are even too abrasive to actually work in a club. Still, each song's hook is essentially a break beat, and therein lies one of the great mysteries to how a record like this ever came to be. It sounds at times like dance music for people who aren't at all interested in actually dancing, or like sound collage for people who aren't at all interested in the fussy world of academic listening. The album features record scratches, Flavor Flav samples, absurd vocal loops, self-referential shout-outs, and the kind of clever connective tissue that later Meat Beat records would use to make albums flow as something more than just collections of singles.
I never picked up the Mute or :/Run reissues as I always just preferred my original WaxTrax! CD and 12", warts and all. In 1990, I wasn't quite ready forArmed Audio Warfare—not ready to understand how or why it worked anyway—I just knew that I liked it.It was a record well ahead of its time, and now in the wake of digital hardcore, breakcore, and mashup culture, it seems like a clear starting point for a revolution.
Looking back, it has only been a bit over a year since the Greyfield Shrines LP, my first exposure to these guys, yet in that year I’ve heard as significant amount of development and change in their work. While that release was reminiscent of the intentionally minimalist drone of Sunn O))), subsequent work has brought in greater elements of noise, electronic music, and post-punk alternative. This LP is perhaps the ultimate culmination of that, being released by no less than four labels and featuring guest appearances from members of Bloodyminded, Nachtmystium, Yakuza, and Velnias.
The change and evolution of their sound is immediate once "Inverted Ruins" launches. The carefully controlled feedback of Andre Foisy’s bass guitar and the simple echoed stabs of Terence Hannum’s synths could be on any of their releases, but the addition of live drums from Velnias member Andrew Scherer and the distant, disgusted vocals of Bloodyminded’s Mark Solotroff push the sound closer towards rock territory, while synthesizer drones and digital noise pull it in the opposite direction. The song slogs along at the pace of stoner rock, but there’s far more noise experimentation going on for it to drift into caveman riff-heavy Sabbath territory.
The long "Procession of Ancestral Brutalism" embraces the squall of black metal, but with a distinct sound and structure that contradicts the genre’s infatuation with muffled flatulent production and cookie monster vocals. Aided by Nachtmystium’s Blake Judd on vocals and guitar, it’s not surprising that it conjures images of black metal, but the complex layering of guitars over Hannum’s almost prog-rock synth lines and Scherer’s freak out drumming, all with a cavalcade of vocal parts sounding like Mayhem and Can battling it out with neither side dominating the other.
The closing "The Columnless Arcade" features the same line-up, with the addition of Yakuza’s Bruce Lamont on saxophone. The screamed tortured vocals and rapid staccato guitar also give a metallic sheen to the proceedings, but there is a greater aridness to the track, a bit more light let in. Shades of the post-punk guitar sound that appeared on the recent 7" split with Harpoon are here as well, giving a purer tone and color than other artists are usually able to muster.
Between these longer pieces linger a few shorter, more sparse instrumental bits that are no less captivating. The sustained organ and insect saxophone of "Between Barrows" have a meditative quality that fits well between the louder, more boisterous tracks. Similarly, "Antediluvian Territory," which sits as the penultimate track, is a sparse duet of organ and guitar, which soars and rings on with a melancholy beauty that calls to mind, at least in mood, some of the best moments of the Cure’s Seventeen Seconds for some reason.
This time last year I thought these guys were doing something different in the field of drone metal, which has continued to be an overly cluttered genre, but I wasn’t sure exactly what that difference was. While I have been concerned at their prolificness over the past year, their output has never been superfluous or unnecessary. Territories stands as the full realization of the tapes, EPs, and split 7" singles that the band has issued in this time, perfectly encapsulating their dark, dystopian sound with the ideal balance of pure heaviness and pensive drone. Topping this one will be tough, but I’m thinking they will be able to do it in time.