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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Music that was made to illustrate a slide lecture on Hans Henny Jahnn's novel The Night of Lead, a tale of alienation and sado-masochism which was greeted with revulsion and largely forgotten. This is the first release under his own name by Hanno Leichtmann, though fans of his work with Static and Pole can listen without too much trepidation.
Anyone familiar with Jahnn's images of (what was then assumed to be) sexual-pathology and the broader themes of his work—such as in the trilogy, Fluss ohne Ufer, which explores the dangers of delving into the secrets of creation—may find Leichtmann's accompanying music surprisingly muted. Perhaps the idea was to create contrasting sadness and quasi-melody as, apart from one horrendously overly-poppy track, there is nothing sounding remotely offensive, repulsive or even mildly irritating. Those of us who approach the record without knowledge of the book or the slides may find that it swells with gradual and affecting motion, successfully balances chill and warm electronics, enjoying a clever ratio of space, tension, rhythm and release.
Opening track "Anfang" is briefly reprised by the final one, "Abspann," for a top-and-tailed effect that is as Elizabethan as it is suggestive of life's circularity or inevitability. I wondered if "Wind" referenced the dusty silent film or meant some cranking motion, before deciding that it really didn't affect my enjoyment one way or the other. Everything progresses in a pleasantly unfussy, lonely and downtempo manner until about 18 seconds into "Elvira" when things veer into an innocuously synthetic cul de sac of horrid blandness, almost threatening the entire introspective journey. A few minutes of silence or dental drilling would have preferable. The record's peak is "Keller" which sounds like a throbbing life-support system encased in ice, a hopeful blip heard through dark space, or a forlorn vessel pushing perilously through fog—a lighthouse winking out of view. Brilliant.
Jahnn also published 17th-century organ music and gained an international reputation as a builder and renovator of organs. The church organ can be the most dogmatic and undemocratic of instruments, so this aspect of his life is of no interest to me. Actually, since there appears to be little happening on this record, it's a slight puzzle as to why I keep playing and mostly enjoying it. Perhaps because, according to listener mood, Nuit Du Plomb is both nothing much at all, and conversely, a splendid aching sigh of a record. Certainly, a desire to both read the book, and see the lecture, has been kindled. Until then, in my slideshow: A cricketer leaves the crease. Tears are wiped away unseen. Icecaps dissolve and fall. A ship is bound for where? Cities decay. Someone gives themself away too easily. Clocks never stop. A man regrets what he did to a friend. Leaves fall and become sodden. Tea goes cold and cakes burn. Machines lose their will to go on, but go on. Ho, and indeed, hum.
Last year's Sleep England, Michael Cashmore's first solo album under his own name, eschewed the verdant soundworlds of Cashmore's previous work as Nature and Organisation in favor of austere, minimal simplicity. This new EP is somewhat of a return to form, featuring lush arrangements and guest vocals by Antony, singing lyrics written by David Tibet.
Sleep England sounded a like Michael Cashmore's version of one of those Wyndham Hill solo guitar records, a style seemingly at odds with his more familiar work in Current 93. Though his compositions for guitar and bass were still shot through with that trademark sense of melancholy beauty, and still consciously drew from the nostalgic wellspring of 1960s British psych-folk, as well as medieval and baroque composition, it was hard not to miss the lush arrangements and guest vocal turns that made Cashmore's 1990s albums as Nature and Organisation so memorable. I can remember first hearing the N&O albums after years of enjoying records by Current 93 and Death in June, and thinking that Cashmore, whether he intended to or not, had assembled the world's first (and only) Apocalyptic Folk "supergroup," tying everything together with his impressive ability to write and arrange such ravishing, evocative music. Though Sleep England was an admirable effort that I quite enjoyed, I secretly held out the hope that Cashmore would return to the style that had informed such classic works as Beauty Reaps the Blood of Solitude and A Dozen Summers Against the World. And with this EP, my wish comes true.
The Snow Abides forms an abbreviated narrative of sorts, opening with the instrumental "My Eyes Open," which serves as a gentle overture for the songs featuring Antony on vocals. The first track begins with a fragile piano figure, recalling Cashmore's unadorned piano compositions for Current 93's Soft Black Stars. Any fears that this EP might share that album's instrumental minimalism quickly fade, however, as a gorgeous swell of strings joins the piano's melancholic refrain. It is a relatively small arrangement, a scaled-back chamber orchestra of sorts, but it sounds resplendent in comparison to the spartan quality of Sleep England.
The title track follows, with Antony's vocals over Cashmore's impressionistic piano melodies. David Tibet's text is perhaps a bit too dense for Antony's vocal talents, which are often better served with simpler phrases and greater structure, but Antony still does an admirable job with an elaborate and meandering lyric. Antony sings: "Royal black and blue/I am not lost (yet little stars)/In the doorway I catch a sign (shuddering still)/No, there is too much, there is too much," the parenthetical phrases representing moments when the vocal is attenuated and moved to the background, or to one side of the stereo channels. At other times, Antony's voice is multitracked for emphasis. This creates an interesting sense of spatial depth on the EP, though I can't help but feel that the vocals are much too prominent in the mix, often drowning out the music.
Such minor quibbles aside, the songs here are somber elegiac, and thus hard to "enjoy" in a traditional sense. However, a sense of beauty and poetry pervades the EP. It is hard not be touched by "How God Moved at Twilight," an evocation of the simple Christian piety and longing of childhood, which threatens to be eclipsed by intervening years of wandering and disillusionment. Cashmore's arrangements on this track are particularly strong, alternating moments of bare piano melody with bursts of lush symphonic catharsis, including flutes and clarinets. "Your Eyes Close" answers the first track with Antony's final vocal on a particularly emotional lyric by Tibet, using images of sleep and wakefulness as symbols for vivification and mortification: "You close your eyes and I die/Whilst others in sleep follow lambs/I look at my hands and count the sun making another scar across my sky."
The EP's final track, "Snow No Longer," musically figures an emotional thaw, with piano tones left to resonate and echo, emphasizing the distance and loneliness of mankind's estrangement from divinity. Finally, in a brief footnote recalling the most spine-chilling moments of classic Apocalyptic Folk, the song fades out in an atmospheric tangle of decaying sound, punctuating by the pristine chime of a single bell. It is a perfect way to conclude an all-too-brief EP that nonetheless manages to communicate a profound spiritual longing through Cashmore's disarming, plaintive melodies.
The full band gets a side, and then each member gets a side, lonely style on this double LP. Considering the plain black sleeve, anonymity seems to be an intrinsic principle. For the sake of functionality, I’ll assume the order of artists listed on the accompanying sticker is also the order of which they appear on the sides: Wolf Eyes, Failing Lights (Mike Connelly), Spykes (John Olsen), and Nate Young (errr, Nate Young).
Wolf Eyes kick things off with the bleating of toads from hell. These bursts of sounds gradually change tone from organic to industrial. Occasional whistles break the monotony and a repeating clicking is the only constant. Utterly non-musical, its like watching random sound objects go by on a conveyer belt.
Failing Lights ups the intensity ante a bit. Loud elongated screeches seesaw back and forth in hurdy-gurdy-like fashion producing something close to, gasp, a melody. The timbres are richer. Factory furnace rumbles join the fray, and slowly all the elements are muffled and strangled away. Screeches become distant moans and so she fades. It is by far my favorite side. Spykes disappoints with a forgettable vacuum hum which gradually gets more high pitched. Organ notes leak through the static and everything cuts out to just lo-fi mic clatter and low freq farts. I yearned for some horns.Nate Young closes the show: metallic banging with demonic voices in the far distance. Shimmering cymbals serge through. Shronky horns appear (so perhaps this is Olsen’s side) while chains and buckets complete the picnic.
Dicking around seems to be the extend of the accomplishment here. I thought Burned Mind was a brilliant song cycle which will some day be used as evidence that noise is, in fact, music. The band has also proved themselves worthy countless times over with numerous horror/shiver/headache inducing noise-bomb-scum-jazz-post-dub-what-the-fuck-ever tapes and CD-Rs. Little of that subversive genius is on display here. I was expecting more from a double LP picture disc.
Making Buddha Machines instantly redundant, this 30-second endless cassette loop by Demons creates a space that the listener gets to color in for themselves. Nate Young (Wolf Eyes) and Steve Kenney make the repetition of this brief loop more involving and entertaining than most drone/noise acts full-length releases.
Wander around inside these 30 seconds, the depth of the sound making if seem so much longer, this cassette begins to feel like it’s an hour long piece, not a brief loop. The splutters of synth and tape collage squelch sound like they were hauled through bubbling bath scum before being slapped onto tape. Return of Eternal Void, Fear of Infinite Life feels like its constantly extending, the several split second edits/gaps make it difficult to tell where the loop ends or begins. These points also help to pin down the locked groove aspect of the cassette, building a rhythm from the highs and lows. Maybe this is the final proof I need that my short term memory is utterly shot to shit, or that this piece of heavy tar, extra-terrestrial ousting has a reach far beyond its brief content.
Originally a drummer, Günter Müller continues his exploration of the instrument's inherent resonant properties in five compositions based on processed recordings of bowed cymbals. «Reframed» achieves a sense of timelessness, placing the listener deep within hovering layers of shimmering sound. Recorded July 2006. Processed and assembled August–December 2006.
Günter Müller was born in München in 1954, and has lived in Switzerland since 1966. Müller has been playing a unique drum set with a mobile pick-ups and a microphone system of his own invention since 1981. The system allows hand generated sounds on drums and percussion to be modulated electronically. Since 1998 minidiscs, later an ipod, are included in his electronic set. He performs solo and has collaborated with a large number of musicians, including Jim O'Rourke, Christian Marclay, Butch Morris, Otomo Yoshihide, Taku Sugimoto, Keith Rowe and Sachiko M. In 1990, he founded the record label For 4 Ears Records.
Seven compositions for analogue synthesizer, percussion, short wave radio, and location recordings made in Croatia, Egypt, Japan, Lebanon and Switzerland. Composed 2005–2006.
Jason Kahn is a sound and visual artist based in Zürich. His work includes drawing, sound installation, performance and composition. He was born in New York, grew up in Los Angeles and relocated to Europe in 1990. Kahn has been exhibiting his sound and visual works since the late 1990's, and has had solo and group exhibitions internationally, including museums, galleries and arts spaces in the USA, Canada, France, Croatia, Germany, Argentina, Egypt, Poland, Switzerland, Denmark, Austria and Spain. Kahn has performed both solo and in collaboration with numerous other musicians, including Tetuzi Akiyama, Kim Cascone, Dieb13, Arnold Dreyblatt, Kevin Drumm, Erik M, John Hudak, Brandon Labelle, Jason Lescalleet, Christian Marclay, Norbert Möslang, David Moss, Günter Müller, Jon Mueller, Toshimaru Nakamura, Sachiko M, Sainkho Namtchylak, Evan Parker, Steve Roden, Taku Sugimoto, Otomo Yoshihide and many others.
The Sea and Cake are back! Thrill Jockey is proud to release Everybody, the band's seventh album and first full-length release in over four years. The record, available nationwide on May 8, marks the latest, perhaps greatest, chapter in a career that has become a benchmark for indie artists everywhere.
Everybody finds The Sea and Cake continuing to perfect their singular brand of dreamlike pop music that sounds delicately handcrafted, yet effortless all the same. Sheets of glowing guitar tones skip along propulsive percussion underscored by gentle, introspective bass lines, all adorned by breathlessly delivered lines of lyrical poetry.
The Sea and Cake is Sam Prekop (guitar, vocals), Archer Prewitt (guitar), John McEntire (drums)and Erik Claridge (bass). Since the release of their self-titled debut in 1993, The Sea and Cake have worked with John McEntire in the studio. For the first time in their fourteen year career, they have enlisted the recording talents of Brian Paulson (Slint, Wilco).
"Music that looks to the heavens but keeps its feet blissfully on the ground." -- GQ
"A warm sonic cocoon with synthesizer veins, it possesses the rare quality of making the listener feel like an active ingredient of the music." -- Billboard
". . . a downright staple of indie rock" -- Pitchfork Media
The second album from Oneida's Bobby Matador and Erica Fletcher percolates the brain with its rich variety of effects and treatments. The songs themselves are pared down pop nuggets without a whole lot of structural variation. Even though there aren't a lot of different styles on display here, the palette of sounds used on this recording often surpasses that limitation.
The first couple of songs on Marginalia are especially strong, even tantalizing with promises of a bright future. “Green Tea” is brewed with subtle strengths that perk the ears even as it soothes. Under a cascading piano loop hides all kinds of strange distortions, shimmering organs, and low-end oscillations. Because the loop is constant, the song doesn’t change much melodically but there’s so much going on texturally that it hardly matters. There are warbling vocals on this track, but they’re less of a focus here than on other parts of the album. “Capture the Flag” ups the ante by picking up the tempo, adding a beat, and placing distortion more prominently in the mix. Here, too, is perhaps the strongest vocal performance on the album from Fletcher as she harmonizes with herself to capture the essence of emotional longing.
Yet as the vocals become more and more the focus of the songs that follow, they become one of the album’s weaknesses. It’s not that Fletcher’s voice is bad, and there are certainly many good moments to be found, but she exhibits a limited range and such a similar delivery on many of the songs that her voice becomes monotonous after a while. That some of the lyrics rely too heavily on pat rhymes doesn’t help, either. The vocals aren’t the only thing to cause my initial enthusiasm to wane. There are a couple of tracks that are pretty derivative. “In the Dark” could easily be a cutting room floor casualty from the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs, and the booming beat on “Back in Yr Corner” sounds suspiciously like their pals the Liars. Even more disappointing is that the production loses steam after a while, sounding somewhat rote toward the end as if the band’s not quite so inspired as they were at the beginning.
While the album never recaptures its initial high, that first excited buzz still stayed with me long after the album was over.
The group's name suggests that the music is going to be like licking white hot, blistering, celestial comet trails as I soar through the universe in a multicolored ball of pure musical ecstasy. Unfortunately I am always disappointed by the "free" folk that greets me when I press play. On their second self-titled album, things have not improved much. There is nothing here to make me change my stance on the music; I still find them entirely impenetrable.
The man behind A Taste of Ra, Nicolai Dunger, obviously has some ambitions for A Taste of Ra to be fluid, unrestrained and elemental but he still has not achieved this goal. I think he can do it but I wonder how many albums it will take before he gets there. Maybe in the future I will come back to his work and appreciate something crucial that I have missed but in the meantime I am not particularly enamoured with this album.
The album starts off with "37 Turns 'round You," a formless and uninteresting introduction. It is based around some aimless piano noodling which might have been listenable on its own but Dunger decides to add some haphazardly played tin whistle to the piece. It may be just conditioning from my tin whistle lessons as a child but every track featuring the out of tune nasal noise of Dunger's tin whistle playing is a chore to listen to. I think the feeling that is meant to be elicited by the devil-may-care approach to all the wind instruments on this album is one of freedom from traditional song structures. Unfortunately it just sounds like they do not know how to play these instruments. Only the odd time does the loose approach to song structure come together, such as on the song “Mother” or the album’s closer “Radhe-Shyam in Bliss Land” but by the time I get to these tracks it is too little, too late.
Before I come across as too gloomy about this album, there are some nice points. The guitars that introduce “Indian Love Call (Continues to Call)” are gorgeous. Alas, the tin whistle returns and masks the sound of both them and the vocals. The vocals on most of the album are not bad at all; Dunger’s voice is a comfortable middle ground between Will Oldham’s old man of the mountains and Marc Bolan’s young man of the woods. Occasionally the lyrics are a little corny but for the most part they are enjoyable. The female harmony on the aforementioned “Radhe-Shyam in Bliss Land” combined with a violin make it one of the most beautiful parts of the album, standing head and shoulders above the rest of the disc.
This album is a hodgepodge of instruments and voices thrown together in an attempt to sound free but in the end A Taste of Ra are imprisoned by a lack of clear vision. Many of the songs make it sound like Dunger is trying to be eccentric just for the sake of it; "The Fox and the Frog" being a fitting example of this as a very proper sounding female voice tells a children's story over a wandering folky background. This story should grab my attention but this piece is so easy to ignore. The entire album is easy to ignore, while it is not bad, it is simply not engaging enough.
‘The Euphoria of Disobedience’ marks their re-emergence after a 10-year hiatus.
Just one short decade after making their last album, UK ambient pioneers O Yuki Conjugate (OYC) release a new CD called "The Euphoria of Disobedience" (TEOD) on their OYC Limited label. This calls for a celebration, and indeed an explanation.
O Yuki Conjugate have released four studio albums and innumerable spin-off and side projects since their first gig in Nottingham in 1982. Currently in their third incarnation, the ever-youthful OYC have cancelled their hip replacements and are going all-out for superannuated ambient glory with their latest CD.
Started in 2002 and completed in late 2006, TEOD explores an area OYC have christened “dirty ambient” – multi layered, hyper textural and distinctly gritty. Less obviously ethnic than previous OYC releases, the perfumed garden of Eno's classic ambience is replaced by rough edges, noxious odours and abrasive textures. The result is a jagged beauty.
OYC are releasing TEOD as both an MP3 download and a numbered limited edition of 1000 in a unique digipak fronted with a hand cast resin tile. Both available only through their website at www.oyukiconjugate.com. In the States this is also available through Soleilmoon & Projekt.
The release of TEOD marks a new period of activity for the group. Their entire back catalogue is currently being made available as downloads from iTunes and their website. OYC are also working on at least one follow-up album provisionally scheduled for release in mid 2007.
Notes
· The 3rd incarnation of O Yuki Conjugate (OYC) is made up of original members Roger Horberry (RH) and Andrew Hulme (AH) with new addition Rob Jenkins (RJ).
§ Originally from Nottingham and now based in London, OYC record in RJ’s impressively analogue studio in deepest Middlesex.
§ The OYC-ers all run side projects – Stone Idols (RJ), Alp (RH) and A Small Good Thing (AH).
§ TEOD features a contribution from composer Cliff Martinez, known for his scores for Steven Soderbergh films
§ OYC have released four full length albums…
- “Scene in Mirage” (LP a-mission 1984) later re-issued as “Primitive” (CD Staalplaat 1996)
- “Into Dark Water” (LP Final Image 1986) later re-issued as “Undercurrents” (CD, Staalplaat 1992)
- “Peyote” (CD Projekt 1991)
- “Equator” (CD Staalplaat 1994)
Plus a remix album “Sunchemical” (CD Staalplaat 1996)
The vibrations these two anonymous musicians produce are deep enough to cause strong sexual arousal, as alien as the technology of a visiting spacecraft, and heavy like the boot of an enemy on your throat. Special Powers is littered with a spectrum of styles, the moods shifting from cold and technological to dirty and carnal fluidly. The beats pound like war drums at times and at others they come to form simple, minimal grooves that pulse and groan with all the twitching, robotic life of a science-fiction novel.
It's hard not to think of the future when Special Powers begins. Telephone tones beep mechanically over the deep, spacious pulse of a bass drum hurled through the cosmos and programmed by a tribe of warring, digital aliens convinced that Voyager was a threat sent from some distant, though mostly harmless, planet. When the orchestra of unknown oscillations begin to buzz like electronic trumpets, trombones, and tubas, it's difficult not to think that Reanimator travelled into the future and brought back some unfamiliar technology with which to make this music. The truth, however, is quite the opposite. Each of these eight tracks were constructed from well-known drum machines, old oscillators, simple guitar pedals, tape, and budget electronic gadgets. So much for the future, I suppose, but the band's music is captivating, utilizing these now old instruments in a way that still manages to sound like the work of some foreign intelligence.
Pan Sonic fans and those familiar with Terminal Sound System will find a lot to like about Special Powers: there's little doubt of the influence Pan Sonic has had on the band and Terminal Sound System's minimal approach to atmosphere matches right up with Reanimator's use of simple, effective backgrounds in their songs. The emphasis of their music exists in the interplay between their steady, scattered beats and the unusual effects they pull out of their machines; some of those effects might count as part of a distant melody and some of them are more reminiscent of the noises employed in movies. "Eat the Magic Toast," for instance, is both propulsive and uneasy, marrying the two elements together in a blurry fusion of synthetic, brass washes of sound and cracking percussion. "Blow Subidah," on the other hand, is three solid minutes of being beaten about the head with a baseball bat. A simple, repetitive, catchy beat rips through the song as various bass effects quake above and below it, sounding like an earthquake captured by subterranean microphones and then run through an array of machines. The band gravitates between these two approaches, opting to emphasize one element one minute and another the next.
There's an air of craziness about the entire album, too, as if the machines the band used suddenly came to life of their own accord and began to flail about violently in their new-found consciousness: it's sensory overload at times, as on "Special Powers" or "No Dancing." All of the elements of the songs will, at times, come together to form a single maniacal moment whose duration is just long enough to scramble grey matter and rearrange it in an uncomfortable manner. However this is accomplished, either by mania or by subtle, creeping insistence, the material is consistently involving and powerful stuff.