29 April 2012

Albums and Singles

The latest album from Italy's Architeuthis Rex sees them continuing to confound and entrance with their eclectic and heavy sound. More focused and unsettling than their debut album, here they once again plumb the depths to uncover a world of sounds which sound like they come from some bottomless fissure in the middle of the ocean. Taking as much inspiration from aquatic zoology (in its various forms) as from music, Urania is a fantastic exploration of concept and sound.

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29 April 2012

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Albums and Singles

As much as I've always enjoyed Blackshaw's work, solo acoustic guitar albums have never quite been my favorite thing and I always wished he would record something else as ambitious and divergent as The Glass Bead's Game's "Cross" (or "Arc," for that matter).  However, James' recent nylon string compositions have caused me to stop thinking that.  Love is the Plan builds upon the promise of the similar Holly, but completely and dazzlingly eclipses it, striking the perfect balance between  blur-fingered virtuosity and poignant melody.  This is easily Blackshaw's best album to date.

Important

I must confess that I did not fall instantly in love with this album–in fact, I initially found it exasperating for a number of disparate reasons.  The main one was that it essentially sounds like Holly II with a couple of digressions added to pad it out.  I also thought that some of the nylon string pieces had some overly polite/pastoral stretches and that the two piano pieces were a bit baffling and aesthetically chameleonic.  For example, "And I Have Come Upon This Place By Lost Ways" is a very unusual piece featuring vocals from Menace Ruine's Genevieve Beaulieu that sounds like Blackshaw may have overstretched his ambitions into a disorienting stylistic no-man's land that is equal parts jazz-via-Gershwin, torch song, medieval ballad, and spiritual.  Then, the admittedly beautiful closer ("The Snows are Melted, the Snows are Gone") goes an entirely different direction, opting for Romantic and melancholy Satie-esque simplicity.  I suppose they share the theme of bittersweet sadness, but I was disappointed at how straightforward James' piano playing was, given how adventurous he had been with "Arc" just a few short years ago.  Curiously, I still think all of the above are perfectly valid observations, but they are all superficial and became largely insignificant once I was fully immersed in the album.

Blackshaw devotes four of the six songs to lengthy, intricate, and churning cascades of finger-picked nylon string arpeggios, so they are basically the meat of the album.  James' playing has evolved enormously since the Holly EP though, almost to a Faustian, met-the-devil-at-the-crossroads degree.  Pieces like "We Who Stole the Dream" are quite simply on an entirely different level of depth, complexity, intensity, and emotion than I was expecting.  As I listened to Love is the Plan more and more, I began to realize that almost every song on the album boasted at least one incredibly poignant or beautiful hook that I loved.  That epiphany, though seemingly minor, completely changed how I listened to the album–instead of focusing on thoughts like "ugh-I wish that piano part wasn't there," I found myself happily anticipating the point in each song when it would cohere into an especially wonderful motif. Consequently, I gradually came to understand and appreciate how masterfully Blackshaw transitioned from theme to theme, endlessly building and releasing tension without ever losing momentum and urgency.  It just took some time and focused attention for me to reach that point.

Of course, I still have absolutely no idea what to make of the piano pieces, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing.  Both certainly have their merits–in fact, I actually enjoyed being totally wrong-footed by Beaulieu's enigmatic, atemporal contribution.  More importantly, Love is the Plan needs those two piano pieces to be there–James knew exactly what he was doing.  Without them, the sequencing simply would not work and the guitar pieces would blur together and be denied their full impact.  Similarly, the album's flaws seem just as necessary, as the imperfections and odd digressions are both humanizing and endearing.  I can't stress enough how pleasantly surprised I am–everything I want in an album is here: vibrancy, ambition, daring, great songwriting, and intimacy (every scrape and creak is audible, as is Blackshaw's breathing).  I don't see how Blackshaw (or anyone else) could possibly surpass his nylon string playing here, both composition-wise and for sheer dexterousness.  It must have taken an enormous amount of willpower for James to not spike his guitar on the floor and proclaim "Top that, suckers.  I'm retiring." when the final note was recorded.  This is great.

• Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
• And I Have Come Upon This Place By Lost Ways
• We Who Stole the Dream

 

29 April 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Mohn is the newest collaborative project for two German techno mainstays: Wolfgang Voigt (aka Studio 1, Mike Ink, Gas) and Jörg Burger (aka the Bionaut, Triola, the Modernist). The duo's debut self-titled album sticks to territory in between the steady, physical pulse of "Tiefental," from last year's Total 12 compilation, and "Manifesto," a damn near beat-less, immersive storm-cloud of ambience from Pop Ambient 2012.

Kompakt

These two gentlemen have collaborated previously on at least one landmark techno album—and they remain close friends and Kompakt figureheads besides—but Mohn marks a significant step into new territory for both. Wolfgang Voigt, best known for his four albums as Gas around the turn of the century, has been making forward-thinking "minimal techno" music (sometimes more minimal, sometimes more techno) for over 20 years. Jörg Burger takes a more far-reaching approach to music: what he gains in pop appeal and sonic variety as compared to Voigt, he loses in formalist consistency of vision. (This is also the key reason that, although both are veterans of their craft, Voigt has maintained a more prominent critical profile.) Together, Burger and Voigt released one stone-cold masterpiece of 1990s electronic music: 1996's Las Vegas, credited to Burger/Ink, which found Voigt processing Burger's guitar and bass foundations into minimalist, long-form waves of sound.

Like John Talabot earlier this year, who switched monikers to signal a stylistic shift, making music under the Mohn name allows Voigt and Burger a chance to shed preconceptions—at least as much as possible—and strike out in an unexplored direction. It also indicates to fans that Mohn, their self-titled debut, is not meant to be heard as a strict follow-up to Las Vegas. (At Mohn's debut live performance in 2007, no material from Las Vegas was played.) Mohn is set apart by its blend of organic and mechanistic sounds, and the ways in which those sounds push and pull at each other, combine, clash, and interweave. Much of Voigt and Burger's previous music leans to the organic side, evoking images of natural phenomena, whereas the boldest tracks on Mohn sound cold, mechanized, made of steel, as if sound-tracking the Industrial Revolution—or the disappearance of a world without machines.

Not everything here has a discernible rhythm: the less forthright tracks lean toward the deep rumble of "Manifesto," Mohn's contribution to Pop Ambient 2012 a few months ago that more closely resembles Lull's dark-ambient '90s work than techno. Opener "Einrauschen" barely registers a pulse, whereas "Seqtor 88" splits the difference between stark, icy techno and the humid ambience of Voigt's Gas project. "Ambientôt" takes inspiration from Neu! and the German experimentalists of the '70s, with a faint krautrock stutter in its step. Most of the tracks come across like dance music on a morphine drip, reducing all rhythms to a slow-motion smear of thick ambient sound, with the organic/analog aspects of Mohn's music fighting for a gasp of air amongst the digital fog. There's something about self-titled songs that tend to encapsulate an artist's modus operandi (see Black Sabbath, Talk Talk, Slowdive, Angels of Light...) and "Mohn" is no different, folding a chilly, narcotic heartbeat into a mountain of delay, echo, looped ambience, and low-end punch.

The most memorable song on Mohn puts a darkly sexual twist on this sound: "Ebertplatz 2020" is barely techno—minimal in structure, but maximal in sound. It starts out with a glittering beat before a thick, gritty slab of extremely low-end bass frequency forces its way into the frame. Of all things, it takes on the same animalistic character as the throb and thrust of NIN's "Closer" (which I maintain is underrated, despite Reznor failing to make interesting music for the last 10-15 years). Burger and Voigt take a subwoofer-busting low-end frequency, then smear it and stretch it out drastically, combining physically jarring bass with the twinkling high-end and a sheet of ambient fuzz. This all conveys a very distinct mood without resorting to sexually suggestive lyrics or cliché: it sounds like two machines fucking, and wouldn't make a bad soundtrack for people doing the same thing. (Is it any coincidence that Mohn is pronounced "moan?")

All things considered, this is a stellar album. Mohn sounds incredibly immersive under a pair of headphones, to the extent of blocking all outside stimuli (earlier this week, I used it to drown out Katy Perry and "Party Rock Anthem" at a girls' birthday party at a roller-skating rink—no small feat). Much of the album can be a challenging listen at close distance, but has just enough melody and familiarity to hold interest, as well as enough ambience to fade into the background if so desired. Most impressively, though, Mohn is yet another feather in the caps of Burger and Voigt, who chose not to repeat their landmark work of 15 years past, but to look outside their bag of established tricks and again push the limits of what electronic, techno, and ambient music can be.

Samples:

• Ambient√¥t
• Saturn
• Ebertplatz 2020

28 April 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Pitre's latest composition is certainly an impressive and mesmerizing one, but it is quite a daunting challenge to find words to describe quite why it works so well.  Built around computer-randomized patterns of harmonics and fleshed out by a sextet of strings and dulcimer, Feel Free's beauty lies in its rippling, organic near-stasis: this is classical music blurred, stretched, and rendered in such a pointillist fashion as to seem like a languid, blissful, and formless haze.

Important

Basing a serious composition upon randomness and chance is certainly nothing new, as John Cage began taking direction from the I Ching as far back as the early '50s.  However, Feel Free might be the most listenable probability-based music that I have heard.  A lot of that certainly has to do the fact that this five-part piece is not purely steered by the vagaries of chance: the random harmonics all seem to fall within a single key and they are merely one part of a work that also contains composed and improvised motifs.  Still, those twinkling, unpredictable harmonics are the single most important part of Feel Free–their strange, unreliable rhythm and ever-shifting harmonies paradoxically provide the piece's only real framework, even if it is as fragile and space-filled as a spiderweb.

Such a gambit, obviously, is only possible when it is executed deftly and ingeniously and Pitre scores on both counts.  For one, despite being computer-randomized, the central harmonics were originally played by an actual person (Pitre) on a guitar and sound very natural–and quite pleasant too (harmonics are pretty inherently likable and chiming).  Conversely, the various violin, cello, harp, contrabass, and dulcimer parts played by Pitre's ensemble sound pretty random despite being played by actual people in real-time according to a score (except where Duane urged them to "feel free" to interact with or ignore their aural surroundings).  Not "random" in any jagged, cacophonous kind of way, mind you, but the amorphous, organic unfolding of plucks and swells feels naturally occurring rather than deliberate (though a number of non-traditional crescendos and confluences snuck up on me to keep it all dynamically absorbing).

While I certainly admire his stealth and fluidity as a composer, it is the blurring of computer and human (and the premeditated and the unexpected) into a single woozy, soft-focus middle ground that is Duane's real masterstroke, yielding a seamless, gently swaying tapestry of sublime, droning beauty.  In a way, Feel Free is a weirdly perfect piece of music: it is complexly textured and imbued with genuine, deep pathos (particularly in the violins), but it is so off-kilter, mysterious, and devoid of any strong melodic motifs that it can probably be endlessly looped without ever becoming boring.

Samples:

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III

 

23 April 2012

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Albums and Singles

After last year's acclaimed Please Stop Loving Me and the Ante Algo Azul subscription series, Szczepanik has almost simultaneously put out his first and second vinyl releases. While the two albums could hardly be more different from each other, both carry the composer's careful attention to detail and creation of beautiful, sparse music.

WéMè Records/Isounderscore

The duality of these albums is striking:from the stark differences in artwork to overall presentations of the albums, they sit at the end of two extremes.From the 10 track We Make Life Sad, which has a distinctly nostalgic picture of two children on the front, to the sparse green and yellow design on The Truth of Transience, which almost resembles a vintage geometry textbook, and features two side-long pieces.

The albums follow similar patterns on the actual sonic content as well, with We Make Life Sad focusing on shorter, hazy, static-drenched pensive pieces, while The Truth of Transience is clean, almost sterile, but not off-putting.Much of the former is enshrouded in a warm, nostalgic static that perfectly channel old, but treasured memories.Most of the pieces are rather quiet, with "Consciousness" and "Long Gone" leaning more into the louder end of the spectrum with what could be old 78s from someone’s attic played loudly."Her Last Breath" also goes a bit more into dissonance, but with a rich, slow repetition that never feels too noisy.

"Another Screened World" feels most in line with Szczepanik’s previous work, with shimmering slow passages echoing and reverberating with a nostalgic melancholy."Over Your Dead Body," besides its uncharacteristically morbid title, is another piece of sustained droning tones, and with the organ-like sounds, has a darker, almost funeral quality to it.

Both "Totemic Vignette" and "Nostalgia" use individual notes more than long, drawn out tones, and what at least sounds like a guitar in the former and piano in the latter.In addition to the more complicated structures, they also are bathed in a gloriously captivating static texture, with the latter especially emphasizing the noisier moments towards its conclusion.

samples:

• Another Screened World
• Totemic Vignette
• Nostalgia

In contrast, The Truth of Transience is a more detached, almost clinical affair.The A side's slow, bellowing opening of cold, sparse tones make this immediately obvious.Nowhere does that reflection on past memories vibe come through here.The droning tones rise and fall, eventually becoming bassier and finally put through a rhythmic tremolo until coming to an abrupt end.

Flipped over, the second part goes for the low-end undercurrent right away, slowly introducing a fuzzed out layer of noise above the rhythmic pulse.Although it is pretty sparse in its construction, there is a clear lushness to the sound that has a multitude of subtleties within.Later on the higher end buzzing elements get slightly more spiny and acidic, ending the piece, once again abruptly, on a dissonant note.

The duality of fuzzy nostalgia and clinical drone are both things that Szczepanik has used in previous works, but here they arepushed to the extremes.Because of this, neither album is better than the other, since they’re both so different, but great in their own ways.Not too many artists can work in these polarizing conditions and succeed in both, but Szczepanik has done just that.

samples:

• The Truth of Transience (Side A, Excerpt 1)
• The Truth of Transience (Side A, Excerpt 2)
• The Truth of Transience (Side B)

 

23 April 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Souvenirs d'un Autre Monde introduced Alcest to the world five years ago with Stéphane "Neige" Paut's ideas fully formed from the start. Écailles de Lune took a conceptually dark detour, with Neige playing around with bold song structures (the album opens with a two-song suite lasting 20 minutes, both parts also titled "Écailles de Lune") and branching into new sounds (see all-acoustic closer "Sur l'Ocean Couleur de Fer"). Third album Les Voyages de l'Âme—translating to The Journeys of the Soul—boasts cleaner production, more immediate hooks, shorter songs, and spiritually evocative titles ("Beings of Light," "Summer's Glory"). In short, this is Alcest's most approachable, immediately striking album.

Prophecy

At just under six minutes, boasting a killer chorus melody, lead single "Autre Temps" is the most accessible song Alcest has yet released. In a parallel/ideal universe, my gut tells me it would be a monster on modern rock radio. Cleanly picked and strummed guitar builds at the song's start, leading into prominently sung verses (in all French, like the rest of the album) and a sky-high wordless chorus, with Neige harmonizing with himself and crying out to the heavens. The song's secret weapon is the bridge, which hints at Alcest's roots in black metal, its increased tempo adding a sense of urgency before the final chorus pierces through layers of guitars like a blinding ray of sunlight through the clouds. It's an enthralling song, sounding like Jesu playing in blissed-out double time. There's nothing quite as punchy as "Autre Temps" in the remaining 45 minutes of Les Voyages de l'Âme, but for what is essentially a gauzy, atmospheric rock album with hints of extreme metal, it's smart to lead with a tune that makes a strong bid for new listeners.

As the album unfolds, Les Voyages de l'Âme solidifies itself as the next great chapter in Alcest's catalogue—no better or worse than their first two albums, really, but a sharpening of their approach. As usual, the majority of the album leans as much toward shoegaze as it does black metal, far removed from the shrieked vocals, blast beat drumming, and blazing tempos that characterize the latter. Those sounds were hard enough to come by on Alcest's previous two albums; now, with a couple exceptions (like the lung-shredding screams of "Là où Naissent les Couleurs Nouvelles"), they have been almost completely exorcised. And even when Les Voyages de l'Âme delves into minor-key atmospherics, the production is bright and crisp, never lo-fi. Instead of dwelling on despair, hopelessness, torment and suicide, like 95% of black metal acts, Alcest are still out to perfect their brand of uplifting, sun-kissed, melodic rock music, with occasional nods to the scene from which they sprouted. Each time they incorporate urgency and intensity, like on side-two highlight "Faiseurs de Mondes," there is something else to balance it out, like the Creation Records textures of "Summer's Glory" or the triumphant near-balladry of the title track.

Seeing the band play in Austin a few days ago confirmed just how much they've mastered this approach. Doe-eyed frontman Neige, who pens and records all of Alcest's studio instrumentation and vocals, except for drums, was very much a beacon of anti-showmanship, staring out longingly over the crowd while performing, with the occasional "Thanks very much!" sprinkled between. Positioned at center stage, Neige naturally drew the most attention, but this was a group effort: second guitarist Zero was tasked with the vocal harmonies that Neige layers in the studio, while five-string bassist Indria and drummer Winterhalter (who also plays with Les Discrets) provided a hard-hitting rhythm section. When not singing, Neige directed his attention to his guitar, engulfing the crowd in swirling distortion and harmonics; whoever introduced this guy to his first Fender Jaguar should be given a medal.

Alcest's live show was as expertly sequenced as their new album, with the band opening with "Autre Temps" (hey, if it isn't broke...) and building from there. Except for the propulsive "Les Iris," from Souvenirs d'un Autre Monde, the initial half-hour was centered around Les Voyages de l'Âme. As the evening progressed, the band pulled out a few choice cuts from their first two albums. The small capacity crowd (maybe 200 people) greeted "Printemps Emeraude," also from Souvenirs, with the most raucous cheers of the night. The front section moshed joyously during "Percées de Lumière," which broke up the predominantly atmospheric mood with Neige screaming into his mic in true black metal fashion. When Alcest called it a night after about an hour—no encore—the crowd filed out, satiated. The concert was marked by Neige's low-key confidence in his songs, not his stage presence. Except for the band playing in front of me, partially obscured by the dim, unchanging lighting and smoke machine, it sounded pretty similar to when I play the albums at home; I'd imagine Neige would take that as a compliment.

Three albums in, Alcest have more or less perfected their style, and with more and more bands blending black metal with other genres, their influence on peers and newer acts seems to be catching up with them. The band they are most often compared to—My Bloody Valentine—cemented their legend and critical reputation by bowing out at the height of their powers. Alcest, on the other hand, seem like they are just warming up, currently in the midst of their first extensive US tour. Whether or not they can evolve their sound without the formula growing stale remains to be seen. For now, Les Voyages de l'Âme, while not the runaway best album of their career, is a fine encapsulation of Alcest's strengths and an achievement in its own right.

Samples:

• Autre Temps
• Les Voyages de l'√Çme
• Faiseurs de Mondes

23 April 2012

Duncan Edwards

Albums and Singles

This is a very welcome reissue of the final album by the Collins sisters. They cast a marvelous spell on mysterious traditional songs from Southern England. It's all here: advice, a beheading, blacksmiths, erections, farming, happiness, a hanging, letters, loss, love, nosebleeds, poaching, pudding, rakes, revenge, treachery, and youth. All that and their cover of "Never Again," a Richard Thompson lament more contemporary to this 1978 recording.

Fledg'ling Records

Shirley Collins met the US music historian Alan Lomax in London and, in 1959, journeyed with him across the United States collecting blues and roots songs for posterity. She returned to England and set about a similar project in her homeland. Long before all that, Shirley and her sister, Dolly, learned to appreciate music from their grandfather, Fred Ball, who knew many old tunes and played the tin whistle.  From their uncle, also called Fred Ball, Dolly learned how to include just the proper material in arrangements and not bring in unnecessary items. This is how songs were passed from one generation to the next and allowed for both preservation of material but also reinterpretation, mishearing, and other deviations from what might be called traditional.

A good example of this process is "Lord Allenwater," a song collected (or remembered) in 1904 by E.A. Stears of Sussex. Shirley sings, Dolly plays flute organ and piano, with Phil Pickett on cornet and Michael Gregory doing percussion. It is probably based on the facts and legends that have built up around the tale of James Ratcliffe, 3rd Earl of Derwentwater, who was beheaded on Tower Hill in 1716 for his part in the Jacobite uprising of the previous year. As Shirley comments:

"The entire story has been handed down as factual—as if it really happened. And other legends have sprung up around the event. It was said that on the night he was executed, the rivers on his estates ran blood, and that the Northern Lights shone more brightly that night than they ever had before; from then they were locally called "Lord Derwentwater's Lights".

Lord Allenwater" is a dramatic tale of how one man met his unavoidable doom with polite defiance, dignity, and generosity. It is one of several pieces which show how Shirley's voice allows stories to become utterly believable and she brings characters to life. Slipping free of gender and time, with her austere tone, she is Lord Allenwater, just as on another song she is the object of the blacksmith's affections, or Gilderoy's lovelorn devotee, and so on. Her singing is unaffected and seems as natural as a stick floating down a stream.

A similar tune (or is it meter?) is used for the happier sounding "Gilderoy," sung in the character of one who loves her golden boy constantly (but adjusts accordingly) from childhood to bereavement as the object of their affection leaves, marries another and is eventually hung after dalliance with a married woman. It's probably not a constant rule, but it often seems to me that the sweeter the folk tune the more bitter or horrific is the narrative outcome. Certainly, the more boisterous and clunky tunes on For As Many As Will tend to be about "lumps of pudding" or include references to virility couched in farming lingo wherein things "rise" if we stand close to our partner. Hey, whatever it takes to ensure the crop comes up for another year.

The original LP did not include the excellent song "The Blacksmith Courted Me" - but the piece is included on the CD. Shirley Collins recorded it three times (each with quite different lyrics). Shirley's calm voice combines with Dolly's restless piano lines for a perfect puzzle of discontent and regret. This song was collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1909 from Mrs. Ellen Powell of Westhope, Hertfordshire. It is one of several included in The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (1959) compiled by Vaughan Williams and A.L. Lloyd (who is also well respected for his, and Ewan MacColl's Blow Boys Blow, a fine collection of sea shanties also played on by Alf Edwards, and one which Captain Beefheart is said to have borrowed from Frank Zappa and never returned).

Such tunes as these have traveled far and wide and been transformed here and there. While Shirley went to the disenfranchised parts of the United States to learn the power of making history, the Collins sister didn't have to travel far to learn their love of music. As Dolly said, "we were lucky that way, listening to Grandad passed on to us feelings about the songs." On all their albums, Dolly's arrangements are perfect in giving variety to simple pieces of music and also in providing an uncluttered structure in which Shirley's voice can be heard. Her beautiful and melancholy singing has a plain humility and yet is full of authority.

Dolly has passed away and Shirley gave up public performance years ago. Their approach to recording has a political aspect in that they insist upon the importance of ordinary lives. In that sense, Shirley and Dolly Collins preserve not only the songs but also the working lives of the rural people who have sung them. They played a vital part in the resurgence of interest in traditional musical forms. Anyone (with or without a musical grandfather) could do worse than to start here if planning to learn how to listen to and create music.

22 April 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Aside from his role as the lead singer of The Buzzcocks, Pete Shelley briefly operated his own label, Groovy Records, devoted to strange electronic music. Drag City have reissued the full Groovy catalog including this mesmerizing solo album by Shelley. Consisting solely of shifting oscillator patterns, this is a far cry from the short, choppy punk he is best known for yet is just as engaging as his more famous efforts.

Drag City

Recorded in 1974, Sky Yen pre-dates any of Shelley’s or his contemporaries’ forays into punk. The music falls closer to Cluster or Tangerine Dream than to The Sex Pistols or The Clash. It is hard truly pin it down as it never settles into the easy drones that many Kosmische groups often employ. This material remained shelved until 1980 when The Buzzcocks had peaked (and were beginning to decline) and Shelley had the means to create his own label. I can only imagine how Buzzcocks fans reacted to the lengthy, abstract sounds contained within the grooves of Sky Yen.

The music is surprisingly aggressive; the tones Shelley generates are at times piercing and linger for longer than is comfortable. Yet for all the sharp edges, Sky Yen is quite engaging. Throughout the first part, Shelley creates a solid, unyielding force field of high-pitched waveforms. He holds some of them for a long time and they form a relentless resonant backbone for the piece. More chaotic whirrs and whistles scatter from the speakers, invading the room like nimble, miniature spacecraft.

The second piece unfurls in much the same way though has more in common with air raid sirens than music. While this would normally be alarming, it is so insistent that it captivates me and holds my attention far beyond expected. While Shelley does not rein himself in, he also does not aim for the volume and frequencies the likes of Merzbow or Whitehouse employ. His goal is total immersion, not hearing loss. By the end of Sky Yen, my ears feel cleansed in a way rarely achieved by any medical intervention. I honestly do not know whether I will come back to this album often but I do feel that it will be occasionally be spun when I need to clear the cobwebs from my mind.

samples:

• Part 1
• Part 2

 

22 April 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

In August of 1982, Mute released the 7" single for "Life on the Line," one month ahead of the forthcoming album. It was a stark contrast to the previous single, "Saturday Night Special," released only in February that year. This too was a catchy melody, but it was unashamedly supplied by a beefy synth and almost purely electric rhythm. Frank had decided to strip the producing and engineering team leaving only John Fryer and himself at the controls. The result is arguably the favorite amongst the fans.

Mute

For me, along with a number of other contemporary listeners, Under the Flag was the entry point for many Fad Gadget fans. The popularity of Depeche Mode and Yazoo in 1981 and 1982 gained Mute widespread attention, allowing for a warmer reception from press, radio, and retail. Licensing into other countries began to take place too, and imports of the Mute's UK pressings were finding their ways overseas.

With Under the Flag, Tovey scaled back his usage of conventional rock instruments to a degree, and even in the absence of Miller and Radcliffe, it was still a Mute family affair, with Alison Moyet on guest vocals (and saxophone!) and photography and painting by Anton Corbijn. At the time, Frank's first child was born and the Brits were involved in that whole Falkland Islands mess. Frank Tovey was eager to make personal political statements and the album has a lot of reflections on conflict and loss. Tovey didn't seem to be basking in the joy of fatherhood, but commenting on the bleak world which he was born into. For me,however, the music commands the most attention.

The album's opener and closer is a bit of a cliche story of man in hard times, finds work in the government as "a civil service tool," but it's the hypnotizing pulse of the sequencer that makes "Under the Flag I" a sheer audio delight. Without a moment's rest, the punchy and playful "Scapegoat" is already in motion. Tovey is joined on vocal duties both by a chorus and a female delivering a Dutch nursery rhyme, and two songs later, "Plainsong," features almost no instruments: mainly a chorus and Tovey.

The highlights of the album actually do correspond with the singles pulled from the record this time. In addition to the lovely (and of course, completely bleak) aforementioned "Life on the Line" is "Love Parasite," which became a popular favorite due to its fat syth bass hook and simple lyrical refrains. It's easily a musical blueprint for Depeche Mode's "Two Minute Warning," from Construction Time Again, a year later. It wasn't an A side, however, but its A side was the flooringly brilliant "For Whom the Bells Toll." It is one's another sad story of loss set to a undeniably fantastic groove, but this time with yelps coming from the chorus. (The yelps were unsurprisingly removed for the truncated single version, however.)

"Under the Flag II" closes the album and it almost seems like Frank, himself, is also getting tired of the political statement: "now the story's become a bore / I don't want to hear it anymore." I actually enjoy the more caustic approach in this version, as lines like "and now the masses have been fed / suck the offal from the dead / now the joker's here to pick the sores" are entertaining to hear.

Fad Gadget played live in support of the album through 1983 but only made it half-way through the tour. Frank returned home from the Netherlands with both legs in casts following a stage dive that landed him on some steps. Other war wounds for him from the tour included, as described in the liner notes, a broken nose, two black eyes, and numerous lacerations and contusions.

samples:

• Under the Flag I
• Love Parasite
• Cipher

16 April 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Folklore Tapes has quietly been one of the most singular and fascinating labels around for the last several years, a secret that they have managed to keep fairly well-concealed with their hyper-limited, hand-made and elaborate editions that tend to disappear quite quickly.  A handful of them eventually surface on Bandcamp, but most do not: Folklore Tapes releases are nothing if not elusive and ephemeral.  Thankfully, some of the more classic releases gradually get reissued, such as this one (which had an initial run of just 30).  This considerably larger (and newly vinyl-ized) reissue has an interesting twist, however, as the lengthy Children of Alice piece from the original has been replaced by three atypical new pieces from guitarist Dean McPhee.  Given that Children of Alice is comprised of the surviving members of Broadcast, that news will likely break a few hearts, but the two playfully hallucinatory soundscapes from the mysterious Mary Arches scratch quite a similar itch.

Folklore Tapes

I certainly do not envy Dean McPhee, as stepping in as the replacement for the sole and rarely heard recording of James Cargill's post-Broadcast project is quite a tall order.  Fortunately, that departed piece is slated to be included in the group's formal debut, so it has not permanently disappeared and all is well.  More importantly, McPhee is a rather unique artist in his own right, so I am always eager to hear new work from him.  In this case, the new work is a three-song suite entitled Avian Dream Songs ("The Robin," "The Nightingale," and "The Blackbird").  I do not have the accompanying book, unfortunately, so I remain regrettably ignorant about each bird's significance in Devonshire lore.  However, I do know that crows are shapeshifters, magpie calls are an ill-omen, and that jackdaw cackles "betray runes of rut so unseemly a libertine would blush."  I would love to someday hear a jackdaw-themed Dean McPhee album, but he opted more for a serene and meditative feel with these pieces rather than going for raw, full-on sex this time around.  In any case, all three pieces are languorous, lovely, and unhurried improvisations over chirping and cooing field recordings of birds.  Of the three, "The Nightingale" is probably my favorite and the most substantial departure from McPhee's usual fare, unfolding as a gorgeously subdued and melancholy flow of volume swells.  I also quite enjoyed the tranquil and sun-dappled "The Blackbird," as it feels the most like an organic interplay with McPhee's unwitting avian collaborators.

I have absolutely no idea who is behind the "Mary Arches" guise, but I definitely know that I like them.  Stylistically, both halves of "The White Bird of the Oxenhams" strike a beautiful balance between collage, kitsch, and hauntology.  Naturally, there are plenty of birds involved here as well, though the specific type of bird that kept turning up to foretell premature deaths in the hapless Oxenham clan is up for debate.  "The Room" initially seems like a rather dark piece, opening with some wonderfully dense and eerie drones and evolving into a dissonant music box motif, but it eventually takes a rather cartoonish turn with some loud snoring and plinking percussion.  It is quite a hard piece to get a handle on, covering some quite strange and varied ground over its twelve minutes.  "The Reverie" is a bit more consistently strong and immediately gratifying, as it is built upon a beautifully wobbly and swooping synth melody over a lazily jaunty groove.  There are also plenty of squelching and crunching field recordings in the periphery to make it even more evocative.  At some point, however, that all fades away and the piece sounds like a crackling old recording of a vampire blasting away on a pipe organ in his lonely castle.  Anything resembling genuine darkness is mischievously undercut with plenty of random boinging noises though, along with some weirdly hollow yet festive percussion that sounds like the missing link between Einstürzende Neubauten and Les Baxter.  Then, bizarrely, it all winds to a close with a rippling and dreamy coda of almost tropical-sounding guitars.

Needless to say, the deranged and kaleidoscopic B-movie kitsch of Mary Arches makes for a very counterintuitive pairing with the understated beauty of Dean McPhee’s trio of avian dreamscapes, but it somehow perversely works as a whole.  While the quiet simplicity and understated melodicism of McPhee's songs admittedly took a few listens to fully seep into my consciousness, they eventually became my favorite part of the album and provide a very necessary, sincere, and earthy counterbalance to the carnival of absurdity that follows.  Of course, I enjoy that aspect of the album too, as there is plenty of fun and an occasional brush with genius amidst all the gleefully wonky madness, even if the "Oxenham" pieces are a bit too long, erratic, and uneven to quite work on their own.  Ultimately, it is McPhee's subtly haunting "The Nightingale" that stealthily dominates the album and comes closest to evoking the eerie witchery and timelessness of the stories that inspired this release, but there is plenty of strange, sublime, and mindwarping terrain to explore around it.

Samples:

• Dean McPhee, "The Nightingale"
• Mary Arches, "The Room"
• Mary Arches, "The Reverie"