25 April 2010

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Albums and Singles

Beginnings are sacred, even for punk rockers. Whatever path they may follow later, musicians carry their formative experiences with them like a talisman. The Endtables carry that kind of sacrosanct aura. Their influence trumps any concern about style, recognition, or even competence. For a few freaks in Louisville, Kentucky circa 1979, they were the most important band on earth.

 

Drag City

Prior to the omnipresence of digital media, the phrase "Do it Yourself" was often a bitter necessity. After all, who was going to write an anthem about circumcision but the Endtables themselves? They were Kentucky’s own salvo against the creeping provincialism of their era. Though most of their lyrics deal the workaday punk-rock themes of that time (greed, militarism, conformity, et cetera) lines like, "his penis is a grossity/it hangs to the floor/streachy and formless, but it’s clean" still have bite to them. It isn’t surprising that the band is discussed thirty years on; they still come off as genuinely unhinged, even now, in an age when taboo-breaking has become cliché.

For all their crude energy, the Endtables could never form musical personality distinctive from their peers. The majority of the tracks keep to a trebly blues-influenced sound common among Midwest punk bands of that era.You can hear premonitions in the snarl of Ron Ashton’s guitar work for the Stooges and singer Steve Rigot’s bleating voice can sound very similar to David Thompson’s singing in Pere Ubu and Rocket from the Tombs. Occasionally, the band will break into something a little less uncommon, such as the heavy riffing in the intro of "Process of Elimination (live)", but the lack of musical idiosyncrasy confirms that the they were of their time, not ahead of it.

Yet retrospective criticism never does full justice to a band like the Endtables. In their era, pop had become desiccated from arena tours and pre-programmed radio playlists. It took hundreds of bands in dozens of cities to convince a generation that live, self-produced music was winning proposition. While bands such as the Ramones and Black Flag continually gather praise for reviving street-level enthusiasm for rock and roll, it was the lower profile bands that kept regional music alive.During their short existence, the Endtables established a scene in Louisville that would eventually produce artists such as Squirrel Bait, Slint, King-Kong and Palace Music. While they never achieved the same artistic variety or creative influence of those groups, precedence alone should assure the Endtables some kind modest legacy.

samples:

• White Glove Test
• Circumcision
• Process of Elimination

25 April 2010

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Albums and Singles

Galaktika is an album full of welcome surprises. A miasmic mish-mash of otherworldly electronica it ranges free form through a whole gamut of seductive sound. A narrative arc can be traced through the way the songs unfold sequentially while still brimming with unpredictable squelches, pitter-patter, and bizarre vapor trails. Richly layered and tightly woven it never feels too dense, but is rather evocative of the ever changing astral imagery of a serialized dream, each sound expertly placed to tantalizing effect.

 

Other Electricities

Lingering throughout the album are the ghostly voices of disembodied monks who continue to haunt the living. I get the feeling there is something sinister about them, or maybe just insane, as if they had lived on an isolated space station instead of in an earthly cloister. The common thread stitching the album together is that of space, its vastness, and the incredible distances separating the orbiting worlds, stars, clouds, and man made junk floating in the blackness. While by no means a new theme in electronic music, it is one that continues to be rewarding as qualified sound artists like Jake Dangers (with Music for Planetarium), and Nurse With Wound (on Space Music) continue to mine the territory. Now Moscow-based Alexey Devyanin, the man behind Gultskra Artikler, adds his contribution to the fold and he more than holds his own.

Sometimes it is hard to distinguish where one song lets up and another starts as they flow, for the most part, seamlessly into each other. The title track opens the album on an esoteric note with the deconstructed chants, both somnolent and abstract, that recur throughout. "Nanorobot" begins with timpani rumbles and the clinking shakes of a shamanic rattle before primitive wind instruments sidle their way in. I perceive the nanorobots as molecular glitches inside the keyboards, like they are eating at the circuitry, in the process of breaking them down. "Saturn" is a brilliant end to the first side. An intricate and melodious pulse drives through what has become a soup of ectoplasmic speaker sludge and crackling electricity.

The second side mixes things up even further as metallic electro-acoustic scrapings are merged with warm synthesizer washes, as on "Sputnik." Further precious moments are offered on "Asteroid" where a more symphonic approach is taken with a focus on the achingly lush synth strings that eventually fade out under the influence of gated tremolo. "Niti" continues with harmonic bell tolls softly reverberating, unmoored and set adrift. The strength of these two songs is in their emotional resonance, which makes for a nice touch amidst the otherwise recondite manifestations on this album. "Asteroid" and "Niti" also remind me of the power electronic music can have for touching the soul.

Great care has been shown in the creation of Galaktika. As a listener I am happy to travel with Devyanin for he is a courageous explorer. This release is presented in two forms, as a limited run of colored vinyl (mine is rubber duck yellow), and as an MP3 download, showcasing what I think are two ideal scenarios for listening. One is at home in the evening with the lights darkened and the hi-fi ready to go as I close my eyes and get comfortable for a bit of armchair voyaging. The other is while lying in bed with my headphones connected to a portable player for a completely immersive session. Either way there is one thing I can be sure of before take off: Gultskra Artikler has prepared an artful itinerary.

samples:

• Solnce
• Saturn
• Asteroid

 

22 April 2010

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Albums and Singles

Pat Maherr, the man behind this project, has assembled a large, intensely atmospheric collage exclusively from old recordings of Richard Wagner’s works. Weighed down with history, it is sometimes hard to separate Wagner’s music from the man and the events which occurred after him to which he has become linked (the rise of anti-Semitism, in case it needed spelling out). Maherr has reclaimed and reduced Wagner’s music into its barest form, only the faintest whisper of recognition remains. Yet, like the composer’s original works, this album seems to go on for an eternity.

Type

Plays Wagner sounds ancient. It sounds far older than even the legends that Wagner based his original works on. The grainy old vinyl recordings obtained by Maherr have been processed and re-recorded to tape. The cassette master was then used to create this CD, giving a ghostly hiss and gently adding a layer of saturated to distortion to the music. The end result is a haunting and dismal sound collage that at times brings to mind the drones and soundscapes that pepper David Lynch’s soundtracks between the ersatz 50s rock and roll and jazz.

While I like the concept and I like the general aesthetic of the musical outcome, an entire album of processed Wagner recordings is too much. Unlike other found sound artists like Philip Jeck, Maherr’s approach does not add much to the sounds he has co-opted beyond what sounds like some time stretching and reverb. Equally, the sounds he has amassed and mutated end up becoming drab audio wallpaper or a game of "spot the composition." I am not meaning to sound so dismissive but listening to this in one go is harder than an opera novice sitting through a complete cycle of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. I have found that dipping in and out of Plays Wagner is much more rewarding, defeating the ear fatigue I was getting from listening to the full album.

A more judicious edit of this album might have been preferable but overall Plays Wagner is not a bad album. Yet I cannot help it would have made a much better EP.

samples:

• Untitled
• Untitled
• Untitled

 

21 April 2010

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Albums and Singles

20 April 2010

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Albums and Singles

This music was inspired by the words of Italian poet Alda Merini, institutionalized away from her family for much of her life, renowned for the unflinching honesty of her work. Years into this project, when copyright problems forced Silvia Tarozzi to create lyrics of her own, she followed Merini’s example and drew upon her own experiences and relationships mainly from 2008-2019. During this period, Tarozzi married, had a child, lost family members, and moved to another country, all of which inform this rich, varied, and deeply personal work finely balanced between firm structure and breezy abstraction.

Unseen Worlds

Tarozzi has collaborated with the legendary Elaine Radigue and Pauline Oliveros and Mi Specchio e Rifletto confirms her virtuosity but also shows the depth of her own vision. One song, "xxx Anna," in which a beautiful yet feverish and dreamlike atmosphere eventually clears, is dedicated to her grandmother whose last years were spent with "a confused mind"yet "wonder intact inside her." Other songs came from the fertile imagination which accompanied her "psychedelic" experience of pregnancy, amplifying and revealing hidden aspects of being.

The idea of visions coming from altered physical states is reminiscent of Simon Jeffe’s account of the dream he had when ill which led to his founding the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, so it is perhaps fitting that the opening track here is comparable with the PCO's work. Called "Al Cancello" it starts with slow solo violin then the pace picks up with a repetitive rhythm, plucked strings and bass, are added, before the melody is taken by a flute. Translating as "At The Gate" this beautiful piece conjured into my mind a child in an idyllic landscape, skipping, breaking into a run, and flying a kite.

A great strength of this record is the way in which vocals are used: often isolated, looped, and set against instrumentation which does not obscure them. The plaintive "La Forza del Canto" is Tarozzi addressing Alda Merini directly, acknowledging their shared birthday, giving thanks for her inspiration. The title track "Mi speechio e rifletto/I speak and reflect" illustrates just that, by creating a hypnotic pattern from several layered loops of Tarozzi's voice. The timbre and organization of the vocals across the whole album is such that poor comprehension of Italian need not detract. Translated text is included though.

There is fantastic contrast throughout this release. "Domina" has an atmosphere similar, if smoother and prettier, to some of Wendy Carlos’s heavier work on the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange. Here Tarozzi uses keyboards to create fuzzy bass notes and soaring strings as a backdrop against which she warmly intones "stop listening to them, they will exploit you!"

"Cunning" features only her keyboards and Domenico Caliri’s electric guitar with added fuzz and sustain. On "L’assenza" (Absence) Vincenzo Vasi's electric bass is the closest I’ve heard to some of the work on Brokeback’s From the Cook County Water Table and combines beautifully with Silvia Tarozzi's violin and accordion. "La so stanza dell’affetto/The substance of affection" starts with a repeated disintegrating loop giving way to cool vocals and a delicate repeated guitar figure, then finally sounds like a slide guitar outtake from Wim Wenders’ Paris Texas.

Even with the translated text, the meaning of "Sembra neve/It looks like snow" is unclear. It may be about her new son, Romeo, or an ode to a landscape under the Italian sun. This track may be my favorite. It begins with Valentina Malanot's ethereal voice combining well with Tarozzi’s more spoken vocals which give way to ripe squarks from Edoardo Marraffa’s tenor saxophone and Tarozzi’s organ tone. Eventually gentle plucks upon Enrico Lazzarini's double-bass and Tiziano Popoli's piano provide a base for perfect absurdity and confusion: sampled Dada mutterings by Raoul Hausmann. It is a terrific album.

samples available here

20 April 2010

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Albums and Singles

As a longtime and somewhat obsessive fan, I am always eager to hear any new Richard Skelton project, but it is fair to say that his discography has become an increasingly varied, unpredictable, and prolifically expanding world to navigate in recent years. While I would hesitate to describe this latest release as "back to basics" or a return to form of any kind, These Charms May Be Sung Over A Wound is nevertheless an unambiguously significant album for Skelton, as it is both his first vinyl release in roughly a decade and an extremely rare departure from his own Aeolian/Corbel Stone Press imprints. As befits such an auspicious event, the album unveils yet another new stage in Skelton's restless creative evolution, expanding upon the epic scope of his recent heavy drones towards both increasingly industrial textures and a more melodic and harmonically complex sensibility than usual. While I personally welcome the latter more than the former, These Charms is easily the most ambitious and substantial stand-alone opus that Skelton has released in years.

Phantom Limb

I once had a friend who was convinced that a band could only be great for either three albums or five years.Obviously, there are a handful of exceptions and a number of impassioned debates that can be had on the subject, but I was nevertheless struck by how often that pronouncement proved to be true.While bands tend to involve multiple creative forces interacting with one another rather than just one overarching vision, it does often seem like there is a finite amount of inspiration and that it inevitably runs its course after just a few releases.Consequently, I am always somewhat astonished when an artist like Richard Skelton comes along and manages to convincingly reinvent himself again and again to release a series of great albums that share little in common with one another.Obviously, collaborating with Autumn Richardson played no small role in keeping Skelton's ideas from growing stale or repetitive, but the more significant factor seems to be that he is a fundamentally curious and deep-thinking fellow who regularly draws inspiration from esoteric and non-musical sources.Uncharacteristically, those inspirations are less explicit than usual for These Charms May Be Sung Over A Wound, but Skelton does note that the album is "intricately and indelibly" bound to his regional landscape (in this case, the valleys along the Scottish border).In that regard, These Charms May Be Sung certainly seems to adhere to the same geological time scale and scope that has informed many other recent Skelton releases.The twist this time around is that the textures that Skelton employs have rarely been less organic and earthy.That newly industrial-inspired aesthetic is best exemplified by the first song that surfaced from the album ("For The Application of Fire"), which slowly transforms a ringing bass motif into something akin to a mechanized and relentlessly forward-moving juggernaut.

For the first third of the album, however, Skelton's more industrial textures are beautifully intertwined with genuine human warmth and a poignant emotional undercurrent.If I have one minor grievance with Skelton's major statements over the last couple of years, it is that his geologic scale and inspirations leave little room for human-scale tenderness and emotion.Obviously, on the rare occasions when Skelton manages to convincingly evoke shifting tectonic plates or a collapsing star, I am perfectly fine with that absence and I am more than happy to just sit back and enjoy the spectacle.Nevertheless, the vulnerability and soul at the heart of pieces like "For Either Deadened or Undeadened" is a welcome return to the more raw and honest emotional intensity of Skelton's classic Type albums (though the emotions here tend to be more bittersweetly radiant than they were in his darkly cathartic early days).In any case, "For Either Deadened or Undeadened" is an absolutely gorgeous piece, simultaneously evoking the slow, sensuous curl of smoke and a sun-dappled autumn landscape.Elsewhere, the tone of "Against All Tendernesses of the Eye" is a bit more ambiguous, but it is similarly successful, as Skelton slowly builds from a foundation of low, oscillating drones into a heavenly crescendo of gently shimmering and quivering harmonies.

When the album arrives at "For The Application of Fire," however, the mood quickly descends into darker territory and mostly remains there.For the most part, the pieces that comprise the second half of the album share an aesthetic centered around slow-motion swells of layered drones, shifting harmonies, and sharp feedback-like textures.Surprisingly, however, there is also the recurrent hint of a beat.On pieces like the wonderfully gnarled and slow-burning "For a Swarthened Body," the deep, subterranean throb remains merely a hint, but both "Against Bite and Rend of Snake" and "For All Cleansings" include enough other rhythmic elements to almost approximate a strain of slow-motion, deconstructed dub-techno (or at least something consistent and machine-like).At the risk of sounding crazy or delusional, I genuinely believe that there is an actual high-hat being played in "Against Bite and Rend of Snake," though it is certainly possible that Skelton is just extremely good at rhythmically harnessing hiss.

Notably, the album borrows all of its titles from "19th-century translations of Anglo-Saxon leechdoms," which are "ancient medicinal remedies" that sometimes "required the recitation of charms to aid the efficacy of the cure."In keeping with that theme, this release is billed as a sort of album-length incantation against fear and darkness.Sadly, I cannot offer a definitive assessment on this release's latent supernatural powers, but I can conclusively state that these songs offer a vivid and immersive listening experience that makes quite an effective (if temporary) escape from reality (particularly when intensified through headphones or extreme volume).At this point, only "For Either Deadened or Undeadened" has fully earned a place in the imaginary "Richard Skelton's Greatest Hits" collection that exists in my head, yet the individual songs on this album are secondary to the deeper, more sustained whole, which is a mesmerizing feast of richly textured, slow-burning transformations executed with a sublime lightness of touch.Moreover, Skelton's dalliance with industrial textures arguably brings his own aesthetic even closer to the aesthetic of the natural world, as ugly harmonies and buzzing, blackened textures are inextricably intermingled with moments of genuine beauty (just like the natural world includes both rapturous sunsets and gazelles being ripped apart by lions).I suspect there is probably a lot more that can be read (or projected) into These Charms May Be Sung that has not occurred to me yet, but the true value of Skelton's conceptual ambitions lies primarily in the fact that they led him to make one hell of a great album.At the present time, there are still a few other Skelton releases that I would categorize as "somewhat more crucial" than this one, but Charms conclusively belongs in the pantheon of his finest releases and it only seems to get better as additional details and layers emerge with subsequent listens.

Samples can be found here.

20 April 2010

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Albums and Singles

This solo project from Max Ravitz has long fascinated me, as he has proven himself to be a fitfully brilliant techno producer over the years, yet his formal albums do not always play to his strengths. As a result, there is no telling where and when a brilliant new song will surface or whether that particular aesthetic will ever be revisited. And then there are occasional surprises like this latest release, wherein Ravitz unabashedly devotes himself to crafting woozy, hook-heavy dance music that will unavoidably be described as "AFX-style acid techno." Obviously, it would be hard to pick a more obvious influence than Richard James, but the idea of a non-willfully difficult Richard James who is perfectly content with crafting conventionally enjoyable hooks and grooves admittedly holds quite a lot of appeal. And it would be a mistake to paint Ravitz as an unimaginative or derivative artist: Maxyboy just happens to catch him in an atypically nostalgic and synth-centric mood (which certainly befits his recent relocation to North Carolina to work for Moog). Whether or not this poppier throwback side of Ravitz's vision sticks around is anybody’s guess, but there is no denying that he is very good at what he does and Maxyboy is an unusually strong and varied collection of songs.

Ghostly International

In 1995, beloved punk trio Jawbreaker followed the darkly cathartic 24 Hour Revenge Therapy with their cleanly produced major label debut Dear You.Predictably, a huge number of their fans felt betrayed and the band broke up in the wake of the resultant backlash.Within a few years, however, many of those same fans gradually realized that Dear You actually featured a remarkable number of Jawbreaker's best songs and the album eventually came to be regarded as something of an improbable, misunderstood classic.It is probably safe to say that Ravitz's fans did not have quite as extreme of a reaction when they first heard Maxyboy, but the difference between this release and previous Patricia releases is similarly dramatic and significant.I was especially struck by the magnitude of that transformation when I revisited last year's excellent Heavy Merging EP last night, as songs like "Balance Acid" masterfully combine a woozily lo-fi production aesthetic, elegantly buried hooks, and a very rhythm-focused compositional approach.With Maxyboy, Ravitz polished up the production and took his vision in a more overtly melodic direction just like the hapless Jawbreaker…for the most part.That said, Maxyboy is too elusively varied to fit most generalizations, which makes me wonder if the true shift may have simply been from Ravitz's usual recording set-up to something more akin to his more stripped-down live set-up.Regardless of how he recorded these ten pieces, however, it is abundantly clear that Ravitz approached this album with great focus and exactitude and that he also composed some of his strongest hooks to date.Sometimes he focused more on beats and sometimes he focused more on melodies or textures, yet every single song on Maxyboy is tightly constructed, effectively paced, and entirely free of unnecessary clutter.In the case of lead single "Downlink," Ravitz managed to focus on seemingly everything at once, as the piece is an impressively sophisticated assemblage of intertwined moving parts from start to finish.

While I admittedly gripe about the current climate of synth fetishism a lot, it is still a delight to hear the textural virtuosity that an artist can unleash when they are in complete command of their gear, as melodies that vibrantly sizzle, bubble, and smear tend to be far more compelling than ones that do not.The opening "Dewpoint" is especially wonderful example of that phenomenon, as an arpeggiated pattern beautifully simmers and snarls beneath a tender chord progression, occasionally intensifying into blurting, ragged, and streaking catharsis. And then Ravitz unveils a lovely and poignant descending melody for a final crescendo.It is difficult to overstate how much such attention to craftsmanship matters, as Ravitz's best songs all share a vivid dynamic intensity, a constant sense of forward motion, and a genuinely satisfying compositional arc.In a similarly acid-tinged vein, "Dr Oetker's Ristorante" is a feast of blearily slow-moving chords, skittering rhythms, and vibrantly gurgling and squirming bass patterns. To be fair, it resembles classic AFX more than anything else on the album, but it is equally true that it would have easily been a highlight of any AFX release it appeared on.Elsewhere, the closing "Ctenophora" is another notable piece, as Ravitz opts to go beatless for a sublime and hallucinatory synth reverie of beautifully juxtaposed twinkling and oozing textures.Those highlights are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg though, as Maxyboy packs enough other pleasures to feel almost like a singles collection, as I am especially fond of the propulsive and infectiously hooky "Crushed Velvet" and the nuanced rhythmic tour de force of "Myokymia."In fact, Ravitz only truly misses the mark once, as relentless kick drum thump of "Dripping" feels quite leaden compared to the album's other songs (and its jazz-inspired chords never quite blossom into anything more).   

As always, my impulse is to try to rank Maxyboy within the larger context of the Patricia discography, but it feels too much like a one-off detour for that to feel appropriate.While it is probably Ravitz's most accessible and immediately gratifying album, the more understated and veiled melodies of earlier Patricia releases are a bit better suited to long-term listenability.That said, it is tough to hear a piece like "Crushed Velvet" and imagine any way that Ravitz could have possibly improved upon what he did.And if Ravitz wants to release a loving homage to classic early '90s techno in 2020, I am certainly not going to complain (and I cannot think of another current artist catering to that specific strain of nostalgia more skillfully than he does).Plenty of bands have been cannibalizing late '70s/early '80s post-punk for the last four decades and it has occasionally yielded some wonderful results.With Maxyboy, Ravitz achieves a similar feat—it certainly is not Ravitz's most distinctive album, but it may nevertheless feature the most enviable hit-to-miss ratio of anything he has released to date.While I am (unobjectively) hoping that the next Patricia album will be more of a middle ground between Ravitz's Opal Tapes fare and this release rather than an increasingly Moog-y continuation of this arc, Maxyboy is convincing evidence that Ravitz's execution is only growing more assured and dazzling with each major statement.

Samples can be found here.

20 April 2010

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Albums and Singles

The German language has words for nearly every complex emotion imaginable. "Weltschmerz" translates to "world-weariness" or, literally, "world pain." Einstürzende Neubauten have touched on many aspects of it throughout their multiple manifestations, but never quite as deeply and consistently as on their 40th anniversary release Alles in Allem (All in All). Formed around insights on their home city of Berlin, the album’s "schwung" expands beyond the German capital city’s borders, achieving weltschmerz twofold: the album was a collaboration for and with worldwide fans, allowing them to contribute lyrically to the album by answering questions posed by Blixa Bargeld, resulting in an album that — while retaining a presence of their home city — maintains no lyrical patriotism to any specific geographic location. Filled with edgy sounds blended with poetry, Bargeld's rich baritone, and traditional sound elements, Alles in Allem showcases their most mature compositions to date whilst maintaining their unique approach to songwriting.

Potomak

Regardless of the band’s musical manifestation through the years, Einstürzende Neubauten’s identity has remained central focused on creative yet carefully crafted compositions, regardless of how chaotic things may seem at first listen. The wayfaring listener will recognize multiple geographical districts within West Berlin, with Bargeld paying visitations to the northern district of Wedding to Friedenau in the south, by way of Liechtensteinbrücke, the Landwehr Canal ("Landwehrkanal") and the Grazer Damm, to ultimately end at the abandoned Tempelhof airfield. With each track sampled at various locations across the city, one can trace Bargeld’s steps on the journey around Berlin, first stopping to visit "Ten Grand Goldie," an electrifying opener with typical Neubauten custom-made squeaks, booms and clangs merged with funky brass and organ.

The rest of the album is more gentle melodically, though hardly in subject matter. Bargeld meanders around to Landwehr Canal, where we learn about the death of Marxist revolutionary, open space, philosopher and anti-war activist Rosa Luxemburg, shot in the head in 1919 and her body dumped into the canal. "Möbliertes Lied" (Furnished Song) builds on metallic percussions (wah-wah spring, metal sheet) while Bargeld’s emotive wafts over farfisa organ, belying the content within: "Den Herrgottswinkel leer geträumt / Offene Weite, nichts von heilig / Um Hummers Willen: Keinen Gott!" (Our Lord’s Corner dreamed away / Vast open spaces, not at all sacred / For Heaven’s sake: No God!!) The aforementioned weltschmerz pierces through every track, but deeply so in "Taschen," which references the bags used by refugees to pack their only belongings in, serving to inject the reality of an outside world into listening ears: "What are you seeking in your dreams? / We seek nothing / We’re waiting." Lost and homeless, with no solid future, the divide between refugee and listener is stark. "Between us and you / Surge the waves colossal / A ravenous monstrosity."

"Seven Screws" is lyrically intriguing, and generated a lot of discussion as to its interpretation amongst supporters. I was struck by the section "I sing and I sing / Until the Hundred-eyes gets sleepy / The strong man now wears a dress / it burns itself deep into his skin." I was reminded of the hundred-eyed giant Argus from my Latin classes, guardian of Io who had been turned into a heifer to avoid the wanting eyes of the god Zeus. While there is no firm interpretation of the track, the myth birthed the phrase "watched by the eyes of Argus," which is to be subjected to intense scrutiny, in action, word or deed, often to a distressing degree. The ability to be oneself without the scrutiny of society is surely the greatest weltschmerz in our ever-connected, ever-shrinking modern global village.

Everything being taken into account, Berlin is no longer so very different from that global village — all in all.

Samples available here.

19 April 2010

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Albums and Singles

Jason Molina's discography is littered with unique albums and unexpected approaches; his constant re-invention and willingness to experiment practically defines his career. But, one of my favorites is one of his cockiest and most unadorned records. Ostensibly devoted to the subject of unrequited love and its many ins and outs, Jason's third album explores a topic most writers rightfully avoid for fear of foolish sentiment and awkward cliché.

 

Secretly Canadian

Writing about love is probably one of the hardest and dumbest things a young writer can attempt. Nevermind that love is easily one of the most written-about subjects in the history of song and poetry, it's just stupendously easy to write very bad songs about a pretty girl or a failed relationship. Everyone's probably scribbled something like that down in a journal somewhere at some point. Molina doesn't exactly shy away from these topics either. On both "Redhead" and "How To Be Perfect Men" Jason tackles them head on, but he does it without forced romance or a single cheap lyrical trope. He opens the record up with a warning shot: "There will be trouble with me / there will be trouble more than these." One verse later he utters an unusually cocky couplet, half-threatening his nameless other with claims of superiority and virility while still managing to sound like a beggar: "There won't be more than one of me / is the only thing I can ever promise you / And I make enough loving for three of me."

Songs: Ohia doesn't sound like this anywhere else. Between its quickly strummed guitar and sultry rhythm combination, "Hot Black Silk" sounds triumphant and desperate simultaneously, as does much of the rest of the record. Molina gravitates between familiar yearning and a reproachful distaste for love's many moods throughout Axxess & Ace. He offers up sage-like advice on "Love & Work," warns against tyranny on "Love Leaves Its Abusers," and with a seducer's confidence sings about love, second chances, and making decisions on the superb "Captain Badass." There aren't lines quite like these anywhere on any other Songs: Ohia album: "Quote Captain Badass, 'I am setting your heart on fire / so when you leave me / I will burn on in your soul...' / You won't have to think twice / If it's love you will know."

The record's second side is a little more subdued than the first, but it continues Molina's lyrical hot streak with songs like "Come Back To Your Man" and "How To Be Perfect Men." The former is an impressionistic demand for forgiveness that quickly takes a selfish turn. For the first time since "Love & Work" Jason hints at some kind of reciprocity, trying to explain whatever it is that needs explaining: "There are demands on spirit and flesh / and I've made the effort to survive them." But, with an unexpected twist, the band launches into a reproachful chorus as Molina half shouts, "Now come back to your man." Like his explanation should be enough to patch things up. The latter is one of the most despairing songs on the record, and it returns to the somewhat jazzy, almost sleazy sound of "Captain Badass," but this time around the mood is total surrender and defeat. With a bitterly sarcastic tone Molina calmly recites, "I choose to have women write my plan / and I have my reasons / They'll write that list / of all that I should be / and perfect men would never be / jealous or desperate / My ghost and I in our grave will lie / and we'll read that plan / on how to be perfect men."

The Secretly Canadian Web site features a quote from Jason about this record, where he says that the album was recorded very much on the fly and without much preparation: many songs were recorded in one take without the musicians having much of a chance to digest the songs. He also says this album is especially devoid of bullshit lyrically, so I take it to be a pretty naked representation of whatever was going through his mind at the time. Thanks to that kind of directness, Axxess & Ace sounds phenomenal. The band performances are sparse, but potent, and the lyrics are both tense and personal, almost uncomfortably so. For that very same reason they are appealing and cathartic. Instead of distancing himself from the subject matter like a student at study, Molina puts him (and us) in the middle of it without shying away from any thought, no matter how ugly. Axxess & Ace deserves to be mentioned among his other great albums, like Ghost Tropic and Magnolia Electric Co., not because it ventures into unusual or highly stylized territory, but because it is without conceit, features some of Molina's best written songs, and because it contains some of the best songs I've heard about love from anyone.

samples:

• Hot Black Silk
• Captain Badass
• Goodnight Lover

 

19 April 2010

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Albums and Singles

Severed Heads’ bizarre 1983 album has led one of the most improbable and ridiculous lives that an album could possibly hope to live. Although it began as a self-released cassette of absurd and unapologetically experimental tape loop collages, a fluke surge of interest in the Australian post-punk scene resulted in a major label record deal, an international tour, and the most unlikely of hit songs. The rest of the story is even stranger still.

 

Sevcom

Severed Heads musical output has essentially been Tom Ellard’s solo project since 1985, but the band was originally formed in 1979 by Richard Fielding and Andrew Wright as Mr. And Mrs. No Smoking Sign (a name chosen for being deliberately stupid, unwieldy, and uncool-sounding).Ellard joined later that year and the band changed their name to Severed Heads for similarly perverse reasons (they thought it would be funny for a trio of beachside suburb-dwelling Australians to get lumped in with scary British industrialists).Then Wright quit because the band wasn’t headed in a musical enough direction and Fielding left a little bit later because the band was becoming far too musical (he did not like the idea of "songs").Both founding members gone, Tom was left alone with a revolving cast of doomed new members (and a band name that he never liked).Amusingly, Fielding later went on to start a band with no human members, just equipment that was set-up to play by itself.It’s unfortunate that he did not become more famous, as I suspect his story might be even more fascinating than Ellard’s.

While Tom retained the passion for tape loops that was the core of the early Severed Heads’ sound, Since the Accident marked the first appearances of the electro pop elements that would later come to define the band in future years (for better or worse).The most overtly melodic piece on the album is "Dead Eyes Opened," a bouncy synthesizer confection that made the Australian charts upon its release and ultimately became a big hit when it was remixed in 1994.Ironically, Ellard has publicly dismissed the song as "insipid" and only included it on the original Terse Tapes release because he needed some filler to avoid leaving blank space on the cassette.Alleged insipidness aside, it's still a very fun and catchy song.Also, scoring a hit with a song that is built around a white noise solo and a British journalist talking about a mutilated corpse is a pretty amazing accomplishment.

The rest of the album, of course, sounds nothing like "Dead Eyes Opened."There are a few other pieces that make the leap from "sound experiment" to "song," but melodies are usually in short supply.They aren't entirely absent though: "A Million Angels," one of the album’s clear highlights, marries a heavenly choral snippet to an endearingly plodding proto-industrial dance beat (and even features an actual chord progression)."Exploring the Secrets of Treating Deaf Mutes" is another great foray into eccentric electro pop, though it unexpectedly features some very intense vocals (presumably not by Ellard).It is a lot more conventionally melodic and songlike than anything else here, but it was inspired by a Maoist-era pamphlet on acupuncture and features a bridge that sounds like an out of control tape reel or a broken short-wave radio, so it is still pretty bizarre by normal standards.

The remainder of the pieces are mostly tape collages and they are fascinating in their own right.I’d be hard-pressed to describe Since the Accident as a great album, but it is certainly a very charismatic and inspired one—mischief and wonder clearly seem to be its sole guiding motivations.While most of the tape experiments roughly follow a template of increasingly dense, tensely repeating loops, the source material is quite varied, wild and imaginative.At this point in their career, the band had absolutely zero hope for success: they were just some friends making the craziest music they could in a sparsely populated country that didn’t have the slightest interest in what they were doing.Consequently, everything was fair game: recordings of Sylvia Plath, Jerry Lewis, howling dingoes, jet engines, nature documentaries, televangelists, snippets of old soul songs, and much, much more are cut-up, slowed-down, sped-up, reversed, and decontextualized into a deranged cacophony.In retrospect, Severed Heads had a lot in common with their US contemporaries Negativland, but without any narrative or political end in mind, just a fascination with pure sound and stuttering, disorienting juxtapositions.

Since its Nettwerk reissue in 1989, Since the Accident has always been paired with a scattering of tracks from its predecessor: the legendary Blubberknife cassette.Musically, Blubberknife treads quite similar territory to Accident, but rarely embellishes its insistently repetitive tape loop pile-ups with beats, vocals, or instruments (aside from "Adolph A Carrot").While surreal and perversely hypnotic at times, Blubberknife’s privileged status in Severed Heads history is due primarily to the fact that it was originally packaged in a shrink-wrapped assemblage of old television parts.Its limited run sold very well, but the packaging was so successful as a bizarre art object that many people never bothered to open it to get to the actual cassette (much to Ellard's bemused consternation).

The current version of this album has the added bonus of featuring reproductions of the locked grooves that first appeared on the 1984 reissue by Virgin Australia, one of which actually began the second side of the album.It is very hard not to love a band that tried so diligently to annoy and alienate the hapless record label that tried to give them their first taste of success.

(Note- I have the 1989 Nettwerk version of the album.The content and sequencing vary quite a bit between different versions.)

Samples:

• Dead Eyes Opened
• A Million Angels
• Alaskan Polar Bear Heater