21 August 2011

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Albums and Singles

John Fahey: Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You (The Fonotone Years 1958-1965)

As with all histories, context and an appreciation for the times are essential. In 1958, when the earliest of these recordings were made there were probably no more than a handful of reissues of pre-war country blues 78s available on record in the United States. The long-playing 33 1/3 record was, itself, only a recent invention. Today, with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pre-war blues and hillbilly reissues available and in print, when it’s possible to walk into any halfway decent record store (to the extent record stores, halfway decent or otherwise, still exist) and find the complete recordings of Charley Patton or Blind Willie Johnson, it may be difficult to comprehend just how obscure and how otherworldly this music once was. — Glenn Jones, from the Introduction to Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You

21 August 2011

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Albums and Singles

I Listen to the Wind That Obliterates My Traces: Music in Vernacular Photographs 1880-1955

... i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces brings together a collection of early photographs related to music, a group of 78rpm recordings, and short excerpts from various literary sources that are contemporary with the sound and images. It is a somewhat intuitive gathering, culled from artist Steve Roden’s collection of thousands of vernacular photographs related to music, sound, and listening. The subjects range from the PT Barnum-esque Professor McRea - “Ontario’s Musical Wonder” (pictured with his complex sculptural one man band contraption) - to anonymous African-American guitar players and images of early phonographs. The images range from professional portraits to ethereal, accidental, double exposures - and include a range of photographic print processes, such as tintypes, ambrotypes, cdvs, cabinet cards, real photo postcards, albumen prints, and turn-of-the-century snapshots. 

The two CDs display a variety of recordings, including one-off amateur recordings, regular commercial releases, and early sound effects records. there is no narrative structure to the book, but the collision of literary quotes (Hamsun, Lagarkvist, Wordsworth, Nabakov, etc.). Recordings and images conspire towards a consistent mood that is anchored by the book’s title, which binds such disparate things as an early recording of an American cowboy ballad, a poem by a Swedish Nobel laureate, a recording of crickets created artificially, and an image of an itinerant anonymous woman sitting in a field, playing a guitar. The book also contains an essay by Roden.

21 August 2011

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Albums and Singles

Nobody that has been following Richard Skelton's career thus far will be astonished to learn that he has added yet another new guise to his stable of projects (A Broken Consort, Carousell, etc.), but the actual content of Wolf Notes is a bit of a dramatic departure.  For one, it is a collaboration (with his wife, Autumn Richardson) rather than a solo endeavor.  Secondly, it is fairly vocal-centric, which caught me a bit off-guard.  In fact, it took me several listens to fully warm to it, as some of my favorite Skelton-esque qualities are downplayed.  In time, however, I grew to appreciate *AR as a uniquely  innocent and anachronistic entity all its own.

Type/Sustain-Release

Wolf Notes is paradoxically an album that is both otherwordly and singularly natural, drawing its inspiration from the landscape surrounding the small Cumbrian village of Ulpha.  While "Ulpha" is descended from Norse words meaning "the hill frequented by wolves" (explaining the album's title), there is nothing sinister or feral happening here, though there is a feeling of primal timelessness that seems thematically appropriate:  Wolf Notes simply sounds like it was conceived and recorded in a world that is temporally and geographically very far from the one most of us inhabit.  That fits quite comfortably with Skelton's previous work: despite being deeply emotive and "human," it seems to be invariably inspired by places where there aren't many people around and that look pretty much exactly the same as they did a thousand years ago.

The five songs function as movements within a single work, as the same themes recur and evolve as the album progresses.  One lilting wordless melody in particular (sung by Autumn) serves as the album's central motif,  but it doesn't appear in every single song (though it is frequently hinted at or deftly danced around).  As for the underlying music, Skelton stays quite firmly within his area of expertise, weaving a groaning and shimmering multilayered web of treated violin drones.  I have always loved his playing and he is characteristically brilliant here, creating a vibrant and prickly halo of microtones and string buzz all around his slow-motion chamber melancholia. Incidentally, a "wolf note" is a type of dissonance, giving the album title a dual meaning.  I have no idea whether or not Skelton consciously uses them here though (obviously, it would be an egregious and unforgiveable thematic faux pas if he didn't).

The heightened sustain, reverb, and spectral after-images enhancing Richard's bowed strings are *AR's only conspicuous nods to modern recording, as Richardson's voice stays fairly pure and unmanipulated throughout.  Also, Skelton generally uses the studio to make himself sound "hyper-natural" rather than less natural.  That difference is important.  Similarly, there is also a conspicuous devotion to old-fashioned virtues like patience, clarity, and simplicity here, as the entire album unfolds at an unhurried pace that accumulates power and momentum simply through inventive repetition, variation, and thoughtfully constructed harmonies.

I think I still prefer some of Skelton's darker and grittier solo work to *AR, but this is definitely an inspired and elegant new facet to his oeuvre.  Actually, in some ways, Wolf Notes might be the most radical thing that he has done yet: there is an uncynical embrace of purity, place, nature, and raw beauty here that is squarely in opposition to our post-modern, post-everything culture (the Sustain-Release version of this album comes with a chapbook of poems about Urpha that even includes a list of native grasses).  He has touched upon all those things before, certainly, but the addition of Autumn's bittersweet voice makes it all seem a bit more vulnerable and human.  Maybe being defiantly pastoral will be the new punk.

Samples:

• Rise
• Decline
• Return

21 August 2011

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Albums and Singles

Lutenist and contemporary composer Jozef van Wissem made his debut appearance on Important Records when James Blackshaw included his sublime piece, "The Mirror of Eternal Light," on his personally curated The Garden of Forking Paths. Fast-forward three years, and van Wissem has released his third full-length for Important: a steady refinement of his craft, clocking in at five songs, 37 minutes (plus a CD-only bonus track).

Important

"The Joy that Never Ends" kicks off the album with three minutes of carefully picked, interweaving lute notes and harmonics, echoing the title track from van Wissem's first Important LP, It Is All that Is Made, in its structure. Halfway through, Jeanne Madic provides a whispered vocal line in French, repeated until the track's end: "Tout ira bien," translated as "All shall be well." That general feeling, one of peace and well-being, runs throughout van Wissem's work as a whole, from his mastery of the Baroque lute (an instrument dating back to 17th century Renaissance days) to his Biblical track titles ("His Is the Ecstasy") and implicit themes of love, family and fatherhood. Van Wissem's music is plaintive, uncluttered and stark—and, more often than not, hypnotic in its disciplined use of structure, repetition, tone and space.

There is one notable departure on The Joy that Never Ends in contrast to his previous Important works. Four tracks in, "Concerning the Beautiful Human Form after Death" finds van Wissem collaborating with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, himself an avid musician and music fan. (Check out the diverse line-up for his All Tomorrow's Parties festival as a recent example, or his collaborations with Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, GZA and other A-list musicians in Coffee and Cigarettes, a collection of short films.) While van Wissem plays a drawn-out series of minimal note clusters on his lute, Jarmusch provides a backdrop of radiating guitar feedback where, typically, there would be silence. It's a bold addition, with Jarmusch showing an impressive deal of subtlety and restraint, letting van Wissem's playing remain center stage.

Like his buddy Blackshaw, van Wissem is often at his best when he stretches his compositional abilities in a long-form setting, ten or fifteen minutes at a time. After four shorter pieces, "The Hearts of the Daughters Are Returned to Their Mothers" fits the bill perfectly, with van Wissem weaving layer upon layer of notes into a beautifully evolving, kaleidoscopic whole. At times, his playing sounds so complex and deeply layered, it's hard to believe van Wissem doesn't have at least twenty fingers—or that he hasn't overdubbed his playing a bit, as he's known to do. In any case, it makes for a gorgeous effect, bringing the piece to a peak three times in 16 minutes. As on the title track, Madic provides a few lines of French vocals as a coda. (Don't ask me to translate—I used Google the first time around.)

"The Great Joy" ends the CD version, van Wissem's playing stark and minimal once again. It is inessential—not a must-have if you'd rather enjoy the snap-crackle-pop of a vinyl pressing than a shiny silver disc—but I found it an effective digestif after the main course.

Samples:

• The Joy that Never Ends
• Concerning the Beautiful Human Form after Death
• The Hearts of the Daughters Are Returned to Their Mothers

21 August 2011

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Albums and Singles

I was both surprised and amused when Natural Snow Buildings released an entire full-length album of all new material to celebrate Record Store Day, as nobody has such a voluminous backlog of material that they can afford to do something like that (well, almost nobody).  Even more unexpectedly, Chants of Niflheim feels like a thematically coherent and deliberately sequenced Natural Snow Buildings album rather than just some collection of curiosities and orphaned songs.  While I wouldn't characterize it as "uniformly brilliant" or "radically different," it is nevertheless a very solid effort that boasts sufficient flashes of greatness to make it unmissable for existing fans.

Blackest Rainbow

In Norse mythology, Niflheim (or Niflheimr) is a cold, bleak region in the lowest level of the universe that translates roughly as "home of mists" (it's beneath the third root of Yggdrasil and somewhat in the vicinity of The Shore of Corpses, if you happen to have a map handy).  That mist-filled realm, presumably still ruled by the goddess Hel, is probably also notable for being populated by the dead (with a strong emphasis on souls that died unheroically).  Despite that singularly sad and macabre inspiration, Chants of Niflheim is not a particularly dark album by Natural Snow Buildings' standards.  Nevertheless, the title is still quite appropriate, as this four-song suite sounds hazy, mysterious, pagan, and hallucinatory enough to do justice to its namesake.

I've seen the term "dream-drone" used a few times to describe the recent work of Natural Snow Buildings and that is probably the most succinct way possible to describe the bulk of this release.  Of the four pieces, "Templar's Ritual" stays most closely rooted to that aesthetic, drifting along for 17 delirious minutes of dense, quivering swells and ephemeral, blurred theremin-like tones.  Mehdi and Solange excel at this type of song– when they get it exactly right, it almost feels like the very air is shimmering.  "Templar's Ritual" does not quite hit that level, but it is still pretty likable.  As is "Chants of the Niflheim, Part Two," which takes an unexpectedly warm and blissed-out tone for most of its duration, before ultimately turning somewhat menacing near the end.  Unfortunately, I've heard too many "straight" Natural Snow Buildings drone pieces at this point for them to fully resonate with me anymore.  Those pieces are often great, but I am like a greedy child that ate way too much of his favorite candy.  Fortunately, Mehdi and Solange have also grown quite adept at inventively twisting and subverting that template.

One such piece is the more pagan-influenced opener "Chants of Niflheim, Part One," in which buzzing drones, cymbal washes, and tambourine-heavy percussion evoke a darkly ritualistic atmosphere.  The album's enigmatically titled closer reaches similar highs.  "H. Scudder" most likely takes its inspiration from the late H. Scudder Mekeel, who was one of the first anthropologists to seriously study American Indian culture.  His fascination with the disintegration of indigenous cultures makes him an appropriate choice here.  The piece itself does not offer many clues, sadly, though it does sound like a surreal and eerily beautiful funeral procession march (perhaps for the death of an entire culture).  It also sounds like something of a minor masterpiece, fluidly drifting through several different movements: Mehdi's unsettlingly doubled-vocal folk musings, heavy swells of buzzing drones, wounded-sounding piano cascades, and something that sounds like the most forlorn parade in the world.  Even better, almost every single one of the individual segments is memorably great– it's a absolutely killer song.

Stylistically, Chants of Niflheim falls very much in the vein of the last Natural Snow Buildings album (Waves of the Random Sea).  So much so, in fact, that it feels like its second half (and not like bonus material either).  I wish more bands would blindside me with unexpected addendums to classic, beloved albums like this.  I wonder if that was their conscious plan.  Probably not, but regardless of its intended purpose (the new album, a tease before the "real" new album, a fun surprise, etc), pieces like "H. Scudder" and "Chants of Niflheim, Part One" ensure that this a fairly exciting and noteworthy addition to Mehdi and Solange's massive discography.

Samples:

• Chants of Niflheim, Part One
• H. Scudder
• Chants of Niflheim, Part Two

 

 

21 August 2011

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Albums and Singles

I was introduced to Bowery Electric's 1996 album when it spent considerable time in rotation at Florida State's student-run radio station, V89. I spent dozens of hours every week delivering pizzas and especially on late shifts or on the way home, tracks from Beat felt like the perfect accompaniment to my directionless malaise.

Kranky

Beat was a monolithic accomplishment from a band that peaked in the middle of their short career. Bowery Electric's 1995 self-titled debut was fine, but something about it always felt a little half-baked. It wanted to soak in slowly-evolving melodies and buzzing drones but it never quite committed to those things. In some ways it felt heavily-indebted to the work of a lot of contemporaries but it never stamped the band's signature on the landscape. Beat, on the other hand, was like Bowery Electric's version of the Hollywood sign pinned to the horizon of what people were calling "post rock." It was a massive and unique record that distilled the essence of that "Kranky sound" into something new.

For the most part, the band ditched live drums for loops on Beat and that decision added a tremendous amount of character. Every time I see a hip hop act with a live drummer who tries to recreate the beats on a kit, I'm disappointed at the loss of that particular quality that comes from stolen sounds. Bowery Electric weren't masters of the sampler or sequencer by any stretch (note the mis-looped beats on Lushlife or the slight flam to the 808 drops on Beat's track "Without Stopping") but they put those tools to use in a way that separated them from all of the other bands playing slow, instrumental rock with the same set of instruments.

On Beat, the bass lines rose to the surface as if someone had gotten a hold of the band's master recordings and decided to make dub mixes out of them. Nothing gets too fast either, a fact that helps the album to maintain a consistent vibe that the other Bowery Electric records missed. I can drop the needle anywhere on Beat and find a perfect reflection of the whole album. Still, there's enough variety within that sound for songs as different as "Fear of Flying" and "Postscript" to feel like extensions of the same idea. The band was playing with samplers and the result was that fantastic kind of naive serendipity that so often strikes when artists work with new and not-terribly-familiar tools.

There are times when a band hits a magical stride and everything comes together through luck or hard work or some combination of unknowable forces to create a perfect album and somehow Bowery Electric made that happen in 1996. Beat sounds very much like the product of intent and experimentation which leaves it rough around the edges in the way that part-electronic music needs to be to sound honest. In fact, after Beat's perfection, 1999's follow up, Lushlife felt like a major miscalculation that took the band into some kind of pop-oriented trip-hop direction. When I saw Bowery Electric on tour with Main, it was clear that they were trying to embrace some of the hip hop aesthetic that had informed their songwriting (their shirts were even a goofy play on the Adidas logo,) but all of that came off like a band that didn't quite understand itself.

The magic of Beat lied in its looping melancholy. Depression can work like a cycle where dour thoughts feed bad moods that beget somber reflections and so on. The songs on Beat worked like that perfectly, all built from simple bass lines, guitar loops, drones, and layers of fuzz that sometimes rode the wave of a drum loop but often just spiraled around in their own sonic soup. Beat was not about style or about the mashup of drone-rock with hip hop; it was about the feeling of trudging through hour after hour, day after day, sometimes peaceful, sometimes mournful, but always destined to wind back up at the same place where you started. That might be the kind of theme that causes a band to stagnate by writing the same record over and over, but in Bowery Electric's case, it seems to have been more like a singular vision that was executed tremendously once, and then left behind. Beat remains one of the records I listen to more often than any other, even 15 years after it was released.

samples:

• Beat
• Fear of Flying
• Coming Down

20 August 2011

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Albums and Singles

Sixteen Oceans is sixteen tracks of the innovative and varied explorations Kieran Hebden is known for, weaving danceable and airy, meandering sounds—and everything in between—into a colorful sonic tapestry. For this album, he creates a sweet retreat of wistful reverie, wavering between fragile notes and jubilant grooves, serving up a suite of tunes that offer a welcoming release and leveraging music’s power to restore. Like the oceans referenced, it’s a fresh breath of fresh, invigorating air, soothing and uplifting in a way that requires little in the way of listener participation other than to sit back and enjoy the ride—a welcome change from much of 2020.

Text

It may have been unintended at the time, but there is a feeling of healing throughout this album: harps, chimes, sitar, dulcimer, flute, timpani, bells, harpsichord, and more are strewn through dreamy synthesizer sounds. The interspersion of bird calls further add to this effect. The primary tracks are held together by the infrequent ambient interlude that make for peaceful listening, but even the lively tracks are bouyed by underpinnings of "peace through movement." Have a listen to "Something in the Sadness" for reference, a track exuding dancefloor energy with a persistent zen-like beat, but bubbling with sensuality and gentleness by way of a subtle strike of twinkling keys, calculated rhythm of background chimes, and a soft layering of harpsichord.

From the outset, the album starts strong with the energetic "School." There are five other "physical" movers: "Baby," "Teenage Birdsong," "Love Salad," "Insect Near Piha Beach" and "Something in the Sadness." Yet, with all the subtleties at play in these tracks, they are candidates for cross-overs to the more "mental" movers like "Harpsichord," "Romantics," "Bubbles At Overlook 25th March 2019" (a fairly self-explanatory title), and especially "4T Recordings." This track is an ambient mantra, an electronic raga of atmospheric proportions, that takes time to get into but is rewarding as it builds. It strikes a polar opposition to the more physical tracks, but is a prime mental mover that encourages the listener to get lost in. My only complaint is that 4T ends too abruptly, waking me from my reverie; thankfully, it is followed by the gorgeous "This is For You," a modulated piano-driven interlude populated with bird and water sounds, eventually flowing into the closer "Mama Teaches Sanskit" which further repeats themes of nature and fully retreats into the mental model of movement, moving far from the dancefloor and into the ears.

This album was released in March of this year, so why write about it in November? This review follows one of the most contentious and divisive elections in American history, and Four Tet’s blissful, dancefloor music is exactly the cure for what ails after a long, arduous journey. This is a prime example of the power of music to lift spirits, and Four Tet’s music serves as a reminder of the power to unite people on the dancefloor, exuding an optimism of it's return.

Sound samples available here.

15 August 2011

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Albums and Singles

As a compilation, this is a somewhat odd proposition: the first half consists of singles dating back to before the release of Information Overload Unit, the latter is post-Leichenschrei, but pre-Machine Age Voodoo material, so essentially sandwiched between their zenith and their nadir. With early material vacillating between noisy textures and punk trappings, and the later tracks showing hints of their synth-pop direction, there's a definite dichotomy here, but both halves excel greatly in what they seek to do.

Walter Ulbricht/Mute

Opening with material from their confusingly early singles, "Factory," "Mekano," and "Meat Processing Section" (all of which shared tracks between them), "Contact" and "Mekano" both use abstractly processed and effected guitars with what sounds like metal barrel percussion and rather naked vocals to create something that’s closer to "punk" than "industrial," to attach genre terms, but fits into neither pigeonhole well."Germanik" amps up the dissonance, with the guitar sounding as if it is piped in from another room while metal percussion and barked pseudo-fascist German vocals become the norm.

Once we get to the middle portion of the album the dissonance is ramped up.The previous three tracks come across as downright quaint once "Retard" starts.Different from the Information Overload Unit track of the same title, the combination of extreme high and low frequencies rival TG's "Subhuman" for pure obnoxiousness, and the lyrics discussing the autopsy of a 12 year old girl is anything but pleasant.I honestly have problems sitting through the entire song just due to the high pitched whistling noise that never relents.

But, of course, there is "Slogun."I think an entire book could be written on both the track and its legacy in various forms of aggressive music.An unidentifiable morass of electronics, guitar, distortion, and what sounds like power tools blast for over six minutes, underscored by an overdriven, rudimentary drum machine beat.Probably most well known is the vocals:manic shouts from both Neil Hill and Graeme Revell barking the slogan of the original Socialist Patients Collective, "Kill for inner peace/bomb for mental health/therapy through violence." Words can't do "Slogun" justice:it is a visceral, physical experience that never stops.I’ve never heard any other piece of music from any genre that hits on such a somatic level.I cannot disagree with the masses that sing the praises of this song:most of SPK's career was great, but this is the perfect culmination of their work, and perhaps the definitive song of the era.

There wasn't an attempt to do a "Slogun 2" after this, on either Information Overload Unit or Leichenschrei, nor should there have been.The remainder of Auto Da Fe is a selection of studio and single tracks from 1982 and 1983, taking the song-oriented direction that was hinted at on Leichenschrei (i.e., "Despair," "Day of Pigs"), but strip away much of the noise and distortion, revealing a sparse, dour proto-pop that is quite different from what they did before, but not entirely out of character either.

"Metal Field" keeps many of the pieces from Leichenschrei:synthetic and metal drums, analog synths, and vocals, but it’s more restrained and subtle.Revell is actually singing, though in a flat, emotionless monotone, and the synths are sequenced into actual melodies and bass lines.It is ostensibly danceable electro, but has this cold, detached feel that makes it anything but conventional.

Similarly, the more upbeat "Walking on Dead Steps" puts together many of the same pieces, but even with its faster tempo and higher energy, lyrics like "fascism is in fashion again" show it wasn't an attempt to gain commercial success.The material from the Dekompositions EP that rounds out the album is comparatively more atmospheric, channeling the mood of their darker work, but with notably more polish and poise."Culturecide" and "Another Dark Age" sound less aggressive compared to other tracks, but are far from danceable, instead beautifully capturing a depressive, bleak mood throughout, even without the layers of grimy distortion and feedback.

It should also be noted that this is not a complete collection of early SPK, and a fair number of things were left off.Somewhat understandably, "Factory" was left off, as it's just a different take of "Mekano" with alternate lyrics, though I would have liked it to have it included for completeness sake."No More" also comes from these early sessions, but is at its core rather amateurish, high schooler punk rock.It's not bad per se, but it doesn’t fit in with any of the other SPK material either.

The "See Saw/Chambermusik" 7" is also excluded completely, likely due to the fact that Revell was not part of the sessions:he was away in the UK recording Information Overload Unit, while Neil Hill, and Hill's wife recorded these tracks in Australia.They actually aren't far removed from what Revell and company were doing at the same time, so their exclusion seems to be more about Revell not participating in the sessions, or perhaps licensing/legal issues.

I think we all know the story after this point:Revell and Leong recorded their attempt at pop music, Machine Age Voodoo, which always struck me as trying too hard.The stiff attempts at funk and conventional pop vocals made the last remnants of the "old" SPK that were there: the metal percussion, feel like an attention-seeking novelty rather than an asset.Coupled with the stereotypical, almost offensive Asian influenced sound, it was an unpleasant piece of generic pop.I'll shamelessly admit that I have the entire Pet Shop Boys discography and actually like Ministry's With Sympathy, but Machine Age Voodoo was simply too much.

Afterward, Revell went on to record Zamia Lehmanni as SPK, paving the way for his current career in film score.That album I can certainly appreciate, but barring "In Flagrante Delicto," it never grabbed me like their early stuff.The slight reprise of pop that came with Gold and Poison I actually found pleasant, if innocuous and vanilla.

But obviously, their catalog up to Dekompositions is what represents their strongest contributions to adventurous music, and it all has held up well over the years.While Leichenschrei is their most cohesive, singular work, I probably show Auto Da Fe some favoritism because it has such a varying sound to it.It actually excels in its disjointedness, and the fact that it has "Slogun" on it doesn’t hurt either.I don't think that any these three albums can be separated though, as they all have their own strengths and contributions to experimental sound art.While I personally only been exposed to them for a bit over a decade, they have lost none of their impact on me, and continue to be as brilliant as ever.

samples:

• Contact
• Slogun
• Walking on Dead Steps

 

14 August 2011

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Albums and Singles

Fans of underground hip-hop have been eagerly awaiting a release like this for a while, as Clams' distinctive productions have been the backdrop for several of the more beloved songs by the utterly inscrutable "BasedGod," Lil B. Although he self-released a "mixtape" a while back (just reissued on Type), this EP is his first ever batch of songs conceived solely as stand-alone pieces.  There are some clear similarities to his other work, like sultry and slowed-down R&B samples, but Rainforest also boasts an appealingly woozy shoegaze/hypnagogic pop sensibility.  I don't think this effort quite deserves the comparisons to Tim Hecker or the "hottest producer on the planet" hyperbole he's been receiving recently, but it's still pretty damn good.

Tri-Angle

The primary idea behind the Clams Casino aesthetic seems to be such a simple one that I am surprised more people have not jumped on it: taking existing pop hooks and warping them into somewhat different pop hooks.  In fact, Casino is kind of the antithesis of "crate-digger" archetype embodied by folks like Madlib, making absolutely no effort to dig up and cannibalize obscure deep cuts that no one else has discovered yet.  Instead, Clams cheerfully borrows from people as ubiquitous as Bjork and Adele.  That absolutely should not work, but Clams (NJ's Michael Volpe) has an amazing ear and devotion to detail.  Also, he is quite inventive.  I guess the lesson here is that a skilled artist can make something his or her own regardless of the materials at hand.

The finest example of his talents on this particular release is the languorously sensual opening piece, "Natural."  The hook is a beautifully slurred and stuttering female vocal snippet that could easily carry the song on its own, but Volpe fills the periphery with all kinds of disorienting and spectral touches like hollow echoes, hisses, backwards instrumentation, and heavy delay that yields a mini-masterpiece of layered pop-savvy melancholia.  It's actually one of my favorite songs of the year thus far, resembling a simplified, shadowy cousin to some of the better recent Four Tet material.

The rest of the songs on the album do not quite hit the same heights, but they still come pretty close (though the Boards of Canada-esque "Treetop" seems like a step in the wrong direction).  Each of the remaining three songs boasts an enticing concoction of ruined and stretched vocals, blurred instrumentation, and spartan head-bobbing beats.  Unfortunately, there is a small catch–they all seem like variations on a very specific template.  Even though this release is under 20 minutes long, it feels like a single idea is being stretched very far.

Also, these pieces are more maximalist than Michael's previous work and sometimes have rock-like crescendos.  I can understand why he made those decisions, as this is the first time his music has had to stand by itself and something needs to fill the void left by the absence of a vocalist, but I don't think he quite got the dynamics right. The best (and most unique) aspects of Clams' work are the ghostly and fragile ones and they need sufficient space to make their full impact–they don't always have it here.  I love the individual parts of this EP: the textures, the hooks, and the subtle hallucinatory touches, but lack of variety prevents me from fully embracing the whole. Volpe is undeniably a formidable and ingenious producer, but his skills as a composer are not quite at the same level yet.  This is well-worth investigating (as is some of his other work), but the surrounding hype is a bit disproportionate for an artist still best appreciated in single-song doses.

Samples:

• Natural
• Drowning
• Waterfalls

 

14 August 2011

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Albums and Singles

Irish steel-string guitarist Cian Nugent's fantastic full-length for VHF is his first widely available recording. It recalls a timeless vinyl record with its two side-length pieces—cohesive and complementary, deftly played, rooted in tradition with a modern experimental bent.

VHF

I first heard Cian Nugent's music on Important Records' tribute to Robbie Basho, We Are All One, in the Sun. His piece, "Odour of Plums," stood out as a highlight—no small feat on an album bookended by Steffen Basho-Junghans, featuring several other strong players. I'm not one for tracking down obscure releases, so Doubles is the first I've heard of Nugent on his own. While I expected something competent, Doubles is a complete joy to listen to, ambitious and fulfilling. It sits comfortably alongside the better works of Ben Chasny and Jack Rose, Jim O'Rourke's guitar-centric albums, and John Fahey's latter-day experiments on Table of the Elements.

"Peaks and Troughs" opens Doubles with a few resonant, off-kilter chords, strummed slowly, the dead air lingering uncomfortably in between. Individual strings are plucked slowly, then a bit faster, lingering around one note, then steering away, then hesitantly back again. Four minutes in, the piece all of a sudden transforms into three dimensions, like watching a flower bud blossom in fast-forward motion. Nugent's technique here draws equally from Middle Eastern and American Primitive guitar techniques, sounding like he drew inspiration out of Sir Richard Bishop's playbook (or something altogether more obscure).

Eventually, all the low end drops out, and Nugent's playing becomes hushed, sparse, but more frantic, desperate. Twelve minutes in, the silence is deafening—and then Nugent brings back the same off-kilter chords that he used at the start, layering notes onto each other until his deft fingerpicking is overtaken by a deep droning hum—at first accompanying his guitar, then suffocating it altogether. (That's about when my wife told me to "turn that shit down"—need I say more?) Listened to without distraction, "Peaks and Troughs" is an eerie, stunning piece—the best solo guitar I've heard all year.

The flipside is "Sixes and Sevens," which also takes its time getting off the ground, with a few piercing chimes and low-frequency thuds scattered in between the vibrating strings. With time, the song unfolds into something utterly gorgeous, with Nugent's pleasant guitar playing accompanied by organ, strings, woodwinds and brass at different points. The song ebbs and flows nicely, its instrumentation lush, its mood relaxed. It never reaches the high drama of "Peaks and Troughs," but what it deliberately lacks in heart-in-throat suspense, it makes up in warm, immersive composition. It is no small feat for a guitarist to record two tracks, 45 minutes between them, and consistently hold my interest. Nugent succeeds, and Doubles is essential listening.

Samples:

• Peaks and Troughs (1)
• Peaks and Troughs (2)
• Sixes and Sevens