Plenty of new music to be had this week from Laetitia Sadier and Storefront Church, Six Organs of Admittance, Able Noise, Yui Onodera, SML, Clinic Stars, Austyn Wohlers, Build Buildings, Zelienople, and Lea Thomas, plus some older tunes by Farah, Guy Blakeslee, Jessica Bailiff, and Richard H. Kirk.
Lake in Girdwood, Alaska by Johnny.
Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
Our increasingly irregular feature looking at crucial new dance music returns this week with reviews of a two-disc DFA/Supersoul Recordings comp, a new collection of Balearic disco, an edits disc by Betty Botox, a mix CD by Optimo and the debut album by Yo Majesty.
"Death From Abroad Presents Supersoul Recordings: Nobody Knows Anything" DFA
DFA's European sister label Death From Abroad gives us a double-disc compilation of singles and b-sides, collecting pretty much everything released via vinyl and digital by Berlin's Supersoul Recordings. Supersoul is a relative newcomer in the dance music scene, putting out its first single in 2006. Founder Xaver Naudascher, who also records for the label, was previously best known for collaborations with Einstürzende Neubauten, remixes for Pylon and UNKLE, and production work on the Run Lola Run soundtrack. I will try not to hold that last credit against him. The label's unifying aesthetic is a focus on lateral-minded, genre-defying approaches to classic subgenres of dance music. A bit of fun can be had spotting the influence from track to track: "Oh, there's a Detroit electro piece," "This one sounds like Italo Disco," etc. However, these genre exercises are far from reverential or narrow in scope. The opener "Lost," credited to Naudascher, mixes messy, hand-played granular synth sounds into the rigid framework of Detroit 909/303 electro. The epic four-part "Moon Unit" by Mogg & Naudascher is krautrock-influenced Italo Disco, combining sparkling arpeggiations with spacious, longform kosmische meanderings. It's awesome stuff, easily matching the bar previously set by Delia & Gavin's The Days of Mars. Walter Jones aims for the ultracompressed disco-house aesthetic made famous by contemporary French producers, but ends up in territory that is no less sleek, crystalline and ultramodern than Naudascher's contributions. Other standouts include Plastique de Reve's two sides, both which find new and interesting ways to breath life into the corpse of Hi-NRG house music, whether with the sassy singalong refrain of the Radical Cheerleaders on "Resist," or the dramatic use of resonance, cutoff, stereo panning and EQ in "Lost in the City." There are a few clunkers across these two discs, but surprisingly few, as Naudascher clearly has a strong editorial voice, and almost everything he has released fits into his vision, bringing dance music's past kicking and screaming into an everpresent now.
Balearic House is less a genre than a particular approach: a buoyant, space-y, lighter-than-air take on sophisticated house and Italo Disco. There don't seem to be any particular rules for the genre, except perhaps for a slightly laid back tempo, 90-110 rather than the usual 120-140 BPM range. In general, there seem to be some affectations of funk, soul and even dub in the music, and a general avoidance of the kind of hard-synced roboticism of electro and trance styles. Instead, we get handclaps, finger snaps, echo, organic hi-hats and bass parts that sound like they might have been played live rather than sequenced on software. Belgium's Eskimo label presents this continuous mix of some of the newest and best examples of the genre by a bunch of faceless European artists you've never heard of, with a few leftfield choices thrown into the mix for good measure. I am often annoyed by commercially-released mix CDs, as they frequently fail as compilations, with tracks only allowed to play for their most action-packed 2-3 minutes, with so much crossfade that the songs are frequently useless for listening in isolation or using for one's own mixing purposes. This compilation is a happy exception, however, with all tracks playing for nearly their full running time, and the transitions seamless but never showy. Thanks goes to mixer/producer Skinny Joey. The breadth and variety of music collected here under the banner of "Balearic Beat" is impressive, from the chillout dub style of Coyote's "Grow Your Hair" to the melodramatic, devastating white soul of "Don't Turn Away From Love" by Lovelock. Though the mix certainly has crescendos and valleys, things never get amped up into tent-burning territory, even on ostensibly "noisy" tracks such as Homerun's "The Killer Storm." Probaby the most leftfield choice here is a Cosmo remix of a track by prickly British experimental post-punk-dance agitators Spektrum, but I must say it fits with the theme remarkably well. Lullabies in the Dark's "Estrella" is air-pushing speaker funk, crashing unceremoniously into Ichisan's spaceborne "Radar Pulse Is Sent," which may be about as corny and emotive as the disc gets. Depending on one's taste level, Cosmic Balearic Beats Vol. 1 might be rejected completely; it certainly doesn't have the crossover appeal of DFA or Ed Banger's output. Nope, I'm afraid this is pure European disco-cheese, and all the better for it.
Betty Botox is another face of producer/mixmaster JD Twitch/Optimo, largely reserved for his edits of material not originally conceived as dance music. I've long been confused as to what exactly the difference between a "remix" and an "edit" is, so if you're in the same boat don't feel bad. As near as I can figure, an "edit" is produced using only the stereo master, and is generally an attempt to whip the track into shape for the dancefloor with a minimum of alteration. A remix generally uses the individual stems and/or re-recordings of parts, and usually implies a much more radical reworking of the original material. Of course, as with all such terms, there is quite a bit of gray area, and in this era of digital audio and "blog house" there are plenty of so-called remixes that have used only the master, and plenty of edits in which there must have been access to the original track parts. Betty Botox leans a bit more towards the classic definition of an edit on Mmm, Betty!, however, presenting a mismatched suite of nine tracks by such unusual suspects as The Residents, Hawkwind and Zed. Some of the choices here are a bit more obvious, such as The Jellies' "Jive Baby On A Saturday Night," which was already a pretty solid disco number. Betty's treatment extends the song and emphasizes the beats and breaks, adding dubby touches here and there. Mostly this will appeal to DJs and amateur mixologists of all stripes, who slave away with beat markers in Ableton Live trying to make atypical songs sync up with a solid 4/4 beat. Here, all the work has been done already, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on the amount of personal pride one takes in doing the work for oneself. As a listening experience, this disc still provides some unexpected pleasures, such as the awesome edit of The Residents' "Diskomo," which was always meant to be a "disco" version of "Eskimo," Betty's remix helping it achieve maximum dancefloor potential. It's shocking just how well the song works as classic mutant disco. Ditto Hawkwind, who are given the Beyond the Wizard's Sleeve-style once-over with "Valium Ten," the repetitive motorik chug and synth lines emphasized. Naum Gabo steps in at the end for an awesome reworking of Zed's "Fremen," a 1970s French prog analog masterpiece. Mmm, Betty! contains more than enough outré dance energy to fuel an exclusive loft party for discriminating ravers, and it also inspires creativity in DJ sets by going well outside the genres usually considered for the dancefloor.
Glasgow's JD Twitch/Optimo (Espacio) has worked to position himself as the music snob's mixologist of choice. Spanning genres and time periods in an audacious manner, Optimo freely moves between populist, speciality and experimental avant-garde music with a magpie sensibility that finds dance mix potential in practically anything. In the case of mixes like the double-disc How To Kill The DJ Part Two (which we reviewed here upon its initial release), Optimo occasionally let the solid backbeat lapse in favor of adventurous explorations of strange juxtapositions and unorthodox mashups. Here on Sleepwalk, his debut for the relatively high profile Domino label, he produces a mix that is high in the music nerd quotient (Nurse With Wound, Coil and Cluster all appear), but very low on the dancefloor quotient. Instead, this is more of a sequenced, slightly crossfaded mix CD made by your friend with really good taste in music and an awesome record collection. As such, it cannot depend upon the usual mitigating factors of dance mixes; instead, it relies purely on whether or not you like Optimo's choices of abstract chillout music. It's hard to complain about the inclusion such perennial cult favorites as Eden Ahbez (cryptic poetry over exotica backing) and Mulatu Astatke (Ethiopian jazz with awesome psych guitar solos), but for adventurous music fans and MP3 blog junkies, most of the tracks included here will be old news. What music nerd hasn't heard of Arthur Russell or Lee Hazlewood or Karen Dalton by now? I suspect that a major attraction for Coil completists will be an "exclusive mix by Peter Christopherson" of "A Cold Cell" (entitled "A Cold Cell in Bangkok"), but it's really nothing special, closer in sound to the Ape of Naples version of the song, and further away from the superior Backwards-era demo included on the Wire Tapper comp years ago. It's hard for me to completely pan this, as so much of the music here is great, but the whole enterprise of releasing a mix disc like this seems creatively bankrupt by its very nature. Optimo is obviously talented (see the Betty Botox review above), but his input here is minimal-to-nonexistent, akin to putting your iPod on shuffle and recording the results. I'm calling bullshit on this whole niche market of commercially-released mix discs until further notice.
Yo Majesty, "Futuristically Speaking...Never Be Afraid Domino
On the other end of the taste spectrum from items such as Optimo's music snob-approved mix CD is Yo Majesty's debut album Futuristically Speaking...Never Be Afraid, which is also out on Domino. Yo Majesty is a female HipHop duo from Tampa, Florida, consisting of MC Shunda K and singer Jwl B. They are hard-hitting ghetto-ass lesbian thugs with foul mouths, and they might just save HipHop, offering a powerful riposte to the genre’s history of misogyny. Their beats are produced by the duo Hard Feelings UK, who combine 1980s electro, Miami bass and straight-up Dirty South crunk to provide a series of impossibly punchy backing tracks for the twosome to rhyme over. And rhyme they do, spitting out a series of obscene soliloquies about fucking, fighting, getting fucked up and fucking shit up. Oh, and they are also Christians. Though this is undoubtedly a HipHop album, it is also just as clearly a club album. The hard-hitting old school bass/electro style and number of refrains that are sung rather than rapped make this work just as well outside the usual HipHop club milieu. Their shows are the stuff of legend, with Jwl B often performing topless, both women provoking the audience with their unapologetically nasty, aggressive lyrical style. The refrain of "Club Action" (otherwise known as the "Fuck that shit" song) has already become famous due to its appearance on a number of underground mixtapes, as well as Girl Talk's latest album, and for good reason. It's infectious Babaataa/Dynamix-style backing track, and profane, lightning-fast rapping, are a recipe for music blog fame. However, there are more complex things afoot across the album, tracks such as "Night Riders" and "Never Be Afraid," in which Shunda K delivers political/philosophical/spiritual messages (incoherent though they may be) over HFUK backing tracks that display an intimate knowledge of the weird alien rhythm science that made Miami Bass and electro such innovative styles in their heyday.
Ridiculously slobbered over by elite geeks as well as the far more fashionable new disco vanguard, the progressive music of Black Devil was allegedly rediscovered after years of obscurity, culminating in a handful of overblown, overlapping releases from Rephlex. Irrespective of the convuluted backstory's validity, original member Bernard Fevre's return after roughly three decades manifests itself as this nebulous collection of undated, unglamorous tunes.
Since Fevre has opted not to reveal just how old or new these six tracks are, I'm therefore compelled to eliminate all the evidently contrived hype from the equation. With context stripped away, what remains simply fails to dazzle beyond a few melodic glints hardly worth revisiting. Opener "The Devil In Us" shuffles through synthesizer soundbanks with untreated attention deficit disorder, while "On Just Foot" figuratively and half-literally farts along with a giddy proto-rave tinkling electro bell line. "I Regret The Flower Power" begins like some funky remix of Throbbing Gristle's "Hamburger Lady" before a bubbly bassline and sharp string patches jump into the forefront, though Fevre's vocals disappoint. Throughout the songs, Fevre's muddy muttering, indistinct trill, and wordless bleats sometimes make for surprisingly decent hooks, though typically lack presence, epitomized by the Moroder-esque "Coach Me" and "An Other Skin."
Other than those who still consider Richard James a tastemaker or delight in anything even remotely Metro Area-ish, I doubt that 28 After, released by a label that hasn't even updated its website to announce this release, can do much more for Black Devil's profile than neatly wrap up its 15 minutes of underground fame.
Despite the reference in the title to the collector of souls, this collaboration between ambient trio Rameses III and Brad Rose of Digitalis, a.k.a. The North Sea, eschews the obvious direction of doom and menace. Instead, they journey into frequently blissful territory, with an emphasis on emotional textures that invite introspection and rejuvenation.
The album consists of two 18-minute tracks supplemented by a remix from Xela. Quiet drones and subtle strings with occasional plucked notes form the main compositional elements of “Death of the Ankou.” While a mournful strain runs through it on occasion, the track doesn’t come across as sad or depressing so much as accepting of things as they are. The effect is surprisingly soothing, if not comforting. Delicate chimes and a distant reed instrument provide the wistful ending, like the last gasp of stars fading in the sunrise. “Night Blossoms Written in Sanskrit” begins with a deeper drone, while higher pitches fly overhead. A strummed guitar surfaces momentarily before it’s absorbed back into nothingness. Some reverberating strums pop up again as the ending escalates toward a sunnier ending. Although the first one isn’t a downer by any means, this track builds from that one into something that’s more joyful and optimistic.
Xela’s remix, “Return of the Ankou,” combines elements of the two main tracks into one which becomes more active and less subtle. The strums are more in the forefront here, as are rattles, chimes, and slight doses of feedback. It’s a nice contrast to the two that precede it, yet linked enough thematically that it returns the album to the beginning in a cycle of death and rebirth.
The experience is both peaceful and invigorating, inviting frequent returns.
Christopher Leary combines beats with orchestral elements in this mostly airy and pleasant album. The songs are all solidly constructed and easy on the ears, but frequently lack distinction. Leary expresses a limited emotional palette on these compositions, and as a result the album is short on personality.
The first few songs are so similar that they’re nearly indistinguishable from each other, and none lingers in the mind after they’re over. Leary changes things a little bit with "Infotain Me," giving it a longer introduction before bringing back the beats. This one doesn’t quite go anywhere different from the others, but it’s a sign of change that continues as the album progresses. "Anomie" adds a slight distortion as a textural component, and the tempo picks up a little bit compared to those that precede it, but it still doesn’t necessarily do anything different.
"Open Top" has some metallic echoes in addition to its standard instrumentation. "Lifewish" is mostly ambient with slight melodies and no beats at all, like "Oneirist," which follows it. "Bluebottles" and the closer "Vegas" are both decent tracks, yet don’t have a whole lot going on that isn’t heard elsewhere on the album.
Since almost every song is ultimately driven by beats rather than melody, the orchestral elements often feel decorative rather than essential. They are frequently beautiful, but don’t evoke anything further. It’s certainly not a bad album, but it’s not terribly exciting or different, either.
This disc, the first of two collaborative volumes, is the live studio seed of Hototogisu and Burning Star Core, and stands as tall as the best of their own work. Creating something beyond their usual repertoires, this five-tracker collaboration sees both acts oozing into one five-brained monster. These are not the usual furious black-outs or dolorous droning jeremiads of much underground collaboration.
The lack of any over exertion of musical influence from either act seems to illustrate how extremely solicitous this duo and trio were of each other’s input. This trapped energy of this live studio recording (god save us from postal collaborations between bored pale laptoppers) audibly bounces between the players. Their lack of musical eggshell treading means that the record is neither a jagged glass soundclash nor a collection of disparate elements that refuses to gel. The glue of Volume One is the multi-tasking sounds of C. Spencer Yeh (Burning Star Core’s mainman) and Hair Police’s Trevor Tremaine, here playing as part of an expanded BxC with fellow policeman Robert Beatty. Tremaine’s percussion provides a bed for the players to leap from, a pacemaker (in both senses of the word) and a structure setting unspoken and unseen borders.
"One" is a good example of both act’s self-control, the drone roar relying more on the trickery and force of muscle and smoke than an overload of the senses. The stamp of the percussion seems to be gating the stretch of the snarling feedback, Hototogisu’s Matthew Bower and Marcia Bassett turning drone and vocal inwards instead of spilling rage across the track. The electronic splatter of "Three" has riverbed singing that’s pinpricked into bloody bawls amidst sand dune drones. Sounding like the fruit of neither act, it again appears to be Tremaine’s central and audibly obvious presence that’s driving this performance. His lone-man-in-a-factory clank and kick seems to thicken up the drones, turning them into a thick matt-paint drool.
From the evidence of this 18-minute five-track disc, this team-up is one that should be forced to get together weekly as an article of law; it totally works. The unstoppable elemental force of Bower and Bassett never sound like they’re gnawing at the structures to get loose and splurge ritual across everything. Saying this is a mellowing and focusing of both bands modus operandi is no insult. The beautiful interplay of "four" feels closest to the sound of Burning Star Core, the little melodic patterns evocative of the work of C. Spencer Yeh. Pulling half-formed blueprints from his violin and electronics his input is more noticeable on repeated visits.
Having been lucky enough to see Hair Police live, I think it’s safe to suggest that the slowly expanding bass line on "Two" is from one of Beatty’s handheld boxes. The drums are at their loosest here, almost sinking into the morass, despite syncing up with low end. This constructed aspect doesn’t just leave the others applying simple drones though; they wriggle and surge under tethers. Their part of the sound never slips into being innocuous; it still packs a hefty sting.
This quintet avoiding the current trend for falling into recurring explosions of collective noise, preferring to explore the territory rather than razing everything to the ground. This volume seems more like a Vulcan mindmeld than a jam session, and maybe the fruits of their union should’ve been tagged with a new amalgamated moniker. Volume Two has a lot to live up to.
Listening to Heather Leigh records is like being abandoned in limbo-like badlands. Very few artists are making this sort of sound world visible, and none are doing it using only pedal steel, voice and harmonica. This Fag Tapes cassette picks up the passengers left stranded in the downpour of her Pot Baby album and takes them further in.
Heather Leigh’s voice would fit equally well in either the cathedral or the graveyard; her lullaby culling call is an instantly recognizable vocal. It’s possible to invest it with either malice or innocence, and this duality also applies to her pedal steel playing. At times it’s a crooked metal wave of weight, and seconds later an untouched feather drift of pastel sounds. The drones never obfuscating the instruments musical origins.
While Leigh’s vocal seems composed and focused, her febrile hand movements spew out the combination of iron and sunburn. She never prevaricates on Jailhouse Rock, and her improvisational choices are not fortuitous; she seems to know exactly where she’s going. Always ready to follow or ride the tones that agitate the air she births ugly/beautiful organically sourced sounds. Coming up with crabwise melodic patterns, her fingers push air into forming the thick treacly sounds of collapsing skylines, spiraling up and into itself. Picking out a steady pattern, like the playing of rubber bells, she stamps out seasick and high-end tones. Just before the twenty minute mark, a harmonica is played sounding like its come straight from the aftermath of the American civil war aftermath. The smoky remains of pedal steel remain like ringing cannon feedback in the ears.
On the second side of the tape there seems to be another voice in the mix aside from Heather’s. This dueling male sounding vocal may be her voice electronically altered or an uncredited partner in crime, but it works incredibly well against the higher notes. Heather Leigh’s music seems to be expanding by increments with every release. Now where’s my solo harmonica CD-R?
Admittedly, I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Les Temps Modernes. Founder James Nice has an unshakeable blind passion for '80s proto-electronica, post-punk, and anything Factory Records ever considered releasing. What this translates to is a reissue program comprised of lost classics, adequate relics, and unearthed turds. Chicken Rhythms falls squarely into that middle category.
An argument has been made that Northside was the product of the esteemed Anthony Wilson trying to exploit the "Madchester" scene that groups like The Stones Roses and the label's very own Happy Mondays were bringing to musical heights or cultural lows, depending on who you ask. Based on these recordings, which includes the band's sole Factory album and a handful of bonus single tracks, it comes across as a forced fit. Despite the outright mimicry of the period's neo-psychedelic visual art on the cover, Northside's music rarely resembles any of these "baggy" groups or their immediate descendents enough to even warrant charging the members as opportunist copycats or bandwagon jumpers. I wonder if Northside might have had at least a little more longevity, or perhaps a shot at a proper crossover hit if they hadn't been branded so irresistably with this faddish scene.
"Shall We Take A Trip," their most notable single, only proferred the band a faint glimmer of success in their native U.K., largely due to and simultaneously in spite of a BBC ban of the tune over its drug-friendly lyrical content. While hardly as anthemic as that classic Mondays' hit "Hallelujah," this track as well as several other very enjoyable numbers like "Take 5" and "My Rising Star" will satiate casual and rabid collectors of '90s alternative music, to say nothing of the Factory completists who depend on LTM.
Using only the sound of manipulated AM radios, Fages creates washes of slow, seemingly unchanging studies of frigid sound. Not unlike the asceticism of Eleh, these deliberately static pieces require intensive listening to fully unravel.
"P" is the harsher of the pair here, drawing out a high pitched, painfully shrill electronic tone that immediately begins and never stops.A slight warbling appears, and subtle flickering and fluttering noises seem to arise due to the clipping of the admittedly loud mix.While it’s grating at times, the subtlety that can be heard is fascinating.
On the flip side, "N" works within the same realm of sustained, constant tones exhumed from AM radio waves, but the result isn’t as shrill and therefore not as tinnitus inducing.Instead, there is an underlying tension that doesn't relent:I always expected something else to happen, but the haunting, spectral sounds emit only the most minuscule of changes.There is a slight climax with a dramatic swell-up at the end, but it doesn't reduce the tension at all.
Considering this 7" is a pair of sparse, often times painful, tones that barely change, it isn't the most pleasant record I've heard all year, but it excels conceptually and artistically.Shades of Eleh are here in the staunch minimalism and focus on sparse frequencies, but there feels like a little bit more of grime here, which adds to the variation that can be heard.
On his first true solo follow-up to 2008's brilliant Black Sea, Christian Fennesz has once again presented a work of hazy, inviting brilliance. With the addition of percussion from Steven Hess on the title track, there’s an even greater sense of pop musicality shining through the more abstract moments.
Christian Fennesz' work is not limited by any form of technology, yet he is frequently and unfairly pigeonholed by outsiders as a "laptop artist," despite the frequent use of untreated guitar in his music.Even when he uses software and digital effects, the result is far more human and organic than he is credited for.
The opening "Liminal" and closing title track exemplify this best, both songs meshing the feeling of 1960s pop with modern avant garde instrumentation.The former launches immediately, mixing his plaintive guitar notes with waves of processed, but organic sound that is unidentifiable, yet inviting.He perfectly balances the dissonance of technology with warm, beautiful melodies.Crunchy fuzz layers and gentle rolling tones coexist in perfect harmony, and the entire piece possesses a living, breathing sound to it.
Ending the EP is the title track, which is a pastoral combination of field recordings and guitar, both electric and acoustic.Hess' drumming is perfectly understated: quiet enough to not disrupt the peaceful ambience, but present enough to give the song a sense of movement and propulsion.It has that perfect end of summer sound he has mastered: a mix of natural beauty with just a hint of nostalgia and melancholy.Fennesz has hinted that future work may go more in this direction, and I think it adds another layer of depth to his already complex oeuvre without upsetting the delicate balance.
Between these two songs there’s a bit more experimentation and variation on similar themes.The shimmering guitar and erratic buzzing of "July" still convey that Fennesz warmth, but is more abstract and collage-like, and also has an overall heavier, more monolithic sound to it.The longer "Shift" is more droning that I was expecting, considering the other songs here.Opening with gentle string-like waves of sound, the pieces slowly come into focus, enshrouded in warm, vintage static.Structurally it stays rather monochromatic, lacking the dramatic changes and development from the other pieces.It’s not quite as captivating as the other tracks on this 10", but a less-than-stellar Fennesz track usually rivals the best work of other artists.
Every piece of music I have heard from Fennesz has been fascinating, and this EP is no exception.I only wish there was more here:the sub-20 minute duration simply serves to tease for what will hopefully be an upcoming full length.Listening to this recently, at the end of August and early September, it perfectly captures that end of Summer vibe that works so well.Rarely are there artists this adventurous that I can turn to no matter what my mood is:it's never off-putting or distracting, which is rare.With a new collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto due at any time and hopefully a new full length, this 10" works as a great teaser.
Landings is the culmination of nearly half a decade spent exploring and remapping Anglezarke, on the West Pennine Moors of northern England. Over the course of its pagesLandings interwines the artist's own narrative with that of the landscape - its topography, history and place-names.
This Third Edition significantly expands on the previously published text, adding new writing from 2009-2011 as well as further research into the toponymic and linguistic heritage of the landscape.
To celebrate its publication, a new 35-minute album has been produced which reworks Rapture - a pivotal recording from the second Landings album. All three albums in the Landings Seriesare now available together, as a high-quality, digital download:
{1} Carousell Landings(28th June, 2006) {2} Richard Skelton Landings(28th June, 2009) {3} Richard Skelton Rapture(28th June, 2011)
Each edition of Landings is individually signed by the artist and presented in a beautiful handmade cover, printed on high-quality Gerstaecker paper.
This massive double-album was pretty much a dream commission for Simon Fisher Turner: being asked by the British Film Institute to score the restored footage from Robert Falcon Scott's doomed 1910 expedition to the South Pole.  Given the demands and difficulties involved (soundtracking endless silent footage of cavorting penguins, for example), I'd say Simon's efforts were hugely successful in regards to verisimilitude, ingenuity, subtlety, and creating an appropriately haunted and desolate mood.  When taken as a stand-alone album with no visual context, however, the long lulls between flashes of beauty and interludes of bittersweet whimsy can be a bit wearying.
To state that Simon Fisher Turner has had an interesting career trajectory would be a bit of an understatement, as he has been a child actor, a teen pop artist, a member of The The, and one of the two comic geniuses behind the enigmatic Deux Filles.  He is most well-known, however, for his work as a soundtrack composer, having scored Loaded as well as some some films involving music-savvy folks like Derek Jarman and David Lynch.  Scoring The Great White Silence would have been daunting for anyone though.  Even the BFI's restoration of the film was nightmarishly complicated, as it had to be painstakingly pieced together from Herbert Ponting's negatives and his notes rather than an existing print.  That turned out to be ominous foreshadowing for Turner's own Herculean challenge (he actually described the experience as "terrifying"): composing a compelling score for two hours of black and white silent footage of ice, penguins, and men that were about to die slowly and miserably.  The task was further complicated by the fact that the film is a fairly high-profile and historically important work and that the music had to add drama and mood to Ponting's material without ever overpowering it.
The BFI's Jane Giles summarized Turner's quandary perfectly as "the score is really important to how to sell a two-hour non-fiction film where there's a lot of penguins and a lot of ice and not much drama."  Ponting's footage wasn't intended as a feature film documenting the end of one of England's greatest explorers– it was commissioned for a series of newsreels to sate the public's thirst for constant updates regarding the expedition and for adorable footage of penguins, which no one in England had seen before.  He didn't even attempt to weave it into a film until ten years later.  Consequently, it has some shortcomings regarding its narrative arc.  Naturally, the ultimate outcome of the voyage retroactively adds gravity, but Turner still had to make it all seem appropriately gripping without transforming Scott's final days into a music video for a Simon Fisher Turner ambient piece.
Rather than launching right into constructing the composition, Turner instead devoted quite a bit of effort to searching out sounds that had strong connections to the footage.  Appropriately, there is quite a bit of silence here, but it is meaningful silence.  Chris Watson had actually made some recordings in the hut where Captain Scott died (for an unrelated project) and helpfully offered them to Turner.  More overtly, Simon also employed what he calls "fake Foley effects" to match the actions taking place on the screen, like faking wind noises by dragging a microphone along a satin curtain.  Additionally, he had excellent luck acquiring quite a few other thematically appropriate sounds, recording the still-intact bell from Scott's ship, locating some contemporaneous gramophone recordings, and sleuthing out the hymn used to close Scott's memorial service.  Once all these elements fell into place, Simon's anxiety subsided a bit and everything started to cohere into a workable shape and trajectory.
The core of the soundtrack is built upon very slow-moving and minimal ambient drone that generally stays fairly austere and melancholy in tone.  Some of it is a bit bland, but I like most of it–in fact, some of it is incredibly beautiful.  The synthesizer parts rarely get the chance to stick around long enough to fully engulf me though, presumably because penguins, precocious cats, and dancing seamen keep appearing on the screen to necessitate a mood shift.  Fortunately, the resultant interludes are exactly what makes this piece so unique and fascinating.  In fact, the scratchy gramophone recordings of a female classical vocalist and the nakedly unprocessed closing hymn are among the most poignant and stunning moments of the entire album.  Though the "found" snippets of music tend to frequently steal the show, they wouldn't work if Turner hadn't done such an amazing job flowing seamlessly between relatively disparate moods (from "banjo hoedown" to "otherworldly, pitch-shifting ambiance," for example).  For all its digressions, the piece never loses the feel of an unfolding whole.  Simon also does an excellent job breaking up his sprawling opus with intelligent textural juxtapositions, cutting through his electronic reverie with sharp strings, scratchy old 78s, swooping theremins, and well-placed field recordings.
As a soundtrack, The Great White Silence probably exceeded everyone's highest expectations, as it manages to be sublime and deeply emotionally resonant without ever becoming too forceful.  In fact, it may very well be a masterpiece, though I won't know for certain until the film gets a US release.  As a decontextualized album, it is a bit flawed solely because it has been removed from its intended purpose as part of a larger whole.  There are a number of passages that I absolutely love, but they slowly trickle out over a period of nearly two hours, which makes this a tough album to listen to in its entirety.  This would be a lot easier to fully embrace if I could isolate individual stretches, but am sure chopping the soundtrack into smaller pieces would have wrecked the flow and synchronicity.  Turner had to choose between making a great Simon Fisher Turner album and making great soundtrack and he chose the latter, but he certainly came admirably close to nailing both.