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.
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The Echo From The Purple Dawn is a brand new full length from C.C.C.C. member Hiroshi Hasegawa's solo project Astro. Using a battery of oscillators, ring modulators and field recordings Hasegawa has created an engaging and versitile album that masterfully drifts between spaced out analog dream drone and a more extreme form of harsher droning. As Astro Hasegawa is able to combine some of the harsher influence of C.C.C.C. into the world of analog space music to create the signature sounds of Astro. Included is a live track recorded at a festival at the Tokyo Keizai niversity organized by Tetsuo Kogawa. Cover art designed by Important.
ASTRO is Hiroshi Hasegawa’s solo project. He is a founding member of the Japanese noise group C.C.C. Born in 1963, Hasegawa began his improvisation with his voice and drums. In 1990, he made the group C.C.C.C. around the concept of improvised mass-noise with a very loud sound. Members included Mayuko Hino, Ryuichi Nagakubo, Fumio Kosakai. Hasegawa began his solo unit ASTRO with analog synthesizers in 1993 and continued playing in C.C.C.C. Though C.C.C.C. is no more, Hasegawa has continued with Astro and his numerous collaborations drifting between dreamy spaced out bliss and full on waterfalls of beautiful noise.
Windy Weber (of Windy & Carl) tried to release her latest recording on Kranky before releasing it through Blue Flea and Kenedik, but the folks over at Kranky rejected it because it sounded like the sort of thing Nurse with Wound fans would enjoy. This is a crushing and feverish record miles away from Weber's previous work. With Warren Defever helping out, I Hate People sounds absolutely hostile and is one of the darkest things I've heard this year.
Two long and murky songs compose all of I Hate People. True to Weber's musical approach as one half of Windy & Carl, both are composed of protracted and reverberating sounds pulled from guitars, organs, and vocal performances. This time around, however, the gleam of Weber's technique is swathed in tenebrous distress and trembling disgust. Everything pretty about the music is suffocated under shuddering strings, half-whispered vocals, and screeching feedback. According to the liner notes, I Hate People is an isolationist opus, a recording about an island devoid of all the fear, hatred, disappointment, betrayal, and suffering caused by people, but it sounds more like a destructive purging of every black emotion in the books.
At various moments, "Sirens" does sound like the documented travels of some nameless individual slowly sailing to a location not found on any map. Still waters course slowly by as a voyager scans the horizon in a storm of screeching guitars and icy half-melodies. Furious solos blaze away beneath a layer of high-pitched tones as the song slowly dissolves and loses its intensity in favor of a slightly more meditative attitude. After 24 minutes Weber sounds as though she is gradually losing whatever ghost was haunting her when the song began. Cool, twilight sounds and a lovely organ drone end the song on an up note; the sirens of the title disappear completely and for just a second I thought that the next song might be a blissful and soothing reward at the end of jarring and tense ride.
"Destroyed" is just the opposite. It begins with a perverted ohm and is immediately supplemented by an uneven breathing. Whatever island Weber has found herself on, it is not one that brings any repose or relief. Over the course of 32 minutes it grows increasingly ominous and twisted. A sinister chant becomes the hub of the song as it weaves itself into a dry and chilling drone. About half way through the song a drill-like effect is pulled from Weber's guitars and the song turns into a nightmare of echoing chains. Miles away from the influence of other individuals, Weber still finds herself entangled in a host of bad memories and contempt. A low hum ends the song with only a hint of activity warbling away beneath it. If this end signifies the tranquility suggested in the liner notes, then it comes at no little price. I Hate People tears its way through the air and leaves a burnt, uneasy calm in its wake.
Amolvancy's clear vinyl album and sleeve is reminiscent of the movie poster for The Day of The Locust. The music is shrill, cathartic, erudite and primitive: sort of like beating kittens to death with a copy of a French literature anthology.
In a sense, I don’t care what this record sounds like as its packaging is so pleasingly fetishistic. The disc itself is transparent but gives up no easy answers. The absence of a track list adds to the impenetrability factor. The vaguely Freudian and iconoclastic sleeve notes have a circular logic which lends the project an infusion of provocation, mystery and fake principles. Even the grooves in the wax seem like a labyrinth with no exit.
Sheila Donovan’s frenzied gibberish is backed by Volcano the Bear’s Aaron Moore and Dave Nuss of the No-Neck Blues Band. I say gibberish, but her words actually appear to be prepared rather than spontaneous improvisation. Amolvacy’s spiky tribal spirit takes aim at the bubble of contemporary morality even as it captures a foxhole somewhere between the mud-covered spunk of The Slits and the alluring irritation of Sue Tompkins (of Life Without Buildings). Worth sticking with and returning to as the grit makes pearls; eventually Ho Ho Kus, Po Po Kus.
It’s cliché to say, but realistically, the idea of paying taxes to a government and how said money becomes allocated is a definite part of the human condition in most societies. Nations have been built, nations have crumbled, revolutions have been sparked, all based on the people paying their government to do things that they may absolutely not support. It is no surprise then that when Aranos takes on this all too familiar topic he does so at a roots level that eschews his sonic manipulations for a set of folk protest songs.
Rather than the studio twisted and manipulated approach to music he normally employs, Tax focuses instead on simple folk/blues guitar riffs and “Regular Joe” type lyrics. On “I Pay Tax” he begins by discussing his daily routine over delta blues inspired acoustic guitar before it hits him, just exactly how everything he has done so far is affected by tax. When he says “tax” it is with an entirely appropriate anger and vitriol that expresses disgust in ways digital media rarely does. This loathing carries over as he addresses the listener in the subsequent “You Pay Tax,” with a more jazz influenced drum and piano backing track.
Inevitably the source of where these taxes goes that becomes the target of criticism is military and war, which is where most of the remaining 2/3rd of the album becomes focused. The stomping, marching percussion of “We Train” outlines just how taxes are used to train the young men and women to fight, and how the same source of funds buys the “(b)est artificial limbs, best wheelchairs, best coffins” for said soldiers. The oddly up-tempo story of “Sargeant Zero” contrasts the odd percussion and piano work with the story of a young criminal who had the choice between jail or military service, and chose the latter.
The disc essentially ends with “I Don’t Want To Pay For War” which is akin to any and all of the so called “protest songs” of the 1960s, an up-tempo sing along type track that follows along lyrically with what could be expected based on the title. The closing “Bowling Along” track probably resembles what most would expect from Aranos based on previous output, a 11 minute piece of droney, electronically manipulated instrumentation that is quiet and meditative.
Throughout the disc, Aranos is more than happy to offer his take on various forms of roots music, “With Our Killing Costume On” resembles an Alpine drinking song that everyone in the bar could be singing along to if its lyrics were just a bit different, and the homily like vocals of “Padre Speaks” explores the connection between taxes and the church over a liturgical backing of harpsichord and muted acoustic guitar.
The trite adage about the only guarantees in life being “death and taxes” is seemingly an eternal truth that isn’t going anywhere, and thus this album is one that is both timeless and national. Conceptually, I’m sure taxes, war, and the connection between the two will be issues of social concern a hundred years from now, and I’m sure this album will feel just as relevant then as it does now.
Diametrically opposite of the other recent Aranos album, Tax, here is a sprawling 65-minute track of studio processing and electronics wizardry. Different by no means inferior, however, and I would characterize this as a more complex work that has many layers to examine.
Visibly the two recent releases couldn’t show their differences more overtly: Tax in its Spartan, clinical digipak while Koryak comes in an origami like foldout sleeve of melted distorted colors, and a bit of purely abstract text in the center of the sleeve, as opposed to the everyman lyrics on Tax.
The album opens with extremely quiet pastiches of electronic hum before a variety of electronic pulses and tones arrive like distant high frequency beacons. As these increase in volume and become more pronounced, it resembles what everyone in the 1960s thought computers of the future would sound like, I can almost imagine the banks of flashing lights and other cheap visual effects. Through this pulse, a wash of symphonic elements, thick and rich tones begin to emerge and become the focus.
Even at its hour-plus duration, the piece never stays static, but continues to waver and mutate like the abstract patterns on the sleeve. The one constant that remains is the sonic meshing of the traditional orchestral instrumentation used as the backing of the track with the digital manipulation and modified tones created by the studio setting. The description of the album is that it was written for three double basses, four violins, a viola, zither, and drum, which could very well be the case considering the depth of sound going on here. Sections where a subtly treated violin, though layered and treated to sound like a swarm of insects, retains its natural color while paired with a rhythmic segment that resembles a skipping CD.
I wouldn’t characterize this as a “dark” type work by any means, but segments of sound run through a dingy, cheap spring reverb tank do make the work feel a bit darker and more sinister, exploiting a character that was prominent in some of the best elements of the early days of industrial. This mood doesn’t last long and is soon uplifted by stuttering pitch-stretched samples and other rhythmic pulses before ending in a bed of lush, beautiful strings that are left mostly untreated by the studio.
Koryak… is one of those works that simply requires multiple listenings, because there is so much going on in the mix, both at the micro and macro level, that there is almost some new nuance to be discovered with each and every listening.
In 1971, members of UK group Mighty Baby and a few Californian friends made visits to Fez and Meknes that left a profound and lasting impression. Converting to Sufism upon their return to London, they recorded and released an album as The Habibiyya, or the followers of spiritual teacher Muhammad ibn al-Habib. The resulting music disarms expectation with its reverence, beauty, and sincerity.
The back story, as detailed in the liner notes, is fascinating in its own right though too convoluted to get into here. Yet it's not important when listening to the music itself. While much of the Moroccan music that had so impressed the group has its historical roots in Andalusian Spain, the group use whatever instruments they have at hand for this recording, including shakuhachis, hand drums, zithers, mandola, flute, banjo, oboe, and viola. This uncommon mixture makes for a unique and pleasant listening experience.
The musicians fasted for three days prior to recording, and then they began each session with an hour of meditation. Their methods paid off, for the music is clear and stunning in their attempts to channel the divine. Using no overdubs, drums often set the tone while the other instruments swirl around them in distinct layers. Tranquil but never boring, these songs are enchanting spiritual explorations that reach to trance-inducing heights. While several songs are instrumentals, when the group does sing, their harmonies are a transcendent pleasure. Further entwining themselves with Ibn al-Habib, the lyrics they sing are actually the master's own words.
The original LP contained six songs, but on this first-ever CD appearance, five more tracks from the same sessions are included. It's hard to see why some of them weren't included on the original released, especially "Peregrinations" and its stunning successor, "Peregrinations Continued." Unlike many reissues that offer bonus tracks, there's no drop in quality here.
No mere dilettantism, this is devout music made by serious adherents of the Sufic order. Although The Habibiyya made no more recordings together, the one they did make is a gorgeous document that still sounds vital and relevant today.
For Sublime Frequencies' latest musical tour, Geoff Hawryluk and Alan Bishop set their sights on Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. As highlighted in recent new stories about their flooding disaster, Myanmar's government keeps a pretty tight grip on what comes into and leaves the country. With that in mind, I was surprised at how much Western influence is discernible on some of the selections here.
Mainly recorded in 2007 with additional segments from 1994-2002, this disc captures radio snippets of classical music, pop music, news and government announcements, commercials, and even an Avril Lavigne cover. The tracks vary in length from ten seconds to several minutes, occasionally buffered with tuning static for broadcast verisimilitude. With over 40 tracks, it's a stimulating assortment. Many of the commentaries and news announcements are strangely in English and are certainly interesting for what they reveal of party machinations, but they aren't the sort of things that beg for a lot of repeated listens. Yet in context they don't detract from the experience, and the wide variety of music surrounding them keeps things moving at a lively pace.
My favorite tracks are the more traditional ones, like "Classical Music (Female Vocal #11)," "Tribal Drums & Male Vocal," and "Classical Music Group." They transport me to somewhere I've never been, giving the music a sense of place that's somewhat lacking in the more Western-influenced songs. While it's amusing to hear foreigners tackle popular Western musical forms on tracks like "Classic Rock-Country Oldie," "How Many Cheeks Have You Kissed? (Mawrs)," "Rock Song," or the Avril Lavigne cover, a lot of them sound generic and aren't the sort of thing I need a lot of in my life. Additionally, like most commercials, the ones included here don't have a lot of musical value, but they do provide the illusion of listening to the radio rather than an album.
Although I can't say that I like all of the music equally, the tracks are brief enough and the running order arranged in such a way that there's rarely a dull moment. While no substitute for traveling to Myanmar in person, this disc serves as an intriguing cultural snapshot.
SOCIAL STUDIES: AN INTRODUCTION TO CHARLES ATLAS Release Date: 5/27 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 Chapultepec 2 Antiphon 3 The Snow Before Us 4 Neither/Nor 5 Grumblebee 6 Demus 7 Photosphere 8 The Deadest Bar 9 Signal Flags 10 Strategies for Success Boxes 11 Port, Noise Complaint
Bio
This compilation celebrates ten years of Charles Atlas. Since 1998 their shimmering monets of sound have carried a recurring stamp of introverted minimalist beauty. Built on foundations of keys and guitars, these pieces avoid the traps of convoluted structure and skip straight to emotion.
Charles Atlas are masters of tranquil deliveries, but the contents have subtle tensions that reveal themselves over a period of years. The packages were sent to you, but without a return address. Their mysteries are always just out of reach, with messages that never demand, or ask for anything in return.
The band has toured the States, England, Italy and performed at the M1 Fringe Festival in Singapore. Charles Atlas has shared bills with Low, Bright Eyes, Papa-M, Mick Turner, The Radar Bros., M. Ward, American Music Club, Pram and Tunng just to name a few. They've released five full lengths, a remix record, two seven inches, one ten-inch, a split CD-EP and have appeared on many label compilations. 'Social Studies' compiles their best material from this very fertile period.
Press
"As far as (blissed-out) instro music goes..CA are at the absolute peak of the mountain". -THE BIG TAKEOVER
"(Charles Atlas) breathe new life into forms that feel familiar but since abandoned." -DUSTED
"This is a band not afraid to wrap itself in haunting beauty that's as fascinating as it is potentially soul-crushing." -FAKEJAZZ
"Creeping fogs, ghost trains and ravens on fenceposts have nothing on the impending sense of cumulative dread this San Franciso trio summons with its spookyvision soundtracks." -MAGNET
Koryak Mistress Stakes Golden Sky is the brand new CD release from Aranos. The recording is an over hour long concerto for three double basses, four violins, viola, zither, and other instruments. Sound samples and ordering info below.
This record contains one track, A concerto for 3 double bases, 4 violins, viola, zither, condomble drum and other things that make noise. Composition is in one movement; division into parts is possible but rather superfluous.
Originated as a simple tune on double bass harmonics. Ran away with itself simply to enjoy digital ones and noughts on little silvery disc or even smaller bits of plastic. It times about one hour before returning to its origin. May gods bless her and all who listen to her.
She arose Gently, gently, As if not to wake Newborn reeds and rushes. Yet shimmering of her power Filled both visible and invisible.
Peter Broderick joins the cast of young contemporary multi-instrumentalists who create evocative classically-tinged minimal music with his debut full-length on Type. Delivered is score music for any day.
While relatively short and unprogressive tunes laden with violin, piano, and banjo are something I'm tiring of quickly these days, Portland's Peter Broderick has given me fair reason to not shut these sounds out too quickly. When I received Float, I was vaguely familiar with the sounds Broderick uses. I was expecting to need to find a particularly melancholic time to pop the CD in, so the delicate piano and string arrangements might appropriately accommodate my mood. The opener, "A Snowflake," immediately dashed my preconceptions of what this album was going to be about. Float is most certainly not all gloom. While there are darker moments, a great deal of the music is full of hope.
The narrative quality of the music is what allows it to fit into many spaces. The tone of the record is by no means stagnant, and I found it adjusting to peculiar scenarios. On a particularly breezy day the thick hum of "Stopping On The Broadway Bridge" was wonderfully accented with the hammering of roofers on the next block and the warm air filtering through my window blinds. The fragile yet confident voices on the following track "Another Glacier" were married flawlessly to the rush of skateboards up and down the street. Just as gracefully, the album transitioned between these pieces and into the duo of tracks which add Yamaha Portasound melodies and percussion during the most intense thunderstorm of the season so far.
The playing on Float is competent and understated, and in turn lends itself well to the minimal nature of the pieces. If anything is pushed too hard on this album, it is segmentation of the recordings. As a great deal of the instruments on this album are played by a single performer, and certainly this is going to require a great deal of multi-tracking in the recording process. However, the pieces on Float do not flow together as naturally as they might have; the recordings sound ever so slightly spliced together. This has its positive effects, though, as I have caught myself feeling like I am looking into a different room of a miniature house with each fraction of piece.
Nina Kernicke is not a composer concerned with bombast. Her already developed (and superb) atmospheres and sinuous melodies are joined on her first full-length by a newly acquired sense of patience and interconnectedness. One song at a time, Kernicke assembles a thriller of a record that triumphs because of its unhurried development and thickly amassed tension.
It isn't until "Dedalus," the album's fourth track, that Kernicke really lets her explosive side loose. The previous three tracks are something of a primer for the pseudo-dystopian aura for which All Sides is known. With a minimum of sources, dirty city-scapes and seedy, back-alley transactions are manifested and situated among a fast-moving and impersonal population of greedy businessmen, cautious detectives, and dirty street punks looking for a kick. All Sides' music is far from impersonal, however. On the contrary, the music brings characters, locations, fears, and even suspicions to life with a great deal of ease. Before the title track's explosive guitars and extended synthesizers slither their way among Kernicke's populated rhythms, both "The Idea" and "Luv" establish an imposing and mournful background that radiates throughout the rest of the album. When "Dedalus" finally breaks the album open with an organic melody and seemingly endless guitar meditation, relief comes as a tangible and wonderful sensation.
Yet it is interrupted; the conspiratorial tone of a German speaker finds its way into the calm heart of the song and Kernicke includes the sounds of seagulls chattering away in the background to increase the sensation that whatever is happening in this album's dark world, it's just as real as the world in which we live. At this point Dedalus begins to feel like a narrative. The narrative was there when "The Idea" first started to play, but as in many good books and movies, Kernicke doesn't immediately give away how all the various puzzle pieces fit together. "The Unfinished End of H.W." is where Kernicke begins to draw her disparate ends together. The intrigue of spy novels and detective stories quickly solidify in the rush of its pattering rhythms and swelling strings, each movement in the song conjuring up the lightning-quick reflexes required of a man on the lamb or an investigator caught in a plot much bigger than he could possibly know. Each following track feels like a well-placed edit or narrative switch wherein the plot is moved along by an unexpected twist or omniscient switch in perspective. "Mistake" exhibits Kernicke's ability to build believable and threatening environments out of sound whereas "Against the Sun" shows off her ability to write a sensuous tune that is equal parts sexuality and nervous suspicion.
Like many great dystopian fictions, Kernicke does not end her work on the most positive of notes. "Into the Sea" is a drone of resignation; imagining a hero at the center of Dedalus' story, this particular track is the main character's tragic failure to rise above the dark and constantly twisting machinations of the world Kernicke so expertly constructed in the opening songs. Both the title of this particular song and its overall mood remind me of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, a book that ends with the female protagonist committing suicide by swimming too far out to sea. "Stay" concludes the album with the beating of an evil heart and the metallic echoes of cold indifference. Upon repeated listens, Dedalus emerges most firmly as an account of someone's downfall. Drawn into a web too thick to escape, the imagined hero reaches for safety, but falls short and is hopelessly lost. But the fall isn't the only attraction in this story as each song is ripe with minute and involving details. All Sides' previous recordings were all fine examples of beat-driven electronic music, but Dedalus is an exceptional record that succeeds on many more fronts. It is one example of how vivid and intense a record can be without taking recourse to ostentatious measures. It is also a record with great hooks and a definite sense of direction and purpose.