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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According to the label, this band was formed by writer/film-maker Philip Mullarkey to create music for and perform live with his art/film project Box. The artists, who have collaborated with the likes of Bill Laswell, Jah Wobble, Fantomas, Melt Banana and Kronos Quartet, among others, met without any planning or preparation and simply improvised together over the span of two days. They must have been a natural fit with one another, because the tracks presented here come together as a well composed suite of out there space rock/free jazz tracks rather than the live-to-tape improvisation that they truly are.
I was intentional in saying "tape" because that is a vital component to the sound and ambience of this album: besides the fact all of the tracks were improvised live there were no overdubs or ProTools editing, and it was recorded to good old analog tape. That fact alone gives the disc a somewhat hazy warmth to it, like the fog of an early summer morning. It never interferes with the fidelity of the recording though, which remains distinct and sharp. The album is front loaded with the massive length "Untitled 9," which is propelled by a hard hitting drum line that only relents at the mid-point break of the track, along with bizarre processed guitar abuse, some oscillating electronic tones, and a very dubby bass line from Fantômas member/John Zorn collaborator Trevor Dunn.
While somewhat structured at first, the mix feels like begins to fall apart: the electronics from Ståle Storløkken start getting wobbly and Raoul Björkenheim's guitar starts to slip into stuttering jazz horn progression sounds before everything comes to a dead stop. The silence is allowed to hang for a bit before the track ramps back up into a similar vibe, but led by Morgan Ågren's brushed drumming and Bjorkenheim switching to viola.
The remaining tracks retain the same sort of mood as the opening, but end up significantly shorter, mostly hovering in the five to eight minute range. Some of these lean more towards the jazzier end of the spectrum, such as the steady beat and more restrained feel of "Untitled 11" and bass lead, skittering rhythms of "Untitled 3." However, the heavily effected guitar and electronic percussion of "Untitled 7" put the recording into a much more space/psych rock dimension as opposed to the jazzier one.
The biggest departure comes with "Untitled 13," which throws some scraping low end guitar riffs on top of pulsing electronics and marching band type drums that paint the whole track more as a unique take on stripped down minimalist metal more than anything in the sphere of jazz. In some regards there is a feel that the album as a whole is antecedent of some of Bill Laswell's stranger experiments during the mid 1990s, which resulted in a slew of varying projects. There are no specific parallels in sound, but in intent and experimentation. Considering the nature of these recordings, I wonder how things will turn out with subsequent releases: now that the players have had enough time to become more familiar, I can only guess how that will play out on the sound in the future.
It would be fine by me if Belong were to repeat the lush distortion of their debut October Language forever. Instead, on Colorloss Record they turn down the bass a little and add lots of vocals that they process just shy of oblivion. All of which creates a feeling similar to listening to A Hard Day’s Night through your teeth.
This four track vinyl-to-digital EP captures the spirit of a tape that has been sitting in the attic for 18 years and has lost a large proportion of its fidelity. Yet these shimmering pieces have the mixture of euphoria and disintegration just right. Some people may hear only echoing noise but others will enjoy a crush-like chemical reaction. Belong lift us up (to) where we love. They create an atmosphere of iridescent, woozy rapture as guitar, synth, and mellotron are chamfered beyond belief and joined with analog effects. The EP evokes a lonely imaginary world; a current reference might be the protagonist living with locked-in syndrome in the film The Diving Bell and The Butterfly.
All four songs inhabit a bizarre space between Tim Hecker, The Floaters, Hawkwind, and Songs of the Humpback Whale. Belong's waves of sound ebb and flow until it becomes difficult to gauge whether the music is fast or slow. The shifting, decomposing, pulse rhythms and hypnotic wash of sound encourage a loss of bearings or a flip of perception. The effect can be like leading a race only to discover that the other runners have turned around and you are now last, or noticing that the picture of the vase is also two people facing each other. It took several listens for me to notice the section during "Beeside" when pretty much everything but the voice cuts away. This moment does not match the shocking realization that at some point in the newer version of Gavin Bryars' Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet the tramp's voice disappears, but in a small way it is pretty effective.
Colorloss Record has the distortion and haunted prettiness of October Language but the new tweaks bode well for Belong's full-length release coming later this year. Incidentally, DJ Fleamarket (curator and High Priest of the Deep South Museum & Church of Sacred Vinyl) informs me that the vocals to "My Clown" and "Beeside" originated on 45s from the English psychedlic groups July and Tintern Abbey, and he's usually correct. Meanwhile, Belong originate from New Orleans and some of us still regret that they were not invited to do the half-time show when the New Orleans Saints played their first post-flood home game in 2006. The NFL and the Bush administration missed a great opportunity. Instead of some washed-up bores drowning out token local brass band artists, Belong might have played "I Never Lose Never Really," and that fucker could have beamed a subliminal message across the globe: something about the abstract nature of freedom, beauty and decay, or the reaffirmation of the imperative to sculpt sonic effigies of the ghost of Brian Wilson and eat great seafood.
Windy Weber, known for being half of the ambient drone duo Windy & Carl, has recorded a solo album. It is quite different from what you may be thinking – it has none of the soothing characteristics you may be expecting, and instead is full of heavy and brooding music.
"At one time or another, in everyone's life, each one of us wants an island…..a place to be away from the rest of the world, a place where no one can hurt or betray us. This record is about that island."
It is comprised of two tracks – "Sirens," coming in at 24 minutes, is instrumental, and is filled with the sound of guitars crying, rising and falling like waves crashing on the rocks. Sirens is ominous, and haunting. It is not music to sleep to, but instead could make you tense and anxious.
The second track is "Destroyed." It is 32 minutes long, and comprised of 3 suites. The first being layers of vocals, woven together to make a chorus of breathing and breathlessness, layers to make you feel as if you may be drowning in the sea…..whether that sea be the ocean, or the sea of life, the day to day world in which you must deal. The second suite becomes noisy, agitated, rumbling and distorted guitars, bass and feedback, and makes you sit on the edge of your seat wondering what is about to happen. The third suite takes you to the end of the album with it's subsonic frequencies and strange unrecognizible sounds.
This is not music for the faint of heart. Windy's dear friend Jody found herself having to pull over while trying to listen to this in the car because it made her too tense. And kranky turned it down for release, feeling it was more suited for listeners of Nurse With Wound or Current 93. Born out of frustration and anger, I Hate People is the story of how in one's life, your car, your dog, a dead bird on the ground, are not going to be as upsetting or devastating to you as another human will be – only people can make you feel so bad. Only people can hurt you, betray you, and make you feel like you want to die. I Hate People is the expression born of real life, and real pain, and is an expression of emotion that is universally shared. At one point or another, we all want an island. But most of us will never get there.
I Hate People will be issued on CD by Blueflea and on LP by Kenedik. The LP will be on limited (1000 copies) beautifully colored splatter vinyl (500 on clear with blue and green and purple splatter, and 500 on clear with blood red splatter), featuring a completely different mix and with a shorter length on each song so as to provide the best sound quality. Cover art features a wonderful selection of photos by Christy Romanick, Windy's dear friend and one of her favorite artists, and Windy's passport photo from 1987 – showing a very angry, young, punk rock beginning to this musician's career.
It is scheduled to be released on one of the most hated days of the year (tax day) April 15, 2008. Read More
Burial Hex and Zodiac Mountain main man Clay Ruby drops the first part of a three volume trip into analogue synth research (an early '70s PAIA 4700 modular synth kit for the trainspotters out there). Somewhere between a key to a parallel neighborhood of headspace and dissident meditative headphone music, this 45 minute piece is more like being transported to a physical place rather than an aural journey.
There isn't much in the way of heavy musical movements here; there are no radical or interrupting introductions of sounds across the single piece of worn electric noise. The piece isn't sedentary by any stretch of the imagination, its layers move at the speed of a slug's shrug. Played as background music or without a suitable spell of concentration, its rewards are mostly impenetrable. But through immersion in its roar the short-lived and slowly dissolving higher shifts of sound become clear. Its seemingly simple structure belies the focus, concentration and involvement that it took to create something this cavernous.
There is also a visual aspect to the music, a huge force blocking the horizon while it plays, the sound's pores filling the air with grey macadam. Ruby's experiments have caught a field recording from a place that never was: a sound deep in the back of his head. Still, Clay Ruby isn't present or apparent on the track, the music remaining resolutely 'ego-less'. Feeling like a great wide daub of naught across the senses, there is nothing elegiac or sinister about the Astral Resin Worm #1’s matter.
With their pop game sharpened to a fine point, Guessmen are still exploring the noir-cartoon world of vocalist Alan Edge's head making them an appealingly dark-and-day-glo experience. The A side of this 7" single, "Black Balloons," forms like a murder of clouds stamped with an indelible paperclip-and-biro tattooed hook, the thick synth melody coming on like tar flavored honey.
Setting itself in motion with pork scratching percussion loops like Her Majesty's Prison breaking out the robot guards, "Black Balloons" is the sound of low quality speed psychosis. It is a rut of club hedonism before an antisocial bass instigated mental collapse, the beat drop prompting one of those everyone-starts-moving-at-the-same-moment moments.
The non-LP B-side cut is 100% Working Man's Club video console acid, packing more swing than Mr. Bumble's hand. "Death by a Thousand Lashes" runs up and down the grooves, a skewed snakes and ladders game of bass, drum and synth. Behind its brief spiky percussion and bent reality bass there are plenty of left turns and plummets.
With their pop game sharpened to a fine point, Guessmen are still exploring the noir-cartoon world of vocalist Alan Edge's head making them an appealingly dark-and-day-glo experience. The A side of this 7" single, "Black Balloons," forms like a murder of clouds stamped with an indelible paperclip-and-biro tattooed hook, the thick synth melody coming on like tar flavored honey.
Santiago, Chile's Un Festin Sagital weave electro-acoustic sounds with rock instruments and voices to create this unpredictable but compelling album. Harrowing background noises share space with patient guitar motifs for songs that are constantly churning and shifting into different modes and styles. Hints of progressive rock and traditional music serve to heighten and confound expectations, making this album a deliriously engaging experience.
The first few songs are particularly unstable. "Epitafio al Delirio de la Permanencia Part 1" goes through several stages, beginning with a distorted rumble, an urgent organ, and competing voices. The song becomes airy with light drones and a repetitive guitar motif that keeps the song from floating away. Squeals and discordant piano take over before the band goes into an old-fashioned song with saxophone. Metal guitar riffs come in later, and the whole song ends with a whimsical carnivalesque organ section. "Part 2" is initially a more introspective affair with light piano and a low-key electronic background. It builds to a harried, schizophrenic peak in the middle of the track and coasts to a finale against a halluncinatory backdrop of piano and constant yet subtle synthesizer pitches. "L'Age Delicieux (la Revolución Perenne)" is organized similarly to the first two tracks, but relies more on percussion and haunting vocals.
The last three songs have the most consistent structure. The briefest track at just under a few minutes, "¡No Hay Coristas!" could come from the soundtrack to an old spaghetti western were it not for its electronic ending. Although "La Dignidad del Espiritu Bestia" starts with violin and hand drums, it builds into a kraut groove with metal overtones before gradually fading into a long, delicate passage. "Destierro" is a ballad with sci-fi synthesizers and guitars. It has a couple of frenzied moments but is mostly pretty mellow, a come-down from the rest of the album’s hyperactive mood swings.
Even though many of the songs are in a constant flux, they never get unintentionally overwhelming. They work because the changes never seem forced or arbitrary but instead flow naturally from one idea to the next, even when the differences are extreme. The band's excellent musicianship makes all of this possible, bringing plausibility to strange music while never alienating the listener.
Tuvan throat singer Soriah gets some help on analog synthesizer from Lana Guerra of Power Circus for this recording that leads the deceased back to the world of the living. Translated as "Offerings of Light to the Dead," it is a mesmeric beacon that creates an atmosphere all its own.
The 30-minute title track has three distinct movements. The first begins quietly with rattles, subtle synth washes, and occasional low-end rumble. Sometimes the bass can get a little out of control, but keyboards and other odd bits mostly manage to balance the mix. After the querulous keyboard squeals become more pronounced, the voice takes stage with ominous throaty drones floating in a vast space. Here the low end interferes a little bit with the hypnotic allure of the vocals, but at the end of the first section, it is gone for good.
The second section begins with rattles like chattering teeth, echoing whispers and groans, channeled lightning, and synth accents. The bass is matched more effectively with the vocals in this part, immersing me much deeper into this strange crossroads between the worlds of the living and the dead. Throwing up ragged rhythms and teases of melody along the way, it ends in electrical screams and revolving shapes of white noise. Constrained shouts, footsteps, and bass like a loose wire begin the last and most frantic movement, building into a cacophony of chirring electronics and warping growls. Yet the song ends with four minutes of light bells, a droning voice, and complementary electronics, the most outright mystical part of the song and its most soothing.
The second track is only half as long. Named after a Oaxacan grasshopper that forms a sizeable portion of that culture's diet, "Esqueleto de Chapulin" has drones, insect-like rattles, and a voice a bit closer to the audience, though not exactly intimate. While the song goes through several phases, its brevity compared to the first one makes it a little more, er, digestable if the thought of a half-hour journey through the realm of the dead seems a daunting place to start.
Both songs are equally fascinating. Together, they create a unique world of sound as ritual that is truly transportive. I can only think that if this is an offering of light, the darkness must be unfathomable.
This limited edition album explores the fine details of unidentifiable field recordings; each manipulated and tinkered with until all that is left is the ambient character of those sounds. As with all good concrete inspired works, the music here is far removed from reality but it is still almost tangible in a physical, solid sense. I just want to run my fingers along the music, strange as that sounds.
It is remarkably cold-sounding music for an album called Spots in the Sun. Granted a sunspot is a relatively cold area of the sun but it is still an unimaginably hot and furious place. However, the grainy rumble of the opening piece lacks any sort of warmth or violence whatsoever. Here and throughout the album, spines of sound grow like crystals on a Petri dish rather than pulse and erupt like emissions from a star. The sound is almost microscopic in character.
Although it is awfully Copernican of me to think that Shoemaker is referring to our sun; this could be his interpretation of light from distant stars. Indeed the huge feeling of space that his music evokes supports this notion. The pauses between sounds go so far beyond pregnant as to being stillborn. The elongated near-silences in the second piece make the shards of sound present in the piece loom imposingly over me. The long piece evolves slowly, the near-silences becoming scratchy cascades of sound and a variety of unusual and unexpected noises bubble and explode out of the mix. A weird, echoing segment of this piece sounds like some bizarre combination of fairground game and a tropical house in a zoo.
The third and fourth pieces continue in the same vein. The idea does not wear thin because I am not quite sure what the idea is. The sound is constantly shifting, leaving no time for extended contemplation as to what the recordings may be or for the noises to become in any way tedious. There is always something that I had yet to notice going on, sometimes even what turns out to be the most dominant sound in terms of volume gets ignored in favour of the smaller sounds.
It must be said that Spots in the Sun is not the sort of album that should be just put on in the background, I thought it was mediocre at best until I actually sat down and engaged with it. The curious blending of sounds makes for repeatedly rewarding listening experiences; there are so many little details that only total immersion reveals them. It is not a far cry from The Hafler Trio or Shoemaker's label mate Matt Waldron.
Solo vocal performances are a naked musical form by definition, but this Richard Youngs vinyl re-release (from a limited CD-R run in 2004) appears that little bit more exposed than most even without the need for conventional lyricism.
Commencing with the 20 minute "Summer's Edge," Youngs manages to instil his solo vocal performance with a contemporary feel, despite it being constructed from a single element. Despite its roots lying in the most traditional of all music forms, there is something about this piece that places it firmly in the now. His delivery of the words seems to encircle the mind, the track becoming more a meditative consciousness-loosening mantra than a narrative or insular state of the union. Youngs extends notes here and there, his delicate voice taking great care with the words he employs. It is this care with the words that makes the song's transformation into something beyond words such an unexpected alchemical process; it is the listening process, the personal involvement given to the record that charges this change. His voice is the same at the end of "Summer's Edge" as it was at its beginning but the consistent turns of phrase almost begin to lose their sense in the repetition: the words becoming more a subtly varying flow of sound rather than stream of words structured into a melody.
While it becomes more difficult to cling to onto the words—instead of literally going with the flow—the overall feeling of an idealistically magnificent loneliness (if such a thing can possibly exist) still remains. Richard Youngs vocal is fragile enough here to be rendered incapable of indulging in effusive sentimentality, even the touch of cold echo on "No Longer in this Perdition" can not harden the man. "Garden of Stones" is the most rooted piece here, encircling phrases painting a picture of the slow impending collapse of sky, earth, and nature. The images as strong as the melody this closer grounds the listener, easing the path back to words and music from something beyond.
The sense of vulnerability and intimacy is clear on these three pieces, despite the record not being an obviously personal affair. With the three tracks here feeling like a like period of grace where he lets us into his confidence, with his shields down Summer Wanderer is a taste of Youngs' interior world in its most melancholy moments.
Looking at it objectively this collaboration between the veteran American 'industrial-tribal' percussionist Z'EV and the German ritual dark ambient duo of Frank Merten and Henry Emich, aka Herbst9, seems a perfect recipe for a successful collaboration. The idea of H9's deeply harmonic and ritual dronescapes supported by Z'EV's richly rhythmic and complex percussion is something of a mouth-watering prospect for me.
Indeed I am happy to report that the result more than lives up to the promise: the percussive authority of Z'EV's rhythms are an excellent structural counterpoint to Herbst9's beautifully dense and deeply subterranean freeform synthesiser drones, whistles, scratchings and scrapings. H9's music is the darkness from the deep and hidden places of the world made substantial, the inhalations and exhalations of the very earth beneath our feet, and the steam and bile of nature's eruptions; Z'EV's contributions are the audible pulse and heartbeat, a measure of the inner moods and caprices of our planet. It is a benighted alien world down there, far from the light and warmth of the sun and rarely glimpsed by humans; coldly cavernous spaces inhabited by troglodytic chirpings, scrapings, creakings, skitterings, and demonic mumblings, hugely amplified both by the cathedral acoustics and the imagination. It is also the seismic upheavals and the unseen rockfalls, the slippages of faultlines and the forceful opening up of fissures. Add in to the mix a certain sense of endarkened and heated closeness, along with an oppressively hellish weight, both in terms of the sheer heavy physicality and the layers of aeons that have piled themselves on top of each other ever since time began—the latter being especially reinforced by the earthiness of Z'EV's percussive backdrop, propelling one backwards to a more 'primitive' era, perhaps when the world was younger and less seismically stable.
It is certainly very darkly evocative and unearthly, bringing to mind all the above and more; there is plenty here to spark the imagination. The music is a constantly shifting tableaux of deep dank caverns, dripping water, disembodied eyes staring out from the Stygian gloom, legions of shuffling creatures in untold numbers and the glow of ever-burning fires suffusing the smoke-filled subterranean environs—plus it is everything I imagined a Bosch painting brought to life would be like: a spine-shivering nightmarish blend of the real, horrific, and phantasmagorical.
Moreover, one of the more pleasing aspects about this is the seamlessness with which the two sets of artists have integrated their contributions into the other's. People could be forgiven for thinking that they all worked together in the same studio rather than the thousands of miles apart they actually were. It is pleasing to hear an album where no single element is allowed to either overpower or undermine any other; the music develops along natural, organic, and cooperative lines, resulting in a completely holistic musical entity, in a reflection perhaps of the bleak subterranean world it describes. The music is both lean and spare and possessed of a sense that it contains nothing extraneous or superfluous—just like craftsmen the artists have carefully sculpted their material, retaining only the most essential elements and rejecting everything else.
For my part though, the ultimate test is whether any particular album can bear repeated hearings without it becoming palling and tiresome—I must have heard this album about four or five times during the course of writing this review and I have to admit that it worked its rhythmic ambient magic every time and I have no doubt that it will continue to do so.