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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It's hard to make a good genre record. The emphasis there is on "good" because it's easy as hell to follow a formula of expected tricks and gags and come out with yet another regurgitation of a genre. Like in the film world, the trick to making a genre record that stands out on its own as a pillar of the genre is an artist behind the work that is willing to jump in head first with a love of the material and an acceptance of the genre's successes and its detritus. Zhark International
Abelcain has turned in such a record—a measuring stick of sorts for thematic breakcore. Pantheon of Fiends, from its lavishly printed sleeve to its two thick plates of blistering beats and uneasy strings, is the ultimate love letter to classic horror films via breakbeats and distorted bass. The spooky sounds and zombie samples have been tried before in this small corner of the world, and the pairing of blood-splattered imagery with hard, asymetic drum breaks is itself an archetype in the world of breakcore and hard drum n bass. All that makes Abelcain's success here that much more impressive, because he's synthesized the beats chopped like bodies and the ominous piano loops more completely than anyone before. The samples aren't just recognizable, they are intentional references to the most iconic horror films of all time and they serve to tie the scattershot rhythms to a theme. In fact, Fiends begs the question, "why hasn't anyone scored a horror film with music like this before?" With rhythms that imitate insects surrying and skeletons marching up stairs in a dank castle, this record would be the perfect way to bring Hollywood's fascination with remaking horror classics into the new millenium. While so many of Abelcain's peers are off on an experiment to further molest the amen break with layers of distortion and monotonous bass pounding, Fiends finds success in a different formula. Cleaning up the beats, allows their razorblade cuts and sutures to bounce giddily off of atonal pianos and theremin samples. Focusing on the precise composition of well-known sounds rather than the quest to produce squelches and skree heretofore unexplored makes the record feel as classic as the references is swipes. In the end, like the best horror movies, Pantheon of Fiends takes the familiar and makes it creepy, brooding, and at the same time fun. People don't go to horror movies to be scared for the sake of being truly afraid; they go to be scared as entertainment, and Pantheon of Fiends is above all else, entertaining.
Recorded live in Dublin, The Anaestheticis composed of seven tracks of piano improvisations. The performancewas recorded in a small building dating from the early 18th century andas such, there is no sound-proofing so at certain points in therecording there are sirens heard from the fire station across thestreet and other city noises. Deserted Village
Also captured are the noises from Smyth'suse of the piano's pedals: a dull thudding that is especially prevalenton the opening track. Both these and the odd stifled cough from theaudience combined with Smyth's style of playing produce a mood that issomewhere between classic noir and H.P. Lovecraft. The applauseand friendly chatter from Smyth have been edited out of the recordingmeaning that any sort of jubilant feeling is gone. The Anaestheticcould very easily become an exercise in alienating the listener butSmyth keeps it human sounding and does not stray too far into academicwank. "II" begins is over eleven minutes of energetic bursts of tight,complex progressions that sound like madness and indeed the thumping ofthe pedals are like Poe's Tell-Tale Heart. The next piece, "III," ismuch more restrained but equally sinister sounding. The sirens come inalmost on cue to add to the atmosphere. Smyth is not content to justsit at the keys and play away, he strums and scrapes the strings duringthe performance with one hand and plays the keys with the other. Hemutes the strings he plays with his fingers which gives veryinteresting textures to the notes. Whilst the first two tracks are abit too plinky and random for my particular taste, The Anaestheticis a great album. As the album plays through and Smyth became morecomfortable with what he was doing the music gets better with eachtrack. I remember leaving the performance on that night feeling drainedbut delighted with what I had heard and the recording does Smyth'sperformance justice.
Stereo Total's latest album (available in three versions from threecountries: Germay, France and the USA) is a bit of a disappointment. Disko B
Some songs like "Ne m'appelle pas ta Biche" show Stereo Total at theirbest: cheap drum machines, cheaper synths and great lyrics. Other songsdon't quite seem to work well on the album. The title track "Do theBambi" is less than impressive, as it sounds overworked and contrived.This is a far cry from the Stereo Total of old who could be bestdescribed as sloppy in an elegant way. Thankfully the lyrics are stillwonderfully bizarre. "Cinémania" is essentially a list of classicheroes and heroines of cinema and "J'ai Faim!" is a love song mixedwith a list of fine foods. Despite the wide range of subject matter ofthe lyrics all the songs seem to blend together. If the album was aboutfive songs shorter it would probably flow a lot better but as it standsDo the Bambiseems a little bloated. Its main problem is that some of the songs arewritten for specific soundtracks (a theatrical version of the story ofChristiane F. and a movie by Jean-Luc Godard). They tend to be theweakest on the album but perhaps they work better in their originalcontext. The exception out of these commissioned works is "Tas de Tole"which sounds like a sixties R'n'B version of Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" (itsounds great). The album finishes with a cover of "Chelsea Girls" whichI prefer to the original by Nico purely because Stereo Total's versionis free of horrible sounding flutes. Do the Bambi is a mixed bunch of songs, not the best Stereo Total album but it's not a disaster by any means.
I thought I'd right a wrong here by reviewing Marissa Nadler's debutalbum, which I completely overlooked upon its release last year. Ballads of Living and Dying is unmistakably the same voice and sensibility as that on Mayflower May, but without the conceptual trappings, there are a greater variety of approaches to be found on the record. Eclipse
The songs on Marissa's debut makegreater use of studio effects, with liberal vocal processing and amyriad of electric guitar effects, including an e-bow which is used tohaunting effect on several of the album's best tracks. On the whole,this album is darker and more psychedelic than Mayflower May,which I suspect might have greater appeal to listeners approaching thismaterial from the standpoint of classic 1960s psych folk like TheTrees, Fairport Convention and Mellow Candle. Nadler's vocals on thisalbum seem even a bit more dramatic and affected than on her sophomorerelease, especially when she tackles a pair of tracks adapted fromother writers' works, using her voice cannily to reshape the words inorder to fit her familiar melodic, cyclical fingerstyle. "Hay TantosMuertos" utilizes words by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and the album'sfinal track adapts Edgar Allan Poe's famously lyrical death ballad"Annabelle Lee" into a chilling slice of haunted psychedelia with anatmosphere inexplicably resembling Dark Side of the Moon-eraFloyd. Nadler's spooky evocation of Civil War-era balladry is inevidence on the track "Box of Cedar," where a soon-to-be war widowbemoans and celebrates her husband's certain fate: "I'm gonna telleverybody I know that I'm glad to see you/You know you're coming homein a box of cedar." Populating the album are a similar cast ofcharacters from the second album, including Mayflower May herself, thelonely ghost of a spoilt and slain maiden who wanders the woods"Without a lover/Without a friend/Without a savior," Nadler sadlyimploring: "And if you see her/Call out her name/And if you hearher/Out in the rain/Mayflower May Belle was her name." The addition onseveral tracks of auxiliary instrumentation including banjo, accordionand organ contributes to a slightly more eclectic sound that stands incontrast to Mayflower May's limited palette. As with the secondalbum, after repeat listens, the strongest aspects are once again thedeceptive simplicity of the songs and the strength of Marissa'sseductively haunting vocals. I could well imagine eventually growingtired of the rather trite stylistic conceit of Marissa Nadler's morbidpsych-folk, but I don't think I'd ever tire of hearing her voice. Infact, I would probably be happy listening to her recite the phone book.
You can keep all your Joanna Newsoms, your Josephine Fosters, yourDiane Clucks, your Mira Billottes and your CocoRosies. I have beenforced to part company with all the other new folk songstresses, asthere is no room in my world now for anyone but Marissa Nadler, whosevoice is so lovely and bewitching that it spins me senseless until Ifind myself wandering aimlessly in a dark wood with no clue how to gethome. Eclipse
Her voice is mysterious and enchanting, whispery and fragile, butalso enunciative and matronly, seductive but elegiac. I can detectshades of Hope Sandoval or Elizabeth Fraser, perhaps, but also darkerstrains of Linda Perhacs or The Trees' Celia Humphries. But just whenyou think that Marissa Nadler's voice is just a gentle, lilting,massaging instrument, there comes a coarse little edge of Anne Briggsand Shirley Colllins, but when you try to grab hold, she has recededfurther into the forest, and her voice echoes off of the canopy oftrees and disappears into the wilderness. The Saga of Mayflower Mayis Ms. Nadler's second album, and it's vaguely conceptual, with eachsong a different chapter in a cloth-bound book of murder ballads, thekind decorated with pressed flowers and handwritten love letters. Thelyrics are a glorious collection of unashamed balladeer cliches, fullof turquoise-colored eyes of lovers, fields of green and skies ofazure, and spoilt maidens silently bleeding to death beneath wildweeping willows, or drowned in rivers by scorned suitors. The fact thather songs play on such familiar lyrical themes works to Ms. Nadler'sadvantage, as it seems she is pulling from some vast collectiveunconscious archive of British and Appalachain folk ballads, whichmakes the emotional impact of the music quite stealthy. I was almostlulled into complacency when "Damsels in the Dark" began, and I wasrudely awakened by its spooky refrain: "Photographs of your face,against the wind/Against the rain, I'm gonna burn them all/And buryyour name." Marissa plays all of the guitars, including 12-string andukelele, and is joined on a few tracks by Brain McTear and Nick Castro,both of Espers and various other related projects. For the most part,Marissa's guitar playing is pretty but unremarkable, little rollingfingerpicked melodies that cycle around and create a foundation for herlovely vocals, which are the real star. There are moments of purehypnotic beauty on this record, when just at the appropriate time,Marissa's vocals are multitracked and overlaid, creating richlyevocative harmonies, a chorus of forest witches answering each lyricwith spine-tingling echoes. What I really respond to in MarissaNadler's music is not its originality, as it is clearly derivative of60s psych-folk, but its lack of pretension and self-consciouskookiness, something that the Joanna Newsoms and Devendra Banharts ofthe world could learn from. I have spun The Saga of Mayflower May more than any other album I've gotten lately, and I'm far from ready to take it out of my player.
A live recording from late last year, this disc is an appetizer for theupcoming collaborative full length between two of the biggest names inelectronic music. Sala Santa Ceciliais one 19-minute laptop duet that will not appear on the future fulllength; however the track is described on the sleeve as an "overture,"so there's the chance that the eventual record could contain elementsherein, though it could just mean an overture for the show itself. Itdoesn't come as much of a surprise that these two would start workingtogether as they both, even as major personalities in the electronicworld, remain attached to acoustic instrumentation, as well as bothstraddling the vague terrain between high ('chin-scratch') experimentaland adult ('couch + cocktail') contemporary musics. I loved Sakamoto'stwo collaborations with Alva Noto (Vrioon I & II) and both of Fennesz's laptop improv trios with Fenn O'Berg,plus Touch is marketing this as if it were "the next level" ofmusic-making as we know it, so expectations were a little high, and thedisc lives up to some of them. The most impressive thing about it isthe amount of different sound elements packed into such a short timewhile achieving a fairly level flow (the fairly level flow is the mostunimpressive thing about it). If the set was improvised, it shows offthe sympathetic nature of each musician to the sound palette of theother as everything locks together so well that even if Touch said itwas improvised I would not believe them. The movement of the trackbenefits from Fennesz's recent retreat from the saturatingly obviousguitar riff and his new love of Vangelis-sized retro synth drones.Sakamoto is on point with some washed-out orchestral snips of his own,and Fennesz counters with some of the same dreamy lateral static cutsthat appear on everything of his except Hotel Parallel. Theopening of the piece is not so impressive, a call-and-response ofmonochrome tones, high-pitched and a little too church-y for my taste,oscillating in a commonplace glitch pattern. At about four minutes, arhythmic pulse ushers in the first meat of the track: bunches of thoseold-style drones, orchestral loops, some digital rain, and obliteratedpiano plunks. Someone goes crazy with the backward orchestra loops alittle too early and muddies the water, but at around nine minuteseverything bottoms out, leaving a beautifully suggestive rhythm ofdigital slices, the likes of which I've not heard from either artist,and around which earth-toned pools of Fennesz heroin start collecting,nice and slow, across the last six minutes. Where on a Fennesz recordthis kind of oceanic nostalgia would be enough, this time someonepeppers it, eggs it on with a mess of sharp and shimmering glitchliquid that really gets out there. The key to enjoying this is gettingtuned to the small changes; after repeated listens, I actually wishcertain sections would be allowed more repetition, more room forsmaller variation. That this is billed as an "overture" helps me topredict that the album will be rightfully more expansive.
Temporary Residence What was once a side-project of Tarentel bandmates has now fortunately matured into a fully-realized band. The Drift play a moody, contemplative, and sometimes ecstatic mixture of jazz and post-rock which is not too difficult to connect back to the current Tarentel sound, even though there is only one shared member at this point. The ensemble features of an accord of stand-up bass, guitar, drums, and trumpet, all sharing space to make some well-choreographed sounds. The two songs on this exquisitely-packaged 12" are teasers from The Drift's recording sessions for their full-length and the promise exhibited in them is exhilarating. "Streets" is a ten-minute explorative piece which has a few movements to it. It begins with what is literally a drifty oceanic sound shattered eventually by the prodding but not unwelcome entrance of the stand-up bass, poking its plucked strings through the haze. A light percussion gives it some feet until the instruments collaboratively all rush in with a swing-happy trumpet signaling the charge. The pleasantries of the song lie in the ability of all the instruments to be playing singularly and separately, doing their own thing, yet somehow melding into some organic mass of melody and rhythm which keeps the song running, jogging, or sprinting (the song phases through all of these paces amazingly well during its movements). Throughout the song, the instruments seem entirely able to step on one another's toes elegantly, if such a thing were possible. There is no disturbance in the dance, even when one instrument decides to muscle its way in and seemingly ask, "May I cut in?" The bass is the true conveyor for "Streets," while the other instruments step up for flings and flirtations, sometimes brief and other times extended. In the end, the circularity of the song brings it back to its beginnings (in true East Coker fashion) and the drifty sound transports it away on some deliberate ebb tide. "Nozomi" enters with relaxing guitar steps underwritten with a light wails from the trumpet. It's like walking up and down the same three graceful steps over and over. The tempo of "Nozomi" is uniformly slow and meditative, unlike "Streets" where there was acceleration paired with deceleration throughout. In fact, "Nozomi" feels entirely more holistic and showcases the more restrained capabilities of The Drift. They can improvise on a hushed level or an explosive level or on both combined. Likewise, this record can be enjoyed in either a hushed or explosive state, but it's better to embrace both.
5RC The 15-year-old version of me loves The Mae Shi. The songs on their second release for Kill Rock Stars imprint 5RC carry all the hallmarks of what my inner child holds near and dear: fucked up guitars, anarchic rhythms, singers barely in control of their vocal chords. So I have to trust my more awkward and chubby counterpart when I say that Heartbeeps is a great record. While 2004's Terrorbird was impressive in its ambitious scope (33 songs in 43 minutes) Heartbeeps is just as impressive in its consistency. Songs like "The Meat of the Inquiry" and "Born for a Short Time" charge out of the blocks spitting strangled notes and caustic noise to all in their path at a breakneck pace. It's no surprise then that "Crimes of Infancy" ends in the sound of the band collectively hyperventilating, seemingly exhausted by their efforts. With all the breathlessness, it makes sense that this nearly sixteen minute endeavor is broken up with small slices of keyboard driven synth-pop such as "Spoils of Victory" and "Spoils of Injury." The Mae Shi are best when they stick to the noisy mash-ups. "The Universal Polymath" and "Heartbeeps" end the album with a great one-two punch, stretching out the time constraints and allowing the tempos to slacken without losing any of their thrust. "The Universal Polymath" could be misinterpreted as dance-punk, but its fractured drums, high frequency guitar, and its succinct conclusion challenge all the precepts of that genre while still managing to capitalize on a ferocious groove. Meanwhile, "Heartbeeps" (in its third incarnation on this release) achieves a nervy, anxious mood where hi-hat fills, analog keyboards, and the desperate vocals of the four singers heighten the unease. While Terrorbird was plagued by the fact that it didn't know whether it wanted to move or pummel the listener, Heartbeeps achieves an excellent balance of The Mae Shi's more caustic approach and their desire for a dance party. My 15-year-old self couldn't be happier.
City Centre Offices It's been raining here every day at a time that I want to go outside and do something fun. As a result, I've been couped up with my computers and a copy of Let Your Heart Draw A Line for a couple of weeks, and it's the perfect formula for creating a blog-obsessed, blanket curling, mopey shut-in. The newest from The Remote Viewer continues with the set up they laid out on their previous record for City Centre Offices, but turns the lights down even lower and captures that stuck-in-your-bedroom melancholy even more effectively. While the instrumentation sounds mostly natural like real pianos and guitars, everything is processed in a way to make it sound smaller, closer, more discreet, and in many cases less perfect. This is the promise of digital recording technology paying off: the use of high tech tools to manipulate recorded sound to be less perfect, more scratchy and more detuned rather than the reverse. These are simple tunes rooted in sad melodies and softly sung or spoken vocals and all the hissing and cracking that can rightfully be added to or brought out of a recording without making it seem like a joke. People are finally putting the click and glitch culture to work for something other than deconstructed techno and dub, and The Remote Viewer are doing it as expertly as anyone. This is the best of the new wave of laptop folk that I've heard because it keeps the songs together and it allows them to speak and mean something rather than letting them noodle off into the ether. There's a difficult balance being struck here between novelty production techniques and straight acoustic playing, between self-consciously pretentious song titles and heart-on-sleeve honesty, but it manages all to work in the end with a little bit of humor and a lot of damp, rainy repetition. Often, the kind of earnest, sappy break-up records recorded by folkies and emo kids and sensitive rockers leave me high and dry because the rock or folk language of guitars and drums and bass guitars feels too played out to resonante. Here is a moody break up record for the rest of us then, sweetly mapping out those lonely longing days where a computer is your only window to the world.
Originally available only as 10", now in special-sleeved compact disc, No Sign comes from artists with a bit more exposure than Sedimental is used to; the music, also, occupies austere and familiar realms, making it less the shock-to-the-head I've come to expect from the label, however deep listening turns over a complex and powerful piece. Sedimental
The pin-prick-on-paper sleeve design is a nice foreshadow of the sound inside, reassuring too, as I've certainly used prickly adjectives to describe microtonal music with a significantly more maximalist approach than this. No Sign's punctures are spaced to produce a decorative, even conservative aesthetic that comes through sonically as well. Kyle Bruckmann and Ernst Karel play wind instruments arranged through forcefields of analog electronic noise. Though fully engrained, their horns are nonetheless distinct and often plaintive, pooling as they do around the open spaces and between scratches of mechanical interference. The word may be "restraint," but that implies an interest in suggesting an instrument's extremes, or at least a dialogic structure in the music, neither of which are present. With EKG, texture and transition feel extra tight, precise as a cube of pin-prickings, a quality that gets reinforced by the track titles, each a time interval, traveling from "Years" down to "Seconds." As with Murray's Places, the focus here seems to be overlappings of sound decay rather than an emphasis on particular lushness or complexity of concrète sound environments, something closer to the work of Axel Dörner whose prolific appearances preceded EKG's in both the Sedimental and Locust catalogs. The supreme breathlessness of Karel and Bruckmann's horns gathers everything into a groaning wheeze of descent rather than the crackling of surface play that defines most else in the closest-checkable genre. No Sign's uniqueness is a product of these visions of closely-structured time lapse coming together with the improvisational intentions and microscopic attentions of a thousand small sounds.
Sedimental A northeastern American sax player bent on packing his unique and extreme vision into an unassuming, highly personal statement, David Gross might as well be poster boy for the Sedimental label. His first for solo alto saxophone, Things I Have Found To Be True follows fellow Bostonian James Coleman's tremendous solo theremin recording Zuihitsu and Performing Tonight, a collection of baffling sax/voice duets from Gross and Liz Tonne. Gross' 15-year history of instrument discovery stops here in an indecipherable tome to childhood and personal history. Gross has made statements about dismantling completely his concept of looking for new niches within a history of jazz etc, and these ideas are completely supported from minute #1 of this disc. The artist's style is probably derivative of someone else; more appropriately it is entirely derivative of the saxophone as an inert vessel of forces, ideas at the core of any history of free music, but Things I Have Found makes clear that these matter not. By covering the disc with personal referents, including Gross' grandmother's beautiful cover painting of the artist and his brother as children, he creates a mythology that is more than simple juxtaposition of abstract sound and subjective information. The first track, "Partially Buried Woodshed," becomes obscure childhood memory, plea for the abstract expressionist credo of emotion-through-basic-gesture, and a brut simulation technique all flooding at once with Gross struggling to keep his breath within the spaces. Others have described the artist's style as "sculptural," a perfect term that hones in on the physicality of the playing and sounds played, while leaving room for projected spaces within the saxophone itself and divergent, imaginary realms created. A woodshed of breath, brass, earth, flesh, and…wood creates itself, outside of history, outside of temporal concerns, a bound diary of suspended moments, whittled down to a purity of expression without a purity of intent. The surprises come when things even remotely close to traditional (read: human) sax sounds creep through, as if by accident. "Dystonia" is a numbing human-voice-through-saxophone-bell piece whose guttural meanderings have surely been done-over countless times but enter the mythology of the record in a refreshing way here: comfort and assurance in, yes indeed, a human presence and abject terror at how the presence asserts itself. Gross' playing is more sparse on this release than any of the other documents I've heard, though these are his most complex compositions; the intimacy with which he approaches the saxophone, each screw in each latch, every fiber in the reed, every pad or valve, and all the negative space in between, is simply astounding.