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!
Comae was one of my ten favourite CD's of 2001..."Where the fuck are you?" was the witty title of one of RobertHampson's Touch Ringtones. Main fans could well ask him that veryquestion. Apart from the odd DJing stint and half a 12" from hisdub-beat persona Chasm courtesy of Fat Cat, he seemed to slip quietlyaway for way too long. He hasn't been idle though, and there's a newMain album due on the K-raa-k label in February. In the meantime, feastyour ears on this wonderful collaboration with Janek Schaefer. I wentto hear Philip Jeck and People Like Us play late last year and waspleasantly surprised when half of the unknown quantity on the bill,Comae, turned out to be none other than Mr Hampson and his laptop. TheComae CD, released by Rhiz, displays similar sound organisation tricksto the Main "Firmament" series, but the focus has shifted from guitarsas sound sources to environmental recordings. Mostly these are mergedinto an organic whole where the origins of the sounds are completelyrecontextualised, but occasionally familiar sounds such as rainfall orcrows cawing are hazily apparent. Comae accentuate the electronmicroscope feel of later Main recordings, taking found sound to alienenvironments. After sudden crackle eruptiung from silence, 'Dichroic'descends into revolving worlds within worlds where sound particlesblink in and out of existance over vast cavernous shifts of densedrone-loop. Often there's a deep slow bass pulse as higher pitchedsounds drop in and out and often attain a climactic resolution.Dynamics and relative volumes are broad and the stereo sound field isutilised effectively. The eight tracks merge into one another forming aseamless whole; 'Induration' cuts dead on a deep surging tide of soundas 'Trine' sets off a ringing backdrop for shards of spikey ethernoiseto float on and rapidly sink into without a trace. The first part of'Mere' seems to be the track in which both Robert and Janek let slipwhat they're best known for. It has a classic Main textured loop overwhich vinyl grooves crackle. Then it cuts abruptly with a rapid wave ofnoise and a more abstract second half follows. For a while it sounds asif they've caught a bee in a jar and the entrapped insect keeps rammingthe glass in futile escape attempts, but at the same time an amplifiedclose up of buzz from right under the bees wing echoes. 'Courou' buildsup into a fairly dense track which occupies similar terrain to JanekSchaefer's Fat Cat album "Above Buildings". 'Verglas' opens with somestarry high pitched brain tickles out of which an ever evolving droneemerges, and a strange machine rumbles. This is perhaps the most mindaltering track as the windy drones are subtley rotated from speaker tospeaker. 'Pavane' is haunting and windswept, a distant mutant pianoechoing hesitantly through memory fog as massive iron doors slam. Allis reduced to a dirty brown sludge before a resounding multi-huedclimax rises from the murk, like a slow motion film of a castlecollapsing in reverse. Comae was one of my ten favourite CD's of 2001,and the minute-long samples below really can't begin to do it justice -it has to be heard as a continuous hour long soundscape. -
Bless Ba-Da-Ben Goldberg's sweet heart for keeping the magic going... Publishing a +200 page book with a various artist compilation CD doesn't happen easily, overnight, nor is it probably financially rewarding. Thankfully he's got the support of a number of great writers and wonderful musicians which I'm sure make the realization of the project worth it. The writings in the fifth book (I can't call these magazine issues), as Ben describes, is lacking a thematic tie. The music, however (recorded especially for the compilation) is somewhat of a tribute to Raymond Scott's classic, 'Soothing Sounds for Baby' LP without doing any cover versions or reinterpretations of the original.
This volume's decidedly more electronic cast than volume 4 includes Cex, Solex, Flowchart, Marumari, Bogdan Raczynski and Arovane alonside a number of others I can't say I'm familiar with, but afterwards am surely interested in. The music and the book work well together, as the soothing, electronic melodies have allowed for some quality "me time" with the book without being obtrusive. [Anybody who has fallen in love with the prettiness of Mum — and I know there are a ton — shouldn't avoid this package.] The book entries are relatively short and entertaining, ranging from a short play, a profile on Boston's best record store Twisted Village, features on upcoming indie rock stars I've never heard of, Raymond Scott, Franklin Bruno and Drew Daniel discussing dissertations, and a ton of music reviews more brief than we've ever been here on The Brain. All this for under $8 even! Mahvelous. This would have been the perfect Christmas gift to a music-loving loved one. -
While this Mego release from O'Rourke may go completely off in theother direction of his concurrent "Insignificance" in that it's a"Powerbook" disc, the compositions which make up the three title tracksvary themselves..."I'm Happy" is comprised of multi-layered vibratosynth and sampled bagpipe ostinatos weaving in and out of each other.When first introduced, they come across as tense, but eventually blendnicely with a long, low rumbling from something resembling a boweddouble bass to break the tension and channel a release. "And I'mSinging" starts with ticking stopwatches, bells and chimes which giveway to a high end dentist drill-like squelch and percussive fumblingsas a backdrop for a flurry of distorted keyboard lines and snippets,pretty piano flourishes and a distant kick drum beating out the time.The piece has some nice movement of sections within it's structure,once again breaking the tension. Even an acoustic guitar is played,sampled and added to the mix. For me, "And A 1,2,3,4" is the surprisetrack. Clocking in at over 20 minutes, this track conveys theatmosphere and mood of listening to Labradford, SOTL, or Godspeed, withit's hauntingly beautiful arrangement of swelling strings, tremologuitar and keyboard drones. At first, the segments of the piece soundalmost random, but after a few cycles through you get the feeling ofhow it moves as a motif becomes more apparent. This disc is bound tosurprise a lot of O'Rourke fans who have come to expect his uniqueangle with this solo showcase on the laptop. The three tracks, havingbeen recorded live in New York, Osaka and Tokyo back between 1997 and1999 begs the question, what the hell took so long for us to get tohear this stuff? -
Subtitled "Inside the Dream Syndicate II", this is the second CD in thetrio documenting a stash of Cale's old sixties tapes unearthed byviolinist Tony Conrad. Tony's probably quite pleased to have thesereleased as they seem to back up his claims that Dream Syndicate sonichappenings were very much collective endeavours. The opening twentyminute Cale and Conrad string drone duet certainly has all the traitsof the previously released 'Day of Niagara' but is a better recording,although still sounding rough hewn. Perhaps it could be viewed as astepping stone on the path to Conrad's unrelenting skullfuck "FourViolins", but it's a transcendent portal in its own right. Cale's deepviola is the foundation with Conrad's violin cutting through the dreammist at spiky glancing angles. The viola is overwhelming, and everytime Cale shifts the drone up or down a notch colours swirl, shift,dissolve and reform. 'Ex-Cathedra' is Cale solo on Vox ContinentalOrgan with a beautiful shimmering tremelo loop underpinned by anintermittent half drowned lower chord. The third track is twelveminutes of what sounds like rummaging through the guts of a piano witha bunch of keys. Latterly the strings are bowed frantically to anintense maelstrom, and remind me of a couple of Thurston Moore'scomparatively polite duets with Nels Cline on "The Pillow Wand".'Carousel' is perhaps the most throwaway track, but only because it'sbeen done better so many times since. Cale makes 'electonic sounds'which thunk thunk thunk in the way that a guitar resting on top of itsamp might. The best is saved until last. The second duet with TonyConrad is as strangely beautiful and haunting as a track with a titlelike 'A Midnight Rain of Green Wrens at the World's Tallest Building'ought to be. The strings ooze retuned sadness for plummetinginter-dimensional avians. The final track finds Cale rattling off someextremely ragged guitar strumming with original Velvet Undergrounddrummer Angus Maclise bashing away on the cimbalom in a clatteringfreefalling ecstatic frenzy which perhaps shows a step in the evolutionof the glorious finale of the first Velvet Underground album. -
The Fall continue to tour a disturbing experimental past life and pack pristine venues with enthusiastic dripping venom, shambolic contempt and twisted wry amusement. "We are the new Fall," the lads hesitantly proclaim on the up an' at 'em opener, as Smith harrangues anyone who'll listen that they'd better look up! Who knows whether they'll stick it long enough to become an old Fall? The drummer's already shuffled off. For now Fall fans can ruminate on the twenty-third (at least 18% studio non-compilation) album proper from Mark E Smith and whoever else can put up with his bad Spanish accent impressions. Ditching the band that made the mostly excellent pro-tooled belter "The Unutterable", Smith has marsalled his ever expendable bedraggled combo to belt out a raw rocking set.
Cog Sinister
Every Fall album has at least one track that demands endless repeated listening. This album's classic 'Crop-Dust' gets its hooks into my brain for hours, combining primal addictive Fall rhythm with a killer snake-charmer riff whilst the sound levels are tweaked like tape drop-out. Mumbled backing vocals recall the twilit dusk of the haunting gross-chapel era, and Smith declaims a tale of a hesitant old singer from Manchester joining World War I soldiers in great coats. There is no mention of flabby wings here, but the time travel plays havoc with the liver and brain. The whole album has a kind of twisted time-warped feel to it. It sounds like the band that made early classics such as "Grotesque" and "Slates" took a dose of straight strychnine at a rockabilly festival and took a temporal wrong turn into an alternate pre-gramme reality in which only Smith could emerge the winner. A small alteration of the past turns time into space, which explains why shoddy collections of Fall demos have been proliferating across the earth. The hilariously abysmal sleeve and credit mistakes (two songs are listed in reverse order; there is a keyboard on the latter live portion of 'African Man' but no sign of former keyboardist Julia Nagle's name) are either a cockeyed homage to fan fleecing demo slew, or Smith just doesn't give a monkey's. In fact he eats monkeys for breakfast if the hilariously messy destruction of Iggy Pop's super dumb 'African Man' is to be taken seriously, which it obviously isn't. The African man eats elephants and lions too, but only because the hotel provides them. Lo-fi tapes and dyspeptic guitars infest the hotels and park themselves willy nilly in Afro Ibis Hotel man's driveway, where he strangles a screaming ibis for his supper (no fork or knife for him). He eats a skunk for lunch and sounds a bit shocked, triggering a time lock back to recent gig audio fragment. The Fall haven't sustained such a lengthy unhinged and uncommercial onslaught since the violin scraping of 'Papal Visit' and this'll have trendy fairweather White Stripes fans running for cover faster than you can say 'Spectre vs Rector'. It's also far and away the funniest track I heard in 2001. Whilst mention of skyscrapers in 'Crop-Dust' might have some dubious claims on Smith's prophetic capabilities, it's 'Kick the Can' and the resurrection of their Can homage 'I am Damo Suzuki' at gigs prior to Michael Karoli's death that rings grimly eerie. For 'Hollow Mind' they redo 'Jerusalem' with too many notes on low power with no discarded brick chip. The R. Dean Taylor cover 'Gotta See Jane' pales anaemically next to the bouncy 'Ghost in my House'. Nevertheless this version of The Fall could teach most of these hyped-up soft rockers, like the Strokes with their Housemartins plus little feedback lick shtick, a thing or seven. This album sounds as ravaged as everyone's favourite toothless idiot savant singer from Salford looks these days. The band are solid enough, if rather normal next to the formidable Scanlon, Hanley, Brix attack, and Smith sounds gloriously deranged even if he seems to have less to say than ever. He's probably been saving up witticisms for his next spoken word album. Mostly Smith's voice has been mixed at speaker damage levels, and if he doesn't finish off yer hi-fi, the dustbin lid drumming on 'My Ex Classmate's Kids' will. That song is basically a slowed down rewrite of the popular freebie Flitwick single 'When I Wake Up in the City'. Instead of coughing and tapes of say nothing radio chat, Smith drawls his most barmy alingual vowels and latterly complains of aftershave stench like twigs up the nose. That's what you get for living in a 'Bourgeois Town' where container drivers do the hassle shmuck with a handful of antacid!
Keven Blectum and Blevin Blectum, a pair of freaky San Francisco art school-type chicks, have made some of the most queasy lo-fi breakbeats since Coil's Scatology. This CD collects two of their early EPs, "Snauses and Mallards" and "De Snaunted Haus." Blectum's scattered, fuzzy beats are a chorus of guttural rumbles, poops, farts, and dysenteric discharge - all messily orchestrated for maximum nausea. If you can keep yourself from laughing at the musical turds populating this bizarre album, you will start to notice sinister undercurrents afoot. The comic strip liner notes and some of the spoken word tracks begin to explain Blectum's anal fantasy land of sex-crazed, cannibalistic "snauses" and "mallards" - two complimentary lifeforms whose main functions are, apparently, to copulate and excrete out the evil, distorted songs herein. The first nine tracks are a random, misshapen assortment of various musical ideas - from distorted jungle to retro-futurist tomfoolery - none of which exist long enough to make any real impact. Beginning with track ten, Kevin and Blevin begin to unravel their terrifyingly absurd tale of a "snaunted haus" with dirty industrial beats, fragmented drum and bass, distorted voices, abstract noise, and even samples from Men at Work (on "Right Time, Right Place"). This is truly an original work; it's rather difficult to compare it to anything. However, listening to this CD repeatedly is a little like playing with your own diarrhea. I hope that these obviously talented women will decide to make a slightly more mature, less fecal album sometime soon.
"Difficult" is a loaded word when used in electronic music reviews. In one context, it can be taken to mean the record is so far ahead of everything else out there that it needs numerous intense listening sessions to be understood and appreciated. On the other hand, it could simply mean that the record is an unfocussed, unlistenable and pretentious piece of crap. So when I tag these two new releases from Miami's Schematic label as being "difficult", which end of the spectrum am I referring to? Well, somewhere in between, but at least a little bit closer to the former than the latter.
On "Aleamapper", Atlanta's Richard Devine almost entirely abandons the crunchy beat structures of his previous releases and offers a set of soundworks that could loosely be referred to as "ambient" for lack of a better classification. There are some really inspired moments amongst the 16 tracks on the disc, but unfortunately the more interesting and vital bits are often cut short (one of the album's best tracks, "Mtr Method", doesn't even hit the two minute mark), while the more esoteric experiments are more often than not allowed to wander aimlessly. Despite these flaws, "Aleamapper" exhibits strong evidence of an artist who is committed to taking his music into new directions, so with a bit of fine tuning, I suspect that Devine's future work in this field of abstract sound could be phenomenal.
As for Mr. von Schirach, his "Escalo Frio" platter feels like a cross between Matmos (who appear as guests on a track) and Prefuse73: quirky, organic sounding IDM with a hint of fractured hip-hop. [Jon adds: but kind of feels like a stoner kid obsessed with video games, Saturday morning cartoons and Count Chocula.] Unfortunately, the MCs he chose to provide vocals to be processed don't offer much in the way of exciting or insightful rhymes, but since they only appear in a comprehensible form on a couple of tracks it's not too distracting. Otherwise the album is actually a lot of fun, with sounds and ideas of all sorts ping-ponging back and forth, and even a goofy fake commercial at the halfway point that's good for a chuckle.
Out now on Temporary Residence is the second full-length release fromXian Hawkins as Sybarite. Oddly enough, the Brooklyn-basedmulti-instrumentalist/producer/ composer has yet to finish and releasewhat he considers to be his official debut album. 'Placement Issues'collects 13 songs from various singles, compilation tracks and a coupleremixes that were limited in number, scarcely distributed, andcompletely impossible to find now. Through these single releases onStatic Caravan, Emanate, and Zealectronic, Hawkins gained the attentionof 4AD, who are scheduled to release Sybarite's debut, 'Nonument,'early on in 2002. It follows the 'Music for a Film' release, also onTemporary Residence, which was assembled as a score to the horrorb-movie, "Kill Me Tomorrow," yet the collection pulls form both earlierand later recordings. Hawkins' most high-profile gig was in the touringincarnate of Silver Apples, and listening to these recordings, it'sclear that his talents as a multi-instrumentalist were important infilling that role. Over the course of these recordings, the manskillfully delves into organic and synthetic electronics, bass, guitar,and various other odds and ends. Songs like "Otonomy" and the albumopener, "Engaged" never get too cliche or predictable, with chopped upacoustic guitar playing, distorted string samples and sharp beats. Thecombination of a lyrical bassline against unobtrusive guitar melodiesin other tracks like "Second Cities" create an attention-grabbingatomsphere that makes this disc hard to be a simple example of auralbackground, especially with the carefully positioned field recording ofa playground at the end. It's not so surprising that hiscomplex-yet-cool instrumental tunes have earned him the support of alabel who's roster includes Fridge and Kammerflimmer Kollektief.Listening to this disc back to back with the soundtrack, 'PlacementIssues' seems miles ahead, with a carefully calculated precision, muchlike the roster on Hefty excel in. My only issues with this collectionare in the rather deceptive gathering of the pieces: not only are therea couple songs missing here and there, but there's no accompanyingnotes nor are they placed in any observable order. [Perhaps that's justthe obsessive completist in me, manifesting itself onto a very youngcareer.] In the end, it's served its purpose as I'm now eager to hearhow he pieces together an album less fragmented and disjunct.
Given enough time Jah Wobble will, hopefully, collaborate with just about everyone. Over the past few years he has successfully mixed his trademark, bedrock bass guitar styling with Laotian folk ("Molam Dub"), inventive saxophone ("Passage to Hades") and all out industrial rock ("The Damage Manual"), among others. Here he teams up with Temple of Sound, the duo of Neil Sparkes and Count Dubulah, both formerly of Transglobal Underground.More success! The disc is initially only available by mail order through Wobble's 30 Hertz label. And no, this isn't an album of Motley Crue covers, just an unfortunate title coincidence. Ten tracks, most in the 5 to 6 minute range, explore a genuine Arabic electro dub amalgamation. Wobble provides the soul shaking bass lines, Dubulah the guitar, keys, strings and programming atmospheres and Sparkes a host of ethnic percussion such as riq, zils, Egyptian tabla and darabuka. Among other contributors are 3 female vocalists - Shahin Badar, Natacha Atlas and Nina Miranda - who grace half the album with powerfully emotive, mostly foreign tongued strains. Every track is solid. Really solid. The quirky loops of "Cleopatra King Size" are laced with electronics, stuttered guitar notes and booming low end. The wandering bass line of "Once Upon a Time in The East" reminisces of Wobble's legendary late '70s tenure in Public Image Ltd. The sweeping strings of "Maghreb Rockers" weave together a delightful tapestry of Middle Eastern flavors. A rolling mass of effected percussion brings "Symphony of Palms" close to Muslimgauze territories. And it doesn't get anymore lovely than the slower, more subtle "La Citadelle" - the lumbering groove, the solemn vocal, the gliding background guitar notes - all of which are revisited in the finale "Mistralazul 2". Fantastic. No word yet on what Wobble is up to next, but other recent releases include "The Early Years" and "Radioaxiom - A Dub Transmission" with longtime collaborator Bill Laswell.
Time will forget music. Much of it. Oldies radio stations are a perfectexample. On most of those channels, you'll find James Brown reduced toonly one hit, "I Got You (I Feel Good)." You'll never hear "FunkyPresident," "Mother Popcorn," or "It's a Mans Mans Mans World." Thesame can be said for a number of artists who might have never reachednumber one. Right now it can be observed with music from the 1980s, aswe're reminded constantly of "Come on Eileen" but never Dexy's MidnightRunner's second single. While Boyd Rice understands that he can'tchange the world, he sure as hell knows how to put up a fight. Twelveof his favorite forgotten girl group songs have been presented here,none of which you have probably ever heard of. While the sound qualityis obviously shoddily reproduced from the old 45s, it sure isrefreshing to hear some really fun girl group songs that haven't beenplayed to death. It's almost like getting one of the Nuggetscollections or the amazing 5xCD set called "Box of Trash", anduncovering a world stifled by corporate decisions to trim playlists andlimit history. If anything Boyd Rice can be commended for, it's hisastonishing ability to make people question their surroundings and getthem thinking. "Music for Pussycats" frighteningly gives me moreconfidence that over time, much of the music we love and write abouthere on Brainwashed will be erased from civilization.