We have finally cleared out the backlog of great music and present some new episodes.
Episode 711 features music from The Jesus and Mary Chain, Zola Jesus, Duster, Sangre Nueva, Dialect, The Bug, Cleared, Mount Eerie, Mulatu Astatke & Hoodna Orchestra, Hayden Pedigo, Bistro Boy, and Ibukun Sunday.
Episode 712 has tunes by Mazza Vision, Waveskania, Black Pus, Sam Gendel, Benny Bock, and Hans Kjorstad, Katharina Grosse, Carina Khorkhordina, Tintin Patrone, Billy Roisz, and Stefan Schneider, His Name Is Alive, artificial memory trace, mclusky, Justin Walter, mastroKristo, Başak Günak, and William Basinski.
Episode 713 brings you sounds from Mouse On Mars, Leavs, Lawrence English, Mo Dotti, Wendy Eisenberg, Envy, Ben Lukas Boysen, Cindytalk, Mercury Rev, White Poppy, Anadol & Marie Klock, and Galaxie 500.
Skolavordustigur Street in Reykjavík photo by Jon (your Podcast DJ).
Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
Sam McKinlay's work as The Rita is almost synonymous with the Harsh Noise Walls (HNW) within the noise community. In contrast to the ever changing and eclectic work of artists like Wolf Eyes and Prurient, the HNW adherents are all about worshiping the stagnant mass of barely changing static and white noise that old school artists like CCCC and the Incapacitants created. This LP surprised me with the amount of variation and depth that it actually has, considering what I was expecting.
While I like a good brutal blast of noise here and there, I tend to prefer stuff that has a distinct style or approach.Much of the HNW stuff I've heard simply sounds like the critique often delivered against any noise music:it simply sounds like a broken AM radio playing through a distortion pedal.However, McKinlay's approach to this is much more nuanced and diverse, and while it meets that impenetrable wall of noise criteria for the genre, there’s more going on besides that.
Never one to hide his interests or source material, "Skate" is based on the source recordings of McKinlay skating on a mic'd up metal rail.Immediately upon its introduction, there’s the obvious clack of a skateboard hitting a rail, discernible through the miasma of white noise.As it progresses, the heavy, thick layers of feedback and static occasionally part, allowing the obvious, raw recordings of skateboarding to be heard within, serving as some sort of perverse rhythmic breakdown to the otherwise concrete wall.
The other side, "Snorkel," is constructed from samples of snorkeling and scuba diving from various horror and adventure films.While the source material is never completely apparent, there's a vibe of an old, worn VHS tape with tracking issues throughout:crackling, hissy sound alongside the harsh, brittle noise.While there are no obvious breaks in the sound—as is found on "Skate"—there is a slow, but obvious progression and shift throughout, giving it much more depth than it seems.
There's no chance this LP would appeal to anyone who can't tell the difference between Merzbow and Masonna, but as someone who usually has little interest in the wall noise approach, I found both sides far more captivating than I had expected.The variation and nuance is quite subtle, but definitely there.
At one time, it would have been unthinkable for a band renowned for their unrelenting volume, chaos and atonality to release an album with this title. However, Neubauten's modus operandi has always been to confound expectations and even after a decade of softening their sound, Silence is Sexy certainly confounded many listeners at the time. Looking back at it now, it is easy to look at it as the start of a new phase in the group’s development. It has certainly lost little of its potency in the last ten years.
From the moment "Sabrina" begins, Silence is Sexy casts its spell on me. Blixa Bargeld’s lyrics cycle through the colors of the German flag and the rest of the band keep a tight rein on the volume; exploring the texture and melodic capabilities of their chosen instruments. These themes run through Silence is Sexy in various forms, creating a solid conceptual backbone for the album. This was the sound of a new Neubauten (Jochen Arbeit and Rudolf Moser both had joined since Ende Neu) and represented a testing of the waters for the various players.
Later in the album, the superb "Die Befindlichkeit des Landes" sees Bargeld ruminating on the state of post-unification Germany, particularly the sense of displacement caused by new construction and the downplaying of history (the name chosen by the band way back in 1980 having a different resonance at the turn of the millennium). He plays on the irony of perhaps Germany’s most famous singer, Marlene Dietrich, commemorated by a tiny square in the Potsdamer area of Berlin. The idea of a new state brought about by the joining of two separate halfs of a city could be seen as a metaphor for the loss of the band’s past (through the loss of F.M. Einheit and Mark Chung) and looking to the future, the what ifs of the latest line up of the group.
Towards the end of the album, one of Neubauten’s best songs emerge in the form of "Sonnenbarke." The song is a stunning voyage on a mythical sun barge, full of cosmic splendor. With alchemical grace, Bargeld transforms the November grey of Berlin into a creative journey through a golden, eternal light. The power of the lyrics resonates into the music where Moser’s use of a jet engine as percussive instrument creates a shining, shimmering constellation of tones (and of course the idea of voyage across the sky is semantically linked to the jet engine itself).
This reissue of Silence is Sexy makes some alterations to the format and tracklisting of the album. Firstly, the second disc featuring "Pelikanol" is completely absent leaving Silence is Sexy as a single disc album. Secondly, the main disc follows the original German tracklisting of the album, which replaces "Total Eclipse of the Sun" with "Anrufe in Abwesenheit." Personally, I always preferred the latter to the former (which was available on the international edition of Strategies Against Architecture III) as it fit better with the concepts and music found elsewhere on Silence is Sexy. So for anyone who already owns the album, there is little here to warrant buying it again (unless you want a set of Neubauten branded matches, which are given as a bonus when buying from the band’s website) but for those who have yet to sample this entry in Neubauten’s back catalogue, I heartily recommend it but would suggest tracking down the older two-disc version instead for the definitive experience.
Motion Sickness of Time Travel's Rachel Evans is having a very Emeralds-esque year, unleashing an impressive slew of excellent (and generally pretty limited) releases under a variety of guises. This particular oneis her first full-length collaboration with her husband, Nova Scotian Arms' Grant Evans, and it unexpectedly avoids using her characteristic reverb-heavy vocals much at all.  That seems like it should be a significant handicap, but it apparently wasn't, as Grant and Rachel have created a beautifully melancholy and subtly psychedelic ambient opus.
Quiet Evenings is noteworthy in being both perfectly named and quite different from either of its members' solo work.  Transcending Spheres probably shares a bit more common ground with Grant's Nova Scotian Arms' work than Rachel's though, simply because it betrays a clear love of Kosmische/vintage synthesizer music, but it lacks any of the darkness that tends to haunt that project.  Instead, he and Rachel use their synthesizers and treated guitars to create warm and shimmering dronescapes.  This a very womb-like album, which, of course, is not especially novel stylistic territory.  However, Quiet Evenings have clearly spent many of their quiet evenings at home diligently honing their craft, as this album is both sublimely executed and utterly immersive from beginning to end.
The music, for the most part, is constructed of multilayered synth drifts and swells.  Within those narrow confines, however, Grant and Rachel find a lot of room to give each song its own unique character.  For example, Rachel's ghostly, whispered vocals make their sole appearance on "Finality," giving the piece a haunting and dreamlike haze.  Even more striking is the forlorn, theremin-sounding section near the end of "The Inevitability of Decay."  The other five pieces are a little bit less overt in asserting themselves, but there are a lot of minor quirks to enjoy: subtly burbling pulses, buried snarls of distortion, electronic bird noises, etc.  Nothing is quite harsh or forceful enough to ever break the album's pleasantly narcotic spell, but there is enough small-scale unpredictability, passing shadow, and mood-variability to prevent things from ever becoming too edgeless or blissed-out.
Quiet Evenings will probably not get as much attention as some other Evans-related releases, as this is certainly very restrained and low-key.  Nevertheless, Transcending Spheres stands among the best releases from either Grant or Rachel, deftly avoiding the tossed-off feel common to many releases by folks this prolific.  It is possible that many of these pieces began their lives as improvisations, but it is obvious that a great deal of effort and care ultimately went into creating a coherent, dynamic, and beautifully textured whole.  As far as ambient albums go, it is hard to get much better than this.
After several years of limited-release, home-recorded solo recordings, Sean Ragon's fascinating neo-folk/post-punk project has finally made its formal debut as an actual band.  While deeply flawed at times, its unusual amalgamation of paganism, acoustic instrumentation, raw power, and wild-eyed intensity can be quite electrifying when it hits the mark.
From the opening notes of "New West," it is immediately apparent that Sean has performed a striking feat of alchemy in assembling his band.  Glenn Maryansky's muscular, rolling toms; the physicality of Micki Pellerano's loud, detuned bass; the clean, floating melodies of Christiana Key's violin; and Sean's own frenzied acoustic guitar strumming and barked/snarled vocals all combine to form a very heavy and distinct aesthetic.  Ragon in particular is quite a compelling and unconventional frontman, easily holding his own against the rumbling din behind him through sheer bulging-tendon force of personality–it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that he finishes every show with bloody fingers and an utterly ravaged throat.  The band manages to hit near-perfection again on the album's ferocious closing song, "Lace Up Your Boots," which sounds like Death in June doing a raucous, go-for-broke cover of an Oi! anthem.  Unfortunately, things get a bit more complicated and ambiguous during the nine songs that separate those two highlights.
The problem is that Cult of Youth's immense energy and vision is only effective when focused properly and many of the songs seem a bit tentative, misguided, or incomplete.  I am tempted to say that this band has mastered exactly one type of song (the "angry, post-punk sea-shanty") and lose the plot whenever they attempt to diverge from that formula, but a few of their digressions are still pretty likable, such as the goth-folk of "Casting Thorns," or the beautifully melancholy "Weary."  Even some of their misfires are at least interesting, like the stomping Wicker Man-style folk-dance-on-amphetamines of "Monsters."  Ragon is clearly drawing inspiration from some curious and eccentric sources, as there are also shades of mariachi, Eastern-tinged psych, and Morricone on display.  Unfortunately, there are also several songs that are just very confusing or outright bad.  I especially have massive problems with the jazz/funk guitar chords in "The Dead Sea" and the vapid, toothless pop of "Through the Fear."  I sometimes get the feeling that Ragon is trying to stretch unfinished or dubious ideas into songs solely through manic enthusiasm and raw conviction.
The occasional schizophrenia and the huge gulf in quality between the great songs and the not-great songs make Cult of Youth a very frustrating album, but one that is still well-worth hearing, as all of the elements of a pretty great and singular band are evident.  It is always enjoyable to hear something that is this aggressively un-trendy, particularly when it is delivered with so much earnest intensity.  There is an impressive amount of guts, creativity, and ambition on display here–Ragon just needs to get a little better at consistently harnessing it.
According to major news stations, approximately 3% of America's population was convinced the rapture might occur on May 21, 2011, due to the prophecy of a Christian evangelist, radio personality, and madman. A day later, and the apocalypse hasn't come—surprise!—which means you still have a chance to hear Bill Callahan's latest, aptly-named album before the world actually ends.
Callahan has been releasing music for 20 years now, and Apocalypse isn't likely to change minds for those not interested by now. It is a fine addition to his catalog, though—I have played it every week since I heard it back in March, and to my ears, this is the best album he has made since his final full-length as Smog, 2005's A River Ain't Too Much to Love. As usual, this is a subtle progression for Callahan that contains small tweaks to his approach—seven intimate songs in 40 minutes that are captured well by the serene, scenic landscape on its cover.
My favorite aspect of the album—like Callahan's last full-length, 2009's Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle—is the total richness of the performances captured. Apocalypse sounds flat-out gorgeous, among the best production and mastering jobs this year. The album was supposedly recorded live in the studio, and the production reflects that: there's a gritty, one-take-or-bust character to the songs that is urgent, impassioned. Details abound in the mix, whether the echo of Callahan's vibrating acoustic guitar strings; the howl and strum of his electric; the gravity of his nuanced baritone; or his ensemble's accompaniment on strings, banjo, drums, and other subtle flourishes. The whole thing is a joy to listen to, regardless of whether the songs themselves are any good.
Luckily, the songs are on-point more often than not. The earthy production lends itself well to a set of seven tunes that sprawl and stretch out, with less concision than Callahan typically seems to shoot for. His lyrics dance around vaguely apocalyptic topics, though often on a personal level, such as the struggles in a relationship. "Where has my baby gone? / She was not a weed, she was a flower," he mourns. At other points, he centers on humility and the value of self-discovery. "My, my, my apocalypse," Callahan intones, "I realized I had said very little about ways, or wheels, or riding for the feeling." His lyrics are just vague enough to avoid being pinned down with specific meaning, but it's tough not to feel their impact all the same. In the same song, he concludes: "Leaving is easy when you've got someplace you need to be"—perhaps the charm is that it's impossible to tell how confident he really is in that assertion.
At one point, Callahan turns his attention outward to his home country. Like many Americans, he struggles with how to interpret recent events and our overall state of life. Should he feel proud and patriotic? Embarrassed? Angry at leaders who made decisions to stay at war? Or should he simply shrug it off with a self-deprecating laugh? Callahan is bright enough to know not to place all his eggs in one basket: emotions are complex things, as is our country, and his lyrics on "America" are simultaneously reverent and critical, witty and unknowing. In the end, he reverts inward again, knowing that when he can't control his surroundings, or the people in his life, that he can always control himself:
One fine morning, I'm gonna ride out Just me and the skeleton crew We're gonna ride out in a country kind of silence
Fair enough—if Apocalypse is his parting shot, it's a bulls-eye.
In a recent interview, Kyle Bobby Dunn told Fracture Compound that he heard "the truth" in his favorite music, a truth that he associates with the "brutal honest beauty" of certain classical compositions. Kyle doesn't spell out what he thinks the truth is, but I suspect that Ways of Meaning provides a clue.
Kyle Bobby Dunn's music is beautiful for a lot of reasons, some obvious and others a little more obscure. In the first place, Kyle writes elegant and aching music that is both picturesque and personal; his melodies effortlessly communicate human emotions like fear, joy, and loneliness, but they can describe places or provide narratives, too. I think it's possible that some of Kyle's music is pleasing simply because it's the musical representation of a pleasing place or memory. Either way, Kyle uses simple ingredients to create attractive, and sometimes complex, music, which brings me to the obscure qualities. They have less to do with the sound of the music itself and more to do with the effort put into making it. Following the lead of several great composers, Kyle strives to produce a wide range of sounds and colors using a minimum of elements, and there is something pleasing about that in and of itself. It is a great challenge to say more with less, and hearing someone face that challenge is akin to watching an athlete accomplish a difficult feat. Ways of Meaning is also just over 40 minutes long, so it features both a strict economy of instrumentation and time. Dunn knows that simplicity has its own beauty, and he has suffused his latest album with it in every way possible.
That's something Kyle has always done with his music, though. What makes Ways different is the secret Kyle has smuggled inside it. That secret first comes to light on "Movement for the Completely Fucked," a song whose title would be comical if it weren't so insidious. Like the other five songs on this album, it's both calm and measured, but unlike the other five, its title is completely incongruous. I'd chalk that fact up to impertinence, except "Movement" is ambiguous to the point of being ice cold, like a dead stare from across the poker table. The music is undeniably attractive, but with this added intrigue, it acquires the brutality Dunn mentioned in his interview. It ceases to be pretty in a simple way, and it loses some of its obscure allure at the same time. But, because it's still composed of the same elements as the other songs, it refuses any deeper inquiry. There are no lyrics, no honest statements, and no guideposts. After getting to this point, all I hear is the sound of Kyle being erased from his music. By stripping his instrumentation down and refusing to utilize conventional forms, Kyle both simplifies his music and removes himself from it. What's left is uncertain and even misleading.
So, when Kyle says he is drawn to the truthfulness of his favorite music, I have to wonder what he has in mind and whether he intends to infuse his own music with that same truthfulness. As I listen to Ways, I think the answer must have something to do with the play between simplicity and meaning, a natural topic for someone attracted to minimalism. It's tempting to think that, as music becomes simpler, so too must its content, but Kyle challenges that notion with the smallest of twists. Were the music just a shade happier or a tad darker, it would be easy to dismiss this discrepancy, or to miss it altogether. Of course, were "Movement for the Completely Fucked" named otherwise, there would be no reason to suspect anything at all. In any case, Kyle underlines the complexity of the idea of "meaning" by demonstrating its volatility in even a spartan musical environment. There's nothing surprising about that conclusion, but he expresses it in such a way that it becomes evidently frightening, honest, and beautiful. Music isn't terribly different from language, and if sound is so ambiguous, then think how much more difficult language must be, whether we realize it or not.
Of course, I haven't read that Kyle has said anything about that. Maybe the truth is that minimalism isn't as minimal as we might think, or that music can be beautiful whether it means anything or not.
This new collaborative project pairs one of the UK’s most gifted and unconventional drone artists, Chris Herbert, with Spanish sound artist Elías Merino. The duo were initially brought together by their shared interest in creating lushly textured soundscapes, but each has a very different process for arriving there: Herbert is quite fond of natural and non-musical "found" sounds, while Merino's work is primarily computer-generated. Their commonalities handily eclipse any potential aesthetic clashes though, as Folds sounds like an absolutely gorgeous drone album enlivened by a churning undercurrent of grainy textures and sneakily obscured small-scale kinetic transformations. I suppose that description could probably apply to much of Herbert's solo work as well, but Folds definitely feels like an extra layer of depth, textural complexity, and visceral power has been added to the picture. Merino's presence has taken something already wonderful and elevated it to a whole new level.
It feels exasperatingly reductionist to describe Ogive's work as "drone," even though that term is a perfectly apt one structurally: Folds' five pieces are all built from a fairly straightforward foundation of hazily dreamlike thrum, crackle, and hiss.Sadly, no one has yet coined a fitting genre name for something that is essentially drone music, but on a much larger and more transcendent scale, nor is there a special designation for drone that vibrantly buzzes with a dazzling ecosystem of intricate, dynamic details.Folds, however, delivers on both of those fronts from start to finish.As such, it demands to be played loudly, as it feels like a force of nature and should be experienced that way.On the opening "Dehiscence," for example, Ogive evoke nothing less than a massive, crashing wave of beauty–it slowly rolls in with rumbling, seismic power, then becomes an overwhelming and completely immersive sensory experience.If a tidal wave washing over a town could be stripped of everything negative and viewed strictly as a slow-motion aesthetic phenomenon, it would probably be a lot like "Dehiscence," completely transforming the landscape and creating an otherworldly and sun-dappled state of suspended animation: everything normally in the town is still there, but radically recontextualized and blurred into unrecognizability.At times, the underwater world of "Dehiscence" has pockets of violence and danger, but it all eventually recedes to leave only gently rippling pools and metaphorical dripping eaves in its wake.In essence, that tableau is what every piece on Folds seems to strive for (and achieve): taking elements of the familiar and transforming them into something alien, new, and weirdly beautiful...and doing it in impressively decisive and enveloping fashion.
On the following "Isomerica," the illusion is a bit easier to deconstruct, as it sounds like a field recording of a clanking and grinding factory floor smoothed over with a languorous wash of shifting, blurry harmonies.It is not any less heavenly than its processor, however.In fact, it even transcends it in some respects, unexpectedly blossoming into what feels like a soft-focus and half-remembered fireworks display near the end.Later, "Refractaise" further highlights Ogive's unconventional genius for texture, as the bed of drones feels like an undulating and visceral machine-like hum that unpredictable swells into grinding and sizzling crescendos.There are also some ghostly sustained tones creating shifting harmonies, but it never sounds like there are any human musicians playing human instruments involved–it sounds instead like I am having an especially real and physical nightmare set in a haunted factory.Elsewhere, "Rifts" feels like a rhythmically pulsing sea of crackling radio waves and shuddering machinery.Gradually, it becomes increasingly disrupted by subterranean surges that cohere into a heavy new rhythm.That industrial churning ultimately gives way to a comparatively pastoral second half...sort of.The drones certainly subside to a roiling simmer and some happy ducks lend their voices to the scene, but it still takes a while before the rumbling subsides enough that it no longer feels like the ground might suddenly tear wide open at any time.The closing "Superhabitat" unexpectedly diverges a bit from the usual winning formula, playing up Ogive’s more straightforward drone aspects a bit more than the other pieces, but is not any weaker for it.Instead, it simply feels like a single sustained and undulating organ chord jacked up to engulfing immensity through plenty of grainy, distorted layering.It sounds a lot like prime Tim Hecker, but a Tim Hecker who found one perfect chord and simply decided to hypnotically ride it out into eternity.
Naturally, a great deal of Folds' success is due to the seamless blurring together of both artists' distinctive and unusual approaches to pure sound: this album is instantly mesmerizing primarily because it feels like an immense and shuddering organic entity.Herbert and Merino are extremely adept at erasing any traces of themselves, and both have a seemingly infallible intuition for avoiding missteps.Any recognizable instruments, deliberate chord changes, or melodies would have unavoidably ruined the spell, regardless of their compositional utility.Consequently, all are nowhere to be found.Instead, Folds seems to have found a post-compositional path where both artists egolessly allowed their sounds and their tools to shape a "natural" flow.Of course, there is also a second piece to the puzzle: such an approach would just be a cool conceptual experiment if it did not sound great, so it is fortunate that Folds is also a rich, muscular, and vibrant tour de force of production skill.Lovely spectral harmonies and subtle, sharply realized textures abound, but they are always in service of a whole that often feels like being consumed by a heavenly avalanche.No one will make a better drone album than this in 2017.
Colleen's newly electronic-based aesthetic came about in something of an accidental way, as Schott originally picked up a synth with the modest intention of creating an additional rhythmic element for her viola da gamba-based work.That experiment was not entirely successful, but proved to be fruitful enough to inspire the purchase of a second synth and led Schott into exploring what could be done with her signature viola da gamba taken out of the picture altogether.On one level, that seems like a bit of a curiously self-sabotaging decision, as a significant part of Colleen's appeal and mystique has always been how hermetic, otherworldly, and anachronistic Schott's aesthetic can be.A lot of Colleen albums feel like they could have been made by an impossibly wise and sad fairy tale princess confined to a tower, viewing the world exclusively through her unreachable window.Making a synth-based album dispels a lot of that illusion and places Colleen quite squarely in 2017.The fundamental Colleen-ness of Schott's vision cannot be so easily shaken off though and A Flame My Love favorably recalls the more primitive and intuitive outsider strangeness of private press New Age visionaries from decades past far more than it does anything happening now.Also, since she started singing, one of the most transfixing elements of Schott's work has been the poetic and hushed confessional intimacy of her vocals.The backdrop may have changed, but it still feels like Schott is attempting to share some kind of enigmatic secret, heartache, or ineffable revelation with me.
At times, Schott embraces her new electronic muse in a way that seems like a natural evolution from her previous work, such as "Summer Night (Bat Song)," which sounds like a dreamlike organ reverie that gently undulates, blurs, and shimmers like a lysergic medieval mass.The closing title piece takes a similar approach, often sounding like a breathy, lilting melody sung over a simple backdrop of sustained accordion chords, though it has an unexpectedly free and amorphous structure.Elsewhere, there are a handful of instrumentals where Schott is clearly experimenting with the strange and beautiful sounds she can wrest from her new synth/delay pedal combination.To her credit, pieces like "Another World" and "One Warm Spark" already a display a unique and distinctive aesthetic of erratically pulsing, burbling, and churning arpeggios.The best pieces, however, are simply the ones that transpose the structured, idiosyncratic "pop" aesthetic of Captain of None into electronic form.The centerpiece of the album is "Winter Dawn," which creates a dense and vibrant polyrhythm of blooping pulses that builds to a haunting chorus where Schott’s words are trailed by ghostly afterimages."Separating" is similarly beguiling, as a spectrally lingering vocal melody languorously unfolds over a throbbing and hallucinatory fantasia of pulsing and liquid synth motifs.
As a whole, A Flame My Love is a fairly adventurous and strong album, but it feels more like an intriguing transitional album rather than a fresh masterpiece.It certainly still sounds like a Colleen album and Schott handles her radical evolution with an impressive degree of nuance, elegance, and ingenuity: there are no real missteps to be found and I would be hard-pressed to identify any clear influences or artists who have recorded anything similar.Unfortunately, past Colleen albums have yielded a number of pieces of absolutely transcendent and otherworldly beauty ("Everyone Alive Wants Answers," "Summer Water," etc.) and this album merely offers a few fine and hooky new songs.For most artists, that would be ample cause for celebration, but Schott has historically set a very high bar for Colleen, making this is a very good album by a historically great artist.That is not to say that Schott's vision has dulled at all, however: A Flame My Love documents kind of a necessary step towards adapting this project more towards live performances and touring.Colleen has already recorded plenty of wonderfully elaborate, introspective bedroom-recorded dreamscapes, chamber pieces, and starkly lovely art-pop gems and none of that needed to be repeated.With this album, Schott finds a way to maintain the soul of Colleen in a more muscular, accessible, and "just plug-in and play" way.In that regard, A Flame My Love is unquestionably a success, but it is more of an enjoyable gateway to some of Schott's deeper work than a new high-water mark.
Among the most diverse entries in their catalog, Nada! is the sound of two very different individuals creating one distinct album. With the departure of Tony Wakeford, the band pretty much dropped the electric post-punk sound that characterized the earliest singles. What remains is about half acoustic ballads, and half gothic synth pop, but somehow feels like a coherent whole, and for me remains one of their best albums ever.
Personally I have never been too concerned with the pseudo-politics and politically incorrectness of the band, which is one of the reasons opinions on them is so decisive.For the most part, other than the militaristic rhythms and references to Klaus Barbie on "C'est un Reve," there’s not a whole lot of National Socialism to be found here, but a fair helping of nihilism and sadness abound.
The acoustic folk songs are, unsurprisingly, the ones courtesy of DIJ mainstay Douglas Pearce, the nascent sound that he would ram into the ground over the next 25 years, with diminishing returns.Here it’s not just a matter of it being fresh, there's also just a greater depth in arrangement and variety of songwriting.Songs like opener "The Honour of Silence" and "Behind the Rose (Fields of Rape)" remain among his strongest compositions, and have just the right amount of drama and bombast to accompany the guitar and vocals.
The classic "She Said Destroy," featuring David Tibet, continues this, leaning more into the pop realm than the other two, but losing none of the mystique.This is what makes this album stand out in the DIJ discography:the songs are catchy and memorable.For me, starting around The Wall of Sacrifice and continuing to the present day, too many of the songs since then simply disappear into the same mire of acoustic guitar and esoteric lyrics, mostly indiscernible from one to the other.Here each are distinct and powerful, never blurring into another track.
The other half of the album is mostly the work of Patrick Leagas, prior to forming Sixth Comm, and has a decidedly synth pop bent to it.Between the chintzy drum machines and rudimentary keyboards, it sounds very much a product of the era.For me, that’s not a problem at all, and it only adds to the quality of songs like "Rain of Despair," which sounds like nothing else the band has ever did with its almost dance-floor oriented drum programming and focus on rhythms more than vocals.
Even with these disparate approaches being used, there is a sense of unity that comes throughout:Leagas' "Foretold," while almost all programming and synths, has the same dark intensity that the folk tracks from Pearce specialize in.At the same time, the Pearce-sung "C'est un Reve" and "Crush My Love" also are far more synthetic than most of his work, yet still very much feel right.
For some reason, the earliest CD issue of this album via World Serpent tacked the bonus tracks to the beginning, while the more recent (and far superior) reissue via Tesco Organisation places them correctly at the end.A combination of B-sides and compilation tracks, to me they have always felt an essential piece of the album.The original version of "The Calling" appears here to balance its "Mark II" album take.Perhaps the best illustration of the dichotomy at play here, the original version relies mostly on Douglas' acoustic guitar playing, while the second version is all about the synths and sequences.
Also in dramatic contrast, the compilation track "The Torture Garden" is among the most avant garde of their early career, with its militaristic keyboards, Gregorian chants and drama infused vocals, which is nearly the polar opposite of "Born Again", a perfect little piece of synth pop that, in a more just world, would have been highly acclaimed upon release.
Like all of the reissued DIJ catalog, the Tesco-assisted reissue blows away the original, with much higher quality artwork and packaging, a quality mastering job, and an overall greater feeling of care in comparison, not to mention a much lower price tag.
Picking a favorite out of Death in June's early work isn't easy for me, because the holy trinity of this, The Guilty Have No Pride, and The World That Summer are all so different, yet brilliant in their own unique ways.Nada! would perhaps win by a hair, though it is a very close race.While Pearce seems to be content to follow a very formulaic approach to recording new work, while simultaneously reissuing mid-period albums in overpriced special packages with castoff tracks and re-recordings, it is work like Nada! that, to me, gives me hope with each new release, though disappointment almost always follows.
Whenever a new vinyl release by Andrew Chalk surfaces, several things are fairly certain: it will be a beautiful object, it will be expensive, and it will be worth it.  Packaging-wise, Violin by Night hits impressive new heights in both lavishness and mystery.  The corresponding songs, on the other hand, are atypically brief and melodic, often more closely resembling a damaged Romantic classical recording than anything drone-like.
The album opens with "A New Heaven," unfolding a gentle, submerged-sounding piano or harmonic motif over a very minimal, murky, and vaporous bed.  It is extremely simple melodically, but Chalk creates some impressive things dynamics, making all the notes ripple, shimmer, and decay like droplets on a moonlit pool.This sets the tone for the album quite beautifully, as almost everything that follows seems evocative of some sort of remote nocturnal grove.  It isn't entirely an idyllic one though, as the album is populated with a number of pieces ("Violin by Night," for example) that feel elusive and spectral, drifting in and out of the sonic foreground like a strange, shifting mist. It is difficult to tell exactly what Chalk is playing on individual pieces due to the heavy processing (and because the liner notes are entirely in Japanese), but much of the album sounds like someone playing a lonely, melancholy organ solo somewhere in the distance, only snatches of which are audible due to the vagaries of the wind and the acoustics of the surrounding landscape.
Of course, there are a number of exceptions.  "Red Horse," for example, is very much a drone piece, augmenting its darkly queasy underbelly with some sort of bizarre overtone experiment that doesn't quite sustain my interest.  The other departures work much better though, as the shadowy, flange-heavy "Then and Now" sounds like a chamber ensemble heard though a thick fog of hallucinogens while "The Falling City" sounds like an understated, less emotionally ravaging cousin to one of Arvo Pärt's more sorrowful string pieces ("Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten," for example).  "The Falling City" is an uncharacteristically melodic and unprocessed work for Chalk, achieving an impressive orchestral grandeur that is not at all what I have come to expect from him.
It is difficult to say where this release falls within Chalk's ouevre quality-wise, as he's responsible for a number of stellar albums.  The important thing is that it is almost uniformly excellent, although the increased focus on melody coincides with a necessary decrease in song length–I miss the immersiveness of Chalk's more long-form work, as some of these songs are over before they fully take hold of me.  Also, I always appreciated that his work asked a lot of patience and focus from me as a listener.  The occasional overt melodies on Violin by Night may be a bit simpler and more accessible, but the shifted balance between space, texture, and melody works quite nicely and I would certainly be happy with wider recognition and increased demand for Andrew Chalk albums.  I can't complain.  Andrew might though, as the physical packaging for this album was handmade and seems like it was pretty damn labor-intensive (cloth, wood, great anthropomorphic animal art, everything in kanji, etc.).
The US edition of Electric Eden was published on Tuesday 10 May (Faber via Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Revised, updated and corrected!
In this groundbreaking survey of more than a century of music making in the British Isles, Rob Young investigates how the idea of folk has been handed down and transformed by successive generations – song collectors, composers, Marxist revivalists, folk-rockers, psychedelic voyagers, free festival-goers, experimental pop stars and electronic innovators. In a sweeping panorama of Albion’s soundscape that takes in the pioneer spirit of Cecil Sharp; the pastoral classicism of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Peter Warlock; the industrial folk revival of Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd; the folk-rock of Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, Shirley Collins, John Martyn and Pentangle; the bucolic psychedelia of The Incredible String Band, The Beatles and Pink Floyd; the acid folk of Comus, Forest, Mr Fox and Trees; The Wicker Man and occult folklore; the early Glastonbury and Stonehenge festivals; and the visionary pop of Kate Bush, Julian Cope and Talk Talk, Electric Eden maps out a native British musical voice that reflects the complex relationships between town and country, progress and nostalgia, radicalism and conservatism.
A wild combination of pagan echoes, spiritual quest, imaginative time-travel, pastoral innocence and electrified creativity, Electric Eden will be treasured by anyone interested in the tangled story of Britain’s folk music and Arcadian dreams.
‘Like its subject, this wonderful and informative book is full of surprises; a deep poetic sense runs alongside adroit analysis, absorbing narrative detail and lucid, singular overview. Young has charted a territory that is sodden with mystery and tunnelled under with ceaselessly interconnecting themes and ideas – it is as much a state of consciousness that his book describes, connecting sun-lit myths of ‘merrie England’ to a bewitchingly autumnal study of English music’s profound relationship with time and the land.’
Michael Bracewell
‘Electric Eden maps the secret aquifer beneath the flourishing landscape of British musical creativity over the last century: the country’s heathen heritage of folklore andfancy, ritual and magic, tall tales and stubborn superstitions. Roving from time immemorial to modern antiquarians like Julian Cope, via the pioneering folk song collectors of the early 20th Century, the psychedelic minstrels of the late 1960s, and 70s mavericks like John Martyn and Kate Bush, Rob Young has crafted a vivid and penetrating study of this old, weird Albion. Electric Eden is a stunning achievement.’ Simon Reynolds