13 July 2013

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Albums and Singles

There are certainly a number of fine labels currently trawling record bins in Jamaica, Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia in search of great lost, unheard, or forgotten music, but Soundway compilations (particularly the African ones) are almost always my favorites.  The reason for that is quite simple: Miles Cleret and his collaborators are especially adept at 1.) knowing a great song when they hear it,  and 2.) making damn sure that there are a number of such songs on every single collection they release.  Unsurprisingly, Kenya Special continues that hot streak, being every bit as essential as their classic Ghana and Nigeria collections.

Soundway

Unlike some other compilations of great regional African music, the 32 songs compiled for Kenya Special are rooted in a time of relative prosperity and stability.  Kenya was far from a dull place politically in the '60s, owing to their newfound independence from England and a war with ethnic Somalis, but Nairobi was very much a thriving city with a booming tourist industry by the time of these recordings.  Tourists, of course, need to be entertained, so many talented West African musicians wound up playing Afro-beat and American soul covers in the city's finer hotels.  Predictably, that fateful collision of cultures eventually yielded its own thing, as intrepid musicians soon began finding ways to combine those tourist-friendly sounds with their own distinctively Kenyan styles of Benga and Rumba/Lingala (and they also found that Nairobi was an easy place to quickly record and release records).  While this compilation includes a few classic examples of those two "native" styles, most of the focus is upon the less-easily categorized cross-pollination that followed.

As a non-expert in African music, I found the sheer number of intermingling styles (chakacha rhythms, taarab music, etc.), regions, languages, and bands represented on Kenya Special a bit overwhelming, but my dim understanding of what is actually happening did not prevent me from enjoying the music at all.  While there is certainly lot of variety on display, the primary recurring stylistic theme that most of these songs share is a tight, killer rhythm section (as well as a refreshing tendency towards relative brevity).  In general, combining a traditional, percussion-heavy African rhythm with a thick, funky bass line seems to be an especially winning formula (Loi Toki Tok's "Ware Wa" being a fine example), particularly when that groove is bolstered by instrumental flourishes like great sax playing (Slim Ali & the Famous Hodi Boys) or dueling flute and organ solos (The Mombasa Vikings).  Other bands shine in very different ways though, such as The Lulus Band with the clean guitar stabs and train-like snare roll of "Ngwendeire Guita."

The most memorable pieces, however, take a bit more dramatic detours from the expected.  Predictably, my favorite piece on the entire album (Orchestre Baba National's "Sweet Sweet Mbombo") opens with an amusingly ridiculous monologue in heavily accented English, but everything else about the song is equally spectacular.  Hafusa Abasi & Slim Ali's "Sina Raha," on the other hand, stands out both for being one of the only songs to feature a female vocalist and for being noticeably influenced by Arabic music.  The Rift Valley Boys also tread rather unique territory with their "Tiga Kurira," which flogs an insistently moronic groove so thoroughly and so exuberantly that it actually becomes perversely infectious and likable.

As is usual for Soundway, the liner notes are very informative, thorough, and well-written, providing all of the context and biographical information that I could possibly need to delve into these artists more thoroughly on my own.  Sadly, no one has a particularly lurid or improbable backstory this time around, but it was still fascinating to learn that artists worldly enough to be appropriating American funk and soul could still write songs discouraging women from drinking alcohol or marrying outside their immediate community.  I was also surprised to learn that many songs were sung in Swahili rather than local dialects in order to avoid alienating rival tribes.  In any case, the music itself (compiled by Miles Cleret, Johan Fredrik Lavik and Rickard Masip) could not be better.  The worst I can say is that a lot of the good songs sound similar to one another and that there are not as many truly great songs as there have been on some of Soundway's other comps (i.e. The World Ends), but those "flaws" are easily balanced out by a near-total lack of weak or even average material.

• Hafusa Abasi & Slim Ali with The Yahoos Band, "Sina Raha"
• Orchestre Baba National, "Sweet Sweet Mbombo"
• The Rift Valley Boys, "Tigra Kurira"

 

13 July 2013

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Albums and Singles

To the casual observer, it probably seems like either Edward Ka-Spel or The Legendary Pink Dots release (or re-release) an album just about every other week these days, but there has not actually been a major new LPD album since 2010's oft-brilliant Seconds Late for the Brighton Line.  While The Gethsemane Option does not quite measure up to that illustrious predecessor, it still boasts enough high points to make serious fans fairly happy.  Less serious fans probably only need to hear a few of the better pieces, but it is clear that Ka-Spel and company set out to deliver a coherent, deliberately sequenced album-sized dose of their signature skewed psychedelia and that its shortcomings are mostly the result of over-ambition.

Metropolis

Appropriately enough, given their new home of Metropolis Records, "A Star is Born" opens the album on a brooding, quasi-industrial note, mixing a muted drum-machine groove, somber synthesizers, space-y studio tricks, creepily evocative lyrics, and sporadic bursts of static and noise to create a haunted and hallucinatory pop gem.  Initially, that impressive momentum continues unabated with "The Garden of Ealing," as it appealingly begins with squelching electronic percussion and an effectively enigmatic and surreal collage of movie/TV samples.  Gradually, it coheres into what is almost yet another fine song, as Ka-Spel's melody and lyrics are both quite strong and the underlying music maintains a nicely simmering degree of muted mindfuckery.

Unfortunately, the album's first signs of bloat and indulgence start to appear as well and they become an increasingly distracting issue as the album progresses, mostly manifesting themselves in meandering, overlong songs; over-the-top vocals; lengthy improvised passages; curiously dated textures; and rare instances of very ill-conceived lyrics.  Those shortcoming are doubly exasperating on this particular album because they are mingled with so many strong ideas and sustained bursts of inspiration.

As a result, most of these songs are mixed successes, but there are a couple of very low lows that I cannot even listen to all the way though, particularly the sing-song major key melody of "Esher Everywhere," which is additionally torpedoed by some '80s rock guitar soloing and very '70s prog synth noodling.  Equally misbegotten is the closing "One More Dimension," which clocks in at nearly ten minutes and painfully devotes much of its running time to Ka-Spel counting dimensions and clumsily, pointlessly rhyming ("Just two more dimensions, too many now to mention").

"One More Dimension" aside, however, the second half of The Gethsemane Option is actually fairly strong.  For example, the throbbing "Grey Scale" boasts some wonderful experimental weirdness in its periphery, along with some delightfully cryptic and paranoid-sounding Ka-Spel stream-of-consciousness and a woozy theremin.  The propulsively buzzing, grinding, and burblingly psychotropic "A Stretch in Time" scores yet again, offering up some instrumental passages that easily rank among LPD's best.  Still another high point is the 11-minute "Pendulums," which is basically just Ka-Spel delivering a very creepy, unnerving monologue over the slow pulse of a heartbeat and a deep clock chime.  It is marred somewhat by both its running time and some quizzical choices in synthesizer textures, but Edward is utterly magnetic when he is at his spoken-word best and the bed beneath him is the perfect foil for his storytelling (and for the gently roiling and whooshing maelstrom of spaciness that follows it).

Despite those successes (roughly half the album), The Gethsemane Option is ultimately a mild disappointment to my admittedly pessimistic ears, but it is a complicated one and my expectations were perhaps unreasonably high given the heights that some of LPD's recent work has reached (particularly The Creature That Tasted Sound and The Silverman's Finisterre).  There was definitely no shortage of inspiration or vision for this album, as nearly every song boasts a few excellent motifs and it all seems to flow together as a cryptically connected whole, but the band definitely had a hard time actually shaping all those ideas into great songs: only "A Stretch in Time" and "A Star is Born" manage to make it all the way through their running time without succumbing to the band's more eccentric and indulgent tendencies.  Of course, those tendencies are an inherent and essential part of the Dots' aesthetic, playing as much a role in their distinctiveness and success as they do in their mis-steps.  Some other LPD albums certainly strike a more favorable balance of those extremes, but The Gethsemane Option is still mostly a fine effort.

• A Star is Born
• Pendulum
• A Stretch in Time

 

13 July 2013

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Albums and Singles

No one could ever say that the short-lived late '70s/early '80s minimal wave scene had a shortage of weirdos or eccentrics, categories in which this Philadelphia trio were prize specimens.  Fortunately, they were also kind of brilliant and have been remarkably influential for a band that only managed to release seven songs before breaking up.  While their more unhinged debut 7"certainly had its moments, this 1981 EP contains their two most enduring classics.

Schematic

Amusingly, when I first became interested in this band, I looked them up on one of my favorite resources for obscure '80s music (Trouser Press) and saw that their entire oeuvre was summarily dismissed with one word ("grating").  Taken in any kind of large dose, that assessment is not wildly off the mark, but Crash Course in Science can also sound quite bracing, original, and vibrant when absorbed in moderation.  In any case, certainly something profoundly different was happening on this EP and the world probably was not ready for it at the time of its release.  Much of that singularity stems from CCIS's decision to eschew actual musical instruments in favor of toys and appliances.  That might not sound completely radical in today's post-noise musical landscape, but it actually still is: lots of bands may abandon instrumentation, but few do it so completely, and I cannot think of any that still attempt to make something resembling pop music.  It is incredibly hard to make catchy pop music without any kind of melody.

That said, the opening "Cardboard Lamb" does make some minor concessions to human ears: it has a very insistent one-note bass line, vocals, and an actual beat.  Of course, it also has plenty of white noise and some rather absurdist, minimal vocals (courtesy of Mallory Yago), but it was actually still catchy enough to become something of a minor club hit in the '80s.  More interestingly, it sounds an awful lot like LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge," which cannot be a mere coincidence (despite CCIS failing to be one of the lucky bands James Murphy name-dropped in that song).

The trio scored yet another club hit with "Flying Turns," which some might remember as one of the absolute best songs on Stones Throw's The Minimal Wave Tapes, Volume I.  For me, "Flying Turns" is the single best example of why this band is so wonderful, as it is based upon little more than a simple metallic-sounding beat, something that sounds like a lunch whistle at a factory, and Yago's deadpan speak-singing and it sounds great: no clutter, no artifice, no development–just a relentlessly propulsive groove strafed by heavy industrial sounds.

The rest of the original EP was rounded out by the more caustic "Crashing Song" and "Factory Forehead," both of which are inspired, but lack the appeal of the EP's "poppier" moments.  "Factory Forehead" in particular is impressively heavy and unhinged by 1981 standards, sounding like Throbbing Gristle jacked-up to punk rock speed and intensity (as opposed to a misanthropic crawl).  Interestingly, the version of Signals from Pier Thirteen that is currently available (Schematic's 2011 reissue) appends two recent remixes (of "Cardboard Lamb" and "Flying Turns," naturally) that take Crash Course's sound in a very contemporary and professional direction, a decision that I find somewhat mystifying and very unnecessary.  I guess the remixes are ok and basically inoffensive, but they smooth over all of the bizarre quirks and character that made the songs great in the first place: it was not the songwriting that made "Cardboard Lamb" sound amazing, it was the entire aesthetic.

Releases like this make me deeply nostalgic for the days of 7"s and singles, as it is hard to imagine a band like Crash Course in Science getting noticed today: DJ culture aside, the current musical climate does not seem to have any place for bands that can do one extremely limited thing extremely well for a short burst.  The best moments of this EP are truly singular and wonderful, achieving a perfect blend of youthful exuberance, bold experimentation, humor, naiveté, obnoxiousness, rawness, and simplicity (and usually keeping it all under 3 minutes to boot).  Curiously, Crash Course in Science recorded a very likable full-length (Near Marineland) immediately after this EP that would have doubtlessly yielded a few more "hits" (like this one, for example), but it did not get mixed or released until Vinyl-on-Demand stepped forward to release a much-needed retrospective in 2009.

• Cardboard Lamb
• Flying Turns
• Crashing Song

 

08 July 2013

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Albums and Singles

As the solo guise of Eric Hardiman, Rambutan is a more distilled abstraction of the psych tendencies he demonstrates in the rock-oriented Century Plants and improvisational quartet Twilight of the Century. Here, on his first full-length foray into the world of vinyl, he delivers an extremely diverse and polished work, bringing in elements from his other projects while still retaining his own personal sound and approach to music.

Fabrica

Throughout the album, there are some consistent elements of late 1960s/early 1970s electronic psychedelia that never resemble anyone in particular per se, but captures the mood and the spirit of the times beautifully.The short, echoing blips that form a rudimentary rhythmic foundation for "Time Garden" have that primitive synth sound nailed down, while odd melodies that almost have a classic rock tinge to them mingle with the occasional abstract electro acoustic outburst.

This repetition of psychedelic phrases appears heavily on "Floodlights," although throughout the song they seem to slowly come unwound, becoming more and more chaotic and disheveled as time clicks away."Frozen Flower" also leans heavy into flanged and tremolo heavy passages, with an emphasis on Hardiman's guitar playing, although it stays relatively low in the mix."Topology" captures a different mood entirely via its bleaker, dissonant passages of sound and reverberating outbursts that makes for one of the darker moments contained within.

From its title, Inverted Summer inescapably called to mind Fennesz's Endless Summer, but the material does not run all that parallel.There are the occasional similarities, like the heavily processed guitar and drum machine beat of "Viaduct" evolving into a similar abstraction of pop music, albeit here with an electronic didgeridoo accompaniment.The lighter, sun drenched electronics that swell in "Shallow Motion" also resemble that laconic, summer vibe, but here it is slow to rise from gritty electronics and distended guitar distortion.

Those are likely just happenstance, however, and I think it is less a matter of direct following than it is two creative artists who happen to work heavily with guitar doing their own thing.While some elements of Hardiman's other projects appear throughout Inverted Summer, never does it sound like anything that would fit better under a different moniker.It is entirely Hardiman's touch, and it shines as a brilliant piece of modern psychedelic experimentation.

samples:

• Time Garden
• Topology
• Frozen Flower

 

08 July 2013

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Albums and Singles

Piotrowicz's previous works have been heavily focused on his use of analog modular synthesizers, vacillating between the realms of pure noise and serious, contemplative electro acoustic compositions. On this album, however, his output demonstrates a distinctly different direction. As a whole it is lighter and more spacious, but never does it lack in its dramatic, heavier moments.

Musica Genera

While Piotrowicz's modular synthesizer appears throughout, it is accompanied by organic instruments:guitar, piano, and vibraphone.Additionally, custom written software was utilized throughout, although for the most part the sounds mesh together to create distinctly alien tones and patterns that resemble nothing else, with only the occasional piano bit or guitar note to slip through.

The 14-plus minute "The Boy and Animal Mass" sets the tone to open the album, with expansive electronics and an understated passage of piano.Synthetic sounds slip in and out, with everything having a loose, improvised feel.Guitar and electronic strings appear, and at times there is a sense of tight structure and composition, just to slowly drift apart and float away amongst deconstructed symphonic sounds.

Both "The Bite" and "Pnemua" remain rather restrained throughout, the former trading in synthetic bells, hushed textures and shards of melody, while the latter is all fragile, glassy percussive sounds.While the bulk of this album is worlds away from his harsher moments on previous albums, these two pieces are especially distinct and quiet in their approach, even amongst the subtlety throughout this one.

"Formatio" is comparably dissonant and harsh, with precise noise strikes opening the piece and leading into a somewhat misleadingly unstructured piece.Amidst this chaos and disorienting stereo panning, Piotrowicz slips in some oddly conventional rhythmic loops to make for a wonderfully disjointed song.The closing "Snakeboy Maximus" leads back to the opening feel of unconventional electronics paired with traditional sounds.Haunting piano fragments lurk behind dissonant streaks of noise, as droning electronic and digital strings fill in the mix, building to an abrupt and dramatic conclusion.

The loose arrangement and structure to When Snakeboy is Dying may at first appear haphazard like at times, but there is more of a sculpture type quality to the recordings.There does feel like a pure sense of entropy throughout, but one that, on some grand scale, feels like pieces of a more specific plan, like any truly meaningful collage or sculpture would.

samples:

• The Boy and Animal Mass
• Formatio
• Snakeboy Maximus

 

07 July 2013

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Albums and Singles

Synthpop pioneer Thomas Leer may have flirted with mainstream success in the '80s as one-half of Act (with Propaganda's Claudia Brücken), but he definitely traveled in some weirder circles as a young man, resulting in some rather interesting early career decisions.  For example, he followed his poppy and ground-breaking 1978 debut single ("Private Plane") with this full-length 1979 collaboration with aberrant fellow Scottish émigré Robert Rental on Throbbing Gristle's decidedly non-hit-minded Industrial Records.  While The Bridge has since faded into relative obscurity, both Leer and Rental were very influential figures at the time and several of these songs still sound wonderful and unique today.

Celluloid/Industrial/Mute

While "Private Plane" is certainly an appealingly catchy and moody bit of poppy post-punk, its status as a seminal moment in DIY culture stems more from Leer's process than the song's content, as he played and recorded the whole thing by himself in his bedroom (the hushed vocals were even purportedly inspired by the fact that his girlfriend was sleeping).  For his part, Robert Rental also recorded an excellent home-recorded debut single in 1978, the singular "Paralysis," which somehow blends an almost-sultry soul groove with machine noise and guitar squall, making it is easy to see how such an effort would have gained Throbbing Gristle's attention.  In fact, Rental is credited with fatefully turning both Chris Carter and William Bennett onto the EDP WASP synthesizer, which he prominently used on that 7".

Unusually, The Bridge is divided into two discrete, very different halves with the duo seamlessly trading vocal and instrumental duties throughout.  The first half occupies something of a logical middle ground between Leer's pop sensibility and Rental's quasi-industrial experimentation, yielding a handful of jittery, prickly, paranoid synthpop gems.  The best of the batch are the tensely propulsive "Monochrome Days" and the endearingly clunky and bloodless electro-blues of "Day Breaks, Night Heals."  Given the '70s-era synthesizers involved and the lo-fi recording (they borrowed an 8-track from TG), the songs necessarily sound a bit dated, but that is actually part of the appeal for me: the raw and quirky early days of synthpop were a lot of fun (Fad Gadget being another fine example).

Granted, a few of the other songs ("Attack Decay" and "Connotations") have not aged well, as they are a bit too primitive or one-dimensionally dark for my taste, but "Fade Away" stands out as another highlight.  It definitely lacks the poppiness of the side's other successful moments, but it is impressively weird and mechanized-sounding.  A lot of that is due to the duo's offbeat choice of instrumentation (all kinds of domestic appliances found their way onto the album), but they also used more conventional instrumentation in strange ways, like manually recording "percussion" loops with their synthesizers rather than using drum machines.

"Fade Away" proves to be the perfect segue into The Bridge's very different second half, as it foreshadows the duo's abandonment of song-craft in favor of abstract, industrial-damaged soundscapes and tape-loop experimentation.  Naturally, the household appliances remain a key constant, but the results are surprisingly musical, restrained, and divergent from either artist's solo work.  Of the four pieces, the warmly droning "Perpetual" stands out as the most beautiful and contemporary-sounding, but almost all are quite striking in their own ways.  In particular, "Interferon" sounds like it could be a lost classic of space-y electronic experimentation by Morton Subotnick or Silver Apples (albeit one with prominent accompaniment by a washing machine).  "The Hard Way In & The Easy Way Out" is also quite likable, conjuring up an immersively burbling and throbbing hum around the buried chatter of a television.

It is a bit of a shame that Leer and Rental never recorded extensively together again (though Leer did play on all of Rental's future solo releases), as their union was a rather visionary, synergistic, and fruitful one.  In fact, many regard The Bridge as one of the best albums that Industrial Records ever released and "Day Breaks, Night Heals" comfortably appeared alongside heavy-hitters like Can, Aphex Twin, John Cage, and Kraftwerk on Mute's epic Rough Trade: Electronic 01 compilation.  More importantly, The Bridge is the most substantial of the exasperatingly few existing documents of Robert Rental's recording career (he died in 2000), as he only surfaced again with the Double Heart 7" (1980), a very limited cassette, and as a member of The Normal (after meeting Daniel Miller at a TG show, naturally).  For his part, Leer was a bit more prolific and successful, but his recording career also came to a premature end, as he become so frustrated with record labels and Abba-sample-related legal troubles in 1988 that he completely abandoned music and vanished, though he eventually resurfaced in the early '00s and remains a very hip influence to name-check.

• Monochrome Days
• Day Breaks, Night Heals
• Perpetual

 

07 July 2013

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Albums and Singles

One of the great tragedies of being an experimental music fan is knowing that there was a mountain of great albums released during the cassette underground's '80s heyday that I will probably never hear.  Fortunately, this 1987 cassette (originally released on Germany's Cthulhu Records) has managed to escape obscurity through the efforts of a few great blogs and The Skaters' Spencer Clark, who has just reissued it on vinyl.  Vox Populi! are probably best known in the US for their 1989 split with HNAS, but their thoughtfully composed mixture of eerie ambient psychedelia and Persian folk could not be much further from Christoph Heemann's Dada-inspired lunacy.  I am utterly baffled as to how this band has managed to remain such a secret, as they were significantly more compelling and inventive than many of their better-known '80s contemporaries.

Pacific City Sound Visions

Vox Populi! began as Axel Kyrou's solo industrial project in the late '70s, but turned into something quite different after he met Iranian émigré Mithra Khalatbary and her percussionist brother Arash in the early '80s.  Since then, Axel and Mithra have been the core of a very fluid group, approximating a sort of a Parisian ethno-industrial His Name Is Alive: a beguiling mixture of weird experimentation, eccentric stylistic detours, and sublime beauty delivered by a revolving cast of characters.

In fact, VP's line-up even varies over the course of this album, as the first half is devoted to Mithra and Axel's studio recordings (with a little help from Arash and Pacific 231), while the second half is culled from a series of live performances with Francis Manne.  I am not normally a fan of live albums at all, but this one is a pleasant exception, as the live material is virtually indistinguishable from the studio material.  Also, these eleven pieces somehow cohere into quite a surreal and coherent whole that is generally considered to be one of VP's best releases by fans (and tentatively by me as well, though I have yet to fully absorb their three-decade discography).

Curiously, the 11 songs on Half Dead Ganja Music are all fairly brief, with only one clocking in at over 4 minutes.  For the most part, that was a great move, as it means that Axel's more bizarre experimental pieces end before they start to seem indulgent.  However, that brevity is a little exasperating for the lush and dream-like drone pieces like "Schmacht" and "Gole Mariam," as they end before I am able become fully immersed in them.  I suspect that sketch-like aesthetic was probably intentional, as drifting from one strange interlude to another is a large part of what makes this album such a unique and appealingly hallucinatory experience, but it would have been nice if Mithra and Axel had allowed themselves time to stretch out a bit when they hit upon something particularly beautiful or striking.  Fortunately, they hit upon such moments with surprising regularity–it seems like they had more than an album's worth of great ideas, but condensed them into a single album anyway.

The album's clear highlight is "Fassle," recorded during a 1987 performance in Ravensburg, Germany (absolutely no one rocks Upper Swabia like VP).  Built upon little more than an eerie, pulsing synth pattern and Mithra's melancholy, sacred-sounding vocals, it encapsulates everything that is great about Vox Populi! in just 3 minutes: strong, yet understated melodic sense; haunted-sounding, otherworldly beauty; uncluttered simplicity; and something that sounds a lot like heavily processed (and vaguely menacing) recordings of some ducks. "Golnessar" also reaches similar heights with similar components, combining a dense, queasily shimmering drone with more ethereal vocalizing and primal animal squawks.  As for low points, they basically do not exist: while some pieces are certainly more melodic and composed than others, the whole album is essentially a well-orchestrated and appropriately phantasmagoric mind-fuck.

My sole critiques are both quite minor ones.  The first is that there is not much in the way of development within individual songs, as each piece is basically just a single theme that starts, continues for a few minutes, then ends.  However, that same charge could easily be leveled against nearly every great post-industrial band of the period and Vox Populi!'s themes are much better and more effectively realized than most.  My other quibble is just that the sequencing could have been a bit better, as the closing abstract trilogy of "Taghmanantes/Gin Gina/Un Jour" feels like a bit of a meandering anticlimax after the brilliance of "Fassle."  However, for an album culled from a mix of studio recordings and three separate live performances, Ganja Music is still sequenced remarkably effectively.

If it gets heard, this album should go a long way towards belatedly establishing Vox Populi! as one of the best and most original bands to emerge from the shadowy post-industrial cassette milieu of the '80s, which is great, since they are still active and around to appreciate it.  In fact, it is very easy to imagine an alternate reality where Vox Populi! got signed to 4AD and became huge, as some of Ganja Music's best moments sound like a more experimental, industrial-damaged This Mortal Coil or Dead Can Dance (perhaps they should have considered doing some Big Star covers to grab Ivo's attention).  Happily, there are some rumblings of a possible Vinyl-on-Demand retrospective in the future, but this is as excellent an introduction to Axel and Mithra's aesthetic as anyone could hope for.

• Gole Mariam
• Golnessar
• Fassle

 

01 July 2013

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Albums and Singles

Ever since the noise community discovered synth pop and minimal wave was born, there has been an excessive influx of pseudo punks armed with TR-606s and unreliable monophonic synthesizers noodling around trying to be the Human League. The problem is that far too many emphasize the minimal part and crank out Soundcloud accounts full of boring repetition and no real sense of direction. Max Brotman and Jesse Short are one of the exceptions to this pattern, however. The fact that they are not only willing to experiment with that template, but also know how to write an actual song, put them head and shoulders amongst the multitude of their peers.

Chondritic Sound

While the opening "Tunnels" at first demonstrates all of those aforementioned clichés, the vocals quickly come in and push things in this punky, catchy direction that is as much Joy Division as Front 242."White Gloves" settles into a more conventional pop structure and pace, but with intersecting layers of synth that make for a memorable song that is not just an exercise in dated technology, but one with a distinct rhythmic pulse and melodic feel.

The insistent throb of the title song brings with it a distinct Alan Vega/Martin Rev sneer without ever coming across as if the current duo were trying to sound like anyone but themselves.A personal favorite is closer "Fell Pastures," which is a fitting, dramatic closer to the album.It is a bit slower paced, but again is a great and memorable song, not just an attempt at capturing a specific sound or spirit of a past era.Overall it sounds as if it could be a lost song from Depeche Mode's A Broken Frame, albeit one of the darker tinged ones.

On the four numbered pieces, however, the duo step out of the pop comfort zone and deliver short, yet effective structured experiments with their equipment.Sparse, yes, but nuanced and varied, and "IV" especially stands out with its liquidy, flowing synths that bring with it tinges of early Skinny Puppy and Cabaret Voltaire.

Like Pure Ground, Jesse Short's project with Chondritic label head Greh Holger, this is music that clearly falls into the current trend of vintage synths and dated drum machines.However, it is not as hung up on being as sparse and minimal as those artists often are, and instead focuses on a good arrangement of sound.Simultaneously, there are also good songs to be heard on Distance Unknown.Not solely interesting sounding synths or drum machine sequences, but catchy, memorable music that captures the era it is emulating, without being unnecessarily weighed down by it.It is not posturing or just following trends, it has the right amount of nostalgia to conjure a specific, but paired with writing and composition that drives its brilliance home.

samples:

• Tunnels
• IV
• Fell Pastures

 

01 July 2013

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Albums and Singles

Much like my approach to Merzbow's prolific schedule, I take a similar tact when indulging in the work of Aidan Baker and Nadja. There is simply too much material coming out under those guises to stay engaged in without quickly becoming burnt out. So again, I am happy to infrequently dabble and keep my interest piqued, which is the case with both this solo release and collaboration with noted minimalist project Troum. In this case, Baker on his own may waiver, but bolstered by collaborators he does extremely well.

Glacial Movements/Alone At Last

Aneira is a single, 47-minute piece sourced exclusively from the use of a 12 string guitar.Baker chose not to just process the recordings but also to utilize different preparations in his playing of the instrument, to coax out sounds that bear little to no resemblance to what it began with.Early on there are hints of the source, from the occasional metallic rattle to the scraped sound of a guitar string, however the larger portion of the material is further divorced from its origins.

Most of it sticks to an undulating, understated melody that resonates throughout the entire album.At times he opts for more clichéd strategies, such as reversed playing that could have been culled from any similar ambient recording.His use of occasional clattering dissonance juxtaposed with calm passages is more effective and captivating, however, and it is on those moments where it shines.There are times where it feels it could have benefited from a bit more editing, however.

On his collaborative recording with German legends Troum, the duo add a different polish and sheen to Baker's sound that helps in spotlighting the beauty that lies within.Spread across four different songs, there is a more pronounced sense of change and development that works more in the album’s favor.Both "Nort" and "Ostan" are delicate and understated in their approach, shifting the tone color from minute to minute while retaining the calm, collected feel.The latter, however, allows some bombastic drama to rise up in its dying moments to excellent effect.

"Westan," on the other hand, leads off immediately with a darker, more aggressive sound.Instead of light, flowing moments it is bleak and at times uncomfortable and oppressive, emphasizing a sense of tension and menace that is made all the more evident via overdriven noise blasts at the end."Sunt" lies somewhere in between, via a slowly building, clean and tone-centric sound that gets a bit spiky via metallic shards and heavily processed sounds, conjuring both light and dark throughout.

While both of these albums are well done, Aidan Baker's collaborations with Troum stands out as a bit more successful, largely due to its combination of pure, distinct sounds with some occasionally ugly moments, but also in its structure of shorter pieces.Aneira is full of good ideas, but throughout its lengthy duration there does not seem to be quite as much movement or development in comparison and thus there are times where it seems to slowly drag along.However, both make for excellent parts of his expansive catalog, and definitely rank amongst the more fleshed out and fully realized works.

samples:

• Aneira
• Nort
• Westan

 

01 July 2013

Administrator

Albums and Singles

The murky depths of low-range tones are like subconscious murmurs. This kind of music speaks in so much depth, more than the imaginary space that an echo brings, or "atmospheres" built with samples and noise. Justin Walter's music is bassy, perplexing and intimate. Lullabies And Nightmares is an album which plays heavily with literal and imagined distances, where contact is always out of reach, always obscured by invariably plump electronic tones and the warmth of his ideas are paired with mechanical rigidity. It helps, too, that he has created a suite of beautiful melodies to mess with.

Kranky

When the trumpet enters on the title track, it is probably the most distinct tone likely to be heard on the album. Lullabies And Nightmares, like its title suggests, is an argument for the fluid romance of dreams and the narcotic sensations of sleep. Walter knows exactly where that sweet spot lies, placing gorgeous synth patches, live drums, and a consistent bass drone behind walls of watery obfuscation. It plays to the strengths of kosmische music in actual melody, but Justin continuously refuses to cave in to crisp reality. Aside from the title track's comparative definition, this is a nocturnal, reclusive work of art best suited for exploring caves at night or catching fireflies.

This is usually to Walter's advantage, particularly on the first half of the record. "Mind Shapes," "Dream Weaving," and the miniature "Awakening" (perhaps a prelude to the aforementioned "Lullabies And Nightmares") are fantastic moments of music, appropriating some of early electronica's arpeggios and pentatonic melodies with impropriety, turning them into disjointed bursts and loops of something sort of resembling a post-rock jam session (underwater, of course). This mood returns on "The Way Of Five," as a shattered metallic creak illuminates Justin's melodies like rusted ships singing along. "Plastic People," a longer and more conventional moment of clarity that weaves glassy percussion, electric piano blips and mellifluous trumpet into a fully realized design, is the album's late highlight. "I Saw Your Face" ends on more inexact terms, a formless kind of sound art, grasping uncertainly around hissing synths and muddy thumping that might have once been a drum beat.

It is difficult to pull off this kind of vague-yet-warm electronic music so well, but it is also as difficult to be convinced of its depth and complexity. Justin Walter's contributions make for a truly engaging listen, and it is all the more flattering of his virtuosity to know that he improvised these. The fragmented and curious creations of a truly gifted performer, the nicest meditations on a unique theme.

samples:

• Dream Weaving
• Mind Shapes
• Plastic People