Being thankful for an earful.
Brand new music by Marie Davidson, Niecy Blues (feat. Joy Guidry), CEL, Marisa Anderson and Luke Schneider, Stina Stjern, Carmen Villain, Murcof, A Lily, and Far Golden Pavilions, with music from the vaults by Tomaga, Ozzobia, Jan Jelinek.
Sushi photo by Lindsay.
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The content of this CD was a surprise. From the sleeve art, the record label and the picture of the band on the back, I was expecting harsh noise. Instead my ears were greeted with the most wonderful electronic murmurs. The two pieces here set my mind adrift on an ocean of warm synthesiser undercurrents and waves of gentle guitar. The feelings this music elicits bring to mind the sheer beauty of Stars of the Lid but with a stronger, denser sound.
“Magic” lives up to its title; the shifting pulses shimmering in stereo, the sounds moving at different speeds with dizzying effect. The piece is reminiscent of Coil’s Time Machines, the drones almost stalling time and provide a platform for vivid daydreaming one second (if a second still had meaning) before utterly capturing my attention the next. Although only 12 minutes long, “Magic” stretches out time to the point where the concept of minutes and seconds means nothing. The piece’s very existence makes the need for time unnecessary. However, having said that, 12 minutes is really not enough.
The second of the two pieces, “The Quaking Mess,” is a slightly busier piece. Like the previous piece, there are sustained tones and drones that flow through the piece but unlike the previous track, there are pulsing and twinkling sounds (the guitar is more prominent here than before) that make it more obvious to the listener. I can still get lost between the sounds but the feeling of reality dissolving around me is not as strong. Instead reality seems to expand, becoming larger than life.
Both of these pieces are immensely satisfying, Emeralds tap into the sounds masterfully and it is hard to believe that three men on synths and a guitar made this beautiful music. It sounds like it was plucked from the cosmos, filtered from the ether or decanted from heaven (take your pick of supernatural metaphor). It will be interesting to see where Emeralds go from here. Solar Bridge is more than just promising.
samples:
Usually I’d imagine something coming out on the Hanson label to be a bit more obtuse and rough than what is presented on this album. Instead of leaning to the noiser end of the spectrum, the two side-long tracks here instead define themselves via classic analog synth drone that is so thick and sustained that it almost becomes tangible, yet never mundane.
Brainwashed Archives
BARK003
Greater Than One, "G-Force" 3xCD
September 1, 2008
Pre-order NOW from Brainwashed Commerce
G-Force marks a clear transitionary period from the post-industrial
sounds of London to the techno sounds of Tricky Disco and GTO. The
package includes all the music from both singles "I Don't Need God"
and "Utopia" plus the Index EP, various compilation tracks, and music
from the Japanese-only VHS tape Video Drug 1, available on CD for the
first time ever.
"Dancefloor Surrealists - and that's just the half of it - GTO
construct collages of multi-lingual samples and wacked-out noises to
cover their technological tracks. G-Force is a cartwheeling
combination of Steinski's nimble feet and The Young Gods' operatic
gusto, all stitched together by St. Winifred's style choir chanting
devil-worship slogans in the middle distance. "Ich Liebe Dich Mein
Prinz" energizes ethnic wailing seemingly recorded through a snorkel,
and "Black Magic" impales minimalist vocals onto a wiry violin while
sevarel Daleks dance themselves dizzy in the studio. Fragments of MC
900 FT Jesus's harsh, dislocated chatter and Front 242's leather-clad
New Beat throb abound, with tons of Acidic sparks and dadaist
references tossed in for extra momentum. But the weirdest, simplest
track here is "Why Do Men Have Nipples?," marrying snatches of
American dating-game show dialogue with a toe-tapping tape-loop of
numb percussion." - Stephen Dalton, NME
"Greater Than One have clear affinities with the sonic terrorism
approach…as well as the grindingly austere "body music" movement
flourishing in Europe, but their own work has an edge of with that's
definitely their own." – Jonathan Romney, The Guardian
"Greater Than One are yet another group who are popular in Europe.
They fit loosely into the new genre of Front Line Assembly, Click
Click, and the lesser purveyors of the new beat. But their redeeming
quality is that they don't shout over their hybrid of techno sound
sculpture. Here they toy with crisp snares, clean beats and the
occasional acid bass line. They Sample amusing commentary from
American TV shows, and steal one-liners from Peter Sellers.
Occasionally, GTO suggest they would be capable of crafting huge
soundscapes, alive with delicate textures of noise. On "Learn with
Pleasure, Knowledge Is Power," speeding rhythms are mixed with layers
of crystalline choral tones. And the simple, schizophrenic collection
of beats and breaks connected by vocal outbursts of "I am somebody,"
on "The Man Who Lived In Books," shows they are not obsessed by
overindulgence." - Rob Deacon
disc a
disc b
disc c
Brainwashed Archives
BARK002
Greater Than One, "London" 2xCD+DVD
September 1, 2008
Pre-order NOW from Brainwashed Commerce
London was the introduction of Greater Than One to the blossoming post-industrial culture as spearheaded by Chicago-based WaxTrax! Records. It was released in July of 1989 as a double LP/single CD collection of music recorded from 1987-1988 on Greater Than One's London-based label, K=K Recordings, and includes the entire LP of Dance of the Cowards. The recordings here have been digitally remastered by the legendary Jeff Lipton (Numero Group, Rykodisc, the list goes on forever) of Peerless Mastering and sound stunning. Bonus material includes the music from the Duty + Trust cassette, originally issued in 1991 by ROIR as well as other compilation tracks recorded at the time. Enhanced CD content includes photos, cover images, and an extensive book with articles and press clippings and words from Michael Wells and many others.
A DVD includes the music videos for "I Don't Need God," "Utopia," and "Pure," as well as three lengthy projections from their performances (featuring user-selectable soundtrack) and an "art reel."
"After two years of drivel about the subversive attitude of sonic piracy, the thrill of robbing and stealing, London illustrates a savage talent lurking behind the collision of styles. This is the end, a new age is coming." - Sam King, Sounds
"London marks the point when the sample band begins to become a genre, new and unique unto itself. Sprawled across two records, we are subjected to, the barrage of modern culture turned into folk music. Disco for the sonic guerilla. Acid house/techno terrorism. Call it what you may, this is a must for the alternative club/radio despite the fact that this is the sound of the mainstream that seeks to drown us. Like Adrian Sherwood and Tom Ellard, Greater Than One chronicle both the valiant fighting the tide and the last breaths of those caught in the undertow." - Rockpool
"Technology, art, ideas, and courage can be combined to create really important, relevant music that affects the way we judge our world, and this compilation is such a work." - Robert Shea, Discotext
disc a
disc b
dvd
Brainwashed Archives
BARK001
Greater Than One, "All the Masters Licked Me" 2xCD
September 1, 2008
Pre-order NOW from Brainwashed Commerce 
disc a
disc b
The sonic interplay that opens "Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum" lacks the dynamics and grit necessary to make it texturally satisfying, and the beats that eventually infiltrate the song aren't very riveting. Not only do they sound canned, they obfuscate the atmospherics in the background to the song's detriment. Many of the rapid glitch beats found in this song as well as "Molten Ghost" and "Are You Aware of the Pink Light Emanating from Your Navel?" seem to come straight out of the Aphex Twin playbook from ten years ago or longer, and I don't really hear anything new or different on these. However, I did like "Ayhuascaro Empyreal," "Physically Modelled Theme for Children," and "Palette Swap Dub" quite a bit. All have a tighter focus and more fully realized rhythms than the other tracks.
Even so, these three tracks aren't enough to redeem this album's sterility and dependence on its forbears. Gaseous Opal Orbs isn't bad by any means, but there isn't enough here to make it more than ordinary.
While Martin's skills and arrangements are impressive, many of these songs have so many movements within them that their overall intentions can get lost. Rather than evolving with the same instruments they start with, instead new instruments crossfade into the mix to form different sections and take the song somewhere new. Even though these new sections are often equal to or better than the parts they're replacing, this constant shifting of themes and instrumentation never quite allows the listener to gain a comfortable foothold. A good example of this is "Tire Swing," one of my favorites on the album. The first half starts with a piercing pitch and vibrato strings before morphing into an elegant dirge for the second half. The latter part is much more interesting but the parts are divided so equally that it sounds more like two unrelated sections that are fused together rather than a tension-building intro that leads into the main body. Almost every song does something like this at least once if not more, and the result is a somewhat choppy, disconnected listening experience rather than the meditative one it could have been.
Martin is clearly very talented, and the music here is often captivating and gorgeous. Too much reliance on seemingly arbitrary changes keeps River Water just shy of being a transcendent recording.
The Baltimore-based duo of Jane & Josh came together as Abiku like some unstoppable galactic collision. Their brand of short, sharp, raw, and unpolished explosions of punk noisiness, interspersed with a few longer expositions and more experimental drone-style pieces, is in itself a kind of joyful collision: a place where keyboards, guitars, and rhythm machines smash together faster and more powerfully than sub-atomic particles in an accelerator. Their latest series of detonations, the two-part CD set of Right and Left, showered me with all kinds of radiative shrapnel, at times threatening to melt my ears and at other times soothing the heat inflicted by the wounds.
Together this two part set, released as separate CDs which are yet simultaneously inextricably linked just like a set of twins (hence the reason for being reviewed as a single entity), represents something of a beast, providing 42 tracks over a total combined running time of just over two hours or more. Most of the tracks seem reluctant to extend themselves beyond the two minute mark, blasting themselves out in a veritable white-hot frenzy of mashed-up distortion, poppy/dancey sequenced rhythms and synthetic percussion, and topped off with the weirdly tremulous voice of Josh and/or the harpy screaming of Jane. As rough around the edges as the production inevitably is, the songs are nevertheless hopelessly catchy and melodic in some cases, memorably so in actuality, borne out by the undeniable fact that I have found myself humming some of the vocal lines hours after the CD has left the room—whatever else can be said about this Abiku have a habit of writing songs that burrow their way into the memory and then travel all the way down to the foot, causing it to involuntarily tap in sympathy with the beat.
Apart from Josh’s querulous singing style, the other memorable aspect here is the strange mix of styles present—almost as if on any given day Abiku arbitrarily decide to write something in a particular style and hack away at it and see what comes out at the end of it. Thus for instance we get the aforementioned ejaculatory pop-punk-noise explosions which ultimately dominate the digital grooves, but in between them are the occasional hints of a quieter and more reflective aesthetic, such as on the closer to the Right album “Water Trust,” an expansive, cosmic 14 minute Philip Glass-style keyboard drone epic that can either be viewed as a abrupt change of stylistic course or a species of interlude meant as a breather after the manic breathlessness of the preceding twenty-one tracks. Additionally, there are almost dance-music style episodes. Despite the apparent contradiction implied in the juxtapositioning of the various styles it somehow doesn’t carry with it any incongruity at all—in fact I would go so far as to posit that it works in its own strange way. Of the two, Right has something of a rawer, more jagged, and less polished edge to it than Left, the latter veering more towards the electronic, experimental end of the spectrum (and even containing one or two of those abovementioned extremely danceable tunes), although it too has its fair share of noisiness and hair-stripping fieriness.
In that sense it would also be fair to say that by utilising the two styles Abiku manage to avoid any accusation of being restrained by any stylistic and musical straitjackets of their own making, although having mentioned that I can quite easily see that sitting through the two albums in one sitting could turn into something of a marathon session for some. I found it highly entertaining (and initially pleasingly and highly unpredictable) for my part, as I was waiting to hear what would emerge from the speakers, whether it be another blistering less-than-two-minute shouting and screaming match, or a more exploratory electronic keyboard affair—but for me, even that limited form of ‘interaction’, in conjunction with the often infectious exuberance exhibited by the noisier tracks, was enough to convince that these two albums weren’t half bad and they even managed to give me a moment or two of nostalgia as it brought back memories of my punk-infested youth, where often enthusiasm and sheer energy would win out over musicianship—and that is perhaps the biggest thing that I took from this. Now, if only my bones could stand a two hour session of bouncing and pogoing around without any fear of doing myself any long-term damage...
samples:
This is only the third album in eleven years from Austin's Experimental Aircraft, after 1999’s self titled debut on Sleepy Bunny (and which was subsequently re-released a year later by Devil in the Woods Records) and Love for the Last Time (Rollerderby) in 2002. Here, once again, the Texas quartet engineer a collection of hazy and melodically high flying, brightly-lit guitar-based indie-rock songs, aided and lifted in the main by Rachel Staggs’ (Eau Claire, Static Silence) warm yet slightly distant voice (but which is yet shot through with a steely strength even so) which floats serenely above a landscape of strong noisy reverb-soaked guitar lines backed by a dependably solid rhythm section.
The principal attribute on show here is—given that each separate element displays a certain simplicity of construction in musical terms, together in the round they combine to create a complex density—a thick patterned sonic carpet full of sculpted depth and shapes. Dark swathes of distorted guitar provide a solid canvas on which sparkling melodies and highlights find themselves picked out, and both the sweetly distracted vocals of Staggs and the more straightforwardly sung delivery of T.J. O’Leary find a springboard from which to launch themselves. More than that though is that that canvas is an expansive one, whose musical and stylistic horizons stretch as far as the eye can see, describing vast limitless soundscapes upon which are drawn the small orbits of the everyday it seems. It’s this aspect of the small painted against the larger backdrop that drives the engine of this album, and for me the brightest sparks come from the friction between the echoey and reverb-sodden guitars, and the borderline ethereality and fragility of Stagg’s vocal lines, which give the impression of a tiny lost point within a much greater space, almost on the verge of being overpowered and being dispersed to the four winds but yet having a hidden steeliness and strength that enables it to both remain whole and be greater than the limits imposed on it.
This is not to say that O’Leary’s voice is lacking in effectiveness, simply that his strengths have a different focus and aims to fill the space it occupies, refusing to let what surrounds it subsume or absorb it in any way. In some ways it’s an act of defiance; in other words, even amongst the vastness, I refuse to be lost and I am a voice that deserves to be heard and listened to. The backing music is equally adept and flexible at creating a supporting framework upon which to hang the two vocal styles, and very often the music is designed to complement whoever’s singing and does so excellently. It is clear, then, that all of the musicians work as a successfully harmonious unit, able to draw out the relative strengths of each, polishing and illuminating them; moreover this particular facet positively shines through, blindingly so I would say.
As a collection of songs melody- and beat-driven songs this has few, if any, faults—however I do have one issue with this CD, and that’s the cover that graces it. Quite simply put it looks like it’s the result of no more than ten minutes work when they discovered that in the euphoria of putting this together they’d actually forgotten to commission an artist to create one. It’s nothing more than a quickly cobbled together Photoshop exercise—in fact I recognised some of the effects used from my time as a designer getting to grips with the new graphics technology in the early '90s, and in these days of sophistication and polish there is absolutely no excuse for producing such a shoddily packaged product.
Just look past that, though, and there is a wealth of texture, emotional range, and musical prowess to please, and certainly from my point of view, it ticks all the boxes: it is melodically sophisticated and mature, with a group of excellent musicians who play to each other’s strengths and abilities, resulting in a coherent package that is confidently delivered and played. That, to all intents and purposes, is what does it for me on this one.
samples:
The sounds on the main piece, “Secrets from a Silk Purse,” come from a recording made by Mangicapra at a gallery where (with the artist’s permission) he bowed a sculpture and later processed the metallic drones into their present form (although there seems to be minimal post-production work here). He uses a far more limited palette of sounds on this compared to his other releases, the drones only accompanied by the occasional cough or sound of a door closing (presumably in the gallery itself). The result is a powerful and singular approach to sound, even if it is not a million miles away from Nurse With Wound or Organum territory.
This EP sounds fantastic and the 3” CD format suits the trio of pieces, allowing them enough time to unfold and remain thematically coherent but not allowing any room for filler. Plus considering this is a larger pressing than most Hoor-Paar-Kraat releases, hopefully more people will catch on to this consistently remarkable project.
