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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Maintaining a consistent level of excellence during improvisational collaborations is a difficult task. Sometimes even when the musicians and the audience find the results cathartic, they don’t always translate well to recorded media. Unfortunately, After at Once is one of those instances.
One of the problems with this album is that much of it sounds like a recorded band practice, and the useful musical phrases are proportionate to any impromptu brainstorming. “A Short Cry,” for instance, has drones that aren’t particularly interesting on their own soon joined by clanging that’s merely distracting. Screams startle the band into action on “Touches,” driving them into a nice tribal pulse, but when the scream comes again after the group abruptly stops several minutes later, it seems that their previous adrenaline burst has left them too exhausted to rouse themselves again and not much comes of it. “Between Blue & Yellow” has decent drumming, but the horns that join the song have limited expressive value.
The title track has fairly ominous drones, but the sarod playing doesn’t go anywhere. Also, the haunting piano near the end of the song is too infrequent and too hard to hear to be fully appreciated. “Awake There” meanders all over the place, with occasional crashes that come out of nowhere to try to galvanize the other musicians, but too frequently I had to keep pinching myself to stay awake. The most structured song is “Sword Abandoned,” with solid melodic playing and vocals, but there are howling sounds swirling in the background that don’t complement the other music.
There are some decent spots here and there, but I’ve heard it done much better elsewhere.
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Despite a clear admiration for the ambient tradition, some irksome excesses such as sonic squiggles and skittery noises mar the intrinsic beauty of this composition.
Best known for his critically lauded Akufen productions on Force Inc. and Trapez, of which I was only occasionally enamoured, Leclair released this album back in 2005, and, for some reason unbeknownst to me, Mutek has decided to reissue it alongside discs from Crackhaus and Skipsapiens "exclusively" for the U.S. market. The 71 minute long work, divided into nine time-coded sections, goes through various transitions, sometimes building constructively on previous themes, other times veering into more surprising terrain with mixed outcomes.
The opening track, billed as a collaboration between Leclair and Mille Plateaux act Rechenzentrum, introduces the warm effected pads that decorate the aural canvus of the entire record. "64e jour" takes the piece to the next level, employing a rather simple repetitious melody to accompany the pads and manufactured glitches. The rain that appears near its end ushers in the more natural environs of "85e jour," full of tropical and oceanic flourishes exemplifying a rare case where Leclair's rampant experimentation pays off in execution. On "114e jour," that watery glaze fades out and makes way for diced guitar strums and echoey stabs that soon reveal a housier swing, inciting an anticipation that fails to be fulfilled as Leclair digresses back to hodgepodge clatter for the sake of clatter.
The guitar returns for "150e jour" as Leclair builds a multi-tracked folk-infused and vaguely Balearic electronic structure much better than most attempts by lesser bedroom-based artists, finally dropping a proper, albeit muted, 4/4 beat around the six minute mark. After such an effectively executed section, he somehow manages to digress yet again on the following cut, combining aquatic gurgles and one-dimensional static that evolves into something more minimal, rhythmic, and, at this point, familiar, yet just as disappointing. "205e jour" stirs things up instantly by reinserting some of the overall piece's best musical elements before abruptly shifting gears for a club-friendly closer replete with all the trimmings of quality microhouse.
Frequently throughout my active listening of Musique pour 3 Femmes Enceintes, I wished Leclair would have just let his ambient textures and luscious melodies breathe without the constant interruption of his superfluous sample contructions. As I've implied throughout, these intrusions more often than not tend to spoil the broth of an otherwise sumptuous stew.
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This live CD-R (recorded who knows where) is yet another powerful example of how the Sunburned bunch turn potential chaos into coherent jams. The word ‘shambles’ seems to lazily follow this collective around for some reason, but they always spend more time being melodious than they do rambling.
"A Soft Bed" opens the three-track disc on a meandering instrumental Western theme: a countrified twanger without the clichéd twang. Slowly this begins to transmogrify into a low-slung piece that’s gravid with a film noir menace. There are no obvious signals or moments of obvious change; the players seem to slowly seep from one frame of mind to another unconsciously molding the sound. This kind of shift is probably best examined on disc, as live the combination of theatrics and energy makes it difficult to resist being carried along.
The nervous tour energy vigour of "Heavy Rescue" carries itself on the dragging of amphetamine worn feet and a jazzy swing. In hands of less accomplished musicians (and they have to be to turn their hand to so many mashed-up styles) the double dutching bass and humpbacked Peppers itchy funk would sound like TV advert music-lite. Here they can empty out ridiculously deep spoken word vocal and overloaded FX on top, and still lock onto a groove. A solid beat picks up, making a bed for a wrenching solo that then imperceptibly sets off a moogy clanking percussive extended breakdown. Instead of ending in a smashing of drum kits or an extended blast of noise its lifted back to daylight by creeping bones popping percussion and another smoky spotlight solo.
The conclusion takes off into replicated digital territory with "Murder Yourself" taking the mantle of most out-there track on this release. Sky-scraping loops from the treble end of the spectrum are scratched into solids as the bass begins precision Morse code assault and battery. This might be enough for some bands: to rip along with a groove that forces wood and nylon into electronic shapes. There are few people who’d think to add a throat cancer Beefheart rant on top; that’s what makes Sunburned Hand of the Man’s live releases worth scouting out.
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My only exposure to Three Lobed Recordings was the Davenport disc, an absolute oddity of found sound recordings and story telling. Pete Nolan (member of bands like The Magik Markers and The Vanishing Voice) is writing that style of music his own way, with sullen guitars and analog equipment enough to give Lustmord an erection.
Three Lobed
Davenport's record is only related to Nolan's project as Spectre Folk by label; there's nothing shared between the two records other than a sense that each performer was trying to write a narrative. Davenport's story was all over the board, jumping from haunted basements to farm houses and old barns; Spectre Folk's is far more lurid. It's contents are pitch-black, singing with all the tremors a man might feel in the presence of killer or a beast. Requiem for Ming Aralia begins with "Tendrils Floating Fastly," a spectacularly electric affair between an old amplifier, an even older guitar, and the sound of keyboards as heard through the ears of Vangelis at a showing of Dawn of the Dead. The two copulate on disc, mingle their fluids pornographically, all the while clinging to the walls and the ceiling, cast a dark shadow on anything in proximity. The music is, simply, effective; the arrangements on this album are elegant without being too complicated. Very basic principles are applied successfully and produce variance enough to be consistently hypnotic.
The second track, "You Showed Me," takes the same production techniques and affinity for the melancholy, but adds Nolan's vocals. They don't interfere with the music at all, their presence being buried in the mix as though this was all a rough take hurriedly put together. The combination, again, of guitar and synthetic recorder is august, filling up all of the record and pushing its space into far, unknown corners. It would be easy to mistake this as the home recordings of some odd ball that lives out in the middle of nowhere West Virginia - the atmosphere is suitably tense and claustrophobic. "Indianana" is an excellent example of how these kinds of recordings can be frighteningly effective at eliciting an ominous reaction in people. C. Spencer Yeh, of the excellent Burning Star Core project, lends his techniques and perspective to this track. At first it sounds like nothing more than ambient noise being processed, until a modified guitar enters the fray and begins to disturb the gently swirling dust. The rest of the album is chopped up between strange performances like this one and Nolan's vocal work, which is equally odd and out of tune. Some feature drums, some feature mangled vocal parts, and others feature perfectly decipherable lines of melody. It's a grab bag of music, but it sounds so damn good together.
This album captured me from the second I played it, all the ingredients for a truly great album are here. It's dangerous, it pushes itself to the edge and back, occupying places both strange and familiar, unusual and beautiful. Again, I'm baffled by the freak folk or free folk association this album has been given, but it doesn't matter so much when the result is actually worth hearing.
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release date: 5 September 2006 on Staubgold
Limited first edition in 5-colours digipak with spot-plastification !
"Space", the new album by Rafael Toral, marks a radical change in his music after 15+ years of accomplished work on guitar and electronics.
"The future perspectives of my former approach to music were threatening to become a comfortable, formulaic 'modus operandi'. It would be against my nature to accept such a development, so I serenely decided to terminate it."
It took him three years to find his way into a complete renovation of his music: "For a new endeavor I needed new information, and I discovered that the field of knowledge in music that I had most to learn from was jazz. There is a long line of connections and fusions between jazz and electronic music, and I envisioned that a step beyond would not be more jazz with electronics, but on electronics." It may sound exaggerated, but this sounds like the blueprint for a new approach to both jazz and electronics with a single stroke.
In his emerging new conception of electronic music, Toral looks to the value of human performance while sharing values from jazz culture. His playing is "articulated with a kind of individual decision, a sense of phrasing and a sensibility to rhythm and form that have little in common with the types of electronic music we know". Quoting Sei Miguel, he says it's "not composed, not improvised, and not a compromise between the two".
In recent years, Rafael Toral has been developing and performing solo concerts on his instruments (modified or custom-built electronic
devices) in a field of work he calls the "Space program". He slowly merged hours of live and studio recordings into "Space" (the program's first release), which is no less than a full orchestra of such instruments. The result suggests that the expression "space-jazz" was invented before the music it would describe best.
The "Space program" is a vast and ambitious undertaking, featuring two parallel series of record releases: "Space Elements" - centering each volume on a certain instrument, while adding few others and featuring collaborations; and the "Solo Series" - documenting solo performance on various instruments. The album "Space" belongs to none of the series. It is the "Space program's" fundamental release.
Rafael Toral was considered in the 1990s "one of the most gifted and innovative guitarists of the decade" (Chicago Reader). He has collaborated with Jim O'Rourke, John Zorn, Alvin Lucier, Evan Parker, David Toop, Sonic Youth, Fennesz and many others, having played across Europe and the US, Canada and Japan. He's a member of the electronic orchestra MIMEO, alongside Keith Rowe and Peter Rehberg, and continues his long-term work with Sei Miguel.
track listing:
01. Space I
02. Space IIa, IIb, IIc, IId
03. Space III
posted by Forced Exposure
Although their name implies aspirations both dark and esoteric, this Australian brother and sister duo instead create an album that's surprisingly inviting. By avoiding any form of indulgence, their hypnotic songs are oddly comforting, if not calming, while retaining enough strangeness to make their approach fresh and inspired.
"Traware" starts a little slow before building into a shambling, mesmeric rhythm that grounds the song while guitar, bass, voice, and perhaps a synthesizer make their own statements and supplications. The drums aren't stagnant, instead changing their rhythm frequently enough to propel the track forward as other instruments enter the mix. The vocals are a wordless instrument, and thankfully not trying to be the dark, spooky variety too often found in music like this. Instead the voice is focused and contented, as if the singer knows something no one else does.
"In the Corner of Her Majik Vision" is a looser affair, comprised of a music box, drums, horns, and what sounds like tape manipulations, among other things. This track is a little less focused than the other two included on the album, yet it has a sonic field that keeps it from becoming boring. The third and final song, "Gravities Rainbow," starts with a music box sort of sound, but with the addition of some sweeping drones that carry an emotional quality not found previously on the album. With a bouncing beat used to great stereo effect, in addition to both pre-recorded and echoing voices, this track is the strangest of the three and perhaps the most enjoyable, though I liked them all.
The Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood take an alchemical journey and leave me transfigured in the process.
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This is the third tribute album to surface since Jhonn Balance passed on. Produced by Dutch radio station Kink FM, it is a mixture of artists who knew and worked with Balance and artists who have no relation to Coil whatsoever. Some of the songs are fitting tributes to the man but others are an insult to him and his art.
Steamin' Sounds
“Slateblue, Dark Seafed” by Scanner opens the proceedings and promises much about the rest of the album. Processed vocals and tribal drumming dominate the piece creating a very surreal atmosphere. There is a lot of attention to detail throughout the piece as little flourishes of synthesiser and segments of field recordings pop up all over the place but Rimbaud keeps it all tasteful and under control. This is followed by “Ode to Tzi” by Black Sun Productions. This piece shows, like a lot of their work, a heavy influence from Coil. I don’t mean this in a derogatory way at all; they sound like they picked up a lot of the magic from their time touring with Coil.
Aural Rage and the Legendary Pink Dots both contribute a fine track each. “I Don’t Need That Deviant Sex” by Aural Rage (former Coil engineer Danny Hyde) is quite different to anything else on the album; it is quite upbeat and weird in a funny way. It is a progression from his last album and sounds really good. “A Japanese Manual for a Crooked Wheel” by the Legendary Pink Dots, along with the Black Sun Productions explore the darkness and unknown that Balance was known to visit but neither one has that dramatic and humorous edge that pushed Coil’s music further than anyone else; Hyde captures much more of that side.
I’m in two minds about Steven Stapleton and David Tibet’s contribution. “Die, Flip or Go to India” is an alternative take of a song that originally appeared on Bright Yellow Moon. It is very good and quite different to the original version (it seems more vibrant and eventful in this take) but I wonder if an alternative take of an old track can be seen as a fitting tribute to a dear friend. As much as I like the track I don’t think it really cuts the mustard as a tribute.
Balance himself appears on “The Coppice Meat.” This originally was only available on the bonus CD from the Moon’s Milk in Four Phases compilation. I’m delighted to see this get a wider release as it is one of the finer tracks from the Coil back catalogue. Balance recites an Angus MacLise poem with powerful dark and swirling drones surrounding his voice. The time when this was recorded represents the peak of Coil’s career in my ears. This is a particularly fitting piece to pick for album in tribute to Balance; the music is superb and the lyrics are especially poignant.
Also of acute interest to Coil fans is Peter Christopherson’s new project The Threshold HouseBoys Choir. “So Young it Knows no Maturing” shows that his musical skills made it to Thailand intact. This is a far better song than the one included on It Just Is…, another tribute album. It consists of processed vocals (one or more of the Threshold HouseBoys) and synthesiser that reminds me a lot of the Musick to Play in the Dark albums. It is a haunting and beautiful piece and is worth the price of admission alone.
Of the rest of the artists, I have no idea who they are. The tracks included aren’t particularly interesting and, with the exception of Kah’s “Stokers Siding,” don’t capture any of the essence of Balance. It feels more like they were included to fill up time on the disc. A visionary and influential man needs a more fitting tribute than a few run of the mill dark ambient bands.
I think all of these tribute albums have missed the opportunity to make a perfect tribute by including a lot of sub-par artists. I’ll probably take the best tracks from X-Rated and put them on a CD with the best of the other tributes and make my own album. What I will say about this album is that there are a good number of quality tracks that make it worth getting but the few less than stellar contributions ruin the flow of the album and take away from the sentiment behind X- Rated: The Dark Files.
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