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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Twenty-one of the bigger names in independent music can be and probably have been wrong, but they're spot on with The Now Sound Redesigned,a remix project that can rightly be called an event. The relevant backstory: in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the four Dedrick siblingscreated some beautifully constructed and legitimately awe-inspiringsunshine pop over a five year period. Never garnering commercialsuccess, the Dedricks called it quits in 1972, leaving their creationsto languish in obscurity forever, but for the LPs purchased second-handby vinyl junkies and fanatical crate diggers.Finding what they heard—soaring melodies, lovely harmonics and cleverarrangements, with top notch production and instrumentation—was amazingin both sonic quality and the fact it was unknown, they all broke thecardinal rule of vinyl digging and shared what they heard. Thepopularity spread slowly but surely until it reached the ears ofSharpshooters and Belle & Sebastian alike. Now, with the FreeDesign catalogue reissued and available on CD, the remix EPs it spawnedare collected and issued here as The Now Sound Redesigned.To wit,most various artists remix collections fall under the category ofirrelevant barely-assed pap. Not so here. The efforts arebilled—correctly—as reinterpretations, with significant changes insound andstructure, sometimes within a track, while retaining strong similarityto the source material.
The new songs are as different as theircreators: Madlib's cut has a signature chopped drum and Yesterday's NewQuintet-esque keyboard loop on top of the 30 year old harmonies;Stereolab offers their own soaring bridges and sunshine-splashed hooksto complement the Dedrick original. MURS nearly tips the boat byplaying the social consciousness card (bummer) but is rescued by DangerMouse's trippy understated backbeat. Other notables on hand includeStones Throw sensei Peanut Butter Wolf—his hand in yet anothermusical archeology project—serving up a high energy Moog-drivensoulride. While any rehashed tune will lack the original's passion anddirection, not one of the 19 tracks feels tired, nor do they want forenergy or purpose. And there's enough sonic variety to please nearlyany conceivable listener, save perhaps the honky-tonk or death metalsets.
All the remixes hold their own, but they pale in comparison tothe original stuff, teases of which serve as interludes. This, morethan anything else speaks to the validity of the album's exercise andthe vitality of the very nearly-forgotten sound. The Free Design Redesignedwill never break any sales records and will be lucky garner significantradio airplay, but it wasn't meant to. Every non-Philistine who plugsinto the Free Design's sounds won't be able to resist the music. If thewell-known names here turn a few more heads onto the Dedricks, all thebetter. Happy crate-digging.
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For any musician that has had a career as long and as important as Michael Gira, keeping up the momentum must be an almost overwhelming task. As if the early Angels of Light material wasn’t enough of a departure from Swans, successive albums and tours have seen Gira stripping his sound and his songs down to a rootsy, folk-fueled core that is both more immediate and more direct than most of his back catalogue. While the last Angels of Light full length left me feeling that I’d peeked a bit too closely in on the man behind the curtain, Gira’s portion of the latest split release with Akron/Family accomplishes more of that uneasy closeness and it’s his portion of the disc that I’m most apt to skip.
A Dylan cover in "I Pity The Poor Immigrant," while sincere, just doesn’t grab me. The Angels of Light version of Swans’ "Mother/Father" is drastically changed but serves really only as a curious look at a deconstruction of a familiar piece. Akron/Family once again serves as Gira’s backing band, and their contributions to his songs are wonderfully sparse and appropriate. I just wish there was an instrumental.
Luckily for me, Akron/Family’s half of the disc shines. "We All Will" is a terrific campfire sing along with some of the most pointed and insightful lyrics , while the chorus of voices in "Awake" give that song a beautiful depth. There’s an earthy exuberance in songs like "Moment" and "Future Myth" that’s simply contagious, and the band balances nicely the dark, detuned music with a willful joy in creating and performing their songs. Even if "Future Myth" outstays its welcome by the eight minute mark, I can’t help but smile at the fun these guys must be having writing and recording these songs.
This has been an excellent year for me for discovering simple, earnest records played by musicians who obviously make music for the same reasons that I listen to it. I’ve had the first half of this record on constant rotation for the last three weeks and it’s honestly one of the most fun records I’ve heard all year. Unfortunately, I just can’t bring myself to feel that way about the Angels of Light penned second half.
Inna City Pressure was a true revelation on its initial releasein 1998. Long before the term "mashup" entered the lexicon andunforeseen marriages between, say, Jay-Z and the Beatles were commoncurrency, Dr. Israel welded together reggae, dub, metal, punk, jungleand drum 'n' bass with ease and verve, simultaneously revealing theunderpinnings the genres had in common while seamlessly creating afresh and vital sound all his own. Seven years on sees Dr. Israel witha new label, hordes of imitators, thousands of these new "mashups," anda large potential audience that may not be in the know. So the braintrust at ROIR has deemed it time for an Inna City Pressure reissue.
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This is an album filled to the brim with the sounds of the space-time beingslowed down to an audible crawl. Sun Ra thought that space was theplace, but Aranos must've decided that such a comment just wouldn't doand took the whole concept a step further: the space-time continuum isthe place, a more ephemeral, seething place.Pieros
If there were gods beforethe universe began, this might've been how they sounded: birds buzzingand calling out over tremendous spaces, questioning the absence ofmaterial and filling it with their cacophonous voices. Aranos' musichas been especially voluminous as of late, being far more free inarrangement and more concerned with the shape of sound rather thanmelody and lyrics. This is the case here, but Aranos' choice ofinstruments makes the abstract sound homey. The buzz of a violin or theoscillation of metal sheets is familiar, providing all the comfortneeded to listen to these three lengthy pieces. True to the (ratherloose) form often associated with textured music, Aranos' soundencompasses a cinematic flare, using the fall of footsteps and thewhisper of excited pipes to portray the architecture of a haunted houseor the gravity of open spaces too large to understand. Consequently,the distinction etched out between the three pieces seems arbitrary,it's nigh on impossible to determine when one starts and the otherbegins.
And Soon Coffin Sings feels like a single pieceimagined in three movements—each moving the music towards theabstract—towards the inevitable hum that vibrates everywhere, ineverything. Halloween might be getting under my skin, but the middlehalf of this album feels creepy, ringing, dancing, and rustling insubtle variations and reproducing the anxiety that something might beright behind me or just around the corner, watching and waiting forjust the right moment to attack. Of course this moment never comes,Aranos only draws the anxiety through the album and never provides anymoment where relaxation might seem like a good idea.
A huge plus, asalways, is Aranos' packaging: this time the album comes in a five-sidedpackage that unfolds to reveal the picture of man with his armsoutstretched, making a welcoming gesture. While the album isn'tdistressing or unwelcoming, it's certainly a strange trip, but one thatAranos is capable of soothing anyone into instead of thrusting theminto the middle of a strange record with no immediate appeals.
Aranos shows no signs of slowing down: this year alone he's released alive album, a 7" for Brainwashed Recordings, a live DVD, a full-lengthstudio recording (Bering Sea) and a live album (Throat Clearance).If Throat Clearance was Aranos' record for inner-space, And Soon Coffin Sings is the sound of that inner-world bleeding away and drenching everything in its viscera.
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There is an atmosphere of particularly chilly austerity on the debutalbum of Mi and L'au. It's not entirely unexpected from an albumproduced by Michael Gira, but it is somewhat unexpected afterlearning that Mi and L'au are friends of fellow Young God folkieDevendra Banhart, and that their album contains contributions fromAkron/Family and Julia Kent. Where Devendra's latest album Cripple Crowreveled in its own expensive, high-tech studio sheen, and containedsome of Banhart's most celebratory and rollicking group compositions, Mi and L'au sounds a lot closer to something that belongs on Young God records: quietly dramatic, somber chamber folk.
Young God
Mi and L'au is a male/female duo existing on the imaginary border oftwo musical phenomena. Mi is from Finland, and consequently the musicpicks up a bit of that Fonal Records Finnish underground psychedeliavibe, where compositions remain loose and kaleidescopic, organic butscattershot, with a frosty nip to remind you of the hostile tundra ofMi's homeland. L'au is from Paris, and an old friend of DevendraBanhart, who wrote his song "Gentle Soul" (from Oh Me Oh My...)for L'au, as a thanks for letting him crash at his place. Perhapsbecause of this connection, Mi and L'au also tune in to the current waveof American "freak folk," singing in English about things like falseteeth and worms, and incorporating an ever-so-subtle atmosphere ofAppalachian Americana. I'm making this album sound as if it is somesort of confused postmodern hybrid, but it's not really, and the musicand songs flow quite naturally, if always somewhat restrained.
It's this restraint that characterizes the music on this pair'sdebut album, always an emotion repressed, a sadness not quitearticulated. The press notes mention Nico, which is a good comparison.Not that Mi's soft, caressing voice really resembles Nico's chillymonotone, but both singers share an emotional nakedness that betrays aweighty, unspoken emotional history. Lyrics are simple throughout,often just simple observations of everyday life that take on a specialsignificance with repetition against the backdrop of Mi and L'au'sskeletal melodies and haunting compositional touches—a gorgeous swellof romantic strings here, a sprinkling of winter bells there, a lightlyplucked banjo, the rhythm of a foot stomping a wood floor.
The production is crystalline and spectral, and is perhaps the mostimpressive thing about the album, with Gira highlighting every creak,quaver and scrape, opening out the mix to reveal hidden undercurrentsof haunted psychedelia and shimmering drones. A track such as "Bums"feels like one sort of thing—a melodic vocal duet, gently pickedguitar and flute—until halfway through, when a rip in the gossamerfabric unleashes a seething undercurrent of swirling, ominousatmospherics that bounce off the dark forest canopy, creating fearfulshadows. At these moments, the duo is most reminiscent of early 90sBritish esoteric psych-folk, shades of Current 93 or Sol Invictus. Thenthere is a track such as "A Word In Your Belly," which achieves all ofthe melancholic, symphonic grandeur of Agaetis Bryjun-era Sigur Ros. (No, really! Listen to the samples below.) Mi and L'auis a lovely and haunting debut album, and another impressive additionto Young God's mostly unblemished track record of uncovering great newtalent.
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Eric Random is a crucial piece of history for fans of Cabaret Voltaire,23 Skidoo, and A Certain Ratio, and this 2xCD collection issued by LTMearlier this year provides an overview that is not only a greatintroduction but a generous selection of difficult to find material.Random's music fits in appropriately between contemporary music of23 Skidoo and Cabaret Voltaire. Structured rhythms provide the backbonefor songs which often push the ten-minute mark, never straying from theestablished tempo, while a bass line frequently remains fairly constantthroughout each piece. On top are layers featuring tape manipulations,faint guitar, horns, melodica, and muted vocals, soaked in primitiveechoes and delays found primarily on early recordings from themightiest dubmasters.
Once again LTM's presentation is classy and respectful, including aninformative booklet to accompany the music. Disc one captures singlesand compilation tracks from 1980-1982 while disc two features the 1982album Earthbound Ghost Need (a Burroughs reference from Naked Lunch) in its entirety.
Random's inclusion of a cover of "Bolero" by Ravel at the end of the Earthbound Ghost Needalbum is hardly a surprise, as the structure of that song is almost ablueprint to the main ideas of most of Eric Random's music: songs arevery long and simply do not stray from their main theme. (It's aformula that shouldn't be unfamiliar to Cabaret Voltaire and Richard H.Kirk fans.) Songs like this work well in clubs and in other socialsettings but two discs of long cuts is a lot more to ask of a listeneras opposed to an extended 12" single here and there. The four songsfrom the That's What I Like About Me EP open the first disc andthe muddy footprints left by Stephen Mallinder and Western Works areall over it. (It's not a bad thing, honest.) The length of these foursongs is an album in nearly anybody's book, which makes it somewhatunbalanced when compared to the following six tracks, which averagearound 4 minutes each.
There is plenty more Eric Random yet to compile and reissue, asfollowing these recordings Random traveled to India to studynon-western musics, continued his friendship and alliance with CabaretVoltaire, playing various concerts with them (including a show withRichard H. Kirk as recently as 2000), releasing music on theirDoublevision imprint, and performing in other projects like The FreeAgents, and The Faction (Nico's backing band in the 1980s). CV fansshould especially be anxious to see the Mad As Mankind single released again but as this stuff was out around 1984, it simply wouldn't have quite fit in to the material collected on Subliminal 1980-1982. I'll wait patiently myself and take the time this material needs to settle in completely.
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Atbest, Noriko’s fifth album mixes pop and more experimental electronicsin a way that is sometimes interesting, mixing standard pop beats andinstruments with more unusual sounds. Unfortunately this form ofsongcraft is far from new and much of the time Noriko misses the markcompletely.
Room40
Blurred in my Mirror starts off very promisingly with“Niagara Hospital;” the electronic beat pushes the song as Noriko’sspoken vocals go in and out synch with the song. It works very well asNoriko’s childlike words jar with the more serious music. “Tabletfor Memory,” with its lazy rhythm and acoustic guitar sounds quite likePortishead, which, although entertaining it isn't something towrite home about. After these first two songs the album loses its steam very quickly.
Most of the other songs seem to gonowhere, all blurring into each other. It’s not that they are bad but they’re not that interesting, failing to hold myattention. Additionally, Noriko’s singing starts to grate on me after awhile. At times her voice is unorthodox and beautiful but there weremoments when I found her singing a little uncomfortable.
Blurred in my Mirrorworks best at the times when the songshave some structure, the moreexperimental tracks lacked the life of the more traditional songs onthe album. They were full of too many ingredients: too many loopsoverpowering the mix. Perhaps this could have worked much better withsomeone elseat the mixing desk. The downfall seems to be too many choices and notenough clarity: noises might sound great when practicing or playingaround but in the end don't actuallysuit any of the songs remarkably well. The strongest cuts were the onesthat used a morelimited palette of sounds which allowed more room in the mix toactually enjoy the music. Blurred in my Mirror could have been a good album were it not for the dud tracks and poor production work. As it stands it is a lacklustre and average album.
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Despite the current shift to strangely accessible indie-pop that hasbeen prevalent in recent years, Animal Collective’s records have neversuffered from the feeling that they’re trying to pull a cheap one ontheir fans. Rather, like the best pop music, their songs are organicand never forced.
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Following a promising 12", The Drift return with a sextet of hazy suites on their phenomenal full-length Noumena. It's unclear whether the bandisconjuring Kantian philosophy with the title; but the songs here are not simply things in themselves, never to be realized or experienced. Rather,the songs are much larger and enveloping, asking to be engaged and experienced.
The Drift is a collaboration between literate members of Tarentel and Halifax Pier and within the hybrid,the sonic imprint of both bands is detectable. The album begins in uncertainty, though,with the Eno-inspired (at least titularly) and embryonic "Gardening, Not Architecture." Precisely four and a half minutes of detuned strings tuningeventually yields to actual song when guitar, percussion, horn, and bass enter in grandiosely, like royalty entering the ballroom after a train ofserfs and jesters. The initial "tuning" part will be hard to listen to for some, especially contrasted against the placid and well-rounded rest of the album. The sound in these first 4.5 minutes is sharp, angular, andcreates the disturbing image of a quartet of schizophrenic and deranged Itzhak Pearlmans preparing some symphonic assault in a very small concerthall, or perhaps (more abstractly) a cloud of vicious insects.
This chaotic theme is actually reprised towards the end, creating amere 4-minute interval of ambling clarity between the bookends ofdissonance."Invisible Cities" is an even more fragmented journey which starts outwithan inviting upright bass line. The bass punctuates the song perfectlywhile the embrace of the tempo is inescapable for the song's thirteenminutes of fracture. It's haunting as much as its Calvinoreference lurks between the notes. "Transatlantic," the focalpoint of the album, lopes along casually for the first seven minutes:electronics wisp around; a cello sound undercuts the haze; eventuallythe bass lays down the thematic progression and the song floatsfrom there. Unexpectedly, the tempo accelerates and the instrumentscrescendo into an altogether new mood. Instead of narcotic, the songbecomes manic and jumpy, spurred on by the instigations of theflugelhorn.
I first listened to Noumena on an island in Maine as the fog was rolling in from the ocean in the late afternoon. It was an incredibly soothing experience and I would recommend it for any introduction to The Drift. But even without the island and the fog and the fir trees, I don't doubt that you will have the same reaction after listening to the dulcet and gentle noise of "Fractured Then Gathered (Reprise)," the album's conclusion:to circle back to the beginning, ready to suffer the vicious insects all over again, just to experience the album once more.
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Khanate do doom like no one else. While there isn’t a huge progression from what they were doing on their last album, Capture & Release pushes their existing formula (for lack of a better term) further than before.
Khanate are about mood. The slower than slow pace and open songstructure makes the music disorientating and menacing. Khanate are sucha commanding force and O’Malley’s contribution is far from being thebackbone of their sound. That accolade goes to Alan Dubin’s vocals. Hisvoice is unique among metal vocalists in that it sounds real, nottheatrical or forced. Dubin sings about something more terrifying thanall the devils in hell: his own demons. On “Release” his mantra of“It’s cold when I touch you” and “It’s cold when I’m near you” hits mein a way that few words can.
Capture & Release sounds like an exorcism, notin a plastic Hollywood way but every musician sounds like he’s playingto stave off an eternity of pain: James Plotkin’s bass pretty muchechoes O’Malley’s guitar but his use of synth cuts through the mire andsounds in an otherworldly way and Tim Wyskida’s drums sound like rapping on thechamber door.
This two track album frightens me. Khanate have orchestrated a thoroughly disturbing record by making exceptional use of pauses and silences. At one point the drums sound like they’re building up to something mammoth but stop and after a brief pause Dubin whispers from somewhere over your shoulder, it's shivering to say the least. While I don’t know if I could listen to this album every day, I think that Capture & Release is a powerful record from one of the best metal bands around.
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Two Brians, one drum kit, one busted contact mic, one bass, and a wholelot of amplified wattage—with these five components Lightning Bolthave managed to carve out a sizeable niche for themselves in theAmerican noise rock scene. And while it would seem that the result ofthat equation would grow tiresome after awhile, just the opposite istrue.
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