Plenty of new music to be had this week from Laetitia Sadier and Storefront Church, Six Organs of Admittance, Able Noise, Yui Onodera, SML, Clinic Stars, Austyn Wohlers, Build Buildings, Zelienople, and Lea Thomas, plus some older tunes by Farah, Guy Blakeslee, Jessica Bailiff, and Richard H. Kirk.
Lake in Girdwood, Alaska by Johnny.
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This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Vance Orchestra releases are hard to find, spread over obscure and very small lables, beautiful designed and highly original. The orchestra are in fact a duo of Dutch musicians, who record a kind of deep listening music one can search for an eternity without a clue where to begin. This is the first full-length album I could get hold of. Packed in a fold-out miniature album sleeve (with an additional booklet full of illustrations and details), the CD clocks in at over 70 minutes with only six tracks. All of the pieces share a similar sound development and compositional evolution, mainly produced by electronics but with some added vocal snippets and bass lines. As the artwork and the titles suggest, the songs are soundtracks for time and space travel or a fictious mission in an alternative reality. Vance Orchestra are aural landscape shapers in a league of their own, only vaguely comparable to Zoviet France. The mood setting is mainly calm and atmospheric, with the exception of "Trying To Stop The Pain," which has a disturbing quality that seems to go on for too long. When everything's shut down late at night or in the early morning hours, whenever a concentrated listening is possible, 'The E Emission' is most mind-altering. Waves of memories and impressions pass on by, making it quite easy to get lost in thoughts while this music permanently feeds the subconscious. There is a love for details and a constructive force behind the music which makes this CDR both a pleasure and a timeless treasure.
Disco-Bruit Here is a beautiful work by two artists who have different approaches to working with sound, but collaborate well. David Myers works with feedback-based sounds through various devices he has built, including a "feedback machine" I've seen him wear during live performances. (Suspended in front of his belly from a strap around his neck, he looked much like a cigarette girl from the 1930s.) Asmus Tietchens is not known to perform live, unless he's simply playing a recording of something composed in the studio. It seems his style is to take a sonic idea or source material, and go into the studio and work it for the length of an album (or double album). So you can pick up most any Tietchens CD or record, and hear a similarity between the pieces as he explores the many possibilities of his initial concept. 'Flussdichte' is the third Tietchens / Myers collaboration. In this case, Myers sent Tietchens some material, and Tietchens went in the studio and built the pieces from this material. The result definitely has Tietchens' stamp on it — you could play it for any Tietchens fan and we'd guess it was his. (That's especially apparent to me when I hear sound that makes me think I'm in a submarine. No, I haven't been in one, but you may know this sound from movies, where the submarine is deep below the surface, and has its own ambient sounds coming from outside.) There are also some lovely melodic bits on the CD, including cut 6 ("T31:M5/10"), which sounds like amusement-park organ music, possibly emanating from an ancient merry-go-round. I won't try to describe any more — you will enjoy your own sound pictures when your allow you mind to drift with this CD playing. Highly recommended.
According to Asmus Tietchens' web site, "Kontakt Der Jünglinge 1" was recorded in the '"Lagerhaus" in Bremen, Germany in 1999. I've witnessed a number of live improvisations with sound and noise in which some unexpected event outside the performance space occurred, such as an ambulance passing by with a loud siren. The performers would typically accept the additional source material and work it into their piece.
In this case it's not a siren, but rather a distant throbbing beat of what must be a band performing or a disco upstairs or next door. I can only guess that the "Lagerhaus" is a nightclub, or adjacent to one, although it's also possible that this sound is a sample brought to the performance by one of the artists. That's part of the charm of listening to a quality recording of a live performance: you don't quite know whether the whole thing was done on a laptop with digitally-stored sounds, or whether the artists were collecting ambient sounds from the performance space, treating them, then releasing them back into the space as part of the performance. This recording definitely sounds like the latter. The deep throb of a distant disco drifts into the piece several times, and sounds so natural. But the beat appears only in small sections, while the overall 45-minute piece is mostly dense with wind and whooshing sounds. If you like your sound a bit more sparse, listen first to Kontakt der Jünglinge 0 (see below).
Die Stadt Recorded inside of a ship in Germany in 2001, this 42-minute piece is sometimes very quiet, with bursts of static and sounds like gurgling water. Elsewhere it has many layers of distinct sounds from drones to gently crackling static. There's a nice range from low to high frequencies and from droning to beeping/chirping sounds, with the overall feeling of something building in intensity, gently subsiding, then regaining strength in several waves. I knew nothing of Thomas Köner before hearing these two Kontakt der Jünglinge CDs, so by checking his web site (http://www.koener.de) I was not surprised to learn he started as a composer for film. From what I know of Asmus Tietchens, he does not often perform live, as he's primarily a studio-based composer. I would have been curious to learn what equipment he used in this performance, if any. Or did he just play prerecorded bits?
I don't know about you, but my first thought when listening to the new Trans Am opus "TA" was not "Hey, this song really could use the remix treatment!" Sadly, that is what has transpired on this, a brief EP of reconstructions of three tracks from that album. The personnel involved are interestingly enough: John Herndon, here as A Grape Dope; Dan the Automator, he of Gorillaz, Deltron 3030 and Lovage fame; underground hip-hop flavorists Prefuse 73 and Dabrye; and Trans Am's own recording engineer Jonathan Kreinik contributing a remix of his own. Really, though, there is no improvement for these songs.Thrill Jockey
The source material is somewhat doomed from the start, so the remix of it can only improve upon the original or add something to it on a marginal level, which these remixes do (kind of). An added problem is also that the tracks that were chosen for remix are a few of the most static on the disc. "Cold War," "Infinite Wavelength," and "Different Kind of Love" are perhaps conducive to this process, but that doesn't make for interesting remixes, just variations. This is certainly the case with the "Cold War" mixes. Herndon does his best to add interesting textures, but we're still left with the lame keyboards and a similar beat, both of which were the main detractors from the original. Jonathan K's remix, coincidentally, focuses more on the other main detractor: the lyrics. It's a valiant effort to ghettoize the track with bizarre keyboards and higher-pitched "It's automatic" jabs, plus a funky beat to underline it. It ultimately goes nowhere, and we're left with those awful words. Dabrye succeeds in altering their material enough to elevate it, but it's still missing something. Maybe a rap from a talented underground MC? Dan the Automator and Prefuse 73 don't so much remix 'Different' - they 'resex' it, bringing the booty-shaking back in full effect. All in all, though, this is not the "perfect companion" to 'TA,' but it's the best you could expect.
Tigerbeat 6 Girl Power gets knocked back back a few steps with Blechdom's latest EP release on TB6. The horrible vocals, detuned music and equally painful subject matter have undoubtedly plunged Miss Kevin's career into unbelievable new lows. The strange thing is that it's all intentional and I love it. While I make no psychological claims, I'm guessing she has probably struggled with but accepted the fact that she will never be an angry (but cute), mousey girl with an acoustic guitar, an anorexic sex kitten, nor a post-punk lipstick lesbian-on-the-four-year-plan fronting a rock quartet who chooses to spell girl with two r's and no i. Her chosen career path is faced with critical obstacles only tightwads like NPR reporters would discuss in depth. First and foremost, she's an entertainer, and until you accept her as such, you're setting yourself up to be soured by the sound. Consider that she's also immersed in a scene dominated by very, very serious men who wear two or three names like they think they're some composer or something. This short but sassy disc compliments her recent live shows with a souvenir of said entertainment. Listening, I recall the fond memories of when I first asked myself, "did she just say 'my pussy getting wetter'," or slipped her some cash during a super-classy rendition of that 1980s hit "Private Dancer," once popularized by Tina Turner (I love that imitation harmonica sound solo). Love it or hate it, it's impossible to take your eyes off of it when it's right in front of you. That, my friends is power. At under 15 minutes, the entertainment is short and sweet and without any fart humor the critics have accused her of playing up in the past. What else are you going to spend your $8 on? Two beers and a bag of chips?
Erstwhile ET is hip again. I'm not really sure why but I'm assuming that it's just being rediscovered yet again by a new generation of creative musicians. But since Extended Technique is in fact old hat I find it hard to get interested in ET per se. Take the woodwind for instance — what's the point, after Bartolozzi, Zorn and the rest have done it all? While ET used to make me think, "Gosh, that's very strange way to play an xyz, how interesting and novel," now I don't. I got over it. It's not that I don't approve of ET. I do. I approve of any effectively deployed technique. But a musicians over-valuation of ET's intrinsic value can be tiresome. Perhaps we all go through that phase, musicians included, so let's charitably ascribe any ET excesses to a passing phase. Meanwhile, Subotnick and Stockhausen, among others, have shown that a tape machine or record player is as much a musical instrument as any other so it's reasonable to think of Jason's approach to tape loops as no less ET than Greg's trumpet playing. But now let's consider the additional aspect of the lamentable challenges faced by the improviser, in particular that editorial judgment cannot be used and the inevitable requirement for novelty, and I think it becomes clear that we really have to cut the brave extended technique improviser a lot of slack. We cannot realistically hope for the extraordinary brilliant results that improvisation can bless us with without expecting some of the rest to be served along side. So I'm very pleased that this CD has much more of the former than of the latter. It's mostly laid back, a bit spooky, film-esque in parts. The brilliance of Jason's sounds lies in his good taste; he concentrates only those that are genuinely good to listen to and works them all the way out without hopping restlessly from one bewildering ET trick to another. In that way it is like Robert Rutman — it's in the finesse, the commitment to beauty. I thought of that because some of the music here sounds a bit like Rutman's. Greg's contribution is sometimes ornamental and at other times it is right in the middle of the generative process. It's at those moments that this CD really impresses. My biggest criticism is that at times the sound of the room it was recorded in is unhelpful and rather distracting but that's an aspect of the paltry budgets these brave adventurers are given to work with. Incidentally, the cover art from Jason's three-year-old Audrey is very attractive.
Hefty The direction of the latest five-song EP from Scott Herren as Savath + Savalas is in keeping with 2000's 'Folk Songs for Trains, Trees and Honey' in that the groundwork of electronica, sampling and live performance bleeds perfectly into each other and still gives off somewhat of an organic feel. "Rolls and Waves of Ignorance" opens the disc with a nice wash of swelling minor chords and percussion under climbing upright bass lines and melodic tenor saxophone, which weave throughout. The mood is tranquil yet somber and somewhat meditative, and, as the title may suggest, with an almost freejazz-type statement to it. "Paths in Soft Focus" grooves along nicely with some quirky keyboard and guitar arpeggiation and long bass tones which are all anchored by the solid drumming of Johnny Herndon (Tortoise, Isotope 217, A Grape Dope). One of the more splendid pieces of music I've heard lately would be "Folk Song for Cello," thanks in part to its brilliant arrangement and orchestration. Building from a plucked cello progression, acoustic guitar harmonics, accordion chords and a hammer dulcimer (!), the tune settles in to a laid-back groove of synth bass, tight drums and playful keyboard and vibe flourishes. "Decatur Queen" goes from repetitive acoustic guitar, upright bass and quietly squelching percussion to a ripping snare line that drives the tune into a full-sounding romp of rhythmic keyboards and wah guitar, complete with layers of horns while closing off the disc, "Rolls and Waves of Acknowledgement" brings the EP full-circle. This track follows the same compositional style as the opener, only more sparsely arranged and with the instrumentation of fuzz guitar, bowed strings and a fuller bass sound. Ironically enough, "Acknowledgement" sounds quite dark in comparison to "Ignorance." Way too short at just over seventeen minutes, this highly recommended EP may have you checking out the various other projects Mr. Herren has on the go at the moment (Prefuse 73, Delarosa + Asora) until another full length disc makes its way out there.
Disco-Bruit Here is a beautiful work by two artists who have different approaches to working with sound, but collaborate well. David Myers works with feedback-based sounds through various devices he has built, including a "feedback machine" I've seen him wear during live performances. (Suspended in front of his belly from a strap around his neck, he looked much like a cigarette girl from the 1930s.) Asmus Tietchens is not known to perform live, unless he's simply playing a recording of something composed in the studio. It seems his style is to take a sonic idea or source material, and go into the studio and work it for the length of an album (or double album). So you can pick up most any Tietchens CD or record, and hear a similarity between the pieces as he explores the many possibilities of his initial concept. 'Flussdichte' is the third Tietchens / Myers collaboration. In this case, Myers sent Tietchens some material, and Tietchens went in the studio and built the pieces from this material. The result definitely has Tietchens' stamp on it — you could play it for any Tietchens fan and we'd guess it was his. (That's especially apparent to me when I hear sound that makes me think I'm in a submarine. No, I haven't been in one, but you may know this sound from movies, where the submarine is deep below the surface, and has its own ambient sounds coming from outside.) There are also some lovely melodic bits on the CD, including cut 6 ("T31:M5/10"), which sounds like amusement-park organ music, possibly emanating from an ancient merry-go-round. I won't try to describe any more — you will enjoy your own sound pictures when your allow you mind to drift with this CD playing. Highly recommended.
Die Stadt Recorded inside of a ship in Germany in 2001, this 42-minute piece is sometimes very quiet, with bursts of static and sounds like gurgling water. Elsewhere it has many layers of distinct sounds from drones to gently crackling static. There's a nice range from low to high frequencies and from droning to beeping/chirping sounds, with the overall feeling of something building in intensity, gently subsiding, then regaining strength in several waves. I knew nothing of Thomas Köner before hearing these two Kontakt der Jünglinge CDs, so by checking his web site (http://www.koener.de) I was not surprised to learn he started as a composer for film. From what I know of Asmus Tietchens, he does not often perform live, as he's primarily a studio-based composer. I would have been curious to learn what equipment he used in this performance, if any. Or did he just play prerecorded bits?
Erstwhile ET is hip again. I'm not really sure why but I'm assuming that it's just being rediscovered yet again by a new generation of creative musicians. But since Extended Technique is in fact old hat I find it hard to get interested in ET per se. Take the woodwind for instance — what's the point, after Bartolozzi, Zorn and the rest have done it all? While ET used to make me think, "Gosh, that's very strange way to play an xyz, how interesting and novel," now I don't. I got over it. It's not that I don't approve of ET. I do. I approve of any effectively deployed technique. But a musicians over-valuation of ET's intrinsic value can be tiresome. Perhaps we all go through that phase, musicians included, so let's charitably ascribe any ET excesses to a passing phase. Meanwhile, Subotnick and Stockhausen, among others, have shown that a tape machine or record player is as much a musical instrument as any other so it's reasonable to think of Jason's approach to tape loops as no less ET than Greg's trumpet playing. But now let's consider the additional aspect of the lamentable challenges faced by the improviser, in particular that editorial judgment cannot be used and the inevitable requirement for novelty, and I think it becomes clear that we really have to cut the brave extended technique improviser a lot of slack. We cannot realistically hope for the extraordinary brilliant results that improvisation can bless us with without expecting some of the rest to be served along side. So I'm very pleased that this CD has much more of the former than of the latter. It's mostly laid back, a bit spooky, film-esque in parts. The brilliance of Jason's sounds lies in his good taste; he concentrates only those that are genuinely good to listen to and works them all the way out without hopping restlessly from one bewildering ET trick to another. In that way it is like Robert Rutman — it's in the finesse, the commitment to beauty. I thought of that because some of the music here sounds a bit like Rutman's. Greg's contribution is sometimes ornamental and at other times it is right in the middle of the generative process. It's at those moments that this CD really impresses. My biggest criticism is that at times the sound of the room it was recorded in is unhelpful and rather distracting but that's an aspect of the paltry budgets these brave adventurers are given to work with. Incidentally, the cover art from Jason's three-year-old Audrey is very attractive.