Round up of Record Reviews, good and not so good
Original position in magazine: pages 65-70
Contents: Charles Hayward, His Name is Alive, Loren MazzaCane Connors, Bob Drake, Sauter / Dietrich / Moore, Amber Asylum, rhBand, Total, Barbara Manning, Spaceheads, Hovercraft, Atman, Voltolux, Electroscope, Yo La Tengo, Broadcast, LaBradford, Aqueous and Roedelius, Trial of the Bow, Piano Magic, Stephen Fellows, Krel, Sophia
Charles Hayward
Escape from Europe: Live in Japan Volume One
JAPAN LOCUS SOLUS LSR 001 CD (1997)
A genuine original is drummer, singer, tape-manipulator and keyboardsman Hayward, his career spanning from This Heat through The Camberwell Now in the 1980s, to becoming a favourite of the European improv scene, for example as part of Regular Music and Les Batteries who performed at the M.I.M.I. Festival in France in 1986. Charles Hayward recently took to peddling his eccentric voice and instrumentation one-man band to Japanese listeners. This decent little CD documents some of it (and there’s better still to come on the 2nd volume, with Keiji Haino, Otomo Yoshihide and Peter Brotzmann). Hayward strikes me as endorsing and living the kind of user-friendly Socialism that you or I could happily live with. Each lyric embodies a cry for fair play or justice, or questions modern sacred cows with a healthy scepticism. Witness the dark sarcasm on ‘Queen Termite Milk’: ‘It’s all right..I’m a social worker.. and I know when to intervene!’ He sings to me of another way of life…but I ignore it, I choose to ignore it. The only trouble I find that half the force has gone these days; Hayward 1997-brand is a bit fluffy, like the Ken Loach of Raining Stones as against the Ken Loach of Cathy Come Home. He’ll never write another lyric as bleak as ‘Not Waving But Drowning’ or ‘Twilight Furniture’, both so fraught with concrete images of isolation; as if to confirm my fears, he yields up retreads of both those This Heat favourites here, skipping about half of the original texts as though his computer-memory had wiped them clean. Revisiting the past then, puts him in the unfortunate position of some kind of ‘alternative’ karaoke singer. Luckily some of the new lyrical material is quite good; and the music is as punchy as ever. His drumming style is just brilliant, and the ingenuity and simplicity whereby he manages to accompany himself live, with tapes and melodica, wins full marks for innovation. Highly effective in this area is the use of bagpiping tapes on ‘Contrary Warp’ and the disturbing voice whirlpools on ‘Not Waving’. But you could argue Hayward is at his best when interacting with other musicians - and the final track ‘Creosote’ really catches fire. Improvising with Makoto Nomura at the piano and melodica and Akira Toyonaga on the guitar, Hayward drums up a storm and magics up some vital seconds of those unpredictable dynamics and tenseness we love him for.
ED PINSENT
His Name is Alive
Stars on ESP
UNITED KINGDOM 4AD RECORDS 6010 CD
His Name Is Alive are more fun than the average 4AD act, and every now and then throw up something totally unexpected which puts a welcome spanner in the otherwise over-polite approach to production. A lot of the listening pleasure comes from the band imitating and distorting stuff which other people would be content just to sample and repeat. On ‘Wall’, birds tweetering along randomly in the background leap into life and start singing in tune with the melody, then one of them picks up a set of bagpipes. There’s another sweet track where parts of ‘Good Vibrations’ are faithfully reproduced, but thrown together in a different order to approximate His Name’s idea of a Smile track. This is an open-minded attitude to music, but commonplace these days - most bands water down the music they’re ‘embracing’ and HNIA are no exception. They use surf, dub and techno but you’d be better advised to stick with the source records. One exception - and the strongest tune - is the theme song ‘Home’, which undergoes three radically different incarnations. The third ends the record trumphantly, starting as a four-track demo than transforming into an all-out gospel number, then it all goes wrong as U2 enter the studioo and whip up the choir into hallelujah-Lord cliche. Then His Name’s drum machine steps in an knocks them back into line.
In common with other 4AD releases, the sleeve is designed by Vaughan Oliver. I can’t understand why this guy gets any work - he has no eye for composition, a taste for empty images, and he throws fonts around like a 3rd-year graphic design student. I guess I also hold him part-guilty (along with ID magazine) for the current preponderance of cluttered, superimposed images. Delve inside the booklet and you’ll find a bewildering photo of someone about to take a spanner to a luminescent cardboard star - nice to see something that suggests a story, rather than an Argos catalogue!
HARLEY RICHARDSON
Loren MazzaCane Connors and Suzanne Langille
Crucible
USA BLACK LABEL RECORDS BLACK 4 CD (1996)
Depressing…comes over like some kinda urban folk music, although Connors is no string-picker to rank with our own Bert Jansch or Archie Fisher; wasted by the acid of punk history, his guitar phrases are mostly trite and aimless, only given any weight by amplification, and he won’t keep time with himself. Nor can Suzanne Langille sing worth a darn, barely able to suggest even the whisper of a melody or project meaning from her dull lyrics. Atrocious recording is (probably) kept deliberately flat, to alienate the listener so you too can share in the artists’ feelings of emotionless sterility. The two never perform as a duo on any single track; it might have been halfway interesting to put them together, although Connors’ melodies occasionally seem to suggest a ghostly reprise of those of his partner. This separation compounds the sense of alienation behind Crucible. Still, you might want to persevere; it’s almost as good as a Folkways recording of some clapped-out rural blues singer reminiscing about his days on the bayou, and you know how desirable those records are.
ED PINSENT
Bob Drake
Little Black Train
USA CRUMBLING TOMES ARCHIVE CTA 6 CD (1996)
What John Zorn is to the saxophone and jazz, Robert Drake is to the guitar, banjo and American folk music. That said he’s not as crazy as Zorn, but keeps switiching styles - Country and Western, Bluegrass, West Coast psychedelia, even a touch of post-punk scratchings, which surface in and out of these perfectly constructed and composed poppy tunes. There’s a sinister edge too - he fashions a patchwork quilt and trims it with black lace. To say Drake is a proficient picker would be understating the case; he’s a master craftsman of the steel strings, the string instrument he can’t play ain’t been made, and there’s a sense of real musical history embedded in every phrase he peels off the frets. Mostly instrumental, but ‘The Unattended Funeral’ has a lyric; it continues a tradition of American death ballads, yet adds a melancholic post-modern twist worthy of Will Oldham as it depicts an empty grave in Nowheresville and the decaying coffin of the poor guy they forgot to bury…because ‘nobody remembers’. The overall sound is fleshed out by drums, bass, violin and keyboard work, recorded at home to produce a very polished and engaging 43 minutes. Evocative children’s book-like sleeve painting of a rocky mountain nightscape, depicts a train shining its light through the night while watched by some vigilant beasts. Perhaps this is how Drake himself feels - a lone beacon in the cold landscape of modern America. The second solo LP (the first was What Day is It?) from this American oddity who was also in Denver band the 5UUs, recorded 2 CDs of minimal songs with Suzanne Lewis as Hail (these could be interesting), played with The Thinking Plague, and mixed the fast-paced energetic (EC) Nudes record which I very much care for. All of these are available in the ReR Megacorp catalogue last time I looked.
ED PINSENT
Jim Sauter, Don Dietrich and Thurston Moore
Barefoot in the Head
USA FORCED EXPOSURE FE-015 CD (1996)
Thurston Moore proclaimed his love of atonal free jazz by aligning himself with this project (recorded in 1988) and adding his guitar to the great wall of sax erected by Jim Sauter and Donald Dietrich. The latter two are All-American Heroes of the Honk, working for years as two-thirds of the fantastic Borbetomagus, and are creators of such closely-knit and intensive free music that they have successfully cleared my house of unwanted guests many a time. Don Miller was the other third, he played electric guitar in that highly unusual line-up, so these two mad reedmen have had no difficulty in swallowing Thurston whole or wiping his electric feedback off the face of the earth with their twinned-bell attack. Forgive an indelicate image, but sometimes their mighty saxes assume the proportion of enormous phalluses, huge and fecund, making Sauter and Dietrich into pagan fertility gods like the Cerne Abbas giant. (So much for the old guitar - penis substitute nonsense - these puffers are the real men!) Their performances here however can be spacier than on their relentless Borbetomagus records, giving some room to breath; check out the eerie ‘On the Phrase “Ass Backwards” ‘ for a spooky high-pitched drone delirium, although if it’s all-out free blowing you need, then ‘Concerning The Sun As A Cool Solid’ is the 18-minute blastoid transcedental workout for you. This is the way free jazz ought to be, unencumbered by any nonsense like drums, pianos, tunes, or boring old common sense.
Sonic Youth are nearly superstars these days, yet continue to sport their avant-garde credentials which they pick up like old clothes from Salvation Army stores. Thurston drew up a list of Top Ten Free Jazz records for Grand Royal magazine #2 recently; his choices were impeccable and he knows the scene, but another side of it was him boasting of the impossible vinyl rarities he’s managed to snag. Still, that’s pretty uncharitable because the guy can also play free - and not just buy his way into it. Thurston acquits himself with honour on these tunes. He propels things along with chuntering guitar on ‘All Doors Look Alike’, adds patented jangly slidey noises on ‘Tanned Moon’, drapes feedback everywhere like a black velvet shroud, and there is much humour and glee in the entire event, including witty song titles like ‘The Date-Reduced Loaf’. Add a fine Max Ernst collage cover and you’ve got a near perfect package I’d say. As the sleeve note puts it, ‘Two free men meet a slave…everyone goes home barefoot’.
ED PINSENT
Amber Asylum
The Natural Philosophy of Love
USA RELEASE RECORDS RR 6955-2 CD (1997)
Like label-mates Trial of the Bow, Amber Asylum are a bit too tasteful and fey overall, but a sentimental twerp like myself can sometimes be moved by the poignancy summoned up on ‘Looking Glass’, one weepy instrumental the musicians thought fit to reprise. Kris Force, Annabel Lee and Martha Burns form a string trio (2 x violins + cello) and play these simple and slow-moving minor-key very introspective tunes, accompanied by a Classical guitar. The introspective element probably comes from composer and vocalist Kris Force, who is one velvet collar away from being a sadder, straighter version of Kate Bush. She also covers ‘Poppies’ by Buffy Sainte-Marie. On the other hand, she added her skills to a couple tracks on the last Swans CD. Perfect listening for a foggy November day. If you like Pre-Raphaelite painting, chances are you’ll like this…just don’t expect another Nico Chelsea Girls.
ED PINSENT
rhBand
Third Order Parasitum
USA DRUNKEN FISH RECORDS DFR-33 CD (1997)
One of the principal dynamic effects I associate with tecnho music is the contrasting peaks and troughs of the oscillating signals. rhBand are emphatically NOT a techno band - no drums for a start! - but they use layers of these exciting oscillations to excellent effect. rhBand are a quartet who perform their improvisations live to tape; they’re remarkably attuned to each other’s moves and when they turn up the dial in unison, it can feel like they’re reaching in through your ears to pull your stomach out through your head. Underpinned with rich, bassy distortion, the total experience is topped with eerie treated sounds. When rhBand turn the dials up to ten they’ll have you levitating three feet above your bed.
HARLEY RICHARDSON
Total
Buffin’ the Celestial Muffin
UNITED KINGDOM RURAL ELECTRIFICATION PROGRAMME REP 001 CD [1996]
Strange things are afoot down on the farm. The animals are restless. A cockerel leads a rebellion against the human oppressor, takes a chainsaw to the barn, then sets it alight. The farmer flees and the animals commence to dismantle the place - chaos ensues for x minutes.
Total are John Godbert and Matthew Bower, a duo who use and abuse traditional instruments (violin, reeds, piano, guitar) as well as the occasional tape loop to fashion painful sounds of devastation for our listening pleasure. This kind of abstract music is a film without pictures - you wonder where the sounds have come from and try and attach visual associations to make sense of them. However the clashing and unexpected sonic combinations don’t fit any story you know so your brain is forced to invent a new one. In case you’re sceptical and wondering what kind of plot or character development there is in my little farmyard storyline above (or how it could sustain my interest for the length of a CD), think of it more like a musical equivalent of a Breugel painting, packed with little incidents and details on a theme.
On this CD, JG and MB buff the celestial muffin with seven indistinguishable (more or less) tracks of noise. Which is not to say that there’s no light or shade here. The low-fi recording technique (I would guess that they turned everything up to eleven and stuck a mike in the middle of the room to let it pick up what it could) means that instruments drop in and out of audibility according to the laws of physics, rather than the whims of a mixer. This could explain the sense that there’s a lot more going on than you can hear, the feeling of being an onlooker. I tried playing this in the background while I got on with some household chores, but found that it kept demanding my full attention; it requires that you fully immerse yourself in the busy-ness of it all. Go back and find yet more in it, if you can listen to this kind of abrasiveness at all.
Hungry for more narrative? There’s the name of the record label / ‘project’, Rural Electrification Program, and the great cover drawing of a demonic-looking creature reaching towards the celestial muffin of the title. A black sun spitting needles of black light into the sky. That’s pretty much the story injected into my mind whenever I listen to this.
HARLEY RICHARDSON
Barbara Manning
1212
UNITED KINGDOM MATADOR RECORDS OLE 221 CD (1997)
You must hear ‘The Arsonist Story’, the tense 19 minute narrative in song which opens this record. Lyrically it’s extremely inventive, phrases filled with deft twists and turns and an intelligence you rarely find these days; thematically, it’s virtually an expansion of Brian Wilson’s ‘Fire’ segment from Smile. In place of the cellos approximating fire sirens on ‘Mrs O’Leary’s Cow’, here we have the chants of ‘Fire! Fire!’ over the urgent instrumental riff ‘Fireman’, and genuine fire sound effects. In the narrative, Manning outlines the behaviour of an alienated teenager who can only express his feelings by setting fire to buildings; she tells a story, but her interest lies in exploring the character’s inner space. She takes 40 seconds to tell us what this guy sounds like playing the piano, as though the character himself has helped to make the record! The fragments of his cracked psyche are suggested in ‘Evil Craves Attention’ - ‘fire is his drink’…and the hopelessly blind parents mourn communication breakdown in ‘Our Son’. (Other listeners have noted the ‘Arson’ pun here). He retreats to his bedroom (another Brian Wilson image, ‘In My Room’), sinking further into a claustrophobic psychosis - ‘my room is 10 by 10, I’d love to watch it burn’. Throughout these songs, musical and sound effects interpolations become increasingly dark; electronic swathes enhance a phrase here and there, until there’s the all-out concrete tape section prepared by Jim O’Rourke, linking the body of the piece to the 7 minute coda. O’Rourke’s disturbing sound collage of fire and cracked ice suggests the warehouse fire and a frozen lake into which the protagonist sinks. In the sublime ‘Trapped and Drowning’, we hear only Manning’s trancey guitar strums, a monotone organ and a mournful trumpet as the hapless character wails ‘the best thing you could do…is not come to my rescue’. This suite is filled with some of the most poignant images of isolation I’ve heard for a long time - it gives singer-songwriting a new lease of life. Manning’s engaging voice and obvious honesty are a breath of fresh air; the rest of the LP is great too, she’s a fine guitarist although sometimes her backing band, especially the drummer, don’t do a lot for me. To me ‘The Arsonist Story’ called for a Van Dyke Parks arrangement, but perhaps that would make it a bit too precious. Manning used to be in various American bands I’ve never heard of, including SF Seals, World of Pooh and 28th Day, but is apparently no stranger to solo projects. Also available on vinyl as a three-sided LP.
ED PINSENT
Spaceheads
Round the Outside
UNITED KINGDOM THESE RECORDS THESE 13CD (1997)
One of those rather annoying modernistic bands who speak of ‘crossing genres’ of music, thereby upsetting many a purist along the way. Andy Diagram comes from an eccentric rock background - in the 1980s he was in the Diagram Brothers and Manchester-based Dislocation Dance, and played with James. He blows trumpet through various old clunky analogue effects such as echoplex, harmoniser and phase shifter and is not afraid to let rip with pretty melodies and funky riffs, at times stumbling into electric-period Miles Davis soundalike territory. Richard Harrison drums and sometimes uses foreign objects to make a percussive racket like a low-rent Tony Oxley; he comes at it from more of a jazz background, having been inspired in that direction by a Ronnie Scott TV show in the 1960s. The pair of them have been involved in various semi-hip avant-gardish projects, for example with singer David Thomas (as Two Pale Boys), and enjoy greater financial success on the European touring circuit than in this country. Having seen them live at the QEH supporting Derek Bailey and the Ruins, I found their novelty wore off very quickly and they didn’t do an awful lot to transcend the limitations of their sound, or their essential mediocrity. Seconds of a trumpet blast or a bit of noise can be sampled and then looped to make a backing track, a trick nabbed from dance culture; this can sometimes work quite well, only to be ruined by Andy Diagram who can’t resist adding a clever tootly trumpet flourish over the top of it, indulging and echoing himself into a mockery of good taste. This CD is slightly better than all that piffling blarney, but I can only manage about 2-3 tracks at a time before, like a creme caramel, it makes my fillings ache. It was recorded from live shows and radio performances in the USA in 1996, has some witty real-life documentary tape samples in between tracks, and mailart superstar Mark Pawson did the dinky limited silkscreened handstamped CD case.
ED PINSENT
Hovercraft
Vagus Nerve / De-Orbit Burn remix by Scanner
UNITED KINGDOM BLAST FIRST BFFP 134S 12″ SINGLE (1997)
Hovercraft, that generally non-descript guitar trio from Seattle, have taken a marginally more interesting turn in this twelve-incher aided by Robin Rimbaud and his Black & Decker grinderette. There’s a chill-out side and a nasty side, the latter of which I find more appealing, principally because you can hardly make out what the band are doing at all. Whatever contribution they made as source material has been largely effaced by Scanner’s malarkey. However, given Hovercraft’s rating in my estimation, and that Scanner’s glib techno-flippancy leaves much to be desired, the meeting of the two doesn’t add up to a great deal. It’s a bit like deep-fried pizza, a chip shop delicacy reputed to be much favoured in Glasgow; a hunk of lardy pastry, smeared with processed cheese and tomato ketchup, is dipped in batter and thrown into six inches of boiling fat; what was an unhealthy proposition to begin with is, amazingly, made even worse.
ED PINSENT
Atman
Personal Forest
USA DRUNKEN FISH RECORDS DFR-34 CD (1997)
Atman are an improvisational trio of musicians involved in the Polish Deep Ecology movement. Their reasons for living permeate into their music, you could never separate the two. Marek, Marek and Piotr have been playing in the forest together for 20 years trying to learn the universal musical language. Moondog said it’s taken him 50 years to find the musical tones that are part of the MegaMind. These tones put the player in touch with and a part of everything in the universe. Atman use these tones too. Some of the instruments heard on A Personal Forest include: various woodwind instruments, Jews harp, polish dulcimer, sitar, zither and even Tibetan liturgical instruments! I would recommend this CD to everyone, the music is very atmospheric and powerful and never follows expected patterns. The music has been created with the highest ideals in mind, which makes a change from the rest of us who play instruments to get people to like us! Atman are an inspiring group. In fact you can even attend a forest workshop with them. There you can make your own instruments and take part in a 24 hour musical ceremony. If anyone would like to go to Poland with me please let me know, OK?
ANDREA B
Voltolux
Voltolux Bremen
GERMANY MAMBO RECORDS (1997)
The Hayfever (German music fanzine) house band, managing some pretty damn convincing retro Space Rock guitar jamming overlaid with occasional modern electro segments. It seems they can get really carried away into the thunderous, noisier realms when they play live…this studio LP may not capture much fire in their performances, but there are some reet tasty episodes from lead instruments soloing away into the zone of digital delay and mono-synth squawks. If you feel the need for 70s-styled Gong-like playing (and nobody will blame you) you can do a lot worse than this. Although not in the same inventiveness stakes as Can, whom they namecheck, they put anything on the Kranky label in its place.
ED PINSENT
Electroscope
Homemade Electroscope
UNITED KINGDOM WURLITZER JUKEBOX WJ 27
Electroscope are the esoteric Scottish duo of Gayle Harrison and John Cavanagh. They are pretty much off exploring their own private obsessions in their own way in their own time and on their own. They use old analogue tape recorders rescued from skips to record quietish clarinet, keyboards and guitar. I hear very few groups that I can’t throw in with a ‘trend’ or into a dismissive box. Believe me, Electroscope are one of the very few that I’d describe as unselfconscious, fascinated and odd. Touches (only touches) remind me of Movietone, Pearls Before Swine, Nico’s harmonium and maybe the Velvets track ‘The Gift’ (John’s moody spoken tribute to Joe Meek). They are the real thing, a quietly individual group which sadly will go over most people’s heads.
ANDREA B
Yo La Tengo
I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One
UNITED KINGDOM MATADOR RECORDS OLE 222-2 CD (1997)
Rather patchy offering from this usually dependable favourite guitar combo. In 1989 their President LP heralded a new direction for the previously unexceptional Yo La Tengo - suddenly they were a superior indie guitar pop band with a powerful and expansive sound. I assumed at the time this was the result of some kind of studio trikery - I later discovered they could reproduce it live, it was just that they’d developed a particular way of using effects pedals. Since then, they’ve expanded their range with each release, bringing country music, ambient and even rave within the scope of their guitar-drums-organ set-up, the expanded playing time of the CD format giving them space to explore, mix and match their different styles. But they’ve also become patchier with time, allowing weak and lazy rehashes of old ideas creeping in amongst the stronger material, With some selective programming of your CD player, you can turn this into an excellent LP-length disc. ‘Autumn Sweater’ is the immediate standout, with the military snap of Georgia Hubley’s drums locking the sinister repeating organ figure into place. Then there’s ‘Moby Octopad’ with bassist James McNew (I think) adding a beautiful, delicate singing component to the already formidable roster of voices. I thought I’d had my fill of Ira Kaplan’s obligatory feedback workouts, but in ‘We’re an American Band’ he’s tied to a melody which forces him onto crazier ground than when he’s in free-form mode.
HARLEY RICHARDSON
Broadcast
Work and Non Work
UNITED KINGDOM WARP CD52 CD (1997)
Broadcast seemed to emerge from a sticky chrysalis fully formed. This compilation of their first three EPs is so sure of its own elliptical cool and confident layering of synthetic sound you wonder if this Birmingham five-piece single-mindedly refined these space-age pop structures long before sitting their GCSEs. Naysayers will point out that such bubbling-moog meets icy-femme-vox stuff couldn’t have existed vvithout the influence of the ubiquitous Stereolab. Fair enough, the ‘Lab were original patrons via their Duophonic imprint, but there any major connections end. Broadcast reject the airy Euro-flavour of their pals in favour of an appealing provincial graininess. Many of their tunes and cut-up instrumentals echo UK 60s black and white TV serials like Danger Man and Edgar Wallace, all stabbing harpsichord motifs and moody John Barry atmospherics. The perfect foil for Trish Keenan’s resigned and restrained singing. Buried halfway back in the mix you can almost picture her in an olive acrylic polo-neck, mumbling fatalistic observations as she stares out at night-time traffic. Impressive and accomplished, Broadcast’s debut could well prove to be their hard-to-follow defining moment.
JOHN BAGNALL
Labradford
Mi media naranja
UNITED KINGDOM BLAST FIRST BFFP 144CD CD (1997)
Mainly an instrumental mood-exercise set, but the treatment of the vocal on the sixth track is subdued and distorted in a way that lets you know in no uncertain terms that the singer is a mysterious, sinister and troubled kinda guy…a Matt Johnson move that suggests there’s a few The The records in his collection. This device is often overused on records to signal ‘alienation’, and its unthinking appearance here is emblematic of the poor attitude of the whole record. Apart from a sound like scraping a cymbal (interestingly used as a rhythm track on the sixth track), there is little sign of anything imaginative about this disc. It’s refreshing to hear modern bands making use of violins, strings and piano, instruments not usually associated with a rock context - step forward Tindersticks or Belle and Sebastian, both of whom are OK although I personally find that contrived scene a bit of a blind alley. However Labradford for their part can’t come up with a decent tune, nor do they have sufficient imagination to do anything special with the delicate arrangements they’ve taken such trouble over. A big difference between them and Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman and co is that those easy-listening arrangers were at least masters of the sweet melody. Granted, we welcome more alternatives to loudness in modern music (this quiet disc is thus a relief from thumping dance music) but Labradford’s lamebrain approach isn’t a successful one. And if I ever hear that expansive Ry Cooder-style slide guitar used to suggest ‘atmosphere’ again, I’ll tape over my copy of Paris Texas. The coup de grace for this listener was the final long track with its banal Play School image of a Hawaiian island paradise (gently descending xylophone notes = a trickling stream, you get the idea), the only surprise being that Labradford resisted the temptation to add the cliched sound of breaking surf. Just how ‘alternative’ is this supposed to be?
HARLEY RICHARDSON
Aqueous and Roedelius
Meeting the Magus
UNITED KINGDOM HERMETIC HERM 4444 CD (1997)
Two musos of the ‘tasteful’ persuasion with their very expensive synthesizer suites have managed to hook up with German big-guy Hans-Joachim Roedelius. This CD is the result, twittering in your face with its electronic sounds ranging from the pleasant and twee to the unbearably naff, with very little in between. Andrew Heath and Felix Jay were clearly thrilled at ‘meeting the magus’, and I suspect their awed respect has paralysed their creative forces somewhat. As to Roedelius’ motivation, who knows; it’s a far cry from his Eno collaborations, and an even further one from Cluster. Felix Jay brought his black boxes to play with Roedelius on stage in London 19/11/97, and his contributions didn’t add a great deal then, either.
ED PINSENT
Trial of the Bow
Rite of Passage
USA RELEASE RECORDS RR 6950-2 CD (1996)
Don’t bother buying this, it’s far too tasteful and pseudo to have in your home. But there’s one nice little ethereal droney track called ‘The Eyre of Awakening’ which I spin now and again; expect it to be sampled by Loop Guru or a canny DJ before long, either that or these geeks will be playing on Sting’s next LP. Trial of the Bow are two harmless Australian clods who create this ’sensual, tribal music’ utilising both ethnic and modern instruments. Bleah.
ED PINSENT
Piano Magic
Popular Mechanics
UNITED KINGDOM CHE 2102 CD (1997)
Don’t throw flimsy sub-categories at Piano Magic! Popular Mechanics is not a piece of Isolationist Electronica, though lengthy passages consist of pure machine-stress crackle. This ain’t synth pop either, even if rinky dink Kraftwerkian melodies sprout up when abstraction momentarily peters out. Then there’s Concrete-style natural sounds and quirky female monologues about lathes, Raleigh bikes, logarithms and baking… Disparate, yet somehow seamless this first Piano Magic disk begs to be heard in its entirety - as an evolving soundscape. If there’s a unifying mood it’s one of mysterious domestic quietude. Maybe those anonymous boffins (a duo?) are heirs to the weird gentility of the BBC Radiophoinc Workshop? Their 7″ For Engineers (Wurlitzer Jukebox WJ26) sounded like the tinkerings of two amiable electricians in a potting shed. Whatever your choice, you shouldn’t regret taking a detour down Piano Magic’s garden path.
JOHN BAGNALL
Stephen Fellows
Mood X
UNITED KINGDOM ENGLISH ELECTRIC RECORDS CSA 301 CD (1997)
Krel
Ad Astra
UNITED KINGDOM DED ERNEST DERNCD 11 CD (1997)
Curious…Fellows, some of you may remember, was the flange-loving guitarist in 1980s group The Comsat Angels, support act at many a duff gig. Here he turns in a CD’s worth of Ambient / Space Rock solo studio experiments. An artist developing his innate talents for electronica, or a cynical cash-in on the latest fads? Either way, this heap of helpings is overlong, where an EP’s worth might have been acceptable. Each track is a two or three minute stab in the dark (one of them using a cigarette lighter as a sound source - pretty avant-garde huh?); everything suggests a rather mediocre talent switching restlessly between gadgets in the very expensive train set of the recording studio. Only a couple of tracks ‘Take 4′ and ‘Whoosh Part Two’ cross the three-minute barrier and begin to develop, but not far enough into ‘Whoosh’ territory. Nothing objectionable, but singularly unspectacular.
Krel’s Ad Astra is an unpretentious dyed-in-the-wool retro item, heavily influenced by the Hawkwind school of 70s Space Rock, and plugs into an entire subculture of fans who love this style of music (and probably little else, one assumes). Played mostly by Martin M of Manchester, here are comfortingly familiar monosyllabic power chord loop riffs, chiming acoustic guitars, phasing effects and oodles of cosmic synth tones. Can be convincing enough when he stays in the groove, but half the force is lost when the beat stops dead to let the track segue rather clumsily into inert synth washes while the creator stares wistfully into the sunset. Other tracks almost resemble the kind of background music used in the Discovery Channel, or by Polytechnic Media students attempting to emulate such films. One Hawkwind is probably enough for this country; they’re like our Grateful Dead in terms of a dedicated legion of blinkered fans, though nowhere near as interesting musically. From the Star Trek typeface on the cover to the banal chocolate box photographs, there’s nothing in this package to surprise or enlighten you, but it is graced with an unassuming charm (despite pretentious sci-fi lyrics, Martin is not a pompous ego-tripping soloist) which wins hands down over the cynical career-move flavour of Mood X.
ED PINSENT
Sophia
Fixed Water
THE FLOWER SHOP RECORDINGS FLOWCD 004
I like a good serving of depressing music as much as the next maladjust, but it’s hard to be affected by the likes of Sophia. The message of Robin Proper’s lyrics seems to be simply ‘life is unfair’, but he expresses this commonplace truth in extremely mundane and pointless terms. The lyrics read like the work of a dour sixth-former cataloguing their misfortunes. If Daniel Johnston’s words are a positive and cathartic expression of pain (for both performer and audience) then Sophia’s is a humourless and self-pityig drain on everyone’s energies. Their music is a stumbling block too, with the band’s cod attempt to be melancholic, sketching in songs soullessly with a mix of lazy finger-picking and slightly detuned acoustic and electric guitars (as if they’ve tried to emulate a single aspect of Neil Young’s music, unable to see the other interesting elements that go into it). I much prefer those parts of this LP where the music is at odds with the apparent intention of the lyrics - in particular on ‘So Slow’ and ‘Happy When You’re Sad’, where the band lock together and a creative spark not otherwise in evidence is suddenly ignited, producing two uplifting gems. An NME journo would probably call Sophia’s music ‘the sound of suicide’ - but as far as I’m concerned the aforementionned two tracks are great reasons for being alive.
HARLEY RICHARDSON