Tagged: avant-rock

May 19, 2013

Unfolk + Live Book: psychedelic journey and call for justice in folk music adventures

Alessandro Monti, Unfolk + Live Book, Diplodisc, 2 x CD DIPL 005/6 (2012)

News reached me the other day of a young software engineer Amanda Ghassaei who etched a Radiohead album with a laser cutter on a wooden disc. She’s also etched other audio recordings onto acrylic and paper. Phooey, you all say, a wooden music-playing record has been made before. WHAT?! I had to find out and sure enough one Heracleum Ipotesis had done it way back when in the High Middle Ages to preserve his “unfolk” music compositions – or so says one Alessandro Monti who with his Unfolk Collective music combo have had their “Unfolk” album from 2006 remastered and reissued with a bonus CD of reworked songs from a previous album “The Venetian Book of the Dead”.

Most tracks on the remastered “Unfolk” disc might have Italian-language titles but the music draws influences from Irish folk music traditions, Indian ragas, Arab and Venetian mediaeval Venetian lute music among other music genres. The journey through the disc is an interesting one: it’s as much a tour through Western contemporary popular music turns on “folk” and tracks like “Aerofolk” feature mind-expanding space cosmic music played on electric guitar, synthesiser and other electronic keyboards, giving a soundtrack that wouldn’t be out of place in the corpus of works by the likes of Can or Amon Düül 2. Speaking of “Aerofolk”, I think that’s becoming my favourite track here the more I listen to it for its sense of wide-eyed wonder and joy in exploring inner and outer space. Generally the happier the music on the album sounds, the better it is; the music that’s melancholy, brooding or contemplative tends to come across as a bit ordinary. One curious coincidence I note is that the violin melody on track 11 matches, note for note, the violin tune on Swedish 1970s space / folk rock group Älgarnas Trädgård’s song “Children of Possibilities” from that band’s first album; I think it’s likely both bands have used the same mediaeval tune.

Disc 2 “Live Book” sees a different set of musicians around Monti playing live in Mestre near Venice and in Leicester in 2011. About half the tracks from “The Venetian Book of the Dead”, referring to the workers and people who lost their lives to cancer and other diseases as a result of industrial accidents in areas around Venice and Mestre during the 1970s and 1980s, appear here. Subordinate to the lyrics, the music adopts moods appropriate to their message: dark, smoky and urgent (“Someone is always screwing someone”) and blunt, blaring and impassioned (“Forgive”). The best track here though is an excursion into a nostalgia for various 20th century music genres that had their roots in Afro-American oppression, poverty and despair: “Bedroom discotheque” gets its soulful, wistful emotion from the beautiful acoustic guitar and electric cello melodies and changes in key that bring on an extra layer of dark desperation to vocalist Kevin Hewick’s singing. Through repetition of the lyrics, Hewick tries to push back an enormous and relentless advance of ice that threatens to wipe out an entire structure of music historical and cultural memory. His lyrical venture into hiphop seems awkward and ill-advised though, as if he can’t quite figure out how this music, born in poverty and violence-ridden ghettoes, and others like it came to be unashamed whores for the global music industry. The music is a mix of unfolk, blues and rock with a slight dominance by electric guitars and other electrified musical instruments.

Some very good music is featured on both discs but there are also passages of quite stodgy instrumental music, especially on the latter half of Disc 2 where the music takes a more pessimistic and embittered turn with tracks like “The radioactive man”. Monti’s quest for social justice in his music hasn’t quite reached the stage where he might start tackling the true sources of oppression in our society, going after banks in their usurpation of control of global economies and their links with corporations across the world including the arms industry, and the media, both “conservative” and “progressive”, alike for pulling huge chunks of wool over our eyes; and then generally calling for people to take back their power and do whatever they can under their control, no matter how small or petty, to create or recreate a fair world. I’m hoping he’s moving in that direction.

In an age in which most music produced these days is under the thumb of global media corporations and even the music of traditional societies from the past or in the current present is shaped and packaged by the music industry as an endless array of exotica, divorced from its original contexts, for consumption by tourists, Monti’s concept of unfolk music may be intended as a challenge to such concepts.

May 12, 2013

Horn Beam Fantasmas

Loopy and intense noisy jazz rock blurt from Cactus Truck, a trio which showcases the saxophone malarkey of John Dikeman as much as the tangled guitar lines of Jasper Stadhouders, while drummer Onno Govaert urges these two rabid loons to propel themselves over the cliff edge. Their album Brand New For China! (PUBLIC EYESORE NO. 119) has a ten-minute opening salvo which will let the listener know instantly if they’ve the stomach to stick around for more of the same. These “spiky” fellows have caused much agitation in and around Amsterdam where they are based (this was recorded in a Netherlands studio), but many improvisers and veteran jazzmen on the international circuits also tip their hats to Cactus Truck. They make sure to put on gardening gloves first, though. I’d like to report a melange of Albert Ayler lines on top of Beefheartian blues rhythms, but their ultra-aggressive music favours surface sound and technique over structure. Not that you’ll notice as you succumb to the joyous free energy on offer here. (09/07/2012)

From the Belgian duo NDE we have Kampfbereit (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR146CD), their second release which in typography and cover art at least is “disguised” as a Black Metal album, but turns out to be a wild experiment in suffocating, extreme noise – situated in the “Death Industrial” sub-sub-genre, as the press notes would have it. As they hurl around their buckets of distortion, hammering percussion, and excessively filtered screaming vocals, NDE also prove they can do dynamic changes pretty well, and the album is designed almost purely as an extreme listening experience, where we are given few clues or map points and the listener’s imagination must work hard to process the scrambled information. A few quieter tracks paint “bleak and empty” vistas of desolate misery, but most of the content is simply intolerably repellent and over-layered loud noise. A painful and torturous journey to the depths of a Pandemonium-styled Hades. (28/07/2012)

Is it too early to say Northern Spy Records are taking up the slack from ESP-Disk? The latter label used to make a point in the 1960s of signing up eccentric performers from rock’s margins, some of them recruited direct from the street, and gradually made history thereby (even if they sold few records at the time). I’m getting a similar vibe from Diamond Terrifier, although my impression is based largely on the photo inside the gatefold of Kill The Self That Wants To Kill Your Self (NORTHERN SPY RECORDS NSCD026), and I may be misreading it completely. This odd record is a one-man show by Sam Hillmer, who exhibits untrammelled raw passion when playing his saxophone, recorded in strange ways and at strange times, with minimal (or zero) accompaniment. That woodwind instrument has rarely sounded so other-worldly. It’s not just microphone placement, either; Hillmer is reaching down into a very deep personal place to extract these hollow bellows and loosing them into the ether like mind-drenching fog clouds. Diamond Terrifier, who cutely expresses his name as <>T, is a truly original primitive. This is his debut record; will the world allow a second release? P.S. – the fauvist version of the American flag on back cover is a nice touch, clues us in to the “alternative” universe of Mr. Hillmer. (19/07/2012)

Blindshore is James Adkisson, a Texas guitarist who used to play in Seven Percent Solution. Hollow (SELF-RELEASED) is a solo album on which he plays everything, and freely owns up to his influences – some of them rather conventional, such as Adrian Belew or Brian May, along with his first loves Fripp and Sonic Youth. The results are agreeable and competent modern rock music, but given his proclivities for progressive rock and melody (no bad things, I hasten to add), Blindshore is unlikely to be mistaken for a carbon-copy of solemn post-rockers such as Isis or Red Sparowes. Adkisson’s vocals are a tad thin, but he uses the singing voice as another instrument in his very thickened mixes, where no space is left unfilled and there is barely space for the listener to move. (18/07/2012)

Attacca are an improvising trio based in Berlin active since 2010, who declare O’ The Emotions! (SCHRAUM 15). Two German players, the trombonist Mattias Müller and the bassist Axel Haller, are joined by Canadian Dave Bennett, a refugee electro-acoustic student who has made his home in Europe’s financial capital and contributes guitar to the trio’s sound. Attacca seem to be all about the very rich sound they make together, rather than owing much of a debt to jazz or even improvised music, and don’t wish to draw attention to their respective techniques. Instead, we hear a compelling and integrated combination of tones and textures, with repetitions and patterns arrived at by very natural means. The ebbs and flows of this watery gelatin suck us in like so much quicksand. The “emotions” of the title are thus very hard to name or identify, and clearly they can only be processed by the players through their exploratory work. (12/07/2012)

More splendidly sickened and corrupted computer noise from dsic, the New Zealand expat who lives in Bristol and whose LF Records netlabel rarely disappoints. Public Benefits, Private Vices (LF020) is one of his more aggressive concoctions, seething with hateful noise for most of its duration, and feeling entitled to pummel the listener’s head with cruel buffets. When this punch-up with a street drunk subsides, we are left with curious passages of disaffected half-noise, which pulsate and sizzle like an angry insect poised to strike again. The only variations to the above scheme are found with the final track, a soothing potion of pure tones deployed in random fashion; and the curious voice loops which last for 36 seconds on track two. Whole album could erupt into violence at any moment, creating a tense and invigorating spin. When I grow tired of “polite” and well-manicured laptop music, I always turn to dsic, a man who’s never afraid to show his Samsung just who wears the pants in his house! (24/07/2012)

Just heard from Alfredo Costa Monteiro yesterday, and here he is again as part of an ad-hoc trio called 300 Basses, with Jonas Kocher and Luca Venitucci. Sei Ritornelli (POTLATCH P212) was recorded in late 2011 when the three of them were on a residency in Switzerland. Although I personally would welcome the formation of an orchestra of 300 musicians playing only the upright double bass (and hopefully doing so at the Hot Gates), the music of 300 Basses is in fact predicated on the accordion. Continuing to pursue his radical, deconstructionist approach to conventional instruments, Monteiro attempts to refashion the very workings of the accordion according to his own diabolical schemes, rethinking the respective purposes of the bellows, keys and buttons. If applied to to the fields of biology or zoology, I suspect his “what-if” approach would lead to his being banned under various international anti-vivisection agreements. The resultant horrors are laid bare on this extreme record, where to my ears the accordions simply seem to be begging for mercy under this cruel and unusual treatment. Still, that’s clearly the intention. Kocher used to make me a little impatient with his earlier slow-moving minimalist releases like Materials and Solo, but there’s a little more fire to be heard in this collaborative work. (09/07/2012)

May 12, 2013

Kentucky: an impassioned and fiery black metal / bluegrass clarion call for justice and the preservation of history

Panopticon, Kentucky, Pagan Flames, CD (2012)

My loyal, faithful fans – they probably number no more than a few misguided and socially maladjusted souls in desperate need of a more fulfilling life – who’ve been following my blatherings on TSP for many years will know that sometimes I get quite political and go off on rants totally unrelated to the music under review. Here at last is a recording over which I can now wax lyrical over politics and social justice; into the bargain also is the fact that it’s a black metal album! Yessiree, that most “apolitical” and socially apathetic of music genres has yielded an inspired and impassioned recording that comes down squarely on the side of one of the most marginalised, impoverished, embattled and least celebrated groups in modern America: the people, in particular the coal-miners, of the Appalachian mountain region in the eastern US. USBM one-man band Panopticon’s “Kentucky” revolves around the history of the struggles of the coal-miners of eastern Kentucky against their employers, the state and federal governments, and established religion for the right to form trade unions, improve their wages and working and living conditions, and give their families and communities a decent life.

The music is a splendid mix of aggressive and pile-driving black metal, stirring bluegrass music performed on banjo and violin, melodic post-rock and spoken voice and found sound recordings. Together with its subject matter, “Kentucky” comes close to being something a more fired-up Godspeed You Black Emperor could have produced if that band had incorporated some black metal aspects. Particular highlights of the album include Panopticon leader A. Lunn’s adaptation of “Come All Ye Coal Miners” which finishes with brief coal-mine work ambience and a brief speech on the history of the exploitation of mine workers and the land alike; “Black Soot and Red Blood” which details the battles the miners fought against a formidable multi-headed enemy; and the instrumental outro track “Kentucky”, a beautiful homage on banjo, resonator and mandolin to the mountains and forests of Kentucky state and the ghosts of people who died defending their lands and communities.

Songs on the album are arranged in a historical time-line form the early history of native Americans to the present and the music proceeds from the personal – two locations in rural Kentucky dear to A Lunn’s heart – to the historical and general.

Admittedly this is not a perfect work – some of the black metal can be repetitive and bombastic and the vocal on “Black Waters” is so distant and blurry that the lyrics can hardly be heard – but the sentiment behind the music is a deeply felt one and powers it all the way through the album. “Kentucky” is a clarion call to all decent-minded people to remember the history of the coal miners in Appalachia and their fight for a decent life, and to support present efforts of community and environmental groups to preserve the lands and natural resources of southeastern Kentucky.

Some of the profits from sales of this album are being donated to fight the use of mountain-top removal as a mining method in Kentucky. Mountain-top removal is a particularly hideous and devastating form of large-scale mining: it involves using dynamite or other explosives to blast away forest, top soil and hundreds of vertical metres of rock to expose coal seams. The debris is dumped into nearby valleys and river-beds, causing silt-up and disrupting the natural flow of streams and rivers. The consequences of this form of mining, while it dispenses with the expense and hazards involved in sending miners underground, can be imagined: air pollution including toxic aerial chemicals, increased soil erosion in affected areas, increased risks of flash-flooding and mudslides threatening homes and communities, pollution of groundwater to name a few.

In addition, the areas affected by mountain-top removal in both Kentucky and neighbouring parts of West Virginia state have historic, cultural and archaeological significance as several of them were the scenes of bitter fighting in the Battle of Blair Mountain, fought by 10,000 coal-miners and supporters against mining companies, local law enforcement and eventually the US Army, in West Virginia in 1921. Several thousand coal-miners who took part in this battle, the largest armed civil uprising in US history after the American Civil War, came over from Kentucky; the miners also received support from local communities, in particular from returned WW1 veterans and medical people who treated wounded miners. The uprising was crushed severely and miners were forced back into the mines on pay and working conditions made worse than before. However the battle also raised public awareness of and sympathy for the appalling working conditions that coal-miners had to face, and eventually in the 1930s the miners benefited from political, social and economic changes brought about by President Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal policies.

However as the fight to preserve Blair Mountain from mining demonstrates, the battle for worker rights and to preserve the memory of this battle continues.

Contact: Pagan Flames

April 20, 2013

The End of the World News

Koji Asano remains as productive and as enigmatic as ever. This Japanese emperor of distorted drone released Travel Coupons (SOLSTICE 047) in June 2012, his 47th new record, and I know for sure there’s another new release from him awaiting me in one of the forthcoming bags. This one has a travel-themed title and a couple of touristy photos from unidentified locales on the cover, plus it comes with a free pack of Koji Asano paper tissues, the kind of complimentary gewgaw you used to be given on airlines. The front cover is, we have to admit, a shade less impenetrable than the average Koji cover – with its attention to framing and composition executed in a manner that might almost satisfy the demands of a renaissance painter, its use of primary colours, and the incidence of a number and two road signs,all giving us signs – potentially loaded semiotic information we might stand a chance of decoding into something useful. No such luck with the music though, which remains nebulous and evasive, obdurate in its refusal to give out with the clues. For a change we have two tracks instead of the usual Asano ploy which is to conquer the listener’s resistance with a single hour’s worth of strange music which pretty does one thing. Track one is the usual faceless electronic drone music treated with wobbly reverb effects to induce travel nausea, which I think Koji has done to disarming effect on another release in the last few years. The second track is rather different though, a kaleidoscope of spinning layers of abstract blurriness which don’t quite overlap. The listener keeps hoping for the shapes to resolve into a meaningful pattern of some sort, but we’re kept on the edge of expectation for 48 minutes. It’s as though Koji had been to a week-long avant-garde music festival which featured several large orchestral works by Stockhausen, and was enjoying a drunken memory of the music he head heard on the long flight home as he slumped exhausted in his seat.

The unclassifiable Tetrix from Calgary send us their new item 28 June 2012. it might be called Tetrix 11 or T11, unless that’s the catalogue number, and it’s their version of a radio play. On this sprawling and bewildering work, their experimental music and fractured avant-rock songs are interspersed with sound effects and cut-ups of radio jingles, plus distorted fragments of real or imaginary radio announcers, cars driving while playing car radios, and tiny excerpts of little plays within a play. Radio play concept albums are an intriguing device, and one that I sometimes wish more musicians would make use of, but when they do they often descend into pretentious concept-album nonsense. In the electro-acoustic area, the most successful example I can think of was Roger Doyle’s Babel / KBBL from 1999. Predictably, Tetrix have a very oblique approach to the task, and their original concept of a radio play is likewise pretty deranged from the get-go. They create a highly compelling and textured sound-jumble full of confusing scene-changes and corresponding acoustical shocks that succeeds admirably – if the aim is maximum listener disorientation. Eventually however a science-fiction story of some sort emerges, including what might be their own spot-on impersonation of War of the Worlds by the Mercury Theater, and this develops into an end-of-the-world scenario relayed through dramatic snippets, including the clever device of characters within the radio play learning information from listening to the radio. Throughout the enfolding apocalypse, Tetrix maintain a cheery and upbeat vibe to the work, and it’s often hard to know when their tongues are in their cheeks or how to separate out the parodic elements in this elaborate mash-up. Even the innocent-looking retro Space Invaders on the cover art somehow assume a slightly sinister bent. With this release, Tetrix may have just found the ideal form of expression for their bonkers multi-faceted style of music: their obvious facility with many musical modes, which apparently grates with some audiences, fits perfectly into this loosely-structured narrative framework. And even if you don’t appreciate either the songs or the story, this release succeeds purely as a sound experience; the wealth of detail and “busy-ness” is quite astounding, with wild dynamics, dramatic changes, tasty textures, filters and studio treatments layered on with relish. And of course it is issued in a suitably gimmicky cover, although by their past standards this one is positively restrained in its colour scheme and use of foldouts.

Time for another item from Italy’s Lisca Records. Culver & Karst serve up a single 33-minute track on Mile High Volcano (LISCA 009), which proves to be no more than an dull and inert rumbling sound, largely unvaried for its duration. It doesn’t have the force or energy to qualify as Harsh Noise, and while the title promises some form of explosive orgasmic sensation, the actual results fail to satisfy.

A large number of musicians are gathered together as the Insub Meta Orchestra, recruited from parts of Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe; about 40 of them may be heard on Archive #1 (INSUBCD04), which I think is the first attempt to release some of their collective experiments after about a year of working together. The six tracks here were distilled and selected from three days of activity during the summer of 2011 in Geneva, and d’incise – who also plays in the Orchestra – released this as a download and physical item on his Insubordinations Netlabel. Given the scale of the enterprise and the large number of instruments, including quite a few electric guitars and electronic musicians, the listener might be expecting chaos, an unkempt, roaring noise. Instead Archive #1 is the document of a very restrained and subdued mass-encounter between sympathetic exploring musicians. It seems many of the participants were likewise anticipating an unholy mess to be the result of this project, but instead a mutual respect developed and a subtle movement towards some form of shared consciousness was a noted phenomenon. By a mixture of unspoken agreements, free improvisation, and semi-structured conduction techniques, this quiet and slow music was created. This is not the mystical massed droning of The Taj Mahal Travellers, nor does it have the tautness and rigour of any given “Onkyo” or “Reduced Improv” ensemble. But there is a genuine commitment to exploration and experimentation, which is refreshing to behold even if the players are sometimes tentative, and the results are somewhat flabby and inconclusive. There are some intriguing sonic combinations; a lot of it is produced by all-acoustic instruments or voices, which is encouraging (only a single laptop musician in the roster); and the album is not an unpleasant listen by any means. But the music still lacks direction, shape, and tension.

March 10, 2013

Old Earth: four-part opus doesn’t quite satisfy as jazz / death metal chamber music piece

Ehnahre, Old Earth, Crucial Blast, CD CBR99 (2011)

Ehnahre are new to me but this trio from Boston, Massachusetts, has been active since 2008 when they released their debut full-length album. These guys play an unstructured and doom-influenced style of death metal that’s very close to heavy improv jazz. “Old Earth” is the group’s third album and is based on a short essay by 20th century Irish avant-garde writer Samuel Beckett. The album consists of one piece broken up into four tracks or movements and by that structure derives as much of its inspiration from forms of classical and chamber music as it does from jazz, doom, hardcore and death metal. Guest musicians include trumpet players Greg Kelley and Forbes Graham, and the ever-trusty eminence grise studio engineer and sometime musician James Plotkin turns up on mastering duties. The guys sometimes come across as sounding a bit like Japan’s slow-burning doomsters Corrupted mixed in with some of their more extreme jazz / improv / metal brethren like Boredoms, Fushitsusha and Ruins.

After a warm-up introduction which includes something that sounds like a distant radio recording of a singer followed by a forlorn piano melody, the threesome play some very quiet guitar and noodle about for several minutes. At the half-way point, the track finally explodes into some fiery spitfire jazz death metal separated by passages of sulky guitar meditations. A haggard death metal vocal yells out lyrics based on the Beckett text while bass guitar surges forward on long booming drone, drums keep busy on fast rhythms and guitars either follow the bass guitar.

The second movement is a mood piece that privileges a chamber music style with the use of double bass as a solo instrument in parts. The clear production on this track underlines the decision to play the track as an acoustic piece. With the solo double bass followed by solo electric guitar, the track appears disjointed and the momentum built up by the first movement is lost. Late in the track, Kelley and Graham join in on trumpets but their performance is very subsidiary to the lead guitar and listeners could query whether the guest musicians are really needed at all.

Doomy death metal credibility is regained in the third movement but at this point I wonder why Ehnahre risked doing a long second piece that takes away all the energy and aggression of the first movement only to have to claw it all back in the third. By the time we reach Track 3, we are two-thirds of the way through the album. After a short, edgy piece marked by stealthy rhythm, the fourth movement comes as a dive into an existential inferno with the main vocalist screaming in torment.

This is an interesting album but the music is very uneven: the first two movements are long, each well over ten minutes, while the last two pieces fit entirely into the running-time of Track 1. You’d normally expect the third movement to be very important because in a four-movement work, the third must build on the efforts of the previous two movements in intensity and tension to a gut-wrenching climax; the fourth movement deals with the climax itself and the consequences that follow, and then it would just tidy all the loose ends and clean up the splatter on the floor and walls. We don’t get anything of the sort here on “Old Earth”. The flow of tension and energy across the album is uneven: the first movement did well in building up that tension but the second track lost it. This means that the third track has the unenviable job of performing its traditional function plus pick up that tension and conflict in the space of five minutes! “Old Earth” ends up being a lesser album than it could have been. There is not one God-Almighty tension-releasing pyrotechnics display anywhere here: the recording is more or less low-key throughout. Your listening experience will be an intriguing one at times but it’ll also be frustrating.

As a metal album, “Old Earth” certainly proves there’s plenty of life in doom and death metal when they come into contact with avant-garde jazz. It’s a bit of a shame though that Ehnahre seem too enamoured with the idea of playing with the structure of the music to upset expectations of how music builds up to a climax and then comes down, and somewhere in the middle lets go of some tension before climbing up again. Sometimes there are things you just should not deconstruct just for the hell of it, even with unstructured and out-there music.

Contact: Crucial Blast Recordings

March 5, 2013

Breed in Me the Darkness: demon hybrid child needs to spread its wings and rejoice in full satanic blackened noise glory

Sutekh Hexen and Andrew Liles, Breed in Me the Darkness, Aurora Borealis Records, cassette (2012)

(NB Album scheduled for CD and vinyl release in mid-March 2013)

Prominent players in the black metal / noise/ drone scene, the Californian band Sutekh Hexen (Scott Miller and Kevin Gan Yuen) teams up with sound artist Andrew Liles to produce this album of two Sutekh Hexen tracks plus their respective remixes. Having someone like Liles, a long-time Nurse With Wound collaborator, chew up Sutekh Hexen tracks might seem a bit superfluous as Sutekh Hexen would appear to have the intense blown-out blackened noise soundscape genre all sewn up with nothing left for anyone to work with into something even more forbidding and extreme but Liles has managed to control and sculpt the tracks to his own out-there specifications. The threesome even cram the originals and the remixes into the modest physical format of a 45-minute cassette tape.

Unusually the first side opens with the remix of “We Once Walked Upon These Coals” with the original following after. Stern piano melodies, brimming with sinister portent, take us into a black passage of ambient horror-expectancy: a deeper melody, steely and rumbling, generally contrasts with a shrill, icy-toned trilling tune. Ghostly wobble and susurrating sound fill the background void. The track slides into a fluttering machine ambience as if a giant mosquito drone the size of a passenger jet were hovering just above. Meanwhile a crowd of voices starts gabbling faraway. Machine-like rhythm guitar riffs start churning out and are joined by an evil lead guitar solo trilling up and down the music scale in joyful, deranged mirth. For a brief time, Liles turns Sutekh Hexen into a Satanic heavy metal band. Fear not, SH aren’t going cartoony-evil, the guitar solo halts and that hellish monster-insect flutter-churn resumes its baleful rhythm.

It’s hard to tell where the remix ends and the original track begins due to the cassette format used but I take the break between tracks as that brief moment of quiet before a series of explosions begins that expands into pealing church bells and a choir of phantom voices that bleed into the metallic bell tones and the swirling mess in the background. Various found sounds – screaming women, twittering birds, the metal mosquito drone, a malevolent chanting priest conducting a Satanic ritual among others – fill the song.

Side B sees SH burst out with manic cloudbursts of blackened guitar noise buzz, ripping through the black atmosphere with a sharp hissy edge reminiscent of a high-pressure water hose spewing its product; this might be a highly distorted vocal. The song quickly exhausts itself and drifts into a ghostly pall that roams widely over a bleak and dark landscape. Liles’ take on “Selling Light to Lesser Gods” reconstructs it in reverse: the remix rises quickly out of the void into which the original disappeared with church organ droning as its companion. A choir of demon choristers howl wordless hymns of damnation from their perches and stalls in the blackest parts of Hell. Piercing vocal hiss sounds stab through the track, pronouncing vile curses upon listeners foolish enough to have followed the recording this far. A maddened organ accompaniment is interrupted by shattering glass and the track passes into another realm of blackened ambient hell where the phantom choristers find their voice again. A layer of fuzzy black metal guitar noise loops repeatedly into a sudden outburst of digital sandstorm chaos, beneath which grit coalesces into a demon voice trying to say something. The whole thing stutters into a rapid train rhythm cut short by shattering glass.

The two tracks and their remixes are good though they might have been better on a CD format: the kind of blackened experimental soundscape noise that SH traffics in needs contrasts of sharp sound, blurry noise and other distortions in sound texture and production to bring out the best in all sound textures used. There’s a point in the music where the entire sound universe passes to a deeper, more sinister plane of existence and a CD format would have brought that transformation into clearer focus. As it is, the album isn’t bad but I think the beast that the trio has created is cramped in a sound cage and must have a different format to spread its wings and fly in full monstrous majesty. The ambient and sound-sculpture aspects of SH almost disappear in the cassette format and the music is in danger of sounding one-dimensional much of the time.

Contact: Aurora Borealis Records

February 28, 2013

Go Back to the Sirius: voyage into multi-dimensional psychedelic realms

3841355101-1 — “A traffic jam of space-ships quickly develops…”

VagusNerve, Go Back to the Sirius, Utech Records, URCD073 (2012)

Are they serious? No way would you want to return to the “serious” world of reality after travelling to Sirius with these space travellers. VagusNerve is a Chinese-based duo of guitarist Li Jianhong and laptopper Vavabond and this is their second release for Utech Records. Initially this seems like just another very long and trippy psychedelic voyage into the deep inner space in our heads until the musicians turn on the full radioactive force of blaring guitar feedback and electronic drones, dolphin whistles, low-end buzz and ghostly phantom voices. In the background, coelenterate UFOs float, land on planets, arise and hover in the atmosphere, their fragile tendril-like tentacles wafting behind them. Barking seal voices reverberate in the black clouds and extended guitar drones reach out in all directions from an unseen singularity. A traffic jam of space-ships quickly develops: perpetual motion engines hum furiously, anti-matter drives are on the verge of exploding/imploding, thrumming vibrations and rapidly spinning energy vortices howl and wobble on the edge of chaos and diffusion through all the galaxies.

That was “The Memory of Light” alone and second track “The Exiled Life” is a bit more subdued but no less disorienting in its swerving highs and lows. Vocals are much less blurry and more forward in the track but still very watery and distorted as though Li was speaking to us from a multi-dimensional plane and our particular inadequate space-time continuum was cramming all the different dimensions into its own crude tunnel. This can still be a noisy piece but it appears less exuberant and more restrained in character.

However it’s the third and final track “Go Back to the Sirius” which is as hard-edged, penetrating and searingly hot as it is deliriously expansive and cosmic in scope and ambition. Laser death rays of attack guitar pass through all defences and scan all the cells in living organisms while faint background droning probes and collects fragments of DNA for future experimentation. Eerie and sinister alien communications pop in and out, sinuous effects flutter into view before disappearing quickly into the ether, and faint phantasms bark and whine while Li’s increasingly stuttering guitar drones command all our attention with their insistent howls and yelps. Eventually this work passes to another plane of existence and calms down considerably yet retains a hysterical edge.

This is a wondrous work if heard loudly late at night when the mind is relaxed and submerging into semi-conscious mode; at other times, the music can sometimes seem monotonous and single-minded, even cantankerous in its insistence on commanding your full attention. I have a sense that “Go Back to the Sirius” might win cult status for this act in years to come, not so much for the music but for its ambition and vision, not to mention the duo pushing their instruments and imagination to the utmost.

Contact: Utech Records

February 25, 2013

In Memoriam J. G. Ballard: muzak soundtrack to Ballard’s novels

Altieri / Balestrazzi / Becuzzi, In Memoriam J. G. Ballard, Old Europa Cafe AVS, OECD 159 (2012)

First work dedicated to the English novelist J G Ballard I’ve ever come across, “In Memoriam …” is quite a good album of melodic and rhythmic industrial/electronic music that attempts to capture something of the particular universe of the author’s novels which in their own way criticised the direction and values of Western society and the popular culture it produced. Each track is named after a novel that Ballard wrote and some of his more famous works like “Crash” and “The Atrocity Exhibition” are referenced.

To be honest, the music is more pleasant and even more unified than what I had expected. The entire album can be heard as one united work of slightly different chapters; I think Ballard’s work was rather more varied than that. Although there is plenty of power electronics hissing, seething and foaming to be found on a track like “Crash”, the industrial pulsating rhythms of that track are more soothing than alarming. I thought there would be screeching tyres, the shatter of windows and the scrunching of metal upon metal mixed in with the groaning and gasping and other mechanics of sexual intercourse to emphasise the central role that automobiles and highways play in our lives and how our relationship with the car and the petroleum that powers it is more intimate than the relationships we might have with members of the opposite sex (and sometimes the same sex as the protagonist of the novel discovers). “The Drowned World” sounds suitably aquatic but for me it doesn’t have that languid, enervated, passive atmosphere of the original novel in which the hero, a typical Ballardian blank-slate character, allows himself to blend into his changed environment and become part of its flow and rhythm.

After a while, I learn not to have high expectations of the music and start to enjoy it as something that works well by itself. A version of “The Atrocity Exhibition” that reflects the disoriented, schizophrenic, almost psychotic nature of the novel and its structure will eventually arrive; in the meantime, the track named after the novel is a busy creature of regular railway-train rhythmic structure, sharpish high-pitched drone and murky underwater ambience. Eventually the track becomes something the novel never was: monotonous and boring.

Yes, the music can be of a very interior nature and in parts is quite sinister and alien. There are some great atmospheres of smoky cloud and digital hissing created here. But I detect very little of that inquiring Ballardian mind and wonder at the extremes of human behaviour, how very irrational by narrow conventional parameters yet totally rational from Ballard’s point of view people can be in situations where the human-technological interface pushes people away from natural forms of intimacy and interactions into more machine-like and mentally disturbed behaviours.

The album ends more quietly than disturbingly: “High Rise”, far from being a ferocious, seething prison of very proper middle class English people who resort to ripping one another apart and the conspicuous consumption that follows when they find they cannot leave their apartment block, is an unassuming industrial-lite piece of pumping rhythm and sighing clouds of noise. Damn.

Hard to say if the man himself would be enthralled by the music on offer: in his last years, Ballard found and wrote himself very deeply into a niche of dystopian comedy about upper middle class lifestyles, the artificial, isolated environments in which they are found, the stresses such environments cause to people and how normal people turn into neurotic or psychotic nutjobs as a result. The music here might serve as a kind of muzak to that period of Ballard’s work. (Hmm, in that sense, maybe Ballard would like the music.) In some ways, Ballard’s death in 2009 might be the most ironic and Ballardian aspect of the man’s life since after 2009 our world has become more and more like the universe his pen created, in which democracy, community, equality, justice and freedom mean their polar opposites, Western humanitarian aid in Third World countries destroys lives and reduces survivors to neo-colonial slavery, people sneer at the homeless and desperate refugees, and modern medicine meant to heal people and reduce their pain instead turns them into rampaging killing machines.

Contact: Old Europa Cafe

February 17, 2013

Negative Reversals

A curiously depressing and moribund piece of abstract noise from Jason Crumer. Let There Be Crumer (SECOND LAYER RECORDS SLR016) is the first I heard from this Oakland, California creator, a man who seems to court death with a rather oblique and multi-layered sophistication, as if wooing the Grim Reaper in calf-skinned gloves and tricorne hat. The music he makes is structured as a tripartite suite, which works admirably when auditioned from head to toe, leading the listener through multiple tunnels of decidedly mixed emotions, not all of them unpleasant, but somehow hard to fathom. Even the beautiful ambient music has a heaviness and bittersweet plangency to it, that somehow prevents our full enjoyment of the moments of respite that exist in Crumer’s otherwise rather bleak universe. It’s a bit like seeing the pallid sun rise at dawn through an array of grey rainclouds, while we are floating on a sea of polluted liquid in a coracle. Then there’s the triple-gatefold sleeve, almost worthy of being exhibited as a concept art statement in its own right. The internal triptych depicts stages of a violent cockfight in Asia, showing what’s at stake; agitated and desperate men, unsmilingly clutching banknotes in the cockpit as they place bets, and a dismal shot of the final outcome. I thought this final image showed dead birds littering the floor, but now I’m not sure – could they be enormous rats? A pessimistic view, which suggests human existence is both a colossal gamble and a squalid struggle to the death. Plus there’s a grisly designer cake photographed on the back cover which induces the same queasy feelings as the death’s head drawn on the disc, and as a visual analogue the cake is not too far away from that skull – if we read the coloured buttons as a row of bared teeth. The inner sleeve is also printed with surreal anecdotes set in a tiny font, just to send your brain spinning into the last stages of delirium. And if that is Mr Crumer on the cover, note how the image is treated to present a lurid visage of washed-out despair, heavily rimmed eyes to suggest lack of sleep or drug use, with an expression that still seeks understanding…the exact inverse of a James Taylor cover shot from 1971…and showing us what has become of the singer-songwriter dream that captivated a million hippies in those innocent days. The album also exhibits a strong and affecting contrast between the compelling and almost tuneful stretches of drone abstraction and the more brutal walls of extremely harsh grinding noise, but I gather that many of Crumer’s releases fit this profile and push the crazy-dynamic aesthetic as far as it can go. In short you won’t know where to put yourself, nor where to set the volume knob on your amplifier. Recommended to fans of John Duncan, particularly if you like his releases such as 1994′s Send.

Neptune‘s msg rcvd (NORTHERN SPY NSCD021) is another glorious oddity. Last heard from these American weirdnuts with their fine album Silent Partner which was the one to introduce me to their unusual world of percussion-and-electronics music, although the band has been promulgating their unique style of music around the Boston area for almost 20 years now. Time to get over the shock of those home-made instruments, which are one of their signature keynotes; let’s just accept that Jason Sandford is a sculptor, musician and just plain wayward visionary type of fellow, here providing the guitar, vocals, feedback organ, oscillator and amplified gas can to the trio’s exploits, accompanied by drummer Kevin Emil Micke and second guitarist / keyboardist Mark William Pearson. Besides the thrilling fractured-rock and electrifying pulsations of ‘Luminous Skull’, we have the more bewildering mental outing called ‘Dark Report’, a minimalist recit of unsettling poetry with only the barest percussive backdrop and shocking noisy shrieky interruptions to punctuate its odd rhythms. This track alone will separate the true believers from the drop-ins who have come in search of more oddball Krautrock-influenced music; ‘Dark Report’ is a genuine existential spooker, and grim enough to have been recorded by the original 1978 Alternative TV. Another major cut of note is ‘Negative Reversal’, a splendid bone-rattler of ramshackle metal, cracked drumming, and unpredictable oscillatory bursts, all used to deliver another cryptic lyric filled with images of skin, anatomical details, and underground-movie styled theatrics, almost a murder mystery story spat out in broken images. The closing number ‘dstl sgnl’ isn’t very uplifting either, with its forlorn spartan drumming and desultory guitar strums, again hewing close to the spirit of near-formless randomness that is the underlying trend of this record. In all, a lugubrious tone may abound on msg rcvd, but the abiding strength of Neptune is their cohesion as performers; they form a tight unit, each leaving space for the others to spread their blackened wings, and have trained themselves to be on guard against the many clichés of improvised and rock music. Particularly so in the drumming department, where they never settle for four beats to the bar – instead, these are rhythms that could wrong-foot any given herd of running giraffes or mountain goats. Neptune also understand how to use noise sparingly and expressively, thus assisting in the depiction of the uncertain emotional states hinted at in their opaque lyrics. Very strong and unusual work which deserves your listening time. This one from 29 February 2012.

The trio Grampus are from Los Angeles, and already on their debut album Ilk Ilk (PFMENTUM CD068) they make theur improvised utterances with rare assurance. The cornerstone of their sound is the modifications wrought upon brass instruments by the ever-reliable digital processor, Max/MSP. Both trumpeter Louis Lopez and trombonist Daniel Eaton go to considerable lengths to disguise, mutate and reorganise the fundamental pitches of their instruments, resulting in colourful alien tones where about 85% of the sound is totally unfamiliar to human ears, the only recognisable element being the traces of human breathing encoded in the music. The percussionist Michael Lockwood negotiates his path around these crazy, ever-expanding shapes, and his brittle attack is a stark contrast to the soft, bulbous blobs of the brass duo. Grampus certainly succeed in creating an unusual sound, and their track titles have a spiky humour. I look forward to hearing a bit more collaborative effort on their next outing, because not all these tracks cohere fully for me, sometimes descending into flabbiness too quickly. From 17 May 2012.

Mag Resistance is the duo of percussionist Mark E. Miller (Toy Killers) with the fab Matthew Wascovich, vocalist and songwriter from Scarcity Of Tanks, our favourite Cleveland band. On the cassette Voice Studies 06 (MY DANCE THE SKULL), they both provide voice elements while Miller does evil things with his mixing desk, and two splendid ten-minute rants are the result. ‘Future Of Futures’ and ‘No More Shadows’ are like political diatribes snatched from a television set broadcasting in 2026, the distorted barking tone yapping out slogans, harsh, clipped statements, and paranoid repetitions to the background of a clunkoid robotic box, sparking on all six. You gotta love the bold simplicity of this approach, like an even more stripped down version of rap music, with no tunes and no strict rhythm. In fact “megaphone and grumbling static noise” just about sums it up. But it’s the scary authority of the speaking voice, which I assume is that of Wascovich, which really makes the hidden subordinate inside of you sit up and take notice. If you listen for long enough you might just find yourself obeying any order, no matter how ludicrous. A strong and abrasive listen with a wiry core. This reminded me a lot of Uns. In fact I think these fellows need to team up with Z’EV as soon as humanly possible; the resulting project could be enough to topple the existing world order. Another from the batch of tapes received from this label 11 May 2012.

EDIT: Toy Killers added at 19:45

January 14, 2013

Four Vinyl Vamaritans

The Bunwinkies LP Maps Of Our New Constellations (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR062) is a collection of acoustic songs from these fey American types who play plenty of acoustic guitars and sing, adding many pleasing instrumental touches from the piano, slide guitar, autoharp, melodica. They are particularly good with the percussion which ornaments in spare and original ways. So far we have like a model version of a country and western backing band, only reduced and updated for the no-nonsense 21st century. But there is also the strong singing voice of Beverly Ketch put to the fore, a voice which once it’s heard will bring a ray of sunshine to every tear duct. Her lyrics are about flowers, colours, life, skies, countryside, the weather, the seasons, the grass and the trees, and such. Mainly about the joys of looking at beautiful things and what we can learn about life thereby. Only a miserable bitterling could complain about that. Another telling song on side one is celebrating the values of the family and the simple country life, as opposed to being ruled by the tyranny of the clock and working for another man, presumably in the city with a huge pocket watch strapped to the back. This is sung by one of the male Bunwinkies. Apparently they like to project the idea of a rural family ¹, even if the band members aren’t all quite related. The production is direct and clear. I like the very simple and plain arrangements – nothing is “hidden” or occluded under studio cloaks, and all the plain instrumental technique is there on full display. Pieces of homespun furniture might adorn the living room of this rural family if we ever visited. If carping, I might say their tunes are not especially original or memorable, and often the singers (the men in the band also vocalise) default to rather obvious melody lines which are already implied in their chord changes. But it’s still a jolly and assured sound they sing out with as they swagger and swing along the country road, without any free-form burbling or off-key nonsense that has oft-times been associated with lesser entries in the “free folk” genre. The album is a pleasant piece of non-weird Americana. From December 2011.

The Ship Chop LP (DEKORDER 059) is edited by Daniel Padden, the talented and visionary Glasgow composer who is also known as a member of Volcano The Bear. His Pause For The Jet LP for this label remains a fave in these quarters. This newie is a cut-up special, the result of a pro-active guerrilla raid on a record collection, perhaps his own, of ethnographic recordings. Apparently when he started his labours, he began keeping careful notes of sources, dates, countries, and other salient details that fell into his sampling sack, and then found that the work he produced was taking on a life of its own, at which point he decided the notes became superfluous. Or at any rate they were a degree of administrative detail which hampered the creative process. I take this to mean that he started out with an interest in significant geographical connections between the history of indigenous music, and then grew more interested in creating these exciting and weird collages that are a law unto themselves, coiled with an internal logic that only a Padden can explain. The results burned onto the vinyl are certainly rich in content. At any given time across these 11 tracks we could hear recordings from “at least three different countries”. Samples, snatches, loops, overlays, cut-ups, and multi-layered playbacks are among the techniques used to create this impossible fantasy of world history, expressed in tongue, foot, hand and arm. A great deal of ingenuity has been used in building these musical juxtapositions. Melody lines from weird bagpipes and horns, vocalists intoning in foreign or lost tongues, and invented rhythm patterns made perhaps from gamelan and drum samples. Unlike Ghédalia Tazartès say who would make it his mission to use ethnographic music history to terrify us with its strangeness, Padden takes a more approachable view and arrives at a sort of latterday Exotica concoction, applying the mannerisms and stylings of Martin Denny and Les Baxter as he boils and fricassees the record collection in the hard drive. He completes the assemblage (and emphasises the artifice of it all) by adding wonderfully contrived fragmented titles, some of which read like lost counsels from the writings of a wise Chinese philosopher, while some of them are just shopping lists of objects which might feasibly have been found in 1930s Africa, Peru or Thailand. Arrived November 2011.

Unusual and striking experiments in song form called Always Already (ASH INTERNATIONAL ASH 10.1) by Purity Supreme. I like the way the package presents a stern countenance explaining very little, assuming that we all know the parties involved; already the release feels like an odd riddle. Two songs on the A side. The main attraction to the listener is the singing-intoning voice of the lead ~~fellow~~ singer, who may or may not be the French half of the act. Cracked and dusty ~~his~~ their vocal cords be, whether through mannered device or naturally desiccated, trying to convey the effect of a dissolute and broken ~~man~~ person. Just right for followers of Wm Burroughs we might think, but this sort of prose-speak-sing also shades into areas once occupied by Nick Cave or Michael Gira, as does the lugubrious and dense content. The lyrics are highly ambiguous, even when they seem straight to the point and use plain English at all times. I like to hear multiple repetitions of slightly mysterious phrases in songs and Purity Supreme does this trick very well. The first song keeps saying “It’s Nice To See You”, when the mood of the singer and indeed the music itself is expressing the exact opposite of that sentiment, and it’s a song that wishes we would just go home and stay there. Angst-ridden steel strings and a relentless drum pattern make this snarky item a vicious twin brother to Leonard Cohen’s later works. The second song is slightly more recognisable as something a weary Lou Reed might have recorded at any time between 1975 and 1988, and with its basic guitar and drum sound could almost pass for any decent slab of indie art-rock music. On the flip, even more words and more repetitions in the two remaining songs. So many words, these songs are more like recited poems or short stories really, very much like a slightly nastier Tom Waits or what we might hear if Charles Bukowski turned his throaty husk to song. Indeed the words are privileged by appearing in full on the front cover. And there’s a very strong cinematic component too, with vivid film noir images somehow encoded in the very sound of the record. Narrators alluding to scenes unknown, to backstories we cannot know, and delivered with a snarling curl to the lip at all times. The creators here are the French musician Christophe Van Huffel, and the American writer-composer Leslie Winer. Quite unusual, muscular, and opaque music from these offbeat modern beatniks.

[Updated above review 16/01/2013: I think I got genders wrong and misidentified performers.]

Big Shadow Montana (HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY HMS020) is a rich abstract droner from BJ Nilsen teaming up with Stilluppsteypa. As electronic ambient mood music goes this is surprisingly rich and full of hidden information. A lot of hidden layers are buried in its vaguely shifting masses of treated sound, and odd segments bob to the surface until we can make out their shapes in the cauldron, at which point they vanish below again. Heavenly choirs, church organ, opera singers, and even some sitars are among these semi-occluded elements. The record even manages to morph into some musical passages now and again, rather than simply meandering around the textured fields of digital linoleum in padded Turkish slippers. To yield these results, much judicious selection and assembly of sources would have been a requisite discipline, methinks. A great deal of time spent by the creators listening and editing. Nilsen is very good at bringing a multitude of field recordings and samples together into a small space and somehow getting them to tell a story, in very loose terms. This one is like a psychedelic sleep-walk episode through a dayglo Tibetan landscape. It is divided up into subtle little episodes, and moves forward on its sluggish feet from one ambiguous stepping stone to the next. Lots of keyboards in evidence, in case I didn’t mention that. And a knack for breaking into a little pop melody when you least expect it. Arrived here 16 February 2012.

For other examples, perhaps see The Grateful Dead and the verso of their Aoxomoxoa LP cover; and Quicksilver Messenger Service, with their outlaw ranchhouse lifestyle. ↩