Tagged: folk

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

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

May 8, 2013

Hidden Album: a breezy klezmer jazz improv fusion

Kruzenshtern i Parohod, hidden album, Auris Media, CD aum031 (2011)

Apart from a couple of those suggestive little black silhouettes on the cover artwork – those little scissors with the droplets remind me of that time I saw Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist” at the cinema and a fellow in the audience yelped in fright and ran for his life out into the streets during Charlotte Gainsbourg’s notorious scene with the clippers – I quite like this breezy fusion of klezmer, jazz and punk metal attitude. The musicians who include an accordionist waltz through Keystone Kops chase soundtrack music and (later in the album) sequences of somewhat darker and more ambivalent jazzy improv. Mood highs and lows are traversed at lightning-fast speed in the blink of an eye, often in the same track. Blastbeat drumming is sometimes present and band leader Igor Krutogolov even has a go at rumbly death metal vocals in one hard-edged musical passage.

If heard in one sitting, the music appears to narrate a story that starts quite brightly and innocently enough and then endures several obstacles and tests of character that culminate in a very emotionally intense and upsetting revelation, as though long-buried family secrets are flushed out of rotting closets into the open and everyone’s lives are turned upside-down. Marriages founded on lies, bad faith and the point of a shotgun are rent apart, people hurriedly get new passports and shoot out of town forever, children big and small alike discover parents they never knew they had and relatives spend the rest of their lives regretting the things they’ve said and done or the lost opportunities they had to pass up. All right, Krutogolov and his pals didn’t intend this album to be a musical soap opera but it just feels that way: some of their playing on the last track “Koshka” can be gut-wrenching in its intensity and the clarinet nearly breaks into pieces trying to reach the peaks of keening sorrow. Next thing we know, we’re suddenly back to gay light-heartedness. When all’s over and done with, my head feels as though as it’s been put through an ancient washing-machine wringer.

The music was recorded all in one day with vocal overdubs added later so it has a live though not very raw feel.

Contact: Auris Media, Kruzenshtern i Parohod

December 7, 2012

Gossamer Albatrosses

The Tower Recordings

Subterraneanact is the duo of Henk Bakker and Jelmer Cnossen, and their debut Subterraneanact (Z6 RECORDS Z6399699) is an unusual piece of studio assemblage created in Rotterdam. The album is a distillation of recordings made in the studio. The recordings have been edited, mixed and remixed; then subjected to further sampling, remixing, and rebuilding processes. At all times the duo were working to their own private sets of compositional and improvisational rules; the aim seems to have been to transform the sounds of their respective instruments as far as possible, resulting in an “atmospheric and expressive sound environment”. Considering the source material was mostly acoustic, i.e. clarinet and drums, it’s a truly extreme example of what intensive reprocessing can do to taped sound. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a purely electronic album on the surface, although there are printed credits for live electronics and sampling using the “Ableton” device. Despite the wild, crazy and sometimes ugly remanipulations of sound, the original clarinets and drums continually show their growly, thumpy faces at various portions in the entertainment, surfacing like live deep-sea fish in a well-cooked bouillabaisse, and about as welcome. The clarinettist Bakker studied his instrument in Utrecht some 20 years ago, has an interesting history of performing, composing and doing radio, and is now associated with WORM in Rotterdam. Cnossen the drummer (also known as Malorix and JC) has drummed in a variety of bands and, of the two, seems more conversant with the sound-recycling process represented here – most of his Malorix work is executed through his personal take on the laptop-plunderphonic-meltdown approach, utilising discarded music from old compact discs and tapes. The screen-printed cover unfolds into an unsettling perspective of an impossible iron tower being built under the earth’s crust, gradually poking its long neck out through a mineshaft opening. This image emphasises the “constructed” nature of the music, but also its sheer impossibility – what we hear sometimes defies rational thought. It’s not that it works by juxtaposition of shocking sounds, but by a form of reworking that feels almost manual when you listen to it. The composers are kneading dough and working plasticine between their fingers. A very hand-knitted and cottage-industry approach to electro-acoustic, resulting in loud, primitive and lumpy musical forms. Arrived 13 April 2012.

The Premature Burial

Subterraneanact create a “virtual” underground space through their studio work. We could say that the American death-metal industrial project T.O.M.B. take things one stage further on UAG (CRUCIAL BLAST RECORDS CBR94), by putting themselves physically into bleak and hostile environments to realise their music. The basic tracks were recorded in assorted locales of horror – abandoned sanatoriums, asylums, morgues, and deserted crypts. It seems they did everything but lock themselves in a cemetery in pursuit of their art. Granted, the music has been reworked in a studio after the fact, but it’s the recording in that selected psychic zone that adds the extra dimension of sheer black terror. Once inside their chosen sanctum, T.O.M.B. would play back their tapes and field recordings at loud volumes to allow reverberant shocks to vibrate from the cold walls, and progress the ritual through drumming exercises, often hammering on the very walls themselves. UAG, an acronym for Uncovered Ancient Gateways, thus assumes the proportions of performance art, as though the CD were a document of unholy and extremely morbid rites; the theme is extended visually in the enclosed booklet of monochrome photos, providing absurdly dramatic reimaginings of these lugubrious seances. Their track titles make multiple references to the grim delights of the “bone orchard”, spicing things up with snippets of witchcraft, bloodletting, moon worship, and various invented ritualistic procedures; and the whole package is topped off with that lurid green-tinted cover art with its fearful symmetry, its runic letters, its hints of sado-masochistic costume, and inverted liturgies. But sonically, this is all quite some way from conventional black metal or industrial death music, and T.O.M.B. (whose name unpacks into Total Occultic Mechanical Blasphemy) serve up strangely compelling and powerful atmospheres on this album, eschewing anything to do with song form in favour of continual tones of abstract oppressive noise, underpinned by frenzied and horrifying drumming. While undoubtedly satisfying to bloodthirsty fans of the respective genres it inhabits, this grisly and claustrophobic record works equally well as extreme experimental noise. Was released in January 2012, I think we may have got our copy in April.

The Senors of Seek

Sent to us by Murray Ward of Cardiff is a splendid split cassette (HI/LO029) by The Failed NASA Experiment and Ø+yn, and it’s released on a terrific micro-label called The Lows and The Highs Records. Their website contains further oddities which look worthy of investigation also. The Failed NASA Experiment turns out to be Murray Ward himself playing solo music with occasional help from Euan Rodger, Alex Williams and Matthew Lovett. Mysterious electronic tones, clattering percussion and random noise bursts, plus extremely heavy psychedelic drones and circular riffs, where the amplified distortion and sense of relentless forward-chugging motion has prompted comparisons with the Faust of the 1970s. TFNE presents a delirious and acid-fried experience, with many puzzling moments inserted into and between the tracks, and concluding the suite with a pastoral acoustic guitar riff that almost makes this tape a lo-fi update on any given Pink Floyd album. The track titles are lyrical and beautiful. This music has the refreshing Celtic tang of well-crafted Welsh magic, enacted by drawing chalk markings on the floor of black-timbered chapels in the hillside.

Ø+yn are an Argentinean five-piece of underground noisemakers, with Cinco Cantos a la Virgen de Satrostramocha on their side of the split. Superficially they may seem to be questing after the same hallucinatory and revelatory states as Mr Ward and his chums, but they pursue their quarry in a much more mysterious way. It’s an offbeat and delirious form of trancey acoustic drone-folk, featuring violins, guitars, percussion and whiney solo lines made with a nasal chanting and wailing voice or equally nasal wind instruments of some sort; many non-western harmonic scales and modes emerge from the improvisations, and at times the music could almost be mistaken for an ethnic oddity from the Folkways catalogue. In some ways this might be seen as a variant of the sort of loopy thing the Finns used to do so well, except Ø+yn are nowhere near so cluttered musically nor (thankfully) as eccentric in the vocal department. Instead, the instrumentation is pared to bone, the recordings are intimate and private, and even the trance-rhythm patterns are rough-hewn and occasionally wobble off the path like a less sure-footed mountain goat. The team may have cinematic aspirations, building their albums in line with the logic of a Jodorowsky film, and even sample a snippet from a Roman Polanski movie for one track. The excellent artworks are collages by Murray Ward, with overlay drawings by Ian Watson. Quite delightful all round; many thanks to Murray for sending this.

November 27, 2012

Early Sumac vinyl

Here’s a lovely Yma Sumac 10-incher (CORAL CRL 56058) which I just received today from a dealer in Athens. I just had to have a copy ever since September this year, when I went to a record fair and saw a copy disappearing under my nose and beard into the hands of a German collector who got to the right box just seconds before me. I had never seen it before. Besides it being an item by my beloved Yma which was unfamiliar, I also fell in love with its yellow, orange and green cover design, and looked it up online. Turns out to be a collection of early recordings made in 1943, recorded some years before her famous debut on Capitol Records, but only issued in America in 1952 to cash in on her popularity after the phenomenal success of Voice of the Xtabay and Legend of the Sun Virgin. This was all news to me. And I call myself an Yma Sumac fan!!

The arrival of this fine item happily coincides with my reading of Yma Sumac: The Art Behind the Legend (NEW YORK YBK PUBLISHERS), a book by Nicholas E. Limansky. I’m just up to p 177 as I wrote these lines, and have learned the definitive tale behind her 1971 rock LP Miracles (another release which surprised me mightily when I saw an ex-library copy at a record fair one time and instantly snarfed it up). Limansky’s book is probably the best text on the subject you’ll ever read. He works very hard to give a balanced and nuanced account of this highly tangled tale, and gives fair dues to all the protagonists. I’ve already learned more about some of the key players who have been somewhat overlooked in the fan-accolades that are usually dished out to Yma, Les Baxter, and Moises Vivanco, such as the flautist Hernán Braña, the dancer Cholita Rivero, and of course Elisabeth Waldo whose Rites of the Pagan LP I have heard, but didn’t realise she also played violin on the Sumac stage tours. Limansky’s achievement in this book is to carefully and respectfully debunk all the nonsense and myths about Sumac (including all the self-made ones) and still leave the essential charm of her music completely Inca-Taqui intact. I can seriously recommend this excellent, thoroughly-researched tome to all hard-core Sumac fans.

Regular readers may or may not care much about my personal Sumac passion, which oddly enough began in 1981 when a friend Pete Woodin purchased the Sun Virgin LP on one of our regular shopping trips to a jazz & blues record shop in Birmingham (and if anyone remembers anything about this shop, run by two brothers named Ray and Alan, please get in touch). My friend plucked it out of the racks on the strength of the cover alone. The man behind the counter made a face, and played us a track in an attempt to bring us to our senses. Needless to say it had the opposite effect, and Pete bought the item on the spot. Soon after this, his hipster friend Pete Thompson found a magazine article about “exotica” LPs and sent us a photocopy. It made the connection between Les Baxter and Yma, and seared the image of the front cover of Baxter’s Jewels of the Sea into my brain. I guess a vinyl original of that item is my next eBay purchase. After that point my obsession truly began. Some indication of where it led me can be deduced in this fannish 1988 article I wrote for John Bagnall’s music zine Hairy Hi-Fi.

Having spun Presenting Yma Sumac on my Bermuda Dansette, I’m not only delighted to have this missing piece of the jigsaw in my hands, but also find the music is wonderful too, even if it’s quite some way from Baxter’s amazing orchestral confections from 1952. It’s basically Peruvian folk music presented in a popular style, but enhanced by her lively and youthful vocal trills. I particularly recommend her rendition of a song called ‘Indian Love’ which is packed with drama and dynamics. Unusual also to hear Yma singing actual words, instead of wordlessly vocalising in such ways as to show off her range – but I’ll leave that sort of analysis to Mr. Limansky. I just hope that German record collector is deriving as much enjoyment from his purchase as I am!

November 24, 2012

Animalia Corolla: beguiling fairy folk psychedelic music with environmental themes

Jüppala Kääpiö, Animalia Corolla, Omnimemento OM04, CD (2012)

Ha- ha, I was fooled into thinking Jüppala Kääpiö was indeed a Finnish folk group beavering away on portable electronic gadgets and handheld instruments in a little log cabin in dense forest somewhere far from Helsinki or Tampere or any other major centre in Finland, keeping to themselves most of the time except on the rare occasion when one of their number would shyly venture to the local community store to post a few CD copies to a generous and kind-hearted distributor like Fonal Records or Aquarius Records in San Francisco or even Ed at TSP. In fact the only real Finnish deal about Jüppala Kääpiö is the name: the Belgian-based act is actually made up of Japanese sound artist Hitoshi Kojo and Swiss singer Carole Kojo. The music they play is based on environmental themes and folklore traditions drawn from various countries and if I listen carefully, I swear I can hear something almost like Okinawan folk music: light, sunny and on the playful side.

The album proper begins with “Yokoso”, a beguiling neo-primitive ditty that repeats over and over with fairy-like chanting and ululating glossolalia, supported by quaint gentle percussion. “Pollen Penetration” follows in a similar vein in a more relaxed manner. “Yetti Frottage” features the kind of delicate abstract fragmented and slowly evolving improv music that once upon a time the label Music Your Mind Will Love You championed; there is even the ghostly and slightly sinister ambience and the quivering violin that I associate with the label. Now Carole Kojo starts singing in a more natural voice that seems at odds with the spooky space critters floating over and above her head: her voice might remind one of Tara Burke of Fursaxa, Merja Kokkonen of Islaja and in parts the girl vocalist from Paavoharju.

As the album progresses, the music becomes more lavish and lush as though the fairies, confident that they have got our attention, are now bringing out more elaborate orchestras of fairy and insect musicians, all playing exotic instruments of which no two are alike, and each and every one of them revelling in the peculiar and unearthly melodies they release from their strings, blow-holes, drums and chimes. Fairy choruses croon and wail their fragile songs of nature, the ever-changing seasons, the fleeting quality of life, the shifting images of beauty and the longing for good times and merry-making long gone.

This is very beguiling and magical music which deserves to be more widely heard. Perhaps a better sound production that would bring out some of the background sounds and enrich the textures of the music – the album might have benefited from different sound atmospheres and a bit of reverb in parts to give some songs a more sculptured feel – might bring “Animalia Corolla” to greater public attention.

Contact: Omnimemento

September 10, 2012

Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water: a varied album of dark folk, apocalyptic visions and unexpected toughness

Kiss the Anus of a Black Cat, Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water, Zeal, zealcdee 029 (2010)

It took me a long while to get a review of this album up on TSP but finally I did it. A very stark and darkly melancholy recording this is too, brimming with feeling too deep to fully express, and what is not expressed directly in the vocals, the printed lyrics or in the spare acoustic guitar melodies is present in the silences behind the music. KTAOABC is the child of one Stef Heeren, a Belgian musician who makes a lot of his own instruments but usually relies on his voice and acoustic guitar; indeed the title track gets by on just voices and guitar for most of its length as do several other, mostly short songs.

The first three songs on the album set the pace: “Hewers of Wood …” is a simple yet emotionally dark and deep piece that might contain a serious morality tale about the failings of human nature in its apparently simple nursery-rhyme lyrics. Heeren is a surprisingly strong singer with an urgent, almost wailing style and the music matches the feeling in his voice: robust rhythms, a distinctive melody with a force and vitality all its own in most songs, and equally intense moods enhanced by sinister organ or other keyboards played by various guest musicians. “Argonaut and magneto” strains at its leashes, yearning to burst out in full agonised cry but Heeren keeps it in check though the lyrics suggest a kind of Southern Gothic rural murder mystery somewhere in the remote Appalachians.

Some songs have a whiffy exotic foreign or psychedelic influence as though Heeren had spent a childhood or adolescence backpacking around India and Southeast Asia and spent most of his nights at temples listening to travelling musical troupes playing droning sitar ragas and thumping tablas at all-night jam sessions. “Veneration” feels like such a song in its rhythm. Other songs may be possessed of an apocalyptic vision (“Feathers of the wings of the angel Gabriel”) in lyrics and twangy bluegrass tunes that would raise the hairs on the back of Nick Cave’s neck.

For a dark folk album, the music is varied and surprisingly tough, even aggressive, at times and would suit a metalhead as much as it would an audience brought up on Comus, Nick Cave and his various bands, and Six Organs of Admittance. I also sense some kinship with some of those eccentric acts like Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood that made up the Kyogle avant-country music scene that I reviewed some years ago and which were on the Music your mind will love you label. Now that KTAOABC have jolted my memory, I wonder what became of them all – the MYMWLY label has shut down indefinitely.

Contact: Zeal

August 16, 2012

Ghosts and Poissons

Lightning Striking Me Again

Pretty Lightning is the duo of German players Christian Berghoff and Sebastian Haas. There Are Witches in the Woods (FONAL RECORDS FR-83) is a set of 11 songs which are imbued with a folk memory of an imaginary past from the pages of Brothers Grimm – wizards, ghosts, old wives tales, thunder, and the moon are all namechecked and sung about to the tune of rousing folk-song like melodies and performed at ear-splitting volumes. Effectively they are a drum and guitar duo, and at times this slightly supernatural record feels like it’s trying to outdo the third Led Zeppelin album in its attempts at realising new forms of “spooky dark folk” music. Another musical touchstone might be the 1969 ESP-Disk oddity by Cromagnon, whose ‘Caledonia’ was memorably covered by Japanese latterday psychmeisters Ghost. Pretty Lightning don’t use the same trick of “guitars sounding like bagpipes”, but they do have a strong line in a rock-solid thumping drum beat that could be used to propel a division of Scots Highlanders on a 50-mile route march through the mud during the Jacobite rebellion. Many of the tracks here follow the path of the dirge with extremely loud and unpolished dirty guitar melodies howling out their pentatonic tunes, although ‘See No Evil’ starts off with an atmospheric organ drone of undeniably Gothic proportions, and the drummer manages to restrain himself for about half of ‘The Sound of Thunder’, allowing eerie banshee howls and doomed stoner vocals to layer up in the nocturnal air. In these areas, the “march or die” factor may be diminished, but the record retains its forces of witchery. I see they both performed on the Datashock record (noted here), which failed to connect with me as much as this one. A nightmarish mix of heavy Kraut sounds with gothic overtones and voodoo curses that will appeal to fans of Cramps and The Gun Club.

The Lower Depths

Marées De Hauteurs Diverses (INSUBORDINATIONS NETLABEL INSUBRWK 02) is a reworking of the album Complaintes De Marée Basse, originally performed by the Swiss improvising duo Diatribes joined by Abdul Moimême. Among those doing the reworking are Francisco López, Nicolas Bernier, and Honoré Feraille. It’s funny how most of their efforts are concentrated on taking a lively and percussion heavy album and rendering it down into calm, formalised drones of great stillness. Digital technology extracts a core of silence and music of heavy depth. Herzog‘s ‘Naufrage / Remix’ is probably the most pertinent example of what I mean; the abrasive impulses of the music are smoothed down into slightly distorted ambient tones, producing a not un-nice effect, but in this serene zone we are floating quite some way from the original source material. Occasionally ghosts and remnants of the original music do surface, but according to Ludger Hennig the music is taking place at ten steps remove, as if performed in another room five miles away; while López is only interested in replaying very short fragments he can use to punctuate his lengthy silent tracts. Mukuhen pays more attention to dynamics; after two minutes of baffling mystery, excerpts of heavily processed music surface to the top of his ‘Poisson Silence, Oki’, and shimmer for a few precious seconds of overdubbed and backwards-running genius. The Montreal composer Nicolas Bernier remains true to the frenzied spirit of D’Incise’s drumming, and indeed he multiplies and overstates it to make it yet more frenzied. Blindhæd (known to us from the Belgian label ini.itu) has a lot of incident in his reworking, but it’s mysterious to the point of obtuseness, and introduces too much artificial drama and contrivance in its strange washes of sound. As can be seen from the titles, and the overall “aquatic” impressions of the sonic content, the record follows an underwater theme, perhaps likening the musicians to deep sea divers picking sea anemones and old bits of wreckage.

Another Brick in the Wall

From California, Bruce Friedman kindly sent us a copy of Edge Study, a recent record he made with the Japanese-born synthesizer player Motoko Honda. We last heard from Friedman in 2009 with the O.P.T.I.O.N.S. record of group improvisation he made for pfmentum, but Edge Study (ANALOG ARTS NO NUMBER) is quite different and a far more appealing example of carefully directed improvisation. I suppose the first thing to note is that it sounds absolutely beautiful. A single trumpet slowly playing long tones along with the rich electric voice of a keyboard synthesizer; there’s emotion (mostly of a rather melancholy hue), stillness, and plenty of space for the listener. So much space it’s like a sense of settled accommodation, a vast sunlit room where you’ll be happy just to curl up on the bare unfurnished floor for the day. To understand all of Friedman’s achievements here requires a musicological knowledge which is beyond this writer, but I like the admission that he is starting to grow weary of some the established aspects of free improvisation in music, most notably the emphasis on the extension of “musical techniques”, and the implication that if you improvise, you also gotta sacrifice melody. So he’s determined to blow his trumpet and take up arms against these particular bug-a-boos, and find his own “comfort zone” where he wouldn’t have to shovel musical tradition into the garbage pail, yet also remain in touching distance of “contemporary sonic approaches”. In like manner, the sound artist and pianist Motoko Honda was invited to respond to this challenge and found that he she too was somewhat sceptical about electronic music’s tendency towards excessive complexity; it’s as though once you have a Moog in your hands, the music all too easily slides into ultra-fast and “clever” noodling. Could Motoko make her Nord keyboard into something “organic and alive”, could she find the soul in the machine which men have been searching for ever since Robert Moog’s prototype first rolled off the conveyor belt in the late 1960s? Edge Study is the triumphant success story, and even if it is billed as “an experiment”, it’s a bold piece of work that gets musicians and listeners right back into a familiar and warm simplicity, a very human place indeed, without having to pick up and carry every piece of conceptual baggage associated with the New York school of “minimalism”. But speaking of which, here is the great Christian Wolff providing three succinct paragraphs as a sleeve note to this excellent release. When spun, he at once thought he was hearing composed music, so distilled and pure are these glorious tones; but he realised this was a result of the self-imposed discipline Friedman has brought to the work. Wolff seems delighted with the lack of melodic development, the absence of repeated patterns, and with the precision of a grand master he observes how “each [note] is just there”. Just there. What a Cagean remark. I suppose it’s this elusive quality that makes Edge Study fascinating, how it almost seems to approximate the very thought processes of the human brain, rendering that phenomenon in musical terms. The sleeve design suggests visually that this experiment has run into a brick wall, but I suggest the exact opposite; it’s got the sort of meditational power that can vibrate such insurmountable obstacles into dust. Very recommended!

Update from Bruce Friedmann: “I love the ‘brick wall’ analogy that you interpreted. In reality, I was considering the edges of the bricks as being similar yet each unique. An analogy to the individual pitches of the trumpet part. Each similar but perhaps nuanced slightly differently?”

June 7, 2012

Out of the Coma: Comus returns from long hiatus with new smoky jazz edge

Comus, Out of the Coma, Coptic Cat, NIFE 014CD (2012)

Out of the coma? – more like out of the deep freeze for this English dark folk band whose last recording came out in the mid-1970s! And while some people might prefer that the new Comus sound exactly like the old Comus, one must allow that in the very long hiatus between the mid-1970s and 2012 the band members must have been listening to plenty of music and absorbing influences, and that very definitely shows here: there’s a mellow jazz edge to the music which makes Comus a bit more contemporary. The sound is fresh and clear and the Comus vibe still has just the right touch of derangement which is very necessary in songs like the title track and the following song “The Sacrifice”. Lyrics deal with resurrection, sacrifice and rebirth on a different plane of existence, and there’s a bonus of a live recording from 1972 that the band found recently.

“Out of the Coma” sounds like a very robust folk-oriented song with passionate singing, at least until the instrumental passage kicks in and that’s a real surprise with saxophone lending a smoky air. “The Sacrifice” is more like the Comus of old with male and female vocal duetting and a pastoral air with sweet flute melody, violin and acoustic guitar: the song swings from serene and peaceful to urgent and anxious as the subject of the song meets her inevitable end to appease an unknown pagan god and assure the next year’s harvest. “The Return” is a beautiful if dark song that switches from major to minor key and back and includes a soulful saxophone solo halfway through.

“The Malgaard Suite”, introduced by Roger Wootton, is the bonus 1972 recording recovered and cleaned up for “Out of the Coma”. Despite it having been recorded on a tape recorder, the sound quality is not bad at all and the song just sounds as if it had been recorded in a room with muted acoustics. The song is a tango-ing duet of male and female singing accompanied by violin and bassoon and at times has a jaunty rhythm. The muted sound actually gives the song a forlorn and slightly desolate quality that suits the recovered / reconstructed lyrics.

The album is a welcome return for Comus: it might not quite reach the heights of the “First Utterance” album in inventiveness and inspiration but there is still plenty of life in the band yet. Comus could have pushed the smoky jazz angle a little more to give the songs more grit and urban edge but that’s just a niggly point and many Comus fans will be happy with the band as it is now.

Contact: Comus

May 10, 2012

Ahad’s Master’s Garden III (2007-2009): The Harmonian Blues (Music for Film, Theatre and Dance)

Zsolt Sores Ahad, Ahad’s Master’s Garden III (2007-2009): The Harmonian Blues (Music for Film, Theatre and Dance), Fourth Dimension, FD2CD76 (2011)

This is a very beguiling double set of psychedelic electroacoustic folk by Budapest-based multi-instrumentalist Zsolt Sores Ahad and his band. In the manner of gypsies the musicians wander high and low through different soundscapes of varying atmosphere: sometimes intimate, friendly yet airy, a little sinister and ambiguous even. As the album’s title indicates, this is indeed soundtrack music for movies, plays and other dramas yet to be made: each track is its own self-referential world and evokes particular visual associations, sounds and even smells.

An early highlight is “On the Top of the Darwin Tillite – Climb the Aztec Siltstone”, an arduous climb up a mysterious pyramid dominated by a long drone that alternately urges us on and warns us of the curse that might await us at the top for disturbing the Aztec gods’ rest. Perhaps we might be sacrificed and our hearts offered to the sun god to ensure his continued travels through the sky. “In the Dry Valleys” offers up searingly hot desert landscapes in which a Cormac McCarthy western might play out. “The Sands are Running Out” features very distorted sounds that sound like they might be coming from an electric guitar, a very lethargic saxophone and unusual percussion that reminds me of a large floating hollow container in a tub of water.

“Potlatch on the Beach of the Dirty Little Hoare Pond – The Heart of a Poet” might be a spiritual quest as suggested by the sitar and an expectant mood early in the piece. The piece develops slowly and seemingly in a disorganised way but the whole thing is held together by the large spaces within and the questing mood.

The second disc is taken up by one track “Lessness (Meeting with Godot)” which is a highly abstract piece featuring very long tones and spoken-word Hungarian-language recordings of Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame”. The track was composed for a theatre performance of this play. For such a long and sparing piece that’s not very immersive and lacks much atmosphere, the music holds very well and generates on-going tension. It does get better in its last five minutes when proceedings turn very hysterical.

The whole set is perhaps best heard as two separate discs: trying to hear both CDs can tax the endurance and the long track does take its time to build up to the climax.

Contact: Fourth Dimension, Zsolt Sores Ahad