Tagged: folk

November 12, 2013

Folk Songs for an Obscure Race: freaky combination of noise junk industrial and faux naif folk

Grim, Folk Songs for an Obscure Race, Haang Niap Records, CD HAANG-002 (2009)

A weirdo industrial junk folk record, this is a compilation of releases and compilation tracks made in the 1980s by the Japanese industrial music project Grim. This band was (maybe still is?) the baby of one Jun Konagaya who sometimes had help from a couple of other noiseniks. This album is very much in the style of industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Z’ev, Einsturzende Neubauten and early Whitehouse: lots of bashing metal rhythms, a harsh declamatory pygmy-Hitler vocal, a screechy high-pitched siren drone, crude rhythms and song structures, and a lo-fi punk sensibility.

The recording switches from early noise-junk industrial to serene soundtrack music to harsh brutal power electronics to delicate acoustic-guitar folk ditties and back again: quite a dizzying range of music styles that bleed into one another can be found here. The contrast between severe uncompromising noise electronics, suggestive of torture, deviant sexuality and compulsive psychotic behaviour, on the one hand and an extreme faux naif innocence in the folk music stylings on the other can be very disturbing. I’m rather reluctantly reminded of some Whitehouse late-1990s releases that had tracks by Peter Sotos where he assembled together spoken dialogue recordings by girls and women who had been sexually abused. On several tracks, Konagaya’s vocal is pained and screechy, far beyond what William Bennett and Phillip Best achieved in their band’s heyday; on some of the later tracks, he could pass for Dalek Caan of the Cult of Skaro from Doctor Who.

What separates Konagaya’s music from his noisician compatriots is strong rhythms throughout the industrial pieces; the quieter folk songs have distinct lullaby melodies. The music is not at all free-flowing and the attitude behind it is very different: it’s often confrontational and hostile to the society from which Grim arises. The folk music pieces can be quite comic in their po-faced blank innocence after all the aggression that’s come before them.

All the music is very good if deranged and the tracks near the end of the album, superficially calm and child-like, are perhaps the most disturbing and freaky of all. They have a Grand Guignol air about them in their careful merry-go-round melodies and rhythms, while in the background something like a Nuremberg rally from the late 1930s might be running. Near the end, dreamy psych-folk songs sung by girl singers who might be evangelising for their particular nut-house religious cult that promises highly sanitised retro-1950s white-picket fence suburban domestic bliss salvation add another level of deranged sensibility. There’s an all-instrumental percussion piece that might have been written for a tap-dancing troupe that rounds off the album and at this point, I shudder to think that our friend Jun has been accepted into his local little trendy avant-garde artist colony that survives on government hand-outs and performance art stunts that try but fail to shock little old ladies and families with small children.

Nevertheless this album is a revelation in that there are actually forgotten Japanese acts that could more than hold their own against the likes of Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse, that also didn’t fit into the classic Japanese noise improv mould. What more might there be, that have been overlooked for far too long?

Contact: Haang Niap Records, haangniap@gmail.com

July 13, 2013

Azad Hind: powerful raging black metal / psychedelia under an Indian nationalist mask

Dressed in Streams, Azad Hind, Colloquial Sound Records, cassette CSR 018 (2012)

In recent months I’ve been alerted to a trend in black metal in which the basic black metal template of minimalist guitar rhythms and interest in guitar-based noise texture and atmosphere combines with psychedelic / trance music elements to generate a highly immersive listening experience. A strong nationalist, anti-colonialist stand may be part and parcel of the music. The bands associated with the LA-based Black Twilight Circle (Arizmenda, Ashdautas, Axeman, Blue Hummingbird on the Left, Kallathon, Volahn) who identify with Mexican nationalism are part of this black metal / psychedelic trend; another band that might also be associated with this tendency though not associated with the BTC bands is Dressed in Streams. DiS is based in Michigan and its agenda extols Indian (as in pertaining to India) nationalism and freedom from colonialism. The group’s calling-card is the use of Indian folk and other musics to bookend its powerful, raging black metal music which obeys no song-writing conventions or expectations and simply carries on and on regardless of time, space or even format in the manner of the Giant Red Spot (actually a centuries-old storm) on the planet Jupiter.

On my crappy little tape player, the cassette sounds quite basic and tinny when I play it as background music. If I listen to it properly and with the sound turned up, the music is simply tremendous and is a true force of terror against all the evils the universe can throw at me. “Leaping Tiger”, after its announcement by a tabla drum rhythm, a sitar and a lone vocalist singing a raga, dives straight into a storm of layers of melodic tremolo guitar, huge bass rhythms, synthesiser horns and roaring, screeching BM voices. The texture of the music is dense and rich. As the song continues, the mood becomes more intense, the growling vocals seem more vicious and all instruments appear at odds with one another so the whole set-up comes across as chaotic (but not very much so).

With “2 April 1941 (Berlin)”, the music picks up where it left off with more background screaming and squiggly guitar chords and giant triumphal riffs dominating the huge barrage of noisy rhythms and percussion. Halfway through the track the rhythm changes and a huge orchestra of synthesiser brass appears between gaps in the choppy guitar chord sequences. Gradually the music, after hitting heroic heights, calms down – even the growling seems less aggressive – and exits to the accompaniment of tabla drums and deep-droning synthesisers.

The band is often labelled National Socialist but I find very little in the actual music itself that’s parallel to the work of acts like Burzum and Graveland; only the track titles and the photographs, some of which can be a little suggestive of sympathy with Nazi Germany, on the cassette sleeve indicate a particular political outlook. The band may be Hindu nationalist or not, I have no idea. The Indian folk music at both ends of the work add an exotic touristy feel and does not really integrate well into the sonic juggernaut. Not knowing who the musicians are and what their intention in using samples of Indian music is, I’m unwilling to pass judgement on why the samples are present at all. Nevertheless to plunge your head into this kind of overwhelming black metal psychedelia after the raga initiation and to hear order in otherwise chaotic and texturally dense music is an experience listeners should try.

Contact: Colloquial Sound Recordings

June 14, 2013

Eternal Zio: free-ranging folk drone improv psychedelia weaves a strange spell

Eternal Zio, self-titled, Boring Machines BM043LP / Black Sweat Records BS003LP, LP (2012)

Don’t let that label name Boring Machines distract you from the debut album of Milanese quartet Eternal Zio: these fellows do all they can to serve up an eclectic recording of free-ranging improv music on as many instruments as they can see in the recording studio. Hurdy gurdy, harmonica, church organ, tribal drums, high-pitched recorders and guitars are some of the ingredients blended into this musical masala. Most of the time, the musicians are at ease strumming their instruments or beating the drums sporadically and casually, as though the day is too hot to do anything other than rest. The tracks range from easy-going rhythm and melody exercises to long trance drone patterns and pieces that just fall a bit short of being “songs”.

At just over 30 minutes in length, this album more resembles one track of six different though related chapters than a collection of proto-songs. The mood is even and laidback, and very few songs lift their pace to something faster than a steady trot. Track 3 is a mesmerising trance poem with highly rhythmic drumming and gently shuddering drone vibrations wrapped around the tom-tom beats. I’m not sure if I’m hearing a bit of The Dead C, Bong, 6majik9 or some of the old Wooden Wand music with a dash of folk spice tossed in for extra flavour. Track 4 picks up a shamanic impression with a deep bull-roarer drone and a voice crooning as if deep in a hypnotic trance. The tribal idea reappears in Track 6, a celebratory stomp-a-thon in which the musicians howl and chant a strange liturgy in an exotic language all their own. I feel as though I’m back in the land of the Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood, that duo who I’m sure we all miss so badly.

The musicians bring plenty of influences and experience to their group jam sessions but the over-riding genre here is folk-tinged droning psychedelia improv with some jazz. The album could have sustained longer and more developed tracks if Eternal Zio had desired. These guys have to be allowed to do their own thang or else the spell they weave might prove to be overkill and the listeners are in danger of remaining mute and spellbound long after the music has ended.

Contact: Boring Machines, Black Sweat Records

June 1, 2013

The Enduring Chill

Ember Schrag
The Sewing Room
USA SINGLE GIRL MARRIED GIRL SGMG25 / EDIBLE ONION EO-016 CD (2012)
Lavishly presented CD of widescreen American yarns (pun intended). Held together by the thread (ahem) of Schrag’s crystalline, melancholy vocals and clean finger-picking. The relaxed backing instrumentation – all played scrupulously well, you can’t hear any joins – is burnished to a rich, welcoming lustre, like a comfy well-used leather armchair. Or a smiling old man with a bag of traditional sweets, a briar pipe, and a face made from a well-used leather armchair. This consummate, mellow and melodious folksy (not a spelling error) music, with many lilting fiddles and softly brushed drums, provides the backdrop for songs primarily of love and loss.

Many archetypal American activities and symbols are delineated lyrically. People sit in saloons, there is cherry pie, cars are driven, people cross the road, other people leave for the coast ¹. The old-time Jesus and God of rural America are invoked. Indeed, although recorded in New York and Nebraska there are hints of the Southern Gothic milieu of Flannery O’Connor in the songs. Likewise the lyrical setting is a slightly fevered mix of road-movie, modern quotidian and idealised Americana. Houston is referenced in one song title and the setting and treatment of the maritime locale in another – ‘I Ain’t A prophet’ – could be compared and contrasted to Houstonian Jandek’s coastal ramblings on ‘Point Judith’ from Six and Six. There alienation and loss inform a thorough deconstruction of lyrics and song structure. The Sewing Room is by contrast quite traditional, even if that tradition leads us to the recent rather than deep past, a microcosm of pop–cultural concerns and tropes and quite poppy in execution. A lot of these songs are rather catchy, and they clearly are crafted songs, starting life in a singer-songwriter mode, honed in performance, fleshed out in the studio with sensitive expanded arrangements.

The overall tonal gestalt is similar to a certain type of American indie movie, some quirk leavened with sentiment and generally rather accessible. There’s probably some Indie rock in there as well. Personally, I instinctively balk at such an approach. But then again, my idea of a pleasant ditty errs more along the lines of Frenchmen singing about toilets (c.f. Red Noise). However, students of Americana and fans of more conventional pop and folk-rock song-forms may well find things to engage and enjoy here.

Led Zeppelin contributed their take on that particular mythological scenario in ‘Going to California’. ↩

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 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 to me 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. (I can’t figure it out myself either, having felt estranged from hiphop and rap since the 1980s when the commercialisation of the genre began.) 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. I’m hoping he’s moving in a direction of 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.

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