Tagged: performed

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 9, 2013

Noize 2005: jazz klezmer fusion that’s born to be wild … or mild

Kruzenshtern i parohod, Noize 2005, Auris Media, CD aum033 (2011)

In spite of its title, this is an album of fusion klezmer / jazz / punk metal and the odd eccentric vocal or two. We’re entertained by sprightly light-hearted runaway chase-caper music dominated by a shrill clarinet with smart crisp percussion and a surprisingly deep, lightly fuzzed bass with an occasional hard edge following in the woodwind instrument’s wake. There’ll be rock or metal rhythms (most notably in the third track “Danglers Song”) but the attitude is not very serious and I get the occasional impression that this Israeli quartet is paying affectionate homage in performing light-hearted send-ups of various past heroes and musical inspirations.

Some tracks stand out more than others: “Shmock on the Water” substitutes Middle Eastern folk melodies for the signature Deep Purple riff; “Danglers Song” pokes fun at rock star posturing; “Young Ones” features creative percussion rhythms; and meaty bass lines and hell-for-tefillin-leather / go-for-broke passages of screaming clarinet and thrashy rhythm abound in the guys’ cover of a John Zorn piece “Meholalot”. Altogether though this is an enjoyable and fun set of spirited music for those born to be wild … or mild.

Contact: Auris Media, Kruzenshtern i parohod

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

May 1, 2013

Off / On: reinventing the Kraftwerkian wheel

Forma, Off / On, Spectrum Spools / Editions Mego, SP 024CD (2012)

Forma is a trio (Mark Dwinell, Sophie Lam, George Bennett) who use analog instruments of 1960s – 1970s vintage to create short electronic song-like melody compositions in a live setting. All ten tracks that appear here were recorded and mixed live in studios in New York and Cleveland. While they are quite separate from one another in construction and definite breaks between can be heard, they are best heard as one continuous work, though perhaps not for reasons the trio would prefer.

The music is pleasant if not very remarkable: it has a hard sound and comes over as artificial in its expression of mood. Several tracks have a forced quality to them as if the musicians are trying to convince themselves of the instruments’ capability to capture mood and sustain and manipulate particular emotions or feelings like joy and optimism, so they have to exaggerate what capacity there is and prolong it. Over time a banal impression drifts over the recording. Even though some later tracks have a bit of spark in the background of the melodies, there loiters with me a feeling that something isn’t quite right. It’s as if I were to wake up one morning and walk around in the street, and feel that every person and dog I see and greet have in fact been replaced by their simulacra that, however much like the real things they resemble in appearance, word and deed, are much lesser and inferior beings. If I were deluded enough to decapitate them, I should find real blood and real brains but I would still “know” somehow that they are not real flesh-and-blood creatures and if I dug deep enough (yick!), I would discover their tiny nano-mechanical workings.

After listening to the album about three or four times, I find no particular track stands out, though the work improves about the seventh or eighth track. The recording is rather like an overly conscious re-invention of the post-Autobahn Kraftwerk wheel in a way that doesn’t illuminate what made Kraftwerk special for generations of musicians who came after them, including Forma themselves.

Contact: Forma

April 22, 2013

Regnum Saturni: flowing, raging, hypnotic black metal noise intensity

Fell Voices, Regnum Saturni, Gilead Media, 2xLP RELIC45 (2013)

Fell Voices is a black metal band based in Santa Cruz (California) but often associated with the Cascadian black metal scene (northwest US / southwest British Columbia, Canada). ”Regnum Saturni” is the first album of theirs that is not named after the band or left untitled; the band has a demo and two previous albums that went without titles, which would have caused some discomfort to distributors and fans alike. Especially as songs on previous albums also had no titles! Well, on “Regnum Saturni” those little problems have now been fixed: the songs that feature now bear titles which together suggest a theme of transformation from a lower level of existence to a higher one. Listeners may well be divided over this release: whereas previous releases had definite melodies and riffs, this album may come across as unstructured and intangible, and the music appears deliberately difficult and remote. Life is not easy when you’re under the spell of Fell Voices!

All three tracks are long and on the double LP version each takes up one side of the record. This means that Side D contains nothing at all. (One would think at least it might have an interesting recording of forest bird and insect noises.) Opener “Flesh from Bone” tiptoes in quietly for a bit before suddenly plunging listeners into a roaring whirlwind of sharp guitar noise which pulses with a grinding chainsaw rhythm. Vocals can barely be heard unless they are wailing or screeching in agony. Yet the music isn’t an endless self-indulgent exercise in black metal noise drone and chaos; there is change from noise and anguish to passages of stillness and solitude, dark though they are. However such interludes are soon swept aside by more scourging music from which lead guitar riffs might arise and glimmer briefly before they are engulfed in the fierce storms.

We segue into Track 2 “Emergence” with the faintest of breaks but the mood and energy level remaining low and restrained. Soon we are tossed into a long extended black metal noise drone world, one featuring a wavering feedback drone and constant repetitive drumming. The effect can be very hypnotic even though the mood is far from serene: in fact it’s aggressive and hostile. Voices scream in pain and torment continuously, guitars wobble as if sharpening their strings on whet-stones and the percussion continues its banging rhythm without rest. This time there’s no let-up, no rest from the torture. Towards the end, the percussion becomes more thunderous and emphatic, voices still scream and the heaving guitars hang over the track.

“Dawn” is a powerful thundering track of attacking percussion and denser-than-ever clouds of black metal guitar. Whining drone, rousing drums, more howling and keening voices and that ever-present boiling guitar noise atmosphere fill your brain from ear to ear. This is a highly suffocating experience. Although the music overall doesn’t stray from the very straight and very narrow, there’s enough variation in its details to keep some, if not most, listeners tagging along. The best moments come in the last few minutes of the track: the drumming consists of thunderous rolls, the screaming becomes unearthly and the shuddering guitars assume a quieter air as gradually the track loses its pent-up fury.

The album can be an exhausting experience to hear all the way through and perhaps there was no need for it to be so long at 61 minutes. The introductions and codas don’t need to be as stretched as they are, as they are joined with only the slightest of breaks. What is most impressive about the album is its raging intensity and the musicians’ utmost dedication to their craft. They obviously don’t care about pandering to all their fans’ preferences; the music is relentlessly single-minded and its scope is very narrow. The band that springs to mind as a point of comparison is Nadja whose music in the past has been similarly noisy, intense and powerful if unvarying.

I can see this album enjoying fairly limited success among Fell Voices’ fans. I can’t see though that the band is prepared to return to a more melodic and less underground style.

Contact: Gilead Media, Vendetta Records

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.

April 2, 2013

Meet Me in a Fog

Kayaka is the lovely Japanese creator Kaya Kamijo whom we last heard from with her CDR Operation Deep Freeze in November 2011. Now that I think of it, Mantile Records in London has reissued that item with added bonus tracks on cassette in January this year. Kayaka sent us her Bass Clarinet Songs (SOI 065) in June 2012 and while she sent it from an address in Spain (she used to live in London), the item is released on a tiny Russian label called Spirals of Invention. “This album is simply dedicated to my bass clarinet and last period I stayed in North London in 2012,” she writes. On seven gorgeous and innovative cuts, her woodwind instrument is overdubbed, processed with echo, and overlaid with cluttering and clattering sounds effects – everything from trains arriving and departing, to a whirlwind in the kitchen cupboards, a neighing horse on ‘Lancelot’, and a typewriter on ‘Three Goats’. Truly moving and beautiful music, at times as alien and unsettling as the best electronic tones you could wish for, and through her understated juxtapositions she arrives at a form of sonic surrealism. She plays with the unfettered joy of a child with a large paintbox colouring everything that moves in red and purple shapes, and the world around her becomes magically transformed when she blows her instrument. Kayaka’s sheer love of life is what impresses us most strongly on these instant compositions, and her determined primitive creative strengths make a mockery of more refined musicians with their swanky improvising and composing ways. What a total delight!

Pat Gillis last wrote to us in January 2010. Now here’s another package from his HC3 Music label, the full-length Held To Account (HC3 TLCD3) which he created as TL0741. It’s a good name to work under. I used to think we’d all have numbers instead of names in the future, but now that seems a positively benign fate compared to what’s clearly going to become of us as we are ground to mulch by the inexorable wheels of monopoly capitalism. Our man Gillis may not share my bleak outlook on our existence, but his sonorous digital groanings and writhings on this outing do not betoken the mind of a fully contented man. He uses synths and tape manipulations like he was kneading bread dough mixed with solid concrete, trying to tame the slimy white filth much as the scuba diver wrestles with the vicious octopus. No root notes, no repetitions, no pulsations, no recognisable shape to these livid slabs of murk – just slices of menacing viscera torn straight from the flanks of a gigantic ox-like creature. Gillis performs everything live in one take, and regards his work as “unsettled dream music”. Purchase and spin this hallucinator and a palpable and unignorable presence will pour into your listening space like five-and-twenty unwanted fat ghosts, slobbering at the jowls. From 13 June 2012.

Luke Younger used to be part of Birds Of Delay. Now he operates solo as Helm and we have a copy of his Impossible Symmetry (PAN 27) LP sent to us 1st June 2012. Five long tracks spread across two sides of vinyl, where it seems the starting point was a live performance using acoustic elements to some degree. Through persistence, duration, and some quite extreme manipulation, the unusual sounds are treated until they go completely bonkers. Each track occupies a very distinct and tangible world; the insane model railway set of ‘Miniatures’ is a strong opener, but ‘Liskojen Yö’ is even more powerful and drags us into a subterranean world where lurking demons may be present hiding behind every stalagmite. The percussive and pulsatory components to this half-lit wonderland are pretty suffocating – Younger is just relentless in his persistent repetitions of small loops and fragments. Like its predecessor, this cut goes off the rails according to a pre-planned gradual scheme of attenuation, while an insistent gurgling high-pitched voice that sounds like a drowning animal in dire straits is gradually pushed forward to occupy the foreground. ‘Arcane Matters’ might be rather formless in comparison, but it’s got that full-on “fire and brimstone” effect that painters of the Underworld have been attempting to steer their palette towards ever since the glory days of John Martin, and it finishes up by flattening the listener and knocking all the air from your lungs. The sizzling ‘Stained Glass Electric’ is the bastard offspring of avant-techno music wreaking fatal havoc in Club Catastrophe, and only ‘Above All and Beyond’ seems to offer a remote sign of hope in this very contemporary vision of the urban apocalypse. Even here, Helm’s take on “soothing ambient drone” is one laced with unpleasant surprises, where even his cold rice pudding is served with a dollop of human blood instead of raspberry jam. An impressive collection of chilling electro-acoustic experimentation. Between the luxury editions of the Pan label and the numerous goodies emanating from Editions Mego, this is a good time for the vinyl-buying fan of electronic music.

March 29, 2013

Right Heft

Concrete and Clay

I quite like the Gobi Wow (NEVER COME ASHORE NCALP1) LP from FvRTvR, which turns out to be the duo of the American percussionist Fritz Welch with German loonoid Guido Henneböhl working a mysterious home-made electronic monstrosity. Together they conspire to leak out disjunctive additive-free homegrown noise comprising electronic bursts, mangled voices, and hammered metallism. This pair were very good together on the Demon Cycle 1-9 release as I recall, a fairly fatal mesmerising diabolic charmer from which grotesque ancient voices would ofttimes creak. Gobi Wow has the same undercurrents of nastery, but is a lot more bitty…the general debris of the sound feels like broken masonry pieces scattered about the studio floor which cannot be fitted together, not least to reconstruct a Greek ruin. Add to that the general inclination of the two players towards refusing musical convention wherever possible, in favour of twisted, slimy and spiky eruptions. These strategies cohere to result in a difficult surface listen, full of uglification and indigestibility. However, what we can admire is the stern determination of the two farming-fishermen to keep going no matter what, even if the weather be inhospitable for planting oats, and the pond yields no more bream to the bitter worms that are suspended on their two rods. We haven’t come across this degree of coarsened aesthetic anti-pleasure since Adam Bohman played with Damian Bisciglia. Rachel Lowther did the modelling clay cover. And it is a good choice of imagery for the music, which has the rough and lumpy quality of a half-worked statement of rawness, ripped from the carcass of a two-headed artist-creating golem type monster. Arrived 25th April 2012.

Something, Anything

Lovely songs by Chris Weisman on his Fresh Sip (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR074) double LP. In fact the entire set is indeed like a “fresh sip” of fruit juice packed with goody vitamins. Chris did just about everything on the album, playing all the instruments and dubbing on tasty harmony vocals, and probably acting as his own producer between takes on what I assume were these home-made recordings originally produced in 2009 in his Battleboro home. There are two “suites”, and on Yen You, many of the songs could be said to start life built on a low-key electro-pop skeleton with a simple programmed beat to keep all elements working to order, but then again each song is also a springboard for rich harmonised vocal melodies, drones, guitar solos, and quite restrained supporting melodies played on nice keyboards. So far everything and everyone is doing flip-fops, lightweight acrobatics of poppy grace. There is a refreshing absence of freakery and psychotic weirdness from each of these sweet productions. Weisman has no interest in de-producing his own songs simply to demonstrate his studio know-how or to explode the mind of the listener, although this isn’t to deny his obvious recording skills. He just likes his art to conceal art. Another strong plus factor is quite simply the limpid beauty of the young man’s singing voice; The Association would have been proud to count him as a member any day. The lyrics seem quite poetic and personal too, with oblique and private messages that have a charm and a depth which you certainly won’t fathom with just one or two spins. Looks like this will be a grower. On I Don’t Care Again there are more songs in like vein, perhaps some of them weighted slightly more in favour of the acoustic guitar and the mysterious poetry and manufactured via a slightly more ramshackle production, but no doubt all four sides are cut from the same paisley cloth. The material was originally released on cassette in 2010 on Autumn Records, something I will never see, so this vinyl rescue is quite welcome. The sleeve design is understated to say the least, and may hint at something about the creator’s impish modesty. At a time when American underground music was in danger of losing its way in an ever-increasing spiral of eccentricity and insanity, it’s refreshing to find there are still some musicians who haven’t completely forsaken the craft of pop melody and concision in songwriting. The press notes make comparisons with Todd Rundgren, which are apt. From 31 May 2012.

Jollity Farm

Songwriting skill which soars and gallops on quite another plane can be found with the Happy Jawbone Family Band from Vermont, one of those wayward and very able combos which the USA seems to be breeding and exporting with considerable skill lately (Colin L. Orchestra, Trawler Bycatch, The Bird Names, King Kong Ding Dong). The songs on this hearty and extroverted freak-party album OK Midnight, You Win (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR063) are played with swagger and confidence, like a slightly tipsy form of country and western mixed with elements of raw psychedelia and played by mutant rockabilly guitarists, all of which would be welcome enough, but the real flavour of the album is to be savoured in the voice of the lead singer. He has a thick and clotted tone with vaguely nasal undercurrents, and he seems to be using a broad tongue which he wraps around each lyrical moment like it was a chunky golden nugget he’s about to chew. You never forget a distinctive singing voice. The effect is made yet more delicious with the additions of high-range female vocal harmonies and backing vocals, which have also signed up to the general agreement agreement to partake of the juice and rollick freely in a fun-loving balmy atmosphere. This may be as close as we’ll get in our time to a reincarnation of the great Kevin Ayers. But these crazed Yankees also have a slightly menacing side when they get warmed up, chanting and declaiming with emphatic mania like some militant hillbillies practising their war chants. Not every one of these melodies may be a memorable one, but when this group find the right couplet of dementia to savour, they’ll hammer it into your forehead with a six-inch nail. Beautifully recorded with a solid and punchy presence. I don’t really know who to credit with what in this loopy collective, although names are supplied on the insert, nor can I tell you what any of the songs mean. You don’t learn them with your brain, so much as feel them in the belly. All this issued under the wraps of cover art which proposes a mutant birth double-horse running every which way, and an insert textured with coarse animal hair.

This Heat

From same label we also have Cold / Burn (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR069), which is another kettle of bones and a return to the juddering noise-drone collective music thing we all love so well. It features Anla Courtis, Okkyung Lee, C. Spencer Yeh and Jon Wesseltoft, with Lasse Marhaug behind the controls – a major meeting of minds which I don’t expect will happen again any time soon. The album is two side-long improvisations made using violin, harmonium, cello and electric guitar, and oodles of instinctive inspiration. It’s one of those miracles of performed music where the finished product is full of paradox – a single wodge of monotonous sound, yet alive with teeming detail; staying firmly on one root note yet also allowing a million and one diversions to wriggle freely across wild scales and tonalities. What I also like is the slightly untidy quality of the playing, where no-one is paying attention to the strictures of performed improvisation, a genre which can have its own set of rigid rules. Nor do they hew to the self-imposed puritanism which can sometimes bedevil those who try to emulate the music of Terry Riley or La Monte Young. My hero on two legs is C. Spencer Yeh, the Bronze God from Brooklyn, who is supplying a good deal of the energy on these sides; when his bowing arm is coiled and unsprung he can piston back and forth continuously for as long as it take a dynasty in China to rise and fall. And any time Courtis steps into a studio or simply enters a room full of listeners, you can expect that room to become charged with his magical-realist visions as he spins his unlikely yarns of metaphysical heroism. Norwegian Wesseltoft, who also adds shruti box and organ to the droning churn, produced a memorable cassette called Singing Cobra Ecstasy for our ears in 2009, and here he just keeps up with a steady shimmering drone long beyond the point of normalcy or sanity would expect. Korean cellist Lee is that fragile genius who won us over with her understated work on the Anicca LP for Dancing Wayang. Besides gender balance in a group, it’s arguably important to get a good balance of acoustic and electric instruments, which may be which this session scores such a direct hit on certain nerval synapses and brainial cord-crakes. You gotta swallow the whole thing like a horse pill the size of a hockey puck to get full effect, and submerge both feet in the rich organic dronery which knows no boundaries, showing how the power of massed imaginative energy in a mutually respecting improv context can knock formal composition hollow, when the parameters are just right. Excellent. From 27th February 2012.

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

February 9, 2013

Making of Rainbows

Nine Inch Snails

Slugfield may be a pretty repulsive name, and an album title like Slime Zone (PNL RECORDS PNL008) isn’t guaranteed to attract many potential fans from the ranks of Radio Norge listeners, but any musical endeavour which involves three Norwegian underground supremos (Marhaug, Ratkje and Nilssen-Love) deserves your warmest embrace, no matter how big the slug may be, nor how wet and slimy its trail. These 2010 recordings were enacted during a jazz festival in Oslo, but the mucus which this trio of gastropods produce is more in the nature of improvised electronic noise. Lasse Marhaug does it with his turntable and electronics set-up, while the very gifted and much-in-demand Maja S.K. Ratkje uses her voice and more electronics. When this pair are zooming together in the “zone” and carving out hefty slabs of richly buzzing atmospherics, Paal Nilssen-Love is able to exercise considerable self-restraint and pull away from his percussive kit, but once he picks up his steel mallets and starts a-hammering then he’s every bit as untamed as two separate Andrew Cyrilles. Ratkje is of course capable of singing like an angel when required, but in this particular milieu she brings wordless abstract screeches and gulps to the conversation, half-swallowing and half-vomiting her near-inhuman streams of vocalese data as if possessed by the Norwegian equivalent of “Old Nick”. An exciting and varied record; the textural dynamics reach all the extremes, and it’s not simply a free-for-all bluster-bout of self-indulgent high volume. The positive qualities of this release can be garnered from the longer tracks such as ‘Bring ‘Em On’ and ‘Happy After Party Dance’, where the players sustain high energy and much complexity for lengthy tussles of unbroken blastage, without any audible signs of flagging. Note sturdy “mini-album” gatefold cover with pastedown artwork for this CD release. From May 2012.

Drum’N'Cello

Peter Gregson performed all the cello parts for Cello Multitracks (NONCLASSICAL NONCLSS014), an album showcasing the work of UK contemporary composer Gabriel Prokofiev. It’s a strong collection which whole-heartedly embraces modern music in two ways: (a) the use of sophisticated multi-tracking studio methods, and (b) a strong influence from dance and remix culture. The former is shown on the first four tracks, a suite for nine cellos whereon Gregson overdubs himself and produces astonishing effects. You may have expected a morass of tasteful minimal droning, but this player has remarkable attack in his bowing and plucking techniques, leaves enormous gaps in the music, and creates a diabolically clever net of exciting dynamic music. The piece ‘Jerk Driver’ alone seems to have the potential to close the gaps between dub music, post-punk and classical composition, while ‘Float Dance’ has enough dissonances to satisfy any hard-core Serialist yet still retains the snap and crackle of dance music, as if a solid rhythm pulse were encoded in its DNA. We could say the same of ‘Tuff Strum’, where the cellist seems determined to recreate an acoustic chamber form of drum’n'bass. Gregson’s skills transfer well into the live environment too; he played his live parts against a bank of eight loudspeakers playing pre-recorded material when the music was premiered in 2011. The electronic dance influence extends to the remaining nine cuts, which are remixes of the music created by various luminaries of DJ culture, with at least one of them (DJ Spooky) hailing from the more “arty” end of that spectrum. These remixes are apparently representative of musical styles that are a closed shop to me, including dubstep, hip-hop and techno, but the use of reverb, loops and drum machines is rarely used to swamp the foregrounded cello sound, which consistently emerges as sharp as shards of broken glass painted black. A thrilling and innovative record. Some classical composers have made complete ninnies of themselves through dabbling in popular music or contemporary forms, but it’s completely different with these two fellows, who are already steeped in the milieu; “Peter makes his own electronic music and has a lot of studio experience,” reports the composer, explaining why they had such an immediate rapport and achieved such productive results. Recommended. From 16 May 2012.

The Water Synth

Enchanting and delicate percussive effects on Ombrophilia (APOSIOPÈSE NO NUMBER), by the Japanese composer Tomoko Sauvage who despite her “wild” surname is about as gentle as a Buddhist baby lamb on these recordings. The process she used involves porcelain bowls, presumably being struck by wooden spoons and making use of metal wire strands in some way. The bowls are filled with water and recorded using hydrophones. There are no melodies or tunes as such, but complex arrays of percussive notes performing like a broken mechanical street-piano. Some of Tomoko’s titles, such as ‘Raindrop Exercise’ and ‘Amniotic Life’, indicate her respect and love for nature, and the entire system is sympathetically described as a “natural synthesizer”. LP format only and limited to 500 copies (mine is a CDR promo). Arrived 04 May 2012.

Petals Fell on Petaluma

No less natural in its approach to electro-acoustic music is the mini-CD Aposiopesis (LF RECORDS LF026), 20 minutes of superb “airy” drone from Petals, the performing name of Kevin Sanders. Very coincidentally, the title here matches the name of the French record label which released the above LP ¹. From what I can gather, the Petals music here is a live taped recording of a set-up involving violin strings, metal bars and elastic bands, creating a feedback system with the actual resonances of the four walls where it was recorded. A delicious combination of room sound, musical drone, and ambient feedback, all colliding with the recording process in subtle ways. Sanders also runs a record label called Hairdryer Excommunication, where he is dedicated to “Pluralising Minimalism”. If that involves enriching impoverished minimal music with added passion, heart and beauty such as we hear on this little gem, then I’m all for it. His website contains images and videos which may illuminate the matter further. From 30 May 2013.

The term is something to do with unfinished sentences. Luckily, it’s not as severe as aphasia. ↩