Tagged: pop music

May 2, 2013

Stereo Space: ruminating on modern life and how it breaks people

Pilesar, Stereo Space, self-released CD (2012)

Piloted in the main by Jason Mullinax, responsible for vocals, keyboards, programmed percussion, most guitars and electronics effects on “Stereo Space”, Pilesar is a band of shifting personnel who create alternative mainstream melodic pop electronica of a sort that brings out the Devo fan in people of a certain generation. The songs featured here are short sweet affairs ruminating on aspects of modern life, particularly its disappointments and how small it can make people feel.

Early highlights include the reggae-tinged “Everywhere is Beauty” and the slightly dark, angsty “Wifestink”, both of which contain some unexpected but very unassuming gems in their rhythms, manipulations and subtle effects that suggest slight anxiety. From then on, the music sweeps by rather too briskly as though Mullinax insists on packing as much complaint into the space of 54 minutes as possible. A brief pause with an admission of emotional vulnerability appears in “Pinky Swear” but the song still feels hurried along, and a connection between song and listener only goes so deep (which is not much at all).

The mid-album sag inevitably arrives with songs notable more for fussiness or having that quality of you the listener having been there and heard that so let’s move right along to the next track. After doing time out in filler wilderness the album perks up with the instrumental “Things Break” which has some interesting texture effects snuck into the background. Final track “Are We Happy Next?” restores some semblance of the bright eccentricity and whimsy encountered at the album’s beginning but with that familiar air of being older, wiser and more guarded about the ups and downs that life always throws at you.

The album will be sure to pick up fans among its target audience of 20 – 30 years of age: the kind of people who enter the world factory bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with heads filled with ambition and wanting to change everything for the better but who come out of the sausage-making machines with dimmed spirit and perhaps bitter about what they’ve been through, railing at life’s injustices and never really questioning why the mass assembly line had to be there in the first place. But the paths “Stereo Space” treads though have already been heavily travelled by other pop acts, many of whom have done a far better and deeper investigation of the territory of emotions, relationships and disappointments experienced along the way.

Contact: Pilesar

March 7, 2013

Kuopio: cool electronic minimalism gets a nervy beat-driven treatment

Vladislav Delay, Kuopio, Raster Noton, CD R-N 144 (2012)

I only hope our man Sasu Ripatti knows what he’s doing naming his Vladislav Delay project’s albums after various Finnish towns; looking at a map of Finland, I see he has his work cut out for the next several decades. I’d happily listen to albums named after towns like Alavus, Kaskinen, Orimattila and Savonlinna though, as long as they’re not factory towns where the main industry involves pumping strange-smelling coloured smoke into the air or equally strange-smelling coloured water into the river. As if VD would do such a thing!

As always, these recordings have a beautiful if (almost classically so) cool minimalist style, a wonderful ambience that’s hard to describe but which to me seems warm and a little stand-offish all at once, and those 3D sounds that peel off the disc in sculpted curves or flubby little blobs. On “Kuopio”, the music acquires a new sense of urgency: the tracks are jittery and nervy even though the nudges of sound appear smooth and reassuring. The tracks are repetitive with constant looping providing the only structure to the music. “Hetkonen” is a highly varied piece with a pleasingly jagged and scrapey edge at times when the music sometimes threatens to smooth over to the point of banality. On the other hand the maddeningly repetitive “Avanne” isn’t much to talk about other than for me to observe the relief I have when the track fades out quickly.

We’re into the second half of the album: “Osottava” leads off with a deadened percussion-like rhythm that recalls Ripatti’s first career as a drummer. “Kulkee” is uncharacteristically heavy-handed in treatment and leaden-footed in pace and beat; at least it still holds its head high. “Marsila” would be equally monotonous if there weren’t that little scraping loop in the background and that other loop of high-pitched rounded tone dollop melody; the track eventually develops a happy skipping routine with some interesting little effects here and there, all crunchy, tinny and shlubby. “Hitto” has a deranged air and veers close to madness, disorientation and chaos.

This beats-driven album with the spastic rhythms and choppy tunes may sometimes drive a listener up the wall over the maddening monotony. It might be saying something about Ripatti’s mood or whatever was happening in his life at the time of recording; it certainly doesn’t sound as if he was relaxed or happy when he made it. I know he has had health and other problems in the past and sometimes when I play his albums I find myself fretting that he’s running himself into the ground. “Kuopio” is sure to satisfy a crowd eager for more techno-oriented dance rhythms; I on the other hand would have preferred something more flowing, mysterious and with varied, shifting moods.

Contact: Raster Noton, Vladislav Delay

March 7, 2013

Discipline: an efficient electronic pop machine lacking in soul and originality

Electric Electric, Discipline, Herzfeld H26 CD (2012)

French trio Electric Electric plays a highly rhythmic and dance-oriented electronic art-punk style of music inspired in equal parts by post-punk /new wave, techno-industrial, ritual and tribal folk genres. “Discipline” is as the band says it is: relentless and repetitive looping electro-pop tunes atop insistent and quite complex tribal polyrhythms that force you to dance, and dance for as long as the music determines you will! There are some very pleasant little melodies played on what seem at first to be folk-oriented instruments but are actually synthesised approximations of the originals. The tracks run with a regimented order all their own and the overall impression I have is an efficient machine in which everything is well co-ordinated and running smoothly, and it hums producing sounds and noises in preplanned combinations and patterns to order. Several pieces start at medium-fast pace and quickly progress to frantic hither-and-thither as though the musicians were being pursued by sinister android police or hostile warriors of a long-lost tribe. The songs give an impression of disorder yet if you listen closely enough even the apparent chaos has all been programmed in advance.

Most songs are quite enjoyable although after about two or three minutes they become soulless automatons allowed to run riot in their own little ruts. Any singing present is located back in the mix and seems drained of all life. The title track is not too bad but after four minutes of mad dashing about in a labyrinth of narrow street alleys, dead-end bazaars and passages of shut wooden doors in a distant city in the Orient, it settles in a boring groove of ever-more frantic to-ing and fro-ing. The gamelan novelty that is “Exotica Today” is briefly bewitching but the repetition is overdone.

At this point I start feeling that my occasional predilection for the traditional folk musics of faraway lands is being not so much exploited for commercial gain as continuously ground and steamrolled to death by the sheer weight of repetition and lack of subtlety and wit on the musicians’ part. I don’t want to hear constant Keystone Cops chases either; I saw enough of those in the Indiana Jones films. If indeed exotic cultures are on the mind, they’re likely to be those of clubs in tourist-oriented beach strips where Westerners hang out all night long binge-drinking, snorting strange substances and dancing to tired disco music of 30-plus years ago after all-day shopping and surfing. Also having to hear snippets of different styles of folk music from places around the world thrown into an electronic pop meat-grinder with no apparent thought given to what they have in common and completely out of their original cultural context, resulting in something that sounds false and lightweight a lot of the time, tends to bring the red mist down before my eyes and before I know it, I’ve done serious damage to an innocent disc.

Contact: Herzfeld

March 7, 2013

Amesoeurs (self-titled): one and only album is inconsistent black metal pop

Amesoeurs, self-titled, Code 666, CD (2009)

At least in a very short career, truncated in part by the unexpected success of Neige’s main project Alcest, Amesoeurs released its one and only full-length recording. The self-titled album is a wide-ranging work in expression and musical style from soft melodic pop to harsh and grim black metal to near-abstract guitar noise. The band takes as its inspiration the bleakness of modern urban life and the stress of day-to-day living in an industrial environment; in this respect, Amesoeurs is the dark twin of the lighter, more fantasy-inspired Alcest and it may be no surprise that the name “Amesoeurs” can mean “soul sisters”.

The album starts off on an optimistic note musically with “Gas in Veins” and “Les Ruches Malade” though there is the shadow of dark things to come on the second song. Gradually the album becomes rockier behind Audrey Sylvain’s fairly bland vocal. With “Recueillement”, the black metal heritage finally emerges with Neige’s raw screaming vocal and music with a hard noisy guitar shower edge though it is dominated by an urban blues style of playing and melancholy riffs. The lead guitar could almost pass for rather sorrowful banjo or mandolin, it has that doleful tone. “Faux Semblants” seems a fairly happy and carefree song (although the lyrics might be about isolation) but there is a dark soul within that puts it in company with the kind of material more northerly European bands like Lifelover and Circle of Ouroborus (both also BM-crossover bands) do.

On the whole the first half of the album is ambiguous with soft feminine pop-punk mixed in with some black metal / hard rock influence. The second half is a more schizophrenic beast, roving from harsh black metal guitar noise to the sweetest, most saccharine melancholy pop, starting with “Trouble (Éveils Infâmes)” which as black metal pop songs go is embarrassing: only the instrumental part at the end, all screaming noisy power-electronics-styled feedback is the song’s saving grace that makes you forget what came immediately before it. It’s as if Audrey Sylvain and Neige have backed into their respective corners in a musical boxing ring and are trading blows that result in some very wild swings from one genre to another and back.

The next three songs swing Audrey Sylvain’s way for the most part apart from a frantic screaming second half to “La Reine Trayeuse” which comes as a shock to what had just been a fairly relaxed piece. This song is more remarkable for the distorted treatments applied to Sylvain’s vocal which affect the ambience of the music. Final track “Au Crépuscule de Nos Rêves” is very much a post-rock / black metal fusion piece featuring for the third time Neige’s black metal vocal as the main voice, at least until we reach the coda which turns out a stiff robotic techno-industrial looping rhythms with sinister falling guitar tones and a ghostly alien spaceship factory ambience in the background.

It’s to be expected with such wild extremes as the two genres of music featured that “Amesoeurs” isn’t a consistent work: on several songs the combination of gritty black metal and Sylvain’s smooth singing doesn’t really gel together and the black metal pop is awkward in an almost self-conscious and embarrassed way. Even more purely black metal tracks like “Trouble (Éveils Infâmes)” have a half-hearted air about them, as if something essential to the song hasn’t worked out the way it should in spite of Neige’s efforts to perfect it. (And if Neige couldn’t do it then I doubt few others can.) The balance is roughly about two-thirds melancholy pop and one-third black metal: I’d have preferred a stronger and more equal blend of the two styles with a greater distortion of Sylvain’s voice and a stronger emphasis on mood and varied ambience. The wide open urban blues space that appears in the pop-oriented songs is effective in expressing the singer’s feeling of isolation and anomie but it also stresses the distance between the pop and the black metal so that the joins between the two are showing their stitches. This could have been a great album if the genres were in equal proportions and the production of the songs had emphasised moods particular to each song.

Pity in a way that Amesoeurs had to break up as this album really sounds like a warm-up to what could have been a better fusion of the two genres … though it’s equally likely that the black metal influence would wane even more and be little more than some edgy noise guitar in parts.

Contact: Code 666

February 16, 2013

… if a night: trippy jazz big on smooth and suave tricks and not much else

Shijo X, … if a night, Bombanella Records / Five Roses Press, CD (2012)

A very nice surprise here … this is the closest I’ve come to reviewing something that could have been recorded for a James Bond film. Song titles like “Zabriskie’s bench”, suggesting a secret yet commonplace rendezvous (like a bus stop outside a nondescript safe house in a quiet leafy street) between spies, certainly suggest as much – and then there are tracks that count the graveyard hours like “02 a.m.”, “04 a.m.” and “06 a.m.” that bookend the album and cut it into its A-side and B-side. The music sounds as if it was performed by a band but it’s actually the output of an Italian duo, Davide Verticelli and Laura Sinigaglia.

Sung in a sultry and sometimes bellowing voice by Sinigaglia, the songs are short and have a cool trippy lounge ambience. The clean, cool sound is at once the duo’s strength and weakness: the music has a precise, but not too sharp, sound which showcases the singing and the instrumentation clearly but lacks warmth and depth. This throws the vocals and melodies into much sharper focus than might be usual for this kind of music so performances have to be top-notch. I sometimes wish the songs were longer so there would be room for improvised instrumental passages in which atmosphere of a smoky, noirish sort would be pronounced but the choice of instrumentation, musical style and the production prevent this.

Overall the album is very busy and business-like but there’s not much on it that leaves a deep impression or has you thinking of late nights in dimly lit bars where bartenders are packing up, pulling down the blinds and casting sideways glances at the lone customer hunched over in the cubicle staring down into his glass, lost in reminiscing about the mystery blonde with the Veronica Lake peekaboo hairstyle and the silhouette figure in black, tottering down the street in stilettoes towards her gangster boyfriend’s car … and of whom he (the private eye) hasn’t seen or heard in the last five years. He wonders if he should look her up in the battered phone book nearby … then he remembers that news story tucked away in the corner of page 6 not so long ago about a woman’s body answering to the lady’s description being fished out of a polluted river.

Lots of smooth and suave tricks abound but an album of this kind of trippy jazz needs to rise above the cliches and stereotypes associated with the music, and include something that really sounds as if it’s coming from the heart.

Contact: Five Roses Press, Shijo X

February 3, 2013

Forbidden Generosity

Not one but three bass clarinets can be heard on The Name By Which The World Knows Them (PEIRA 13), on a 2011 recording of improvised music by Mythic Birds. The woodwinds of Keefe Jackson, Jeff Kimmel and Jason Stein are accompanied by the modular synth utterings of Brian Labycz, and on this intimate recording the listener is guaranteed a lengthy stay in the warm bass tones of these concerted and massed clarinets, their ambiguous meditations twisting into complex melodic knots, while the tunes are punctuated by growling, breathing, creaking and stuttering effects. Bass tones galore fersure, but not everything is swimming like a midnight turtle in the lower registers, as the fourth track ‘Dissimulation’ will attest, where the swooping wails and high-pitched yawps exhibit the familiar warmth and expression of the human voice as only these instruments can. At all times the studious Labycz provides the correct degree of structured support from the cybernetic guts of his electronic instrument; none could accuse the man of creating excessive or attention-seeking analogue blasts. Notwithstanding a few subdued and misty passages of minimalism, this is largely a lively and noisy album characterised by a shared interest among the players in invention, abstraction, and juicy combinations of sound. Good to hear some old-fashioned craft and sweat in the improv genre. From 29 May 2012.

Jaap Blonk is the well-known Dutch improviser who does it all with his voice, one of the few abstract vocal hollering types we have in Europe (Phil Minton and Vanessa Mackness are two greats from the UK wing that spring to mind). On the short Voice Studies (MY DANCE THE SKULL VS07) cassette, he whispers and sighs like a sibilant ghost on ‘Approximate Air’, an effect which may remind Irish listeners of the banshee, but in its ineffectual wispiness isn’t much more effective than a breezy night spent on the Norfolk broads. My money is on ‘Apostatic Aria’ on the flip, which is packed with more full-bodied roaring, insane vocalese, mad growling and cartoon-character honkings dribbling from an inflamed cakehole. The raspy and abrasive qualities of this “chin music” verge on the alarming, as the performer brings great emotional charge into his very physical work. Clearly this particular piece also uses some overdubs, unless Blonk has a second mouth concealed in his belly, much like the mythical men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders. It feels to me like most of the work is done by the throat; he’s practically transformed his own larynx into a fleshy distorting amplifier. In which case Blonk must be the biggest consumer of Fishermans Friend lozenges in the low-lying countries. One of three cassette tapes received from this SE London-based label, all limited editions of 100 copies.

More loopy maximalism by Music From The Film, an American fringe act whose unhinged recordings we have noted before in 2011 (How The West Was Once). On Vi Kommer Til A Fa Deg (ZEROMOON ZERO 134), the duo of Gary Young and Arthur Harrison are joined by Kevin Buckholdt, and once again a generous list of instrumentation indicates their “everything and the kitchen sink” approach to making music. Perhaps they liken themselves to the over-enthused supermarket shopper on the cover, whose trolley is laden to overflowing with consumer goods. There’s a staggering 22 tracks on the album, many of which are the vehicle for a vocal recit or narrative which does indeed add the hoped-for cinematic dimension – it’s possible to hear each track as a fragment from a movie, complete with dialogue and sound effects. A very unusual movie, I might add. Elsewhere, songs are attempted, results of which resemble a cabaret band imitating The Residents around the period of Cube-E. There are some very interesting sounds going down here, but when it comes to production the band just cannot leave well enough alone – almost every component has been doctored or distorted in some fashion, such that no sound reaches your ears without a concomitant wobble or queasy reverb effect. The sense of playful absurdity, not unlike that of Smegma or other lunatics from the LAFMS, is allowed free rein at all times, producing surreal and sometimes terrifying outcomes. I have a small reservation concerning the lack of structure, both within the songs and the album as whole; I feel that MFTF could certainly benefit from recruiting an editor, or a tough-minded producer, to tighten up the act. Assuming that is they could find someone mad enough to work with them. From 15 May 2012.

And speaking of loons, here’s everyone’s favourite Ergo Phizmiz. He is one of the UK’s certified geniuses of avant-pop – while I may not have that many of his actual releases, I get the strong impression he has a genuine facility for composing songs and making records that would make most musicians curl up into a tight ball of green-coloured envy. Especially when the results are so delicious. The added bonus in the cake mix is his one-of-a-kind personality, for which the adjectives “eccentric” or “idiosyncratic” remain palpably inadequate. Unusually, we were sent a promo CD copy of ‘It’s A Sin’ (CARE IN THE COMMUNITY NO NUMBER), his cover version of the Pet Shop Boys single, which was timed to be released as a single on the exact day 25 years after the original was put out. Phizmiz eschews the synth-pop basis of the original and renders the song as a form of highly dramatic song-speech, singing against a guitar and drum background that pounds home every syllable of the lyrics like knocking nine-inch copper nails into the hull of an antique sailing ship. Phizmiz reveals his own personal attachment to the song which features strongly in his personal history, and the accumulated weight of his emotional investment can be heard writ large across three pulsating minutes. His performance verges on the histrionic; it paints a disturbingly accurate if overwrought portrait of a soul sickened by his own sinful life, where even the pleasures his evils once brought are now a distant memory, but he cannot escape the cycle of sin. Phizmiz may not quite get to the “essence of the song” as he intends with each cover version he records, but he does express a potent and very plausible interpretation of the song which even its original composers may not be aware of. Astonishing. Still, if you think this audio rendition is a OTT, wait till you see the video. From 29 May 2012.

January 6, 2013

Miniature Candies

The Replace (EDITION DEGEM DEGEM CD10) compilation was put together by Marc Behrens for a Berlin label. He poses pointed questions about the many ways in which modern electro-acoustic music seemed to promise artistic utopias in the 20th century, and whether this notion still has any currency today. 14 modern electronica artistes (see image for full list of names) contribute to the debate in both musical and annotated form, covering topics such as philosophy, landscape painting, YouTube, spirituality, colour and geometric forms, and a chess-playing machine. Ambitious in scope, but so much of the music feels drab, unfinished, and half-baked.

A similarly difficult conundrum about modern life is posed by the ever-active Francisco López on his Untitled #284 (CRÓNICA 066-2012). He asks questions about reality, virtual reality, and the disappearance of real things, wondering about what it is we might actually be perceiving, as we flit about from coffee shop to shopping mall. Is it the real thing that is missing, or are we just feeding off our memories of reality? Armed with these Cartesian sentiments, and to further this poignant discussion, he reprocesses some field recordings he made in Lisbon in 1992. The accoutrements and blandishments of the modern urban world – if that is indeed what we are hearing – have rarely sounded so threatening, chaotic and alien. Looks like López peeled back the mask which cloaks reality, and didn’t like what he found.

Assured and entertaining retro-rock from Vibravoid on their Gravity Zero (SULATRON RECORDS ST 1201) album. If only they’d been operating in the UK around 1988-1989, then Spacemen 3, Bevis Frond and Sundial would not have enjoyed quite the same monopoly on lush psych-influenced muscular underground rock music. This album benefits from the rich additions of mellotron, Theremin and other far-out instruments to the punchy mix, but these Europeans also know how to compose a decent chord-filled song and stick to it. Their update on H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The White Ship’, one of my personal faves among bad-acid dirges from the late 1960s, is one of many highlights.

Pierre Alexandre Tremblay is one of many Canadian electro-acoustic composers showcased on the empreintes DIGITales label who enjoys having their work presented as a 5.1 surround sound experience in stereo, pressed on a DVD for improved audio quality. Quelque reflets (IMED 11109) contains a number of his meditative and philosophical musings in sound form, of which I most enjoyed the tripartite opening number ‘Reflets de notre société crépusculaire’, with its title highly suggestive of an unpublished Edward Gorey book. Tremblay endeavours here to express his feelings of powerlessness in today’s world. Similar ethical dilemmas are expressed on the other works.

FilFla‘s Flip Tap (SOMEONE GOOD RMSG013) is a collection of short and concise instrumental pop tunes put together by the Japanese composer Keiichi Sugimoto, and an instalment in the ’10 Songs in 20 Minutes’ series, this label’s plan to celebrate the joys of avant-pop music. Sugimoto evidently has the skill of compression and his deftness in creating these upbeat and jolly episodes with their near-perfect production sheen is considerable. If only there were some actual melodies one could sink one’s teeth into. Seconds of high-pitched and extremely pleasant electronic miniaturised candy shapes fly by, but without much apparent song-form structure to underpin them. I’d imagine this is like watching a day’s worth of Japanese TV commercials in the space of half an hour.

I’m not a serious soundtrack music collector, but I gather there has grown up a rich subculture where individual composers of library music for KPM, De Wolfe, Chappell and others are being identified and celebrated after the fact, elevated from their formerly rather anonymous positions, while original pressings of the records are eagerly collected by covetous fans and DJs. Perhaps a similar mindset informs Sid Chip Sounds: The Music of the Commodore 64 (ROBOT ELEPHANT RECORDS RER013), an extremely unusual compilation which gathers examples of music for computer games designed for the Commodore 64 home computer system, first launched in 1982. Bob Yannes is named as the pioneering maestro who made this possible through his development of the SID Chip, and a number of composers – among them Martin Galway, Matt Gray, Ben Daglish, David Whittaker and others – are all showcased with examples of their musical endeavours. The games, including Last Ninja, Gauntlet 3 and Comic Bakery, are likewise namechecked. Musically, the album may feel a bit undernourished and the annoying limitations of the squelchy electronic sound may start to grate on some ears after only 10 minutes of play, but there is much interest to be derived from the inventive ways in which the musicians learned to overcome those limitations, to produce bouncy and entertaining music. That said, I think to call them “revolutionary composers”, as per the press release, is a massive overstatement. This release plugs into a whole retro subculture of young DJs who grew up with this material as part of their personal soundtrack, and are now restating it through assorted lo-fi subgenres such as 8-bit, chiptune, and gabba. Issued as a CD and double LP; only the packaging is a massive disappointment, and I’m not sure why it couldn’t have featured some colourful screengrabs from the games (licensing problems perhaps).

Florian Hecker compiled the double 10-inch LP set with the elaborate title 2/8 Bregman 4/8 Deutsch 7/8 Hecker 1/8 Höller (PRESTO!? P!?018), and the fractions involved in that naming scheme are to do with the amount of input from each contributor. It would be interesting to apply that degree of calibration to the thorny problem of composers’ rights, so maybe Hecker should consider contracting his skills to the international rights societies for music. Forty minutes of music are thus spread across four sides to be played at 45 RPM. The first two sections seemed to be nothing more than just minimal and extremely irritating digital sequences played randomly at high speed; anonymous ringtone music. But the third and fourth segments are slightly more engaging with their looped repetitions of a short vocal sound, which could be a micro-second sampled from the voice of a female announcer and reduced to a single syllable. Doubtless, if we listened to them for long enough we would experience the aural hallucinations which Disinformation has termed “Rorschach Audio”. These represent updates on the classic Steve Reich tape loops of voice segments, although our man Hecker evinces no interest whatsoever in the human emotions, politics or spirituality evidenced on ‘It’s Gonna Rain’ and ‘Come Out’. Instead, the entire work is trying to make a marginal point about sensory perception and the psychology of hearing. Accordingly the press release comes with a reading list of academic books and papers on the subject, to assist us in our investigations. I recall feeling equally unengaged and alienated by Hecker’s Speculative Solution from 2011, and sadly this one isn’t doing much to reconcile me with the current scientific directions of his work.

All the above arrived at TSP headquarters in February and April 2012.

November 11, 2012

Dream Seeds: too bland, poppy and smooth for very dark subject matter

Extra Life, Dream Seeds, Northern Spy Records, NSCD 022 (2012)

That album cover has that curious and creepy look that I associate with the artwork for The Melvins’ albums but the music here is very, very different from those doom metal musicians’ work. Superficially poppy and intimate, as though made just for one person and that one person is you, the self-confessional album hides very dark fantasies and traumas, too dark to ever reveal to the light: traumas and thoughts that would see the unseen narrator-singer go into the slammer were they to be made public. “Dream Seeds” is the work of Charlie Looker who performs all vocals (which remind me of Depeche Mode in their pure strong choir-boy tones that suggest both innocence and self-torment), acoustic guitar and some synthesiser plus two other musicians on electronics, synth, guitar, percussion and backing vocals who make up Extra Life. The music emphasises awkward and deliberately clunky rhythms and beats, an epic and varied sound that takes in hard-edged pop-rock, moods of melancholy, fear, sorrow and despair, and synth-based orchestration.

To be honest, I find the music palls over the album’s running time: there’s something about it that’s bland and blunt and leaves me feeling remote and uninvolved. Perhaps the style of music adopted here is the problem: I guess I expect music this dark and personal to have some anguish and hints of self-examination, self-torture and pleading / bargaining with God that would be reflected in the very texture of the music – some harsh layers of sound here and there that would contrast with the smoothness of the singing. As the album goes, the emotion that should have been spread throughout instead comes in the last song and sounds very forced. I feel as though I’m sitting through some kitchen-sink drama that’s been done too often already and the burnt-out actors are simply going through the motions again.

The lyrics are the best part of the album and could stand apart as a monologue. Taken together, the lyrics form a narrative of guilt on the vocalist’s part for going ahead with an abortion or a few abortions in spite of his religious pro-life background and his fantasies about what he’d like to do to several children under his care as a teacher. Extreme abusive corporal punishment (“Discipline for Edwin”) and paedophilia (“Little One”, “First Song”) are hinted at. The last two tracks bring back memories of the abortions, controlling the unruly class of school-kids with a paddle and finally release from a particular mortal coil.

“First Song” is the best song on the album for its intense emotion and the mood of darkening cloud, a feeling that something very wrong is occurring, but apart from this, the music and singing just don’t seem to fit the subject matter well enough.

Contact: Northern Spy Records

November 10, 2012

Shades Of Grey

Roxy Music

Mark Vernon has created entertaining and witty radiophonic records as one half of Vernon & Burns, and has remained consistently surprising and innovative with his musical and sound art endeavours. Compared to the jollifications of the V&B records, Static Cinema (ENTR’ACTE E126) is a much more refined and restrained piece of work, characterised by its quiet and gentle approach to the management and organisation of sound, and it conveys a general aura of mysterious events unfolding in a surreal, deserted landscape. In the assembly of these small and intimate sounds, Mark Vernon successfully blurs edges between music, sound art and field recording, at the same time building intriguing environments for the listener to get lost in. Track 1 is like a silent white-walled chamber, while track 3 presents an impossible vista comprised of staircases to nowhere, small electronic devices behaving strangely, cars moving through the air, and a dog barking everywhere as though suspended upside down in the sky as in a Chagall painting. Vernon had it in mind to produce an audio drama where the lead actors are missing from the equation, like a vintage BBC radio three play where the dialogue is taken away and all that’s left are the sound effects from the talented technicians, and of course background music supplied by an idealised version of the Radiophonic Workshop. Vernon achieved all of this through juxtaposing recordings of his home-made improvisations played on household objects with an array of field recordings fetched from multiple locations across Europe. His elliptical approach is brilliant, and his understated imagination never falls asleep for a minute, completely transcending the technique. Sent to us 29 March 2012; limited to 200 copies.

Happy Mondays

Got a full-length LP from Leeds underground combo Geese, who have impressed us in the past with ‘Kensington Terrace’ (their half of a 7″ split) and their groovy The Starseed cassette. All Property Is Theft, All Flesh Is Grass (VANITY CASE RECORDS VC-13) is mostly the work of Graham Bailey and David Lazonby who wrote and performed most of the songs, joined by guest players. Geese perform most of their songs building on a skeletal acoustic guitar basis, filling out the sound with minimal drum machine rhythms, vocals, and melodies played on recorders, keyboards, or lightly acid-fried electric guitars. This is a group that has a dedication to craft in melody and song-writing that feels almost old-fashioned in today’s world of shortcuts and lazy productions, and not one of these highly quirky avant-pop songs would have felt out of place on the John Peel show in the mid 1980s. Lyrically and storytelling-wise, prepare to enter a looking-glass world with scorpions and snakes, a Japanese lady with a pink guitar, a hotel rendezvous between Brueghel and Bosch, a somewhat forlorn take on drug experiences, and quotations from Dante recast into musical form. You may find the thin singing voices an acquired taste, but I applaud their decision to croon and intone in undisguised Yorkshire accents throughout. It’s mostly acoustic folk-pop, and not much of the energetic psych-rock approach of The Starseed is in evidence, except at certain moments when the guitars are let off the leash. Overall a rain-sodden urban vista illuminated by occasional flashes of fauvist colour is conveyed by these wistful and crestfallen melodies and wry vocals. Received 29 March 2012 but released in May 2012.

Sing A Rainbow

Machinefabriek is an admirable sound artist to be sure, though I sometimes find he is less able to transcend his technique and methods as successfully as Mark Vernon above. Said techniques are however quite unusual and he’s made them all his own. On Colour Tones (FANG BOMB FB021), he creates sound art through a combination of guitars, tape loops, rescued vinyl records, small tape recorders like dictaphones, a Korg synthesizer, and effects pedals. There are also sampled musical notes from guest musicians, including woodwind players and a cellist; and all sounds are further reprocessed through computer technology. No-one is more skilled and subtle in arranging his source materials than Rutger Zuydervelt, but one is often made aware of the paraphernalia that was used to realise them; the workings of this semi-organic clock-like mechanism made with wooden cogs are visibly evident behind the mist and foggings of the musical sailcloth which covers the blades of his windmill. Colour Tones originated from an art exhibition in Amsterdam in 2011 at the WM Gallery, and were directly inspired by the works of an obscure Latvian short story writer. Some examples of sound art have reached us where the artists are more like physics scientists, and they strive to remake light waves into musical tones, thus somehow enabling us to “hear” the colour yellow. But I suppose this record is not really in that mould, as Zuydervelt has worked hard to compose and layer his materials, rather than surrender to pure process. In aesthetic terms, it might be closer to Dumitrescu and his psychological and philosophical associations based on numbers, something which I think he learned from the writings of Edmund Husserl. Five colours are represented on this album, concluding with a track called ‘Mosaic’ which presumably allows for a mental melange of many colours; oddly enough the rainbow on the front cover is simply five shades of grey, represented by process dots of various sizes. Some intriguing effects are on offer on this 32-minute CD, but not enough variation or drama for this listener among the burnished ambient tones. Arrived 17 March 2012. Must admit it’s good to hear from Fang Bomb again; please bring us more antisocial inarticulate dark gloom-noise from Goteborg!

Drip Painting

From Austin Texas we have a tape by Social Drag called New Age Healer (STUNNED RECORDS No. 132). The intention here seems to be to present a listening experience that is the complete inverse of a relaxing-soothing New Age music tape, and accordingly we get about 38 minutes of disorganised and slightly abrasive electronic music. Yet its creator still insists on the healing powers of his music and proposes this prescription as a “remedy for any digital-age depressions”. Social Drag clearly knows how to extract powerful bellows and alien groans from his equipment, and gradually an alien breathing pattern of rise-and-fall rhythms emerges from this vortex of churning, grisly sound, occasionally interrupted by ghastly mutated voices spitting out short messages in clipped tones. Personally I would have liked to find a bit more coherence and structure in the arrangements; for the most part the music gloops out and accumulates into a rather sprawling mass, whose purpose and direction is far from clear. Arrived 20 March 2012 and limited to 111 copies in a splatter-painting cover.

November 3, 2012

The Bag Is Ready

Une Saison en Enfer

Season Two (SOLAR IPSE #01) is the latest team-up of those two Italian improvisers Ninni Morgia and Marcello Magliocchi; last heard them doing their guitar and percussion duo thing on the 2011 Sound Gates LP, which we noted this summer. Both are radical inventors or reinventors of musical instruments, Magliocchi in that he creates his own percussive instruments from found objects but also has many extended techniques concealed up his long white sleeves. His approach to playing the bowed cymbal, for example, creates a dynamo hum of evil proportions on ‘Medusa’, its tidal swells sucking you into a fatal whirlpool for 9 minutes. On ‘Avoiding Traps’, his suffused cymbal fog effect is like a cloud of liquid metal alloys floating in the room, capable of nickel-plating both lungs instantly. The Sicilian guitarist Morgia is one of the busiest guitar-players on the planet, equipped with arms and fingers made of recycled Slinky Toys. He does everything he can on his electric guitar apart from strike a recognisable chord or hold down a note in conventional fingering manner. Instead, distortion and mutation are his watchwords, muffling strings at every opportunity or causing them to hoot and howl like animals, and activating his strumming right hand to more or less pounce on the strings like a cougar from a tree, making unexpected dives and leaps and occasionally even shredding the flesh with his long sharp claws. Which reminds me that, pound for pound, this album is much more aggressive than the rather wispy and mysterious Sound Gates, the latter record resembling at times an electro-acoustic foray into the tunnels of the cerebellum, much as we loved it. Season Two isn’t exactly the improv remake of ‘God Save The Queen’, but half of the tracks are quite short and punchy and characterised by a thunderous undercurrent of bass tones and a considerable amount of shrill noisy attack at the front end. The nine-minute ‘Thor’s Tunnel’ in particular should endear this duo to listeners who derive twisted kicks from the more feral and untutored guitar-drum noise assaults of MoHa! or Mouthus. There are sterner and more meditative tracks, but overall a raucous and passionate album on which there’s no denying the musicianly skills of both these artistes, who pay close attention to interactivity, detail and dynamics in every second of these live recordings, yet are still able to blast out with the force of a dozen red devils when the occasion demands it. Arrived 22 March 2012.

Tales from the Crypt

From 05 March 2012, we have Joke Lanz and his Münster Bern (CUBUS RECORDS CB 368). Me, I’m still reeling from the fabulous two double-LP compilations ¹ of his Sudden Infant work which brought home to me the importance and influence of this outrageously unique personality, besides being shocking, hilarious and terrifying all at once. This item is less of a confrontational noise assault-performance thing and shows Lanz’s diabolical skills in working the turntables on a single 26-minute track which he recorded live in the cathedral at a music festival in Bern. It’s mostly a mind-sappingly odd and bewildering frieze of aural collage, with a string of disconnected sound events (music snatches, voices, sound effects and generally unrecognisable goop) following the dark logic of a mind which only its owner truly understands. Church bells give way to dripping-tap electronica bloops, then dissonant avant-guitar plucks, then a sobbing voice, a deeply troubling high-key whine, then a calm TV announcer’s voice; by about mid-point the vocal elements are becoming quite grotesque, with speeded-up repeats and loops rendering their every syllable as pure gibberish. It’s like viewing a series of surreal art objects in glass boxes arranged in a long line, creating an impression on your mind which grows more nightmarish and ridiculous the further into the gallery you walk with tentative step. I say this to emphasise the separatedness of Joke’s sounds; some turntablers like to confuse us with multiple overlays which crash together into a sonic pile-up in short order, but here each item is presented to us in almost stark isolation, with the accretion of sounds only gradually coalescing to form a semi-connected statement. The natural echo of the cathedral only increases that sense of isolation, and some of the noises here feel like silly little clowns or cartoon animals performing their zany turns in the most inappropriate possible setting before a cold or indifferent audience. The disruption to clear thinking is completed by the interventions of Joke’s stabbing finger, aggressively halting, reversing and rubbing the rotating discs with his radical take on the “scratching” technique. And what a powerful finger it is too. I mean, just look at that photo on the back cover. It looks like it’s hinged in three places, something you could pull out of a metal toolbox and use as a car jack. Lanz’s sense of jet-black humour seems to have been a key operator for this work, but the lasting effect of Münster Bern is one of total absurdity, a miniature portrait of the futility and folly of existence.

Jesus Couldn’t Drum

Curio of the day is this package called Don’t Drum for Other Girls (SEED RECORDS SEEDCD33) which arrived 23 March 2012 in an elaborate screenprinted foldout cover. This was sent to us by the Department of Music at Goldsmiths College in New Cross, and may represent a stage in a music/art student project. It’s credited to a band called Sleeps In Oysters, but they just did the basic music and numerous other creators have been involved in the realisation of this elaborate multi-media package. Luckily I have the latest version of VLC media player which is capable of displaying entire contents of disc in a menu, regardless of their file formats. There are about five original tunes by Sleeps In Oysters and some remixes-reworkings of same by Diasonic, John Oyster, DJ Arctic Roll, Liquid Chris H. and Christ. The songs aren’t much more than basic girl-pop with electro beat trappings and semi-punky guitar chords, with a nondescript girl vocalist intoning the lyrics with very little real passion or expression. As pop songs go, better melodies have been written. So far it’s something of a cocktail, but from what I can gather from the press notes which freely invoke everything from post-punk pop to modern-day girl bands, stopping off at Cyndi Lauper and 1980s power pop en route, that is exactly the intention. Oddly enough the reworked versions of the songs are more interesting to my ears; ‘He Drummed Part 2′ strips away almost all the song elements and offers us an attenuated mechanical whine blended with an ambient background tune, while something resembling a mad prepared electric violin is sawn apart with fiendish glee. John Oyster is responsible for that, and also the ‘Son Of Drum Mix’ of the title track which buries the basic tracks in a compressed echo chamber while bringing some insane drum machine tracks to the fore. Curious rather than exciting, but even so it just about manages to demonstrate how conventional pop can be recast as vaguely experimental music. Equally odd is the performance artist The Strangest Pet, who adds a twisted spoken narrative to another version of ‘He Drummed’. Then we come to the moving images segment, which is a pop promo video for the title song made by Carlos Saez of Madrid. It hasn’t improved the song for me much (third hearing in and it’s becoming rather grating) but care has gone into building the colourful pop-art props, and the images of the musicians running around the town dressed as outsize Korg synthesisers have an endearing quality. We also see the artistes inside their cramped cardboard boxes looking almost frantic, trapped, beating against the walls of a cell. The package includes generous number of photos of the video shoot, and the other visual elements are folders of image files – collage artworks created by an English artist LustrousChemistry (i.e. Paul Hearn), who also assembled the hand-made package for the release. A good effort in all, but what is it trying to communicate? The package is an odd mix of banality, cliché and experimentation, and any shared ground between the diverse talents involved is hard to discern. I can’t find the missing pazzazz factor that would make this very mixed package truly lift off for me. There may be some intended ironic subtext about pop music, but it’s nothing like as coherent as (say) X-Ray Spex, Bow Wow Wow, ABC or even Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

My Life’s a Gunshot (Retrospective 1989-2009). ↩