Tagged: songs

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 11, 2013

Call Me Animal

Exotic item of the month comes from Maria Monti, the Italian actress and cabaret singer who has a film career going back to 1962 and had a starring role in Leone’s A Fistful Of Dynamite. The album Il Bestiario (UNSEEN WORLDS UW08) was a 1974 showcase for the assured and unusual vocal mannerisms of this Italian chanteuse, whose nearest equivalents might be Lotte Lenya or Gisela May. Monti clearly had this unerring ability to interpret a song through acting it as much as singing it, and her wiry acrobatics on this album are just amazing to hear. There’s a real clarity of intent and meaning in Maria Monti’s singing, which is rare; not a single fudged word or a smeared note. Listeners who enjoy authentic craft in song delivery are in for a treat, and may want to start looking for her 1972 double album Memoria Di Milano for further examples of how she might approach cabaret, chanson and ballad styles. But beyond the technical ability, we are struck by her emotional range, the sharpness of her observations. On a song like ‘L’Uomo’, even to non-Italian speakers, there’s no mistaking the meaning of the lyric from her no-nonsense and slightly world-weary tone. It genuinely is one of those songs with a theme the whole world can recognise. And there’s also the poignant and nostalgic beauty of ‘Aria, Terra, Acqua E Fuoco’, with its understated acoustic guitars and piano arrangement, a yearning piece sung with a crystal-clear purity that could bring an ache to the hearts of all the statues in Lombardy. On this account, I suppose Jacques Brel or Scott Walker come to mind as similarly tempest-tossed souls performing a balancing act between detachment and compassion, attempting to resolve their personal test-tube full of conflicting feelings and mental storms. But few performers have the grace or poise, the understated power, of a Maria Monti.

The other point of interest to us here is the credit roster: Alvin Curran, now widely known for his very extreme synth experiments and avant-garde compositions, did the arrangements for the album and contributed synth backdrops, and Steve Lacy (soprano sax) is one of the session players – along with two guitarists and a baritone sax player. While the results may not be the wild mix of MEV with free jazz this combination might promise, it is still an unusual-sounding record with some daring and startling dynamics in evidence on tracks such as ‘La Pecora Crede Di Essere Un Cavallo’, a stark and bony thing which is almost like a more approachable version of John Cale’s production for Nico. And ‘Il Serpente Innamorato’ is a dramatic tour de force, a slice of apocalyptic poetry-recit and crazy mutant cinematic music compacted into two and a half minutes of precision-tooled mayhem. Slices of sonic art like this ought to make Il Bestiario a must-have item for fans of art music, soundtrack LPs, chanteuse records, and the cinema of Jess Franco. Maybe it’s some kind of missing link between all of these strands of buried wayward European madness. The producer was Ezio Leoni, a titan of the Italian music industry who’s been involved in the production and arrangement of about two hundred records from the late 1950s onwards. This was released in June 2012, a limited pressing, and sorry to tell you it seems to be sold out already from the label, but surely must be available somewhere. Highly recommended.

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

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

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.

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 30, 2013

Yorkshire Black Metal and Beyond: distinctive raw black metal style with associated scene is just the remedy

A Brief Survey of Yorkshire Black Metal (White Medal) and Beyond

White Medal is a raw black metal project masterminded by that one-man Yorkshire black metal universe George Proctor whose other bands have been featured in the previous two Yorkshire Black Metal posts. Everything mentioned in this post here appears on Youtube.com. A very early track, dating back to 2008, is “Chance (Rebirth)” and an excellent introduction to White Medal and the whole Yorkshire black metal scene (man?) it is too: after a gentle acoustic guitar opening, the song blasts wide open with a frenzied string blizzard attack, a constantly thrumming rhythm and deep rasping vocals.

A later track from WM’s 2012 demo release “Yorkshire Steel”, “Wod, Blod n’ Feathers” is a raw and rousing bass-heavy song, strong on riff and melody, and perhaps a harbinger of what we can expect from this band. The vocals are very strong and clear if frighteningly guttural. The fact that the lyrics might be in Yorkshire dialect does not detract at all as in practice it’s difficult to follow the lyrics, so distorted are the guitars and singing. A slow instrumental section about two thirds of the way through shows good understanding and control of musical, atmospheric and emotional elements in creating and sustaining tension. “Before Tha’ Arrived”, coming off a 2012 split EP with fellow UK band Caina, is a powerful pained song with vocals somewhere between anguished and deranged, and massive-sounding riffs throughout.

In-between these songs recorded in 2008 and 2012, WM released several demos which were later scooped up into a compilation CD “Yorkshire Heathen Black Metal” which among other things documents the band’s progress from guitar noise textures to actual melodic but still very raw black metal songs. All tracks have titles in Yorkshire dialect so I assume the lyrics are also in the same dialect. This might herald a trend among some UKBM bands to write songs in Old English and its variant dialects and in fact Proctor’s label Legion Blotan Records & Distribution actually boasts an act that might write songs in that language.

This is Satanhartalt from Northumberland whose track “Deathscufaegewinn” is a cold, mysterious and creepy mood piece of clunking machinery, ghostly whistling and a kind of dry-cave-air ambience. “Feondscipe” is a dreary trudging drumming ordeal through murkiness and hissing blackness while drunken piano sounds off in an apathetic and desultory manner. A deep vocal moans in the background. “Carcerntheostru” is an amazing piece of near-industrial metal scythe sweeping across the sonic firmament while high-pitched drones shrill at deafening levels and other strange machine effects come and go. Most of the track is rolling, whirring machinery rumbling on forever as if the lever got stuck and the damn thing can’t be turned off at the power point.

From Lancaster hails Lost Flood, also on Legion Blotan, whose “In the Snow” is more straightforward raw black metal, repetitive and minimalist in structure and hardly varying at all. Gruff, abrasive vocals come in fits and spurts. The drumming is primitive and consists of banging and crashing cymbals and pounding drums.

Scotland offers up Esk who so far has just one demo to her name. This is an experimental and abstract black metal / noise ambient project of one Lucy Johnson who sings for black metal act Rife. Esk has an unnamed track from her 2012 demo release up on Youtube and this is a booming piece with heavily distorted vocals and a blizzard atmosphere. Rife themselves hail from Newcastle and from the evidence of a song “Autocracy, have a raw crusty style of black metal with sinister inhuman vocals placed far back in the mix.

Last but not least, and this is drawing away from black metal into noise, there is Mutant Ape, Proctor’s very noisy noise project which is not bad at all, judging from tracks like ”Worlds Collide and “Skums”. It’s all very chaotic-sounding stuff featuring screechy background vocals and dense clouds of distortion blur outlines of the instruments, making it hard for listeners to pick them out. At this point, Proctor is probably making a lot of TSP readers feel puny and murderously jealous of his numerous black metal, industrial, noise and other music projects so I dare not investigate his other musical activities any further. Next thing you know, he’ll be playing organ and conducting the choir performing a new hymn (which he wrote, natch) at your local country church.

In a country with many problems of various dimensions – political, cultural and economic the most obvious of difficulties but also ethical, what with so many institutions once respected but becoming increasingly discredited as their histories come to light – there seems to be a search for new identity and new values that might stand the British in a more confident and worthy direction. The rise of a distinct raw black metal style drawing on several musical genres and associated network in northern England might represent one facet of this search.

January 29, 2013

Yorkshire Black Metal II: four years of raucous fusion punk black metal by Sump

A Brief Survey of Yorkshire Black Metal: Sump

Astute readers of my previous post on Yorkshire Black Metal will have noticed I omitted to mention Sump and White Medal and that was deliberate on my part as these two bands – more bastard children of proud prolific parents George Proctor and Gareth Howells – seem to have the most releases. As of this time of writing (29 January 2013), in a brief four-year period starting in 2008 the two bands amassed over 25 recordings, mostly demos, EPs and split recordings with other equally obscure acts, between them. Sump play a fusion of black metal and punk and White Medal play black metal with lyrics written in Yorkshire dialect.

A number of Sump tracks have been uploaded to Youtube by MutantApe (Proctor’s Youtube uploader alter-ego). An early track is “Satan has Spoken”, recorded in 2009, with a skipping rhythm and bouts of crashing cymbals. It actually sounds like an old punk song from 30 years ago but I can’t remember who did it then (it might have been XTC, I’m not sure). Another early song is “Gang Street”, from the band’s first demo recorded in 2009: very short and not terribly sweet but at least GP and GH sounded like they were having a grand time bashing strings and skins together.

From 2010, there is “Miserable Sin”, another garage track with more of a catchy rhythm, lots of opportunities for hand claps and vocal track than the rest reviewed here. It comes from the “Taken Dead” demo.

“Standing by the Grave”, released in late 2011 on the “DictaHell” tape, is a noisy buzzing track with a steady pace and rhythm, quite groovy in fact, and blurry distorted vocals of an enraged-pygmy sort. “We Know Your Face” is another very raw garage song with chuggy rhythm and screechy singing: it invites singing along with a basic call-and-response chorus. “Old Fools” starts with a thumping bass drum and some abstract-sounding guitar chainsaw drones that segue into rock-n-roll rhythms, groove-tastic riffing and the most raggedy-raspy vocals this North Sea side of black metal. All too quickly this track ends and I’m quite sorry it does because it’s a very good song and demented to boot.

“Leave this Knife” is a recent (2012) recording and I’m happy to say it shows no evidence of song-writing progress or refinement of musicianship: Sump is still a happy raucous and droning duo peddling punk rock ditties with steady rock-n-roll rhythms and basic melodies. Long may they continue in this vein!

Maybe one day these guys will go all serious and worthy: they will write songs with deadly dull repetitive music shorn of originality and inspiration; lyrics will be about love or saving the world; they will play to full-house football-stadium audiences with elaborate lighting rigs and a stageshow circus of magicians and acrobats; they will become tax exiles with their base in the Netherlands. Until that day arrives in the far distant future, all I wish for is for Sump to gather up their demos and release them all onto one compilation tape or CD for all to enjoy.

Originally I was going to include some songs by White Medal in this survey but as usual this piece ended up closer to 1,000 words than the intended 100 so I’d better leave that band for another time.

Contact: Sump