Monthly Archive

Right, hold on to all of your clothes, because I’m about to blow them right off using the power of hyperbole.  It is highly likely that this will be one of the records of the year in the end-of-year charts of anyone with any idea about what they are doing (i.e. me, and I can’t wait to do that first chart.  I’m so excited that I may just do it now, inventing some fictitious records to cover the last 3 months of the year. NB no-one releases records in December except Robbie Williams and Daniel O’Donnell, and they are unlikely to feature heavily).

The traditional Necks release contains one hour long slab of gently evolving trio improvisation, building up like a sonic Buckaroo from sparse beginnings – a slow, simple, bass riff for example – and adding layers gradually until the piece collapses.  It was somewhat of a surprise to see three twenty minute tracks listed on the back of Chemist, making it virtually A Hard Day’s Night or Rocket to Russia by the Necks’ monolithic standards.

It was even more of a surprise to hear first track “Fatal” hit the ground at considerable speed.   A sick four-note bass figure, repeating obsessively like something from the Jack Johnson sessions (regular readers will surmise that this is a Miles Davis reference, and not one to the as yet unreleased studio out-takes where the dull Hawaiian singer-songwriter jams with Cecil Taylor, Chuck D and Christian Fennesz) underpins beautiful rolling and tumbling piano; coming across like the livelier moments of the Triosk catalogue [ERROR: Microsoft Excel cannot calculate a formula.  Cell references in the formula refer to the formula’s result, creating a circular reference].  The track churns, coiling in on itself concentrically, adding guitar and static noise until the tension becomes unbearable.  Crescendo is threatened, but the track (the big tease!) is unwilling to provide release.

After such excitement, the muted bass and bleep introduction to “Buoyant” is considerable relief.  Slowly, and almost imperceptibly, understated flickers of piano melody are grafted on, along with half-heard high-pitched squeaky wheel noises.  Eventually, drummer Tony Buck flies over, carpet bombing Tony Williams-esque figures over the last five minutes of the track.  The overall effect is like a telescoping of one of their epic works into a twenty minute piece.

Closer “Abillera” clinches the deal, and may well be my favourite thing of this year so far.  It begins, appropriately enough, with an introduction akin to one of Jimmy Garrison’s to Coltrane’s later hyper-inflated versions of “My Favourite Things”.  The bass gradually feels its way in to the tune, where it is joined by shimmering Steve Reichian piano and guitar.  Proper funky drumming is dropped into place around the seven minute mark, allowing The Necks to motor along with huge grins on their faces for the remainder.  If this irrepressible iridescence had carried on for an hour, it wouldn’t have been long enough for me; it is one almightily addictive sugar rush. 

Go buy.  Best put your clothes back on first though.

Using cinemas for gigs?  Makes a change from turning them into churches I suppose (I remember once having a great idea for an article about this conversion phenomenon, drawing out the parallels between the cinema and church-going experiences…that was about as far as it got though.  If somebody could finish it for me that would be just grand).  I contrived to miss the recent Biosphere Picturehouse tour a few months ago (damn damn damnity damn!), and wasn’t about to make the same mistake with Juana Molina given that her Son album has probably been my most played record this year (although iTunes, the lying bastard that it is, swears (lies!) that that title belongs to Islaja’s Paala Aurinkoon). 

A couple of notes on the support acts.  First we had Biggi, who managed to confound my long-held notion that everything from Iceland is pretty brilliant, by managing to be considerably less than the sum of their constituent parts.  The title of Mapsadaisical’s Most Fondly Thought Of Musical Nation must now be fought over in polite Scandinavian fashion by Norway and Finland.

Fionn Regan was next, and surprised me by not being a girl, which shows my utter ignorance of the vagaries of Irish naming conventions.  Despite being praised by Damien Rice, and having a voice which reminded me of Mike Scott of the Waterboys, I quite enjoyed Fionn.  This was mainly due to the success of his high risk strategy of employing an extremely talented cross between one of the Allman Brothers and a very friendly bear as drummer.  

Juana Molina tumbled out in front of the folds of the giant red curtain looking for all the world like a piece of plankton inside a whale’s mouth; opener “Un Beso Llega” was (misguided metaphor continuation alert!) like having your warm bits licked by a whale’s tongue.  Assuming that were a very nice and pleasurable thing, which I often think it would be.

Unaccompanied, Juana built fragile constructions by pasting her beautiful Argentinian voice (truly this article is a musical league of nations.  We are the world.  We are the children.  We are the ones who make a brighter day so lets start giving) over her looped guitar and keyboard structures using fizzy electronic glue.  Son standout “Micael” descended magnificently from pastoral beginnings into lively rhythms.

Touring companions Psapp created merry mischief by requesting Juana play the unplanned “El Perro” (“The Dog Song”, she helpfully translates).  The background to this song demonstrates an interesting Latin American approach to neighbourly relations - after being kept awake by a dog once too often, and the owner refusing to believe that her dog barked all day, Juana taped the dog and played it back at the neighbour’s house at high volume.  You know when you give a dog a good shoeing and it is all like, yelping and barking and stuff – well, this was all like that.  We sat spellbound as Juana did all but turn into the hound, and gave her the biggest round of applause of the night.

Juana finished by covering us with the soothing salve of “Salvese Quien Pueda” (boy have I upset my spellchecker now), wrapping us up warm before patting us on the head and giving us a gentle shove out of her church, towards the distinctly un-Argentinian Brixton weather systems outside.

I was pawed by Grizzly Bear for the first time at this year’s Homefires festival. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of The Conway Hall, reading through the blurb about all the bands playing, something about them intrigued me; well, intrigued and frightened me: here was another guitar band signed to Warp Records.

In the last year or two Warp, once home to any number of knob-twiddling techno lunatic types, and possessed of a very singular and exciting vision for what it should mean to be a recording artist on the label, has embarked on a curious diversification strategy.  Great-white-hope punk-funkers !!! dumped a lumpen second album on the label in 2004, Gravenhurst have delivered some diverting if inessential krautfolk, and Maximo Park, despite quite fascinating hair, fell some way short of expectations.  Such inauspicious toe-dipping caused some fretting amongst label fans.

Grizzly Bear, as discussed previously, were terrific at Homefires, and I began to hope that Warp’s A&R radar had recalibrated after those earlier troubles.  Yellow House delivers on that promise.  A record of texture and depth, a fastidious weave of multi-instrumental thread over some colourful electronic backgrounds.  A song such as “Lullaby”, “Knife” or “Plans” will start fairly conventionally with simple voice and guitar, before adding layers such as bell and flute, brass and piano, burbling analogue sound and scrabbly electric guitar.  Vocals are dreamy, multitracked and with the reverb dial turned up way past 11; sections of “Little Brother” appear to have fallen off the back of Pet Sounds.  Epic stuff, none more so than the closer “Colorado”, which seems to paint the air with an sense of sadness, the smell of which lingers long after the album has ended.

DANIEL ROSSEN INTERVIEW 

With all of the above in mind, I pestered the thankfully very accommodating Daniel Rossen (Grizzly Bear guitarist, occasional vocalist and songwriter) for insights into the Homefires experience, their new home at Warp, and current Grizzly Bear listening (which I enjoyed, hence the links).

MAP: How did you enjoy the Homefires gig? It was the first time I had seen you guys, and I thought you and Final Fantasy blew everyone else away.

DR: Homefires was a little stressful but a great time. It was the last date on a month long tour of Europe and I had almost completely lost my voice by the end, but somehow I managed to scream out “On a Neck” at the end of the show so there was a little personal triumph for me. But it was a great show to end our tour with, and the response from the audience was so warm. It was a nice surprise. And I got to see Vashti Bunyan sing in person which was exciting.

MAP: Are there any British delicacies you are looking forward to eating when you get back here on tour next month?

DR: Hmm. Soupy ale? Sausages? Mashed potatoes? Marmite? Random baked beans on toast at the gas station in Cardiff?

MAP: How does it feel being signed to Warp?

DR: It’s comforting. It’s nice to have a home with people you can trust with your music for a while, just to be done with the whole headache of where we’re going to go. We love everyone at Warp and they seem to have a clear sort of vision of what to do with us and seem to really understand what we are trying to do as well.

MAP: It has a reputation in this country for being home to experimental electronic musicians and sonic terrorists.  What do you think made them sign Grizzly Bear?

DR: Hard to say. I like to think we ended up with them just because our music appeals to them, regardless of experimental motives and being sonic terrorists and whatnot. I don’t think that’s our goal anyway. But there’s a real emphasis on production and texture in yellow house - there was a lot of playing with the form in our arrangements and all of us tend to hop around on instruments and tinker endlessly. Also, our clarinetist/bassist/generally multi-instrumental Chris Taylor engineered and produced the record with the band, and often in his work the line between instrumental texture and production texture is a little blurry. So maybe in that way there is some similarity between us and the more electronic artists on the roster like Jamie Lidell and Broadcast.

MAP: Does it put any pressure on you to do anything different?

DR: There’s certainly more pressure to be more professional and keep up with press responsibilities and all that, though I try as best I can to ignore all of it. I don’t think there’s any pressure to do things differently in our music. In that department we get bored easily anyway, and tend to always want to switch things up. But I think I’m answering a different question now…

MAP: Which artists on the label do you listen to?

DR: My personal favorites are Broadcast and Jamie Lidell. Battles and Tyondai Braxton are also favorites of the band. But I think we all love and respect the whole Warp roster and feel honored to be a part of it.

MAP: Which other bands are exciting the Bear right now?

DR: The last great record we’ve heard is by a guy called Shugo Tokumaru released by a parisian label called Active Suspension. Hard to explain his music but it’s fantastic. lo-fi but very intricate. We’ve also been in love with the new O.C.S. record - I guess they are called “Ohsees” now- anyway, it’s the project of John Dwyer from the Coachwhips. also hard to explain but so ridiculously great. And a young man named Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson.

I’ve never been to Birmingham.  I’ve been to most of the UK’s biggest cities.  I’ve been to every corner of the UK (actually I’ve checked the map – apparently we don’t have corners, but a long and highly irregular coastline.  We look a bit like a man with a mohican.  Sticking his tongue out.  Hee hee hee, what a funny shape)  I’ve been to some of the really scenic places and to many (too many) of the places which don’t feature in the official tourist guides.  Only the joke ones.  But I’ve never been to Birmingham.

This means I have always been free to come up with my own vividly bleak imagining of what Birmingham is like.  Smoke billowing from factories; big grey factories populated by sad faced men.  Dirty children running through terraced streets chasing emaciated burglar’s dogs.  Entire suburbs populated only by guns.  A sprawling city shuffling to a sick industrial beat.

However, if only I thought about it a bit, I would realise that this was not the case.  I have been aware of the work of Brum band Broadcast for at least a decade; long enough for me to have made some reasonable extrapolations:

1) Birmingham is a bit exotic and interesting.
2) Birmingham is in space.
3) Birmingham is a movie.
4) Birmingham exists mainly in the late 1960s.

Future Crayon is the second (after 1997’s Work and Non Work) round-up show featuring highlights from EPs, B-sides, various artists compilations and so on.  And, like fellow travellers Stereolab (see their Switched On series), the group seem to keep some of their most interesting work for such distant outposts of their starry universe.

Future Crayon takes us from the brilliant Morricone down the krautrock disco of “Still Feels Like Tears” to the brilliant Morricone down the krautrock disco of “Hammer Like A Master” (oh, alright, taking a pretty experimental route in between, marking the bands journey from their lush 1960s radio workshop beginnings, through the early sparse albums to their more recent fizzy electronic phase).  Somehow, from such crude space dust, they have fashioned one of their sparkliest and strongest records.

Apologies to those of you have seen all of this for yourselves.  During last week’s Dragon’s Den, some old crackpot with 1970s paedophile P.E. teacher hair stepped up to the plate, or wherever it is that dragons go to hit things out of sight.  Onto a naked witch’s back, perhaps.  He had wheeled in a crappy looking blue seat, which didn’t look like much of an invention to me, but then again I am not a dragon, and don’t have a dragon’s x-ray eyes.  He began to scrabble around various secret doors, like an excitable child opening an advent calendar.  In one compartment was a set of exercise bike pedals.  In another, a pully weight thing.  Round the back was a treadmill.  Finally, to assorted gasps from the assembled dragons, he unrolled an open-air Olympic-sized swimming pool, in which he swam half a dozen laps with a sad, slow, lop-sided front crawl.  Now I am a bit of a latecomer to this show, but with so much bona fide genius on display, I thought he was a certainty to win the million pound record contract.  But no.  He wasn’t even afforded the dignity of a bottom two sing-off.  Him and his chair were chased out of aforementioned den, with dragons pissing firey piss all over his inventorial chips.  The lesson appears to be this: it doesn’t matter how many brilliant ideas you have if all you are going to do with them is stuff them inside a crappy blue chair.

Why am I going on about this?  The new OOIOO record, their fifth I think (like near relatives Boredoms, their discography and record distribution are a bit like three dimensional jigsaw puzzles), has more ideas than a dozen bags of assorted brainstorming scientists of the highest order - even up to and including your Stephen Hawkings and your Johnny Balls.  And while it may lack a sense of coherence, by sheer force of conviction alone it nails those bags of scientists to a rocket and launches them to the moon.

Taiga kicks off in fine style with drums and shouting, before following this with fanfares and shrieking, then crazy pseudo-latin time signatures and chanting.  Accordions and wailing.  Rhythm and barking.  Funk and girl group harmonies.  Short of attention span, switching and twitching as if smashed on cocaine-dusted cola cubes, this record invents a million new genres.  If they were to package them inside a seat, it would be so uncomfortable you couldn’t sit on it for long, and would be upholstered extravagantly and in a somewhat impractical colour scheme.  Clearly it would never sell, and no-one would take a 40% stakeholding in the company that made it.  Utter genius, obviously.

At times a cacophony of half-heard voices, misremembered sounds, and grief-wracked shrieking, this record sounds like my worst nightmare.  In fact, listening to it on a broken down tube train somewhere under London, I began to feel that the world was coming to an end.

I can’t imagine a more terrifying way to open an album than with the ten minutes of “Evangelista I”.  Dissonant violins and cello are scraped against each other as Carla pleads with bloody conviction for love and/or death.  Unrecognisable objects are rapped as if some otherwordly game of table tennis, umpired by a 1930s preacher.  Following this with a funereally paced cover of the traditional Steal Away (“I ain’t got long to stay here”) provides surprising respite before “How To survive Being Hit By Lightning” takes us back into that dreamlike sound-world, with the sky cracking and crackling with static.  It took me a few listens to even notice the submerged bass throbbing like a pulse in your  head, which keeps you from sleep or invades your dreams, assuming you can tell the difference.  The sepulchral, claustrophobic “Baby That’s The Creeps” locks you in and drains your oxygen supply for kicks.  The Low cover, “Pissing”, is a thing of beauty and is as straightforward as the album gets, although even that is smeared with feedback and strings scraping to a crescendo they never reach.

The influence of Carla’s new label Constellation is obvious on the cellos of the opener, the muffled piano of “Inside Sleeps”, and the tape loop experiments such as those on “Nels’ Box” (Nels Cline I assume).  These combine to bring about the disconcerting radio stuck between stations effect into which Godspeed records fall between tracks, heightening the awesome atmospheric conditions of Evangelista, which leave you sprawled on the floor having fallen from bed (or from your tube carriage seat), gasping for breath, confused and sick, with a vague recollection of unspeakable violation.

I’ve always liked the idea of robots dancing.  Not like the advert where the car turns (sorry, transforms)  into a robot and starts thrashing, that scares me a bit.  And the music isn’t so good.  But no, a proper robot, dancing.  Preferably one that looks recognisably humanoid. 

In particular, I’ve always liked the idea of programming a robot to dance.  Dancing wouldn’t be its primary function, for dancing can really only be a secondary function for people other than Michael Flatley, and most people (in fact the overwhelming majority) are people other than Michael Flatley.

You could create a robot which is so brilliant and intelligent that it could beat Garry Kasparov at chess (where has he been since then?  In some sort of almighty chess huff?  I always thought the bishop on the chess board looks a bit huffy.  Maybe he has become a bishop, forever doomed to wander squares of one colour), could design and build a house, could fly a plane and could hunt and slay a tiger using customisable knife and fire limb attachments. 

As an additional feature, you could  (nay, should) program it to dance on command, whenever it hears a particular piece of music.  For example, S Club 7’s magnum opus “Don’t Stop Movin’”.  Whenever it hears this, it forgets whatever it is doing, and starts frugging, bumping and grinding, doing the twist or whatever the youth do these days in those dancehalls, or whatever the youth call those places these days.  It would have to sing too.  “Beep Beep Beep-Beep, Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep-Beep, Beep-Beep Beep-Beep Beep-Beep Beep BEEP BEEP BEEP”.  All without any emotion being shown on its huge metal face.

Of course, chess games would most likely have to be forfeited, houses would be designed with curious purple ziggurat extensions, planes would spear themselves into the ground at hundreds of miles per hour, and most worryingly, tigers would remain at large to kill and eat millions of people.  However you have to weight these things up.  You got to see a robot dance, didn’t you?

Anyway, as I was sort of saying, the new Strønen/Storløkken record, or Humcrush as they seem to indicate they want to be called now, is really good (although not as stunning as Thomas Strønen’s hypercussive Pohlitz album from earlier this year), but makes me think about dancing robots. 

More microscopic minimalism from polymath Taylor Deupree, sound designer, graphic designer, interior designer, and founder of the 12K label.  As you would expect, this is precision engineered stuff. 

Given Taylor Deupree’s overlapping careers - and professed belief in the interlinking of sound, design, and surroundings - the choices of upstate New York for the recording, and of monochromatic leafless trees for the cover of Northern are instructive.  Indeed, it is hardly possible to envisage a less urban electronic record.  Like the forest, an outer appearance of quiet disorder belies the activity and structure within. 

This contrast between the natural and synthetic can be heard in the title track, as a processed electronic piano near-melody plays over what sounds like someone scrabbling around the forest floor for berries.  The conflict between the winter weather and the need to keep warm is another key element of the record, as in the bitter icy wind attempting to blow away the underlying warmth of “A Dead Yellow Carpet”, and in the way “November” stokes an electronic campfire with woozy, breathy mellotron.  Sine waves colour spaces between sparse electronic rhythms before static falls like rain on leaves on “Everything’s Gone Grey”, before water is evoked further on “Shell Shell Bye”, rippling as wind fusses chimes and a guitar is strummed with the lack of purpose born of being miles from the city’s stress.  “Haze It May Be” may be my favourite, as a gentle nagging electronic riff is chased through the woods and smothered by choral buzz. 

I’ve been listening to this for a few weeks now, and have found it a thoroughly rewarding and most evocative experience, allowing me to experience such an array of contradictory feelings and emotions in an hour, in the fashion that only the greatest pieces of art can do.  Northern is a record designed to live in.  Bring warm clothes, mind.

Ah, Australia.  Land of great hotness, ferocious wildlife, beery bonhomie, and nothing else whatsoever.  A musical desert, where people are so laid back they have to listen to shit like Jack Johnson and the John Butler Trio just to get themselves all angry and fired up so that they can swim real fast like.

Although, to be fair, there appears to be a healthier ambient, improvisational, jazz-inflected piano driven electronica scene than exists in most other outposts of the Commonwealth, whatever that word means, I think I read it in a book of facts or on a coin or a flag or something.

I adored Triosk’s Moment Returns record, which crackled with a glorious blue static electricity. Headlight Serenade is a bit different, favouring a much more live sound, closer to Tortoise (without the marimba) or fellow Aussies The Necks (without the hour long tracks which go dummm dummm dummmmmmmmmmm tink dummmm dummm dummmmmmmmmm tink).  Eschewing the processed sound of Moment Returns in favour of such an organic sound is a winning move; skittery drums chattering like nervous tree creatures (most likely to be more venomous than a tree frog eating a cobra which has a big jar of ricin shoved up its ass, if snakes have asses…which I suppose they must.  God damn them and their poisonous slithery asses!).  “Intensives Leben” is typical - simple, slow, one note bass riffs are repeated in Necks-ish fashion, while the track is hammered into place around them.  Note also how the drifting “Lazy Boat” is tied to the dock with improvised but well constructed drum pattern knots.

The electronics do become marginally more intrusive as the album progresses, to include the occasional outbreak of concrete munching, sounds treated to sound like tambura (which, when combined with the piano, brings Alice Coltrane to mind), and brief sampled drum explosions on “Headlights”.  So restrained, until the last track when, like when you truss up your kid, feed them Sunny Delight and Mars Bars for a full day and then eventually let them loose, things get thrown around and things get broken, who do you think is going to have to clean that up, and oh dear, someone is crying now.  The track in question, “Fear Survivor”, is the only moment on The Headlight Serenade which doesn’t quite gel; a disappointing end to a marvellous record. 

I’ve walked along Brixton’s Acre Lane a number of times – on the way to the supermarket, or the pub – and never really gave much thought to Number 32.  And neither would you, given that is just part of one of any number of new housing developments munching their way through once unfashionable areas of South London.  Yet Number 32 was once Cold Storage, the pie factory turned recording studio, referred to in the title of the 6 CD career retrospective This Heat box set.  Rarely can there have been greater symbiosis between band and location, between band and time; the collision between old industry and new technology, between the old racism and new multiculturalism, between the old left wing and new right.  Between the iron curtain and cold cold steel.

Their self-titled debut album is a heady mongrel, flecking spitttles of post-punk in the face of some cerebral sonic experimentation.  “Horizontal Hold” crashes into the hum of “Test Card”, and lurches around in search of a groove it can stay in for the night, or at least until it is awoken by the industrial gamelan of “Water”.  “24 Track Loop” is still a thrilling pitch-shifting, shape-shifting beast – like one of the tape manipulation tracks from Neu! 2, but with Jaki Liebezeit on drums; the Can axis is even more pronounced on “Twilight Furniture”, which could slip almost unnoticed onto Tago Mago if it had the confidence to stare the doorman down.  The album then heads east, through the “Rainforest” and towards “The Fall of Saigon”, where guitars are prepared and played with chopsticks.  Sonic Foo Yung, if you will.Follow up Deceit is a more cohesive howl into the abyss.  Attempting to outdo the sense of abandon and adventure of its predecessor, the album manages to incorporate melodica, sampling, pan pipes and Albini-esque splintered steel guitar shrapnel; in fact everything up to and including the town hall clock.  Lyrical content is dogmatically consistent; raging about advertising, capitalism, fascism, and nuclear war over the disparate looped and found sounds.  Deceit is a-buzz with so much fraught and twitchy energy.

The contemporaneously recorded “Health and Efficiency” single makes up the next disc, and sets itself up in opposition to Deceit, charging in on a ridiculously catchy riff and lyrics about the sunshine.  There are even “whooo”s in the background, for heaven’s sake.  About two minutes in, seemingly embarrassed by its own effortless pop, it chucks itself into a hole and spends the next five minutes running from side to side until it makes itself dizzy and it throws up its school dinner, full of mad colourful visions .  Two plus five equals seven, making this seven of the most thrilling minutes in recorded music.  The B-side was the 45rpm version of “Graphic”, which I thought sounded like Deathprod on mogadon until I heard the 33rpm version which takes up 20 minutes of the Repeat disc.

I’m not sure how much the nascent John Peel tracks or the 80/81 live performance add value, but the inclusion of Repeat – essentially “24 Track Loop” hyper-inflated beyond all constraints of time and common sense – is a marvellous thing, twitching and phasing for twenty minutes, after which the Cold-Storage-as-instrument “Steel”, and the aforementioned “Graphic” are welcome respite

I’m bound to be back in Acre Lane some time soon.  I think I’ll pause a while longer to howl at consumerism, as represented by a stray shopping trolley or something.  Then I’ll fidget a bit, before wandering off in some other direction.