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“The numbers get so high, of the dead flying through the sky. Oh I don’t know why…love comes to me”. What the fuck? Oh, I get it, Bonnie Prince Billy is back. After a couple of middling collaborations with Matt Sweeney and Tortoise, and a weird re-performed greatest hits, this is Will Oldham’s first proper BPB record since 2003’s Master and Everyone, and I find myself once more waist deep in his historically choppy seas.
With strings. As if he didn’t already squeeze your brain’s emotional centre until it came out through his fingers like Playdough, this type he has employed Bjork and Sigur Ros producer Valgeir Sigurdsson, and Antony and the Johnsons arranger Nico Muhly to add strings. The arrangements are sympathetic, restrained on the gentle “Cursed Sleep”, grinding and churning on the tortured “The Seedling”.
And with a female singing partner. Dawn McCarthy of Faun Fables has been drafted in to play Cher to Oldham’s Sonny Beardo, her winsome tunefulness proving to mix neatly with his deep wavering voice, especially on the lengthy penultimate duet, the gorgeous “I Called You Back” (“When I was quiet, I heard your voice in everything”, they sing to each other, and I find myself truly moved).
As per the opening quotation, the album’s lyrical theme is very much that of a man deeply in love, despite it all. “It all” definitely seems to include a bit of bad weather, although given that the album was recorded in Iceland, I think that should have been forecast. We get lots of lips, lots of kissing. Lots of legs, with the knee in particular coming in for a bit of welcome romantic scrutiny.
The Letting Go is a surprisingly inventive and at times experimental album (see the playful electronics of “Lay and Love”, and Jim White’s angular drumming on the untitled closer), without a doubt musically his best. However, aware as I am that asking for him to be a bit less happy, and to wish unpleasant deaths on a few more people, is a bit unfair, I felt the album lacked the lyrical bite and depth found on earlier Oldham releases.
I’ve been listening to this a lot over the last month or so but I don’t think I’ve quite come to terms with it yet – not in the same way as I haven’t come to terms with Scott Walker’s The Drift, which has really bullied me, calling me ”stupid” and putting chewing gum in my hair, but just in the sense of not quite being able to get a handle on it. I feel that every time I look at it it changes; if I know its energy, I don’t know its position. As a result, any attempt to review it is probably attempting to defy the law of physics, and I can’t tell if I am doing it justice.
Still, I press on misguidedly. This is the fourth album by the Boxhead Ensemble, currently consisting essentially of guitar (played by Boxhead director Michael Krassner), cello, piano and percussion, although rarely does it feel like there are many of them playing at any one time – they are very economical with sound. Tracks wander from languid Ry Cooder style desert music to elegant chamber pieces, and somehow I think it all makes sense. Tracks are all named numerically, but are arranged on the album out of numerical order, indicating the care that has gone into the running order – tracks occasionally seem to fuse together with invisible seams.
Nocturne 1 features elegiac cello getting spooked by (quiet) Godspeed guitar, and ambles playing its Once Upon A Time In The West harmonica into the late night Paris, Texas of Nocturnes 5 and 3, where it gets its head down for the night. Nocturne 8 is dreamlike/nightmarish with its sound of delicately processed piano, like a frontier town Sakamoto/Noto. Nocturne 4 marks a new day with the funereal but melodically rich classicism of its double tracked cellos, which drag into the increasingly menacing Nocturne 7. Nocturne 2 then howls with pained strings until Nocturne 10 puts its arm around its shoulder, shrugs and says “it’ll probably all work out” before walking out with it to the desert to show it a rude-looking cactus.
The album is deceptively simple, but every listen reveals new textures, conflicting emotions and hidden melodies, as what appears initially to be a sparse canvas pans out into massive cinemascope. Or at least it does on this listen…
Listen and buy at Boomkat
Colleen a.k.a. Cecile Schott is has been responsible for two of the most bewitching things released on the Leaf label (and two of my most played albums over the last couple of years, so says iTunes, and I believe it for once). Everyone Alive Wants Answers and The Golden Morning Breaks are marvellous works, painstakingly built up from sampled acoustic instrumentation (things with keys, things with strings, little things that go eee, little things that go bing) and processed so as to create evocative sound worlds. Minimalist, but always anchored to melody, albeit fragile fragments which would be of little use in strong winds.
For the mini-album – still 38 minutes long, mind – Colleen Et Les Boites A Musique, created for a French Radiophonic Workshop broadcast, she has limited her scope of source material, restricting herself only to music boxes (keep up, non-French speakers). It seems that music boxes come in a larger variety than my ‘flu-fettered imagination can picture (I can only see a kitsch jewellery box, music playing, ballet dancer twirling. That, and the cruel hands of death, although I kinda wish my imagination would stop picturing them), from whacking big 1940s contraptions, to the tiny ones inside birthday cards (see, I wouldn’t have thought of those). Colleen recklessly tosses aside the manufacturer’s instructions and invalidates her warranties by getting involved with the mechanics using hammers and her fingers, before adding her subtle electronic shades.
The result is as satisfying as her full length albums. Demonstrating fastidious attention to detail, Colleen flips open her boxes to reveal gamelan and calypso, as well as overtones of Morricone, Reich and, more surprisingly, Konono No.1, in a series of tracks ranging from 30 seconds to 7 minutes in length. The epic closing track “I’ll Read You a Story” decides to make full use of its extended time on air by trying to reduce me to tears (give me a break, I’m ill), as I feel its gossamer melodies suffused with aching sadness slipping through my fingers.
Download “Under The Roof” here
Watch the video for “I’ll Read You a Story” here
Listen to further tracks at Colleen’s Myspace page
I’ve been all over the piano recently like some cheap floosy in a cabaret club. This year you have seen me gyrating enthusiastically but unerotically to Triosk and The Necks. Last year I was pretty much giving lapdances on the piano stools of Julien Neto and In The Country (count yourself lucky you didn’t see that). The latest record to wait until after the show, buy me one drink too many, and try to put its hand up my blouse is Be Still by Adrian Klumpes.
Klumpes is 33.333% of the aforementioned Australian jazz/electronics trio Triosk. While the other two members were out the back tending the barbie (feel free to replace this with a cheap, crude Australian stereotype of your own choosing), he had a few hours in the studio on his own to lay down the piano tracks for Be Still, which he then processed and enhanced electronically. Although the short recording period could be expected to give the tracks a sense of contiguity – and in terms of acoustics and resonance, and a certain feeling of edgy restlessness, that is the case – the album is broad-ranging in its emotional reach, and the level of intrusiveness of the digital elements varies from nil to about, oooh, sixteen.
At the sparse end we have the title track, which is constructed around a beautiful and emotive melodic motif, played repeatedly as if it provides therapeutic respite from some trauma. The ten minutes of unadorned piano which make up “Unrest” form the album’s glorious centrepiece; propelling you gleefully downstream over urgent and insistent piano which tumbles like river rapids, shifting course and gaining intensity as it goes.
On “Why” and “Give In”, the sounds are kidnapped and taken far from source (as per Fennesz’s treatment of the guitar) with the tracks eventually left at the roadside scarred by feedback. “Exhale”, marginally less successfully, sounds like a piano being wheeled in a supermarket trolley through Iceland’s car park (note for foreign readers: Iceland is a UK supermarket chain at the less expensive end of the market. Their car parks are probably full of detritus. Not that I’ve ever been, obviously. Anyway, to clarify: this has nothing to do with Iceland the country, whose car parks are probably entirely free of detritus. Not that I’ve ever been, sadly). Last track “Passing Pain” seems mistitled; there is a shrieking undercurrent of grief which the piano seems to be doing its best to ignore, as opposed to overcome.
Be Still is a mesmeric and powerful record which, via distillation of their core ethos into specific sonic and emotional fractions, may even surpass Triosk’s excellent latest. Cop a feel.
Listen to tracks on Adrian Klumpes’ Myspace page here
Download mp3 of “Exhale” from the Leaf site here
I’m not sure anyone really leaves any of these Don’t Look Back concerts, featuring bands performing entire albums in sequence, feeling disappointed. You are not exactly going to moan about songs they didn’t play – it wasn’t on the album, so they didn’t play it. Complaints about the running order would also be churlish. Unless the band stages some sort of dirty protest, childishly smearing their meisterwerk over the walls, I reckon you’ll be alright.
Tindersticks’ Second is one of my all-time touchstones. Emotionally rich to the point of extreme weepiness, lyrics of heartbroken helplessness strewn like broken dishes over a carpet of intricate orchestration. Given the persistent rumours about whether or not Tindersticks actually existed as a band any more, I was bemused to see it listed as part of the Don’t Look Back series. And then a bit excited. Of course, I didn’t leave disappointed.
From the shrieking asymmetric violins of “El Diablo En El Ojo” to the closing descending piano lines of “Sleepy Song”, the album was delivered beautifully. The band hadn’t defaulted on rehearsal duties for this undertaking – even given the paucity of recent live shows, it is doubtful how often some of these tracks have been played live in the last decade. The two-piece brass and eleven piece string sections were well drilled, although I was surprised to see how many of the string parts Dickon Hinchcliffe plays himself. Stuart Staples was reassuringly suave of appearance and cracked of voice, dispensing inaudible in-between song bonhomie in the manner of a chain-smoking funeral director.
While the orchestral lachrymose pieces – “A Night In”, “Tiny Tears” were as good as I could have hoped for, the slower pieces like “Seaweed” and “Cherry Blossoms” really came alive in the reverential hush of the Barbican. There was very little deviation from the recorded versions – maybe the trumpet and violin duet introduction to “No More Affairs”, and the lack of female counterpart on “Travelling Light”, but somehow the songs felt imbued with even more emotional resonance – perhaps through my having acquired a few more years worth of regret and heartbreak, or just because I didn’t know if I’d hear them again like this, I’m not sure.
If this was to be the last Tindersticks performance – and the complete lack of any acknowledgement by Staples and Hinchcliffe of each others existence did not appear to bode well – they went out on a high with some choice encores. The lurching “City Sickness”, naturally, followed by some curiosities including “Can Our Love” (with its glorious brief string interlude), “Buried Bones” (odd, in that this was another duet which had to be sung solo), and the funereal “Walking”. We got the dark comedy of “My Sister” for a second time; “Well it took so long to rehearse”, may have been what he said. I passed an old friend on the way out, who thought this encore was a bit superfluous, I’m not sure I agreed; I could probably have listened to Stuart Staples doing this a third time. To finish, a quote from my favourite ever lyrics, where the blind girl describes what she sees to her brother:
“I can see little twinkly stars, like Christmas tree lights in faraway windows. Rings of brightly coloured rocks floating around orange and mustard planets. I can see huge tiger striped fishes chasing tiny blue and yellow dashes, all tails and fins and bubbles.”
I’d look at the grey house opposite, and close the curtains.
Listening to Alva Noto’s new record For gives me the feeling I used to get as a child when I walked past a sub-station; the electrical crackle and hum filling me with a sense of awe and foreboding. Tracks like “Transit” and “Gulf Night” are so charged with static that they make my hair stand on end, and make me want to run a lightning conductor up my trouser leg.
I wonder to what extent my fear of these places is due to those public information broadcasts which featured people hoofing footballs into them, scampering over the high fence to retrieve them with inevitably faintly comic tragic consequences. And why did they stop showing these commercials? Are sub-stations much safer than they used to be? Do we use a different “safe” type of electricity now? What about pylons? I reckon people still throw Frisbees in their vicinity.
Incidentally , I digress from this digression – have you noticed how there appears to be a classic UK pylon design, but in other countries, they shun this design in favour of something even more alien-looking or asymmetric? Does each country employ a different pylon designer (and if so, what does that career involve once they have created the basic pylon template)?
Come to think of it I don’t remember having seen a really good sub-station recently; one in the classic open-air format – I have seen enclosed ones, but they don’t scare me, despite the man on the yellow sign attached to the door getting really fucked over by a giant arrow.
Back to For. I am safely earthed later in the album by the ringing melodies of “Jr” and the lethargic twinkling of “Odradek”, the latter in particular bringing to mind the languid mood of the extended drum-free pieces on Neu! or early Kraftwerk records. Last track “Z1” threatens to boot my football back over the fence, but crafty employment of piano over a carpet of barely audible clicks and beeps remind me of some of Alva Noto’s magnificent collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, and I remember that I don’t like playing football so much anyway. Interestingly, all pieces are dedications of some sort (for example, to photographer Jeff Wall, to Coil’s Jhonn Balance, to John Cage, to, erm, Ernie and Bert).
The Chartier/Deupree piece, recorded for an exhibition of seascape photography, is a different beast altogether. The first section is like a musical interpretation of the equation y=x/15, in the way it rises almost imperceptibly from nothing over its quarter of an hour. It takes around six minutes for me to register any recorded sound over the mundane hubbub of everyday life. Sine waves surface periodically out of a sea of electronic chatter, before all is becalmed again. The tide comes back in in the closing half, with increasingly pure metallic tones rising over the intense humming of an underwater electronic monastery (no, I probably didn’t think that one through).
“He’ll have you in a dither with his zither!”. So went the trailers for the Carol Reed/Graham Greene masterpiece The Third Man, featuring Orson Welles running through the shadows of Vienna, a big wheel, something about a cuckoo clock, and Anton Karas’s zither. “A zither?”, the audiences must have thought, “What the hell is the that? But it has a Z in it, and I’m well up for a bit of dithering, so I’ll have two tickets please, and do you sell any popcorn in 1949?”. Hence assuring the film’s success. Here are a couple of photos of Anton Karas; note the hangers-on, groupies and general ditherers…
It has taken some time for another zither-based record to come my way (57 years would be an exaggeration, although I like to exaggerate, finding it really big and really clever). I wouldn’t have expected to find it on Rune Grammofon, although perhaps the core strength of Rune Grammofon is its inherent unpredictability – silence next to noise, precision next to wild improvisation. No dithering, generally. It was through a Rune round-up, Money Will Ruin Everything, that I first became aware of Svalastog – via a track under his own name, which sounded like a minor Biosphere (an Eden Project, maybe), and one as part of the group Information.
New album Woodwork marks a stunning change of direction, caused by the discovery of something called a harpeleik, essentially a Norwegian zither, which once belonged to his grandfather (a nice quote from Svalastog on the Rune Grammofon website:“It appeared that he had been a fiddler before he lost all his fingers at the sawmill and converted to become a hardcore pietist, setting down a prohibition against music, dancing, card-playing and television. That made me want to convert as well, from digital medias to real playing”).
Typical pieces begin quietly with some acoustic fragments, which are pulled together by a sort of internal gravity, coalescing into loops. These spin for variable periods before being joined by various satellites, with further samples, drones, effects and noise, which stabilise the revolutions, create tides and weather patterns, and allow life to exist on planet Svalastog.
Opener “Wood Metal Friction” does pretty much what it says on the tin; rubbing metallic whine against a ten second loop of acoustic melody (echoed in recurrent dream fashion by the later “Centreline Reminder”), which is harried with increasing menace by bleep and buzz. “Snow Tracer” sheds its gentle patterns as if it has just come in from the Norwegian cold and is removing layers of clothes, relaxing in front of the understated industry of “Reconnecting Joints”, which scuttles off to fetch it a cup of tea. The album is full of bewitching attention to detail, each listen revealing fresh discoveries, such as the gossamer stitching of minute electronic and zither snatches to create the fragile rhythms of “White Oak White Pine” and the wonderfully prosaically titled “Cow Goat Goat” (named as if listing the first three animals seen on a train journey through rural Norway).
Rune Grammofon have set the bar high in 2006 with the release of Thomas Stronen’s mighty Pohlitz. While Woodwork can’t compete with that release’s dizzying percussive rush, it compensates via creation of a timelessly consistent and cohesive world, a world in which I may just decide to dither for a while longer.
On holiday. Somewhere hot. Somewhere oh so in the middle of who knows quite where.
I am lying next to a swimming pool, no-one is around, all is peace. If I strain I can make out distant rhythms, but who wants to strain in this heat? I turn, and see a foreign beastie, which has fallen onto its back. It flails around a bit, managing to build a slight rocking momentum, almost enough to right itself. It hangs almost at right angles to the ground…before toppling once again to its back. As you would expect, this process is repeated over and over, the insect struggling about in silence, tormented by the heat.
I could help it, maybe using a stick or something else which would enable me to prod gently at it from a safe distance (phobia, innit). But I can barely even be bothered to lift my pina colada, never mind go foraging for long (long long) twigs. And what would be the point? What is the average lifespan of one of these things anyway? It has probably just wasted ten percent of its life riding its imaginary six-pedalled bicycle. No sane girly insect would want to mate this upside-down loser after such a show of beastly ineptitude.
The insect will probably not be aware of the consequences of its foolishness. It thrashes in blissful ignorance; it is I who have to deal with the thoughts of its mortality and in particular the fact that it is most likely going to be turned to charcoal before long. I begin to hope that before this happens, the sun will move, covering the creature with a lengthening shadow. Maximum effect for minimum effort on my part.
I’ve been listening to this album for a few weeks now (not continually), on headphones, rocking back and forth with my hands cupped over my ears. It has made my head ring with notions that are at once idyllic and fatalistic, as its peaceful five note loop decays into a shadow that I’d rather not confront.
It is more than just a parochial Jocko thing – I am on record as saying that pretty much nothing of any musical use has ever come out of my homeland. No, not even Deacon Blue. Or The Proclaimers. There is something about the Fence Collective and their shambling, alcohol-fuelled songs of Fife and yearning that really floats my fishing boat. Dragged along in the dolphin-friendly net of The Spitz’s Festival of Folk were half a dozen members of that ramshackle collective.
Us punctual types were treated to a surprise (maybe surprise is too strong a word – when I saw the line-up I thought the fact his name was missing was merely a misprint – let us say unannounced) brief early solo set from Collective chief King Creosote. Magnificently poignant songs of small town heartbreak, sparsely adorned and all the better for it.
Candythief were next, and I found their powerpop trio shtick too sweet for my palate. Too conventional and uninteresting, I was forced to keep myself awake by going for a quick fish for gossip with the lovely Adem about next year’s Homefires.
I’ve often mused on the Frank Zappa question (a bit like the West Lothian question, but with much further reaching consequences for the constitutional structure of this country): Does humour belong in music? I have come to the conclusion that it does, but only in funny music. Hardsparrow are funny music; kicking off with a song called “Crab Fishing”, sung as a love song to a inflatable crab. And something featuring the lyrics “Gordo is a paedo, he saw me in my Speedos, and I’m not going back to that lido ever again” made me want to wet myself in appreciation of its genius (I reckon you might want to download that one here).
The errroneously upside-down headed Gummi Bako at first lead me to believe that he was continuing in that comedy vein by adopting a curiously querulous nasal tone for his first song. Unfortunately, that appears to be his chosen singing voice, and I found it difficult to bear, let alone make out what he was on about. A call for “Kenneth” prompted King Creosote to stagger up behind the drums for his next appearance.
Barbarossa did a useful one-man-band folky laptop thing with acoustic guitar, sweet sweet vocals, and occasional crunchy electronics. A good-looking fellow, and considerably less evil than his t-shirt promised. “Love and You” is dreamy, and still rattling around in my head. Mp3s here.
And so we finish as we began, covered in blood and with our umbilical cords wrapped around our necks with more cannily-observed songs about love and loss. Pictish Trail, real name Johnny Lynch, has the kind of beautifully emotive voice which would make me get a bit misty eyed after a whisky or two. The highlight comes towards the end when “Kenneth” and Adem are called to the stage for the busily percussive harmonies of “Into The Smoke”. After that, I untied my boat and drifted off into the night, hastily adjusting my prejudices about Scottish artists as I went.
Probably the most incongruous sight there could be in the middle of The Spitz’s Festival of Folk: the insane wall of amps that Keiji Haino had assembled for this bone crunching evening. Standing before them at the start of the gig filled me with awe – like gazing up at a giant stone statue of the God of some fearsome religion (you know, like those in Indian Jones movies).
The Alan Wilkinson/Steve Noble/John Edwards trio were on first, and gave the Spitz a good hard shake with some first rate improvisation. Alan Wilkinson played alto and, more effectively, baritone saxophones, splitting notes asunder and casting them up before this God. Steve Noble played drums with great skill, deep concentration, fine touch, and deceptively minimal movement (reminding me of a golfer lining up a long putt). John Edwards merely confirmed his position as probably the finest bassist I have seen live, plucking and sawing and tinking and thumping with a manic energy, occasionally leading Noble in a descent into some funkier stuff.
The catacoustics of Touch recording artist z’ev provided such sweet relief. He played gongs of various metals and sizes suspended from a frame, and played them with such touch and precision, like a one man gamelan steel drum ensemble. Tracing shapes with sticks over drum skins produced incredibly resonant buzzes and drones. I have rarely enjoyed three quarters of an hour spent looking at a bald man’s back as much.
It became clear quite quickly that Keiji Haino intended to use any means at his disposal to produce the most fucked up racket he could, no matter how ridiculous he would make himself look in the process. He began by facing off against Chris Corsano on drums (a fight most would lose within three rounds) seemingly intent on battering the drum kit into the restaurant below, before switching to theremins, playing them like a witch keeping four cauldrons bubbling.
Corsano, initially deferential, found more space to cut loose when Keiji switched to his more conventional guitar, layering metallic percussion onto his drum kit, and crashing around in hyperactive and thoroughly watchable fashion. This furious invention made it abundantly clear why he appears to be in such demand these days in all manner of group settings (how many great records has he appeared on in the last 12 months?).
After breaking a string, we were treated to a bit of mildly comic shouting and stamping about, Keiji piling on the distortion effects and upping the noise levels, switching back to theremins for some piercingly high stuff, by which point I decided to get the hell out of my spot in the front row as I was terrified my ears were going to burst and I was going to bleed to death through my ears in order to get a different perspective from a nice viewpoint.
By this point I began to notice how my body had been acclimatising itself to this monstrous pack rape of a sonic assault – whenever there was a moment of temporary respite, the absence of noise made me feel dizzy, and instantly quite ill. I was relieved to see Keiji picking his (repaired) guitar back up, and showering us with some gorgeous distortion-heavy six stringed wash; Corsano surfed this ethereal wave to the shore. A stunning fifteen minute section in an hour plus of the most ungodly noise.
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