Monthly Archive

The front cover of Stefan Betke’s new album suggests (in perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek fashion) that a change is afoot.  Think back to early Pole: stark one colour covers refusing to overshadow the minimal glitch-dub therein.  Even the later releases with minor shifts in musical direction– the self-titled album, and 45/45 - the packaging remained mainly undecorated.   Steingarten on the other hand comes housed in packaging with an image of one of the most deliberately over-elaborate and hyper-detailed near-wonders of the world: one of King Ludwig’s Bavarian fantasy castles, Schloss Neuschwanstein. 

Flinging back the doors to Steingarten reveals, if not the opulent overload suggested by the cover, but at least that a few euros have been spent on some choice pieces by someone with quite an eye for detail.  Betke’s dubby roots, and the hip-hop stylings of 45/45 have been mostly discarded in the make-over in favour of some stripped down electro-funk, overlaid on occasion with, of all things, some feedbacky guitar noise.  Take first track “Warum”: rubbery 4 note guitar loop repeats in increasingly fuzzy fashion (reminding me of Emperor Tomato Ketchup era Stereolab) walking the track up to a pace where it can join “Winkelstreben”’s busy dubstep, which itself is eventually smeared by scrabbly six-string abuse.  “Achterbahn” is another highlight, built as it is around a naggingly scratchy Slits-ish sample.  It takes the woozy mellotron (can a mellotron be anything other than woozy?) of last track “Pferd” to remind you that you may in fact just have been listening to a Pole album.

Steingarten is an architectural gem, go dance about it.

Listen to “Warum” here.
Listen to more at Pole’s myspace and at ~scape

In return for taking someone to see some free improv earlier in the week, which was never really going to be their cup of tea, I was taken to the 100 Club - on London’s retail paradise Oxford Street - the other night to see something they wanted to see.  I’d never been there before (to the venue; I may have dallied a while on the street once or twice before).  The venue was nice; wider than it was long, friendly bar staff, hi-tech Dyson hand driers in the loos.  To compensate it was full of middle-aged, poorly dressed, overweight, bearded (and frankly, rather ugly) men.

One of the support acts was a woman playing a steel guitar.  She was rubbish, horribly derivative blues sung in a grating faux-American accent, but there was one hilarious (to me, no-one else seemed all that amused) moment when she dedicated a song to her husband. 

The song featured his name, sung repeatedly, and with tongue nowhere near cheek.

Her husband’s name was Barry (the crime was compounded by rhyming it with “marry”).

Barry.  If ever there was a name I had never envisaged being celebrated in song, there it was.  I nearly laughed her out of the building back to her seemingly beloved Noo Awwwwleans.

Do Make Say Think were always that bit friendlier-sounding, more positive in outlook and less prone to bouts of screamy anger than labelmates Godspeed You Black Emperor.  Which is probably why, bearing in mind Godspeed’s extended absence, DMST have endured that bit longer – less worry, less stress.  In fact, Godspeed were probably swallowed by one of the frown lines on their own foreheads, tumbling into it as if sucked into an almighty rend in the space-time continuum, tumbling with fists raised like antennazzzzzz…

With You, You’re A History In Rust, DMST show little sign of corrosion affecting any of their many parts.  The jazzy twin-drum attack is still the foundation of their sound, producing the off-balance rhythms of “The Universe!”, to which the band can solder their mariachi-flavoured trumpet and joyous guitar crescendo (well, you would, wouldn’t you).  Neat folkish touches abound, such as the fingerpicking on “A Tender History Of Rust”, and Akron/Family provide shanty backing vocals throughout.  “Herstory Of Glory” has a military funk, with marimba scuttling instead of marching across its rubbery bass.

Upon the release of their fifth album now may be the time for DMST to be lifted out once and for all from under the hulking shadow cast by their hibernating Constellation cousins.  Not only is You, You’re A History In Rust a typically cohesive, uplifting and musicianly effort from them (possibly even my favourite of theirs), but as uncle Neil will no doubt remind you, Rust Never Sleeps.

Listen to “The Universe!” here, and hear for yourself why it needed an exclamation mark.

Right, 2007, let’s be having you.  Time to brush off the cobwebs and kick out the jams.  To provide some heat on this coldest of winter nights, The Spitz gave us American free jazz legend Noah Howard.  I’ve got a few of his records – The Black Ark (one of The Wire’s great out-of-print records in a list a few years back), Message to South Africa with the Chris McGregor, and Uhuru Na Umoja with Frank Wright – but beyond those he has played with the likes of The Art Ensemble, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, and the one who seems to have had a biggest impact on his sax playing, Albert Ayler.  Some pedigree.  And some pick-up band for the occasion – arguably the finest tenor, bass and drums in the country at present in Evan Parker, John Edwards and Chris Corsano.

To start the fire, we had guitar/drums duo Ascension.  I don’t know much about these two and, let’s face it, googling Ascension free improvisation was never going to help (stupid name, really stupid name, the equivalent of some electronic musicians calling themselves “Chiastic Slide”, or some avant-rock band calling themselves “Daydream Nation”?). 

The drummer brought to mind a cabbie reading The Sun on the dashboard whilst flicking hand signals to passing cabbie mates, and demonstrated calm unhurried precision as he drove the music through some pretty rough sidestreets.  The guitarist was possessed of such lank-haired geek nonchalance, as if he had been called from the IT service desk to fix your printer; Derek Bailey pings and bongs built to Sonny Sharrock splintered glass before some Thurston-esque amp-fiddling cut the power to the guitar altogether.  They never really recovered the considerable momentum they had built to that point, and the obsessional cable-fiddling distracted somewhat thereafter.

Noah Howard may have looked younger than sixty-three, but either he has the mind of an older man or was displaying something bordering on ignorance or contempt by seemingly not bothering to learn the names of his stellar companions on stage.  I cringed at his continual name-free references to “these local geniuses” and his repeated imploring for us to come out and support them whenever they played live, as if they were a bunch up young up-and-comers.

A typical piece would begin with Howard playing an Ayler-esque theme and getting a surprisingly deferential Parker to double on it.  Howard would put a straightjacket on Corsano by getting him to play some straight-up backbeats and marching drums – I’m not sure if the smile on the drummer’s face was rueful, or one of genuine enjoyment.  Still, it was fun to watch Corsano try to wriggle free, angling his way in amongst Edwards bass thwonks before clattering around until Howard cut him off.  It was “my bass player”, as he was called by Noah all evening, who seemed to be the apple of his eye, given the repeated solos he was commanded to take (awesome, all of them, building into loud thumping runs down the strings).

When Howard let the band off the leash, they veered from the straight-yet-swingy stuff towards the Black Ark and straight on through, at times forcing their leader (this was no genuine democratic free improvisation group; they were Noah Howard’s band and they knew it) to the side of the stage, nodding appreciatively.  By the time Howard and Parker had marched off Arkestra-fashion through the crowd at the end, these sections of fire music had well and truly melted the snow on the roof of the venue.

I arrived back on Sunday from a holiday in Taroudant and the Atlas mountains.  I’m glad to see the place is still standing.  I was worried I’d left the gas on.

Some musical memories:

1) Small children playing crude drums (see picture above).  Beating paint pots with sticks with an extraordinarily instinctive sense of rhythm.  I was spellbound.

2) Jay-Z’s “Anything” being played in a taxi.  The lyrics about bitches and strippers seemed rather out of place to me in this overwhelmingly Islamic part of the world.  The driver didn’t bat an eyelid.

3) Berber street musicians playing down a back alley of the maze-like souq with minimal passing foot traffic. The importance of having a few dirhams in coins for tips cannot be understated.  Unfortunately, the difficulty in breaking a 100 dirham note to get a few dirhams in change also cannot be understated.

4) The call to prayer, five times a day.  First one at about 5am, heard usually in a dream.  Two variants: the one that sounds like a motorbike accelerating (”aaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAllah akbar!”), and on rare occasions, and from only one of the mosques, a gloriously melodic muezzin sung with passion.

5) Being invited into a berber home for mint tea, we spotted a large goat skin drum hanging on the wall.  They were only too happy to demonstrate (see below).  Satisfyingly loud and resonant.

Before we start, my not entirely interesting Nick Cave story: 10 years ago, he came into the shop in which I was working and enquired about a Sony Playstation.  He wanted one, clearly.  “But,” he asked, “will it work on my shitty little TV?”.

Anyway, it is now my turn to ask a question: are we still interested in the output of Nick Cave?  I’m guessing he is asking a similar question, by the way he has esconced himself within a new band.  This is Grinderman, not Nick Cave, not Nick Cave and the Grindermen, and most certainly not Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (although there are a couple of Bad Seeds involved)

This is a filthy record.  Filthy in sound, all fucked-up, scuffed-up, scuzzed up, noise and distortion, tinny drums and howling feedback.  Filthy of mouth too, sweary and sex-obsessed (a bit rapey, even); songs are called “No Pussy Blues” and “Love Bomb” for heaven’s sake, as if possessed by the twin spirits of Jon Spencer and Tom Jones (ewwwwwwwww!).  Nick works himself up into a filthy evil-Otis tizzy on “Honey Bee”, fa-fa-fa-ing as if it will call down old Nick himself.  I have no idea what the likes of the delicate and decidedly unfilthy “Chain Of Flowers” is doing on here, and I suspect it too is a bit scared.

In answer to his question, yes, it should have done.  In answer to my question, yes, I think we should be.  Nick Cave has dug himself out of a bit of a middle-aged rut with Grinderman.  The rock and roll muse has revisited him, hallelujah, and he has been possessed again by some of his madder youthful demons.  Grinderman is a filthy riot, and heads are going to be ripped off when they do this thing live. 

Listen to “No Pussy Blues”, featuring Nick Cave killing an electric guitar, here
Listen to more at their myspace page here.

Just a quick note on the lovely lovely lovely pixie harpist Joanna Newsom, who plays in London tonight.  I had tickets for this, but then booked a holiday instead (it was the last free week in my work schedule until April, and I was damned if I could wait that long), so had to get rid of the tickets.  Which was quite upsetting,  Tears were shed, I can assure you.  But not by the person I was taking, who still has that problem with the Newsom voice, and would much rather be killed to death by scorpions in the Atlas mountains than be sitting in the Barbican tonight.

Tickets were going for around £250 a pair on ebay at the time (they since went up to a ludicrous £450, I hear), but instead of making a massive profit (which to be fair I would only have blown on coffee, biscotti, and Blue Note reissues) I opted to sell them in entirely altruistic fashion to the Newsom-daft, ticket-poor Milkman for face value. 

I’m not pointing this out to get an MBE or anything (save those for the cricketers and their cats, please), but merely to increase the pressure on him to write us the bestest review he can so that I can read it through teary eyes from a Moroccan internet cafe over the next day or two.  He works better under pressure, I reckon. 

If he doesn’t write it promptly, if someone could arrange a denial of service attack on his blog I’d appreciate it - I’m probably otherwise occupied with a lamb tagine.

I’ve just heard the news that Alice Coltrane has died.  I’m quite distraught by this.  An amazing human being who managed the near-impossible task of stepping out from the colossal shadow cast by her late husband, producing a run of albums in the 1970s (Ptah, World Galaxy, Universal Consciousness, A Monastic Trio, Journey In Satchidananda, Huntingdon, Lord Of Lords) which demonstrated amply the reasons for John’s faith in her abilities. 

Lord, help her to be.

Although I have spent many an evening gazing at its vast rotunda from inside the inside of Cotton’s Rhum Shack on the Chalk Farm Road, this was my first visit to the Camden Roundhouse, at least since that time I used it to turn a steam engine through 180 degrees in the mid 1800s.  This time it was a complete lack of revolution that caused me to attend; the Zero Degrees of Separation tour featuring the folkish tag team of Juan Molina, Vashti Bunyan, Vetiver and Adem.

On entering, I noted the wondrous restored roof.  In case events were to slack, I thought I could happily lose myself in amongst the intricate joistwork supporting its elegant wooden dome, imagining myself flying pigeon fashion through its spaceship-like beams and struts.

This meticulously planned event saw the four acoustic guitar-toting types and their respective bands going at it mob-handed, with at any one time up to a dozen individuals on stage gently reworking each other’s songs.  Occasionally this reworking would be so gentle as to involve a dozen people shaking bells while the song was performed with little real modification, as on Adem’s sweet “Love And Other Planets”.

The whole zero degrees of separation thing was highlighted by the ease with which smaller groups could coalesce - Vetiver and Vashti Bunyan for a stroll through Kathy Heideman’s “Sleep A Million Years”, followed by Adem and Vashti, Vetiver and Juana, all as if they had been playing together for a million years.

Despite this, the highlights were the solo moments.  Vashti did “the mobile phone song” as she put it, along with “Wayward”, “Hidden” and the flautistic “Lately” from her unexpectedly brilliant much-delayed follow up to her 1970 debut.  Vetiver’s gorgeous “Maureen” showcased Andy Cabic’s incredible voice, somehow capable of sounding utterly detached yet emotionally charged simultaneously.

No-one got within a million miles of the magnificent Juana Molina however.  Her “Micael” (from album Son, one of my favourites of last year as you know) and “Salvese Quien Pueda”, built up from looped guitar figures, keyboard burble and vocal fragments, dissolving with extended scat-singing codas, somehow filled the cavernous roofspace, and the much-deserved ovation she received at the end damn near brought it all crashing down around us. 

They sound like (band x) sparring with (band y) after having consuming a bucketful of (drug z)!  Ah, the reviewer’s magic formula.  If only you could get some software to do this for you.  Analyse the music.  Find a couple of similar (although not too similar) bands.  If the music is slow and fuzzy, let drug z = a downer.  If fast and/or fidgety, let drug z = an upper.  Job done.  Meanwhile I kick back on my exclusive Caribbean island, drinking rum cocktails, with scantily-clad wenches thoughtlessly interrupting an otherwise unspoilt panoramic seaview.

[Note that, in order to be eligible for inclusion on this site any review needs to feature at least one reference to the the sea.  I’m actually considering a new category on this site in which I review all my favourite and least favourite bodies of water e.g. The Pacific: “big selfish smug show-off bastard of an ocean”.  Let me know if this is something you want to sea.  I mean see]

You could play that game with Deerhunter, but like what happens every time I attempt to play Monopoly, you’d be playing it all night (does anyone else have that problem?  Am I playing it wrong?).  Cryptograms is such a geometrically unstable thing, all irregular sides and facets.  Mentally unstable, some would suggest, to the point of schizophrenia.  There is the snarly Liars punk-funk of “Lake Somerset” and the Fenneszisms of “White Ink” (think “Circassian” from his Venice).  “Octet Stream” is a lost track from one of Spiritualized’s first two albums, full of nagging circular guitar buzz; “Red Ink” closes the first half of the album with Stars Of The Lid drone.  The shuffly-muffly “Strange Lights” actually reminded me of The Stone Roses, a band I thought I had successfully erased from my brain a goodly number of years ago.

So, as you can see I’m not going down that route.  I don’t know enough about all of them there drugs, for a start (honest, officer, they were just resting in my bloodstream).  I do know that Deerhunter are a fine addition to the increasingly essential Kranky roster, and in Cryptograms they have probably made a record which will get some people a bit too excited for this early in the year.  If ever I meet them in some paradise, tropical or otherwise, rum cocktails are on me.
Listen to tracks on Deerhunter’s Myspace page here.

I have some Amazon vouchers to spend, and am not sure what I’ll do with them.  I’m currently leaning towards this, and not just because the plate in my skull is attracted to all the metal in it:

I only have one of this seemingly never ending series of clunky Miles Davis box sets.  It is of course the Jack Johnson one (none of which appears to be on my iPod, maybe I should be putting my vouchers towards a new 80GB one of those fellas) , which was worth the extravagance to get to hear the full Sonny Sharrock, exploding from his uncredited corner of the Miles discography and spraying shards of guitar all over the shop (try this: “Willie Nelson (Insert 2))”. 

One thing that has always confused me about Jack Johnson is this - with all this glorious noise on tape, why did Teo Macero feel the need to splice in that section of In A Silent Way exactly half way through ”Yesternow”?  The change in ambience jars for me every time I hear it.  Once me and Neil joked about making an album - we were probably rather drunk, to be honest.  It would have consisted solely of us banging on things and shouting, but we figured we could make the whole thing hang together by inserting 10 seconds of In A Silent Way midway through.  Hey, we could have been right.

The Cellar Door Sessions (along with the arse end of the Jack Johnson set) formed the basis of the Live Evil double album, which is one of my favourites, only partly because of that wonderful cover art and only partly because palindromes make something in my brain go ping.  I listened back to Live Evil the other day - probably the first time in about a year - and was made dizzy by its rush of colours.  And not just those on the sleeve.    Jack DeJohnette and Keith Jarrett in particular burn the place up - how did Jarrett go from this sick funk (as in “What I Say”) to the Koln sessions to his standards trio?  Are these located on the same continent? 

Anyway, if anyone has any better suggestions for how to spend 45 of your GBP, stick them in the comments below, and I’ll consider it.  And no, you don’t win anything.

You’ve got to love Animal Collective.  No, really, it is the law.  Some wag in Parliament introduced an early day motion on the subject; so early in fact that he was the only one there, and it ended up on the statute book.  Exactly how the poll tax was introduced, in fact.  Contravention is punishable by five and half days in jail with only a copy of Feels, a Jeffrey Archer “novel”, and a bucket of live shrimps for company.

Obviously, this doesn’t apply outside UK territorial waters; indeed many is the foolhardy dissenter who has made a dash for waters beyond Rockall (careful if you are considering  this, given the current shipping forecast for the region: BACKING SOUTHWEST FOR A TIME, 4 OR 5 INCREASING 6 TO GALE 8. VERY ROUGH OCCASIONALLY HIGH. OCCASIONAL RAIN. MODERATE OR GOOD.  I’d put the oars back in the shed for now if I were you).  What with globalization, harmonization, convergence and all that, I can’t imagine you’d truly be safe expressing a contrary opinion anywhere really, all it would take would be one mischievous overseas bureaucrat with a penchant for early morning starts and retrospective legislation, and you’d be well scuppered.

So for now, just love them.  Even if you don’t, although obviously you do, don’t you?  Clutch their post-Feels meagerly-proportioned new EP to your post-xmas amply-proportioned bosom, and cherish it, for it contains three new songs, some chanting, funny noises, nothing approaching a chorus, and a slightly superfluous live version of the title track which you can listen to here.

You can listen to more, and buy it here (although note that due to a loophole the size of German Bight in the Act, you are not currently legally obliged to do so).

The sound of lapping water around my ears tells me it must be time to pick myself out of the blurry gutter I find myself in post Hogmanay shenanigans before I am run over by the fast-approaching lorry containing 2007’s release schedule.

Or it could be just one of the found sounds employed by Warp Records’ resident insect-botherer Mira Calix to create her new album of digital symphonies.  In Eyes Set Against The Sun, the minimal constructions heard on releases such as 2003’s Skimskitta have gone widescreen, yet still manage to keep the microscopic attention to detail which fills her work with such intrigue.  As well as the aforementioned watery gurgle, parts including children’s choirs, mulch underfoot, piano and thumb piano, bird song, and a million other sounds I can just about make out are all herein.  They are soldered seamlessly to an orchestral body, glowing white hot, flowing like liquid, cooling to brittle metallic chill, as Calix fuses the disparate elements of her preceding recordings to create this thoroughly rewarding piece of work.

Standout tracks are often around the ten-minute mark.  “The Way You Are When” sounds like one of Calix’s London Sinfonietta collaborations, a buzz of menace presaging an elegy’s tumble to skittery mechanical death.  “Eelio” features a piano being set adrift at windy sea, its stately notes ringing in sharp contrast to the oh-so-Warp beats of the subsequent “Umbra/Penumbra”, before “One Line Behind” ends the album in dramatic fashion.

From a now semi-lucid and markedly more upright position, I cast my gaze to the horizon for the first rays of the new year.  I rejoice with Eyes Set Against The Sun.  After last month’s socially dysfunctional list-building fest, let me be the first to say that this is the album of the year so far.

Listen to “Umbra/Penumbra” here
Listen to more and buy it at Boomkat here