Monthly Archive

The constituent members of the appallingly-monikered Christmas Decorations  have released stuff on big-favourites-over-here 12K and Kranky, and have combined here for an excursion into a metaphorical Western Sahara of an area, fiercely disputed between electronica, avant-rock, electro-acoustic improvisation and folk. 

Blasted soundscapes abound, from the Endless Winter Fenneszisms of “Twig Harpoon”, to “Closer To The Carpet” which is more reminiscent of the more glacial moments of Neu! or Harmonia.  “Upstage The Drips” appears to be at first glance a Ry Cooder slide guitar one-horse town in the desert, complete with squeaking railway station sign, but brushing the sand from the windows shows plenty of life in the local tavern – flecks of abstract noise agitatedly hoist the track to a higher level.  The hum of “Browning Out” morphs into the scorched distortion of “Clay Margins” over a plain of minute and considered snatches of sound, strings, cymbals.  The influence of the folk underground emerges from the embers of “Mice Over Feathers”, an esoteric electronic meander through Sunburned Hand / JOMF territory.

Christmas Decorations have delivered a diverse yet precise set of compositions, all shot through with alluringly cryptic allusions to melody.  You could wander dazed through this for days without reaching the border.  Buy it as an unseasonal gift to yourself.

Listen to “Upstage The Drips“, “Clay Margins” and “Mirrored Mold” courtesy of Brainwashed.

Some of you will know that the professionals I hold in the highest esteem are those employed to write the headlines for Britain’s tabloids.  You don’t see surgeons or teachers trying to form ridiculous puns to accompany pictures of minor celebrities out jogging, and I’ll continue to bestow my non-attendance upon hospitals and schools until those lightweights get their fingers out.

With that in mind, I’m well chuffed with my triumphant debut performance in the Guardian’s Arts Blog caption competition last week , relating to the musical pursuits of everyone’s favourite all-action buddhist.  See the award of this most prestigious of honours (and my latest effort, which I’m sure you could top) in this week’s competition.

I could use this space to write a review of the lovely packaging, but I think Colin is much better than me at that kind of thing.  Suffice to say it is lovely and colourful and features bits of card that you have to puzzellate into a square.   Come to think of it, not enough albums come with puzzles.  Math rock doesn’t count.  Joanna Newsom’s lyrics don’t count.  Maybe my brain is just puzzle-starved and I should see that new David Lynch movie this weekend to satiate it…

Efterklang certainly are filmic.  They have taken the b/w template of their Tripper album - electronics, strings -and coloured it in until the disparate shades smear and smudge together (as a child I would often try to layer as many colours of crayon on top of each other as I could, expecting to attain chromatic nirvana in the process, but actually merely obtaining a shitty brown; Efterklang have done rather better).

The five songs on this EP started live as live set filler, becoming live set staples and then live set favourites.  They have taken them and worked on them in the studio, adorning them with trumpet, piano, string quartet, choir, and moody Icelandicness - “Falling Horses” has epic density, prime era Constellation records stuff; the green mountains of  “Himmelbjerget” overlook a dark valley.  “Hands Playing Butterfly” is deceptively slight; its wonderful blue shimmer leading us up to the drunken stomparound of “Towards The Bare Hill”.

Under Giant Trees comes full circle with the full and spirited “Jojo”, completing a short if substantial release.  You could do much worse than finding yourself lost under the giant trees in Efterklang’s little world for a while this weekend (it may well beat spending several hours in one of David Lynch’s).

Hear a live version of “Jojo” here, from the band’s website.

When you think of the typical release on the excellent 12K/Line labels run by American minimalist Taylor Deupree, you tend to think of pristine audio micro-surgery, clothed in austere monochromatic covers.  You’d be forgiven for having forgotten the output of the sister label Happy, with its more poppy Japanese output – of such seemingly different lineage that your brain may find it hard to make the familial connection.  The new Moskitoo album incestuously blurs the divide in eye-opening fashion.

Make no mistake: while this may seem unchallenging when racked next to a Richard Chartier release, it is still an experimental record, and not just from a label-strategic point of view.  While the sweet breathy melodic coo on top distracts and disarms, Drape would think nothing of pitting wind chime against drone, accordion against irregularity, glockenspiel against chirrup, piano against concrete.  This is abstract, ambitious, other-worldly electronica with an instinctive untutored grasp of popular music as a second language.

There have been signs of late that 12K is a restless beast, stepping outside its niche with releases by the likes of Christopher Willits (and don’t forget the last Deupree record Northern – a hugely enjoyable and reasonably accessible affair which I hope you’ve checked out by now, as it appears to be sold out).  It is a credit to them that they can release something slightly more commercial without coming close to compromising their studied aesthetic.  Of course now I’ve said all this, the next release on the label will be a recording of a particularly buzzy fridge…

Download ”Skie” courtesy of 12K; you can buy Drape from their lovely shop.  There are some marvellous remixes too; especially the Taylor Deupree mix of “Skie”.  Speaking of Taylor, there is an open Q&A on his blog, so if you want to ask him anything about the 12K studied aesthetic, now is your chance.

Appropriately enough, given its title, Arve Henriksen’s last release Chiaroscuro was a bit of a polarising release.   I know some who found it unlistenably over-easy and ad-friendly.  They were idiots, and are no longer my friends.  It was of course a gorgeous three-foot-deep-in-snow-morning-with-with-pixies-making-snowmen-in-the-garden kind of record.  The kind I’d most hate to try and follow.

Unsurprisingly perhaps Strjon is rather different; it is a darker and more diverse affair.  Where Chiaroscuro gained cohesion from having Arve seemingly do the whole thing himself (setting itself up to be judged by the standard of his trumpet playing it was hardly going to fail, but putting his falsetto centre stage was bold), he has retreated into his Supersilent shell for Strjon (Helge Sten and Stale Storlokken are prominent); I must confess that I found this surprising for an album apparently inspired by some very personal reminiscences about his childhood home in Norway.  Traces of Chiaroscuro remain in the likes of “Twin Lake” and “Alpine Pyramid”, but these are like chinks of white light shining through holes in black card.

Helge Sten holds the stencil aloft.  Right from the first track this is clear – it features just Arve’s trumpet, but whereas on Chiaroscuro this would have been allowed to blow crisp and clear, here it begins almost imperceptibly to crackle and crumble.   I saw Supersilent live last year, and was fascinated at how Helge played with and disrupted the rhythms of the drums; on “Ascent” he performs a similar trick but without the drums – almost as if he is shuffling columns of air, a glorious three card con trick.  The album’s key sequence comes towards the end, with the gradual descent from tracks eight to ten into hellish drone; culminating in eight minutes of Arve’s throat singing (I doubt that would sell many cars). 

There is just about enough light for Strjon to trace the dots between solo Arve, Supersilent, and solo Deathprod.  I’m not sure I can describe the shape it delineates, but can’t stop looking at it.  It can’t be good for me; Strjon is a blinder.

Listen to the drone of the title track here.  Buy it from Boomkat.

Playing this, I can’t help the feeling that I’m turning up at someone’s house when he least expects it.  It is cold and dark, he seems a bit sleepy, but he is scurrying about, trying desperately to tidy up, stuffing dishes in the bookcase and books in the dishwasher. ( Or is he trying to hide something?  What exactly have I walked in on? Is my way back out still clear?  Make excuses.  Back up slowly.  Back up a bit quicker.  Slam door, run.)

“Standing On A Hummingbird” seems to be trying hard to bury something where no-one can find it.  Mobile phone interference scrawls upon vinyl crackle layered on digital glitch.  Initially I thought this may have been to disguise a lack of substance – nothing sounded finished.  A guitar tunes up.  Someone fingers a violin but doesn’t really begin to play it.  One hand claps.  Things were just kind of, well, ummm….oooh, look at the time…oh, yes, not really getting to the point.  After a few listens I really began to enjoy the Pole-isms (“Roots Growing”, mellotron), the Fennesz-isms (“From Verse To Verse”, bleached guitar), and the near-incategorisable electro-acousticisms in the middle.  There is a consistent spring-like mood to the work; birds wake up to herald the first shoots, these scraps of inchoate melody, as they burst through the covering of frost. 

I’ve always been a bit quick to damn people when I first meet them – they are either dull, potential mass murderers, or just about acceptable.  But life is too short, I always think; if I was to give everyone and everything a proper chance, I’m not sure how much time I’d have left (and in any case slamming a door sometimes feels just so satisfying).  Sometimes I may well miss out…fortunately not this time.

You can listen to album standout “From Verse To Verse” here.  Go to the Anticipate website to download a free Mark Templeton EP, of which “Goodbye To You” is but one of four tracks.  Purchase the album here.

Another week, another festival on the South Bank; this time the audio visual spectacular Optronic featuring cutting edge music set to visuals on “the UK’s largest screen”.  I haven’t been to the Imax in years, and I had forgotten just how big that screen is.  Standing at the bottom and looking up made me quite the dizzy; this feeling intensified as the evening progressed, and I would end up leaving quite delirious.

Semiconductor performed two pieces.  The first involved their self-developed software throwing up images in real time onto the screen to correlate with the music being created.  This began with punchy fractures of sound being represented by fractal bulletholes, and progressed through more complex sounds (still Raster-Noton like in their minimalist aesthetic) begetting increasingly confusing rushes of 2D and 3D shapes, polygons and structures, until eventually the music seemed to be giving birth to new life forms in front of our eyes, black-winged red boxes thrashing hyperactively to agitated click-rhythms.  The second piece was developed in a NASA lab (literally), and featured - the mechanics of the first in reverse.  This time music was reacting to visuals - manipulation of awe-inducing (especially on Imax scale) images of solar flares produced rowdy cosmic static.  The notion of space as a calm and silent place was subverted; instead we had space as an angry, violent, unpredictable force.

I found the Charles Atlas visuals quite moving.  Footage from pre-war movies of faces showing extremes of human feeling (laughter, screaming, anger, death) was looped and digitally treated - splashes of colour would illuminate the images, before they were consumed by flock and fleck.  Images of men flexing their muscles contrasted with images of women dancing, with the spectre of war casting a pox on both their houses, soldiers charging and bombers diving.  Fennesz’s improvised reaction to this matched the depth of the visuals with aplomb.  Beginning with what sounded like one of William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, he piled on the guitar and the distortion, filling the cavernous space with white noise and low-end rumble.  At all times was the music sympathetic to the visuals (so much so that I would find it hard to believe that elements had not been pre-arranged), structures emerged from the segments of repetition, building in power as the images became distressed and entangled with one another.  At last, someone has found a suitable use for the Imax cinema, we should hope that Optronica becomes a fixture in the calendar.

Tribal drums.  Unintelligible vocals. Screaming.  Whooshing noises.  Explosions.  For the first few minutes of “Good Girl/Carrots” you could be forgiven for thinking that you’ve walked into the new Mel Gibson movie as opposed to the latest release from Animal Collective member Panda Bear.  The film’s on later, form an orderly queue, amuse yourselves in the bar, or go shout drunken anti-semitism in the street, whatever.

Although perhaps those here for the film will hear the above-mentioned chaotic rumble dissolving into its blissed-out Brian Wilson-isms and be converted to the church of Noah Lennox.  The Beach Boys influence is even stronger on “Comfy In Nautica”, which could have walked into Smile, ordered itself a pina colada, casually patronised Mike Love, and exited without leaving a tip, all entirely unnoticed.  Words and sounds reverberate within the twelve minutes of “Bros”’s heat haze, rendering it dreamlike, a reimagining of a remembrance of a beautiful experience you can’t be entirely sure you ever had in the first place.  Feel them flows.

It is quite brilliant, and could be the record for those who find the endearingly unfocused Animal Collective records too one-dimensional.  It will certainly leave you with a smile on your face (NB: I make no such guarantee to those here for the Mel Gibson movie).

Listen to “Comfy In Nautica” here.  Buy it from Fat Cat.

This year’s Ether festival on the South Bank may not have had any of the astonishing genre alloys of the previous six (the Sinfonietta doing dubstep, anyone?), but still featured a reasonable line-up of white box tinkerers and and six string tamperers. Instead of seeing Battles showing off their new glam squirrel direction, I opted to check out Mira Calix translating her fine album Eyes Set Against The Sun to the comfy leather-seated environment of the Purcell Room.

Gong Gong were the support, and boy were they French. I’d had some onion soup earlier in the week, and that wouldn’t even come close to the Frenchnicity on display here. They had silly moustaches and mugged in comedy fashion to the crowd. They played some slightly dated-sounding dance music infused with traces of France’s multi-culturalism. They spoke to the crowd in French accents.

They had a killer app in their light show. One band member was an extra tasked with running around the stage pinning up bits of card, balloons, and more elaborate constructions onto which he could project images reflected from banks of mirrors stage front. All very entertaining, especially when one of the large balloons ended up being batted around over our heads in a manner unbecoming of such a traditionally serious festival.

To be fair, Gong Gong were pretty good when they stepped out from behind their banks of knobs and got jazz busy with drum kit and double bass, in front of spinning wheels of colour and light rockets.

I’d been led to expect Ellis Island Sound at this point due to a loose-with-the-facts (no!) Grauniad write-up in Saturday’s Guide. But it was to be straight into Mira Calix and “Because To Why”. Cellist Oliver Coates and viola player Xandi Van Dijk plucked and scraped - in a manner I can’t imagine being transcribed on their sheet music - as a spooked-out choir of children sailed down a turbulent river.

Much of the rest of the concert featured Calix creating delicate backdrops (the sounds of crickets eating Rice Krispies with chopsticks in a rainforest) giving nodded cues to the string section to play from their scores; the results would then be further looped and manipulated. Occasionally rhythms would emerge from this electrical soup; the industrial clanks of “Umbra Penumbra” in particular shook the walls of the Purcell Room.

The whole of the first section was played as a continuum; it lasted an hour but felt like no more than half that. After a brief pause, Calix cut loose a deep buzzy drone over which the viola and cello improvised, and the experimental ethos of Ether truly came alive.

There’s a lot to be said for an album which features the likes of Tindersticks, Bonnie Prince Billy, Jarvis Cocker and Kurt Wagner covering songs from childrens’ TV and films. 

However, can you imagine how much better it would be if the principle had been applied in reverse?  Here are some of my suggestions:

1) Rod, Jane and Freddy from Rainbow covering the Tindersticks’ “Tiny Tears”.  With interpretative dancing.  I see them all on a boat, play-rowing across an ocean of tears painted by Geoffrey and Bungle (despite the best efforts of Zippy to throw his fly-faced spanner in the works).

2) Acerbic reclusive (and ever-so-slightly dead) misanthrope Kenneth Williams of Jackanory/Wind In The Willows fame (how he would have loved that description) doing Pulp.  I can just imagine the sneer on his face: “Common People?  Oh how dreadful”.  He can follow that with Lambchop’s “Up With People” if he is feeling particularly generous, which to be fair isn’t the most common character trait of the dead.

3) Keith Harris and Orville doing “I See A Darkness”.  Can you imagine?  Keith: “You’re my friend”.  Orville: “It’s what you told me…”.  Do you think Keith ever noticed the kind of thoughts Orville got?  This song is the dark and inevitable comedown after the halcyon days joyously recalled in “Orville’s Song”; perhaps Cuddles The Monkey could leap out of his box for an encore chorus of “Death To Everyone”at the end.

Hear (and fear) Bonnie Prince Billy’s awesome “Puff The Magic Dragon” here courtesy of City Slang.  Listen to more (and see Jarvis reading “The Lion and Albert”) at the Songs For The Young At Heart website.  Oh, and you can buy it here.

I don’t do so much hip-hop on here, but US duo Dalek kick the boundaries of that constellation into such an irregular and appealing shape that it would be shame to let their new release Abandoned Language fly overhead without shifting my telescope skywards.  There is so much going on here that I can barely keep it in focus.  They have kept the experimental ethos of last album Absence, but replaced the MBV guitar scree with, well, a galaxy of invention.

The ten minutes of the title track are a tense and dense tour-de-force; a frustrated chorus howling at the lack of change over an unchanging beat, whilst all around them rise ever building layers of orchestra, piano, mellotron, and Glenn Branca guitar.  It is as if they were rapping to a Philip Jeck turntable symphony, and if they weren’t giving it all that lazy motherfucking nigger shtick, I’d be calling it the best thing I’ve heard so far in 07.  Not that there isn’t much competition elsewhere on the record, as it lurches from that incredible beginning into the crumbly violins/rubbery bass of “Bricks Crumble”, then the relentless Tim Hecker static/guitar night terrors of “Paragraphs Relentless”.  “Content To Play Villain” kicks up some turbulent waves in Gorillaz waters, and next up the rhyme, beat and melody-free “Lynch” shows Angelo Badalamenti what the monster in the cupboard really looks like.  They can’t quite sustain this onslaught of ideas over the hour, but I’m not sure who could.

Following on from the theme of a recent review, I remember being disappointed at the fact that we waited 70 years for Halley’s Comet to come around and all I could see through my telescope was a slow white smudge in the sky, and not some glowing red ball of fire tearing a hole in the sky.  I hope you aren’t equally disappointed with this, the first hip-hop review on here in decades, as the subject matter really should be setting your heavens alight.

Listen to “Bricks Crumble” here.  Hear more at Deadverse.  Buy it here.

I’d been invited to see a bit of klezmer in the East End; this wasn’t exactly what I had pictured.  An amazingly talented violinist (I have seen no better) with such effortless command of her instrument - from the slow low elegy to the frantic high-pitched Jewish party - but who still felt compelled to take to the stage wearing nothing but her underwear, in doing so (for me) compromising herself.  Maybe I’m being harsh.

With apologies to Neil for the bastardised abridged history…

I used to write for a website some years ago, which eventually succumbed to the twin demons of complete inactivity and all-consuming guilt for said inactivity.  One of our collective sought an interview with Steve Reid, on the back of having heard his ace Nova on Soul Jazz.  Good enough for us.  Steve was at the time earning his corn on the Pizza Express circuit, playing straight up hard bop stuff, so next time he was in London they met.  The project turned from an interview to a book.  From a book to a documentary.  And from there, some kind of personal crusade to get Steve his props.

First, Steve was reintroduced to the Fire Music.  Gigs were arranged pairing Steve with the cream of the London improv scene – the likes of John Edwards and Tony Bevan.  [Posters were required; it was decided that Steve’s efforts proclaiming himself “legendiary drummet” would not suffice].  They were all crammed onto tiny stages in London pubs with Steve grinning like a maniac on day release; the gigs were a blast.  By the time they played the Spitz, Kieran Hebden had picked up the trail, nodding heads with the rest of us.  A massive gig with the Steve Reid Ensemble (as they had become) supporting Four Tet followed, and the seeds of a new venture were being sown.  The Ensemble’s own album – Spirit Walk, a much more commercially palatable if much less exciting version of their live Bitches Brew - featured contributions from Kieran, and was followed quickly by the two joyfully rough and ready Steve and Kieran discs on Domino.  They then toured their drum/electronic face-off for a while, although to me, it began to sound increasingly tired, lacking in the fun and spontaneity of those early days.

So to reinvigorate themselves, they’ve gone record shopping.  Kieran armed himself with a bunch of obscure samples to play to Steve, to get some sort of percussive reaction.  Steve has gone in with a copy of Africa/Brass, and played “Greensleeves” (yup, he played Kieran a centuries-old tune than everyone knows.  What had he been smoking?).  The result is a step back from the formless jamming – hey, you know I mean formless in a good way -  and instead we have a much simpler and punchier ten-tracker.  Think somewhere between The Exchange Sessions and Everything Ecstatic.  Great bits: opener “The Sun Never Sets” hiding behind a twanging melody before leaping out to fire a battery of electronic effects against Steve’s four-four bam-bam; “Brain”reminding me of being at a Caribou/Manitoba gig, minus the part where they tried to decapitate me with a cymbal.  Steve kind of fits in, staying in his rhythms; rarely is he called upon to try anything too fancy – which seemingly suits Kieran, giving him the opportunity to boss the session.  He enjoys it so much that by the end he even creates an enjoyably cacophonous superhero theme (erm, “Superheros”). 

As this enjoyable album subsides with an African clatter and crackle, I do wonder where Kieran intends going next from here.  If I have to interview him to find out, past form suggests there will be a long wait before we find out…

Download “The Sun Never Sets“; listen to clips of “Brain” and “Our Time” , all courtesy of the good folks at Domino.  You can buy it there too.

When I was boy, I was obsessed with space.  I remember once running out to a bookshop and spending all my birthday money on a giant glossy colour hardback space encyclopaedia.  Such a wild child.  I’d spend nights sitting in my bedroom gazing at the pictures, tracing the rings of Saturn with my finger, remembering the names of the constellations.  I can still pick out the Pleiades and Cassiopeia, even if I can’t spell them.  Nebulae and galaxies held me in awe – the shapes, patterns, colours; strange astral geometries writ large across the heavens.  Fractals and spirals, insane forces holding them together and ripping them asunder.  Thinking about their physical and temporal (dis)location made my young brain spin at the speed of light, leaving me confused and dizzy.

I’d watch the documentaries and science lectures on TV, and would puzzle over red giants, white dwarfs and black holes. I’d hear of stars being devoured by black holes, falling into them at an unimaginable speed imperceptible to even the most powerful telescope.  I felt small.  Hey, I was small.

This small boy got a small telescope one xmas.  Such excitement, straining at the fetters imposed by having to wait ten hours for nightfall.  I had a star chart cut from a magazine, concentric wheels which when rotated revealed the evening’s celestial scene in a window; how easily the whirl of the earth was neutralised by cardboard disc.  I’d wonder at my expanded constellations, marvelling at how their stars seemed to get no larger, just further apart and with hundreds of new specks appearing within their boundaries, until my eyes would lose their earthly sense of purpose, the world becoming visible only through uncomfortable Vaseline-smeared glasses.  I’d always hunt down Jupiter and its moons; one, two, three, four…five….six….is that seven?  The diffuse star in Orion’s sword became the pool of his nebula, my pleasure undiminished by my being unprepared for its decidedly unbooklike monochromaticism.

But the moon…I always had trouble with the moon.   Too big, too bright, especially if it came into my field of vision unexpectedly.  I’d have to set my telescope up pointing in its general direction, then step well back from the telescope.  I’d line my eye up and inch towards it, ever so slowly, the moon getting bigger and bigger until it was all I could see.  It looked so different magnified; I’d try with little success to reconcile the seas and craters I could see with the man-in-the-moon image I had carried in my head for so long.  I’d get a bit scared, always, it felt too big, too close, I could feel its gravity snatching at my pyjamas and I’d have to stop and pack up, reverting to gazing unaided, tracing the constellations in my chart.

I’m still small.  Occasionally I’m reminded of this. 

Listen to “Apreludes (in C Sharp Major)” courtesy of Brainwashed.

And “A Meaningful Moment Through A Meaning(less) Process” courtesy of the good folks at Green Clothes