Monthly Archive

Standing in one of the Scala’s interminable queues is like being trapped in a 21st century London update of a Hieronymous Bosch painting, with the bleak environs of Kings Cross populated by red-faced ticket touts, Robocop-esque security guards (head-mounted video cameras, I kid you not), confused drunks falling out of neon-signed pizza “establishments”, as well as a thousand frustrated queue-shufflers - and high proportion of those were even French.  Well, I suppose they would be, seeing as we were hear to see the Gallic polymath Yann Tiersen.

And a high proportion of that high proportion were, I’m guessing, here to hear Amelie, Goodbye Lenin and such like.  Of course Tiersen had been to the Dirty Three curated ATP and had bought the Grinderman (”No Pussy Blues”) t-shirt to prove it, and had no such intentions; he hurled his five piece band headfirst into some fairly combustible leftfield rock.

This was better than most vanity projects.  While the band probably sounded more like a slightly less interesting Electrelane, despite doing that krautrock dur-nur-nur dur-nur-nur thing so beloved of this reviewer, they clearly had Sonic Youth pretensions.  In particular the lead guitarist, who played his guitar with drumsticks (naturally) and an electric drill, and played crotch-thrusting feedback.

Unsurprisingly, it was in the moments in which Tiersen’s guitar roadie disemburdened him of one of whichever of his plectrummed plethora he was using at the time, handing him his violin, that the gig touched greatness.  A squalling violin/guitar duel saw Tiersen sawing obsessively over sheet metal until both fused in the heat.  As those sparks fizzled, Tiersen launched into an dizzying solo violin run that had the audience giving a floating-on-air ovation.

While there were moments of interest that followed, in particular when he crouched in a purple pool to play tiny keyboard and xylophone, the more conventional moments eventually began to catch me looking at my watch and fretting over last train times.  I left midway through the encore.  It was good to beat the hellish queue.

I went to see Islaja play as part of a Fonal showcase (with Es and Kiila) last year in St Giles-in-the-Field church in central London (watch a clip here from the Wire’s website, dancing bunny included).  I enjoyed the show very much, despite my confessing at the end that the evening left me none-the-wiser idea as to whether Islaja had any musical talent in anything approaching a conventional sense.  That strange otherworldly voice – undoubtedly strong and pure, but happiest when leaping around carefree shorn of any link to melody.  She played guitar too; but it was a shambling, strangely tuned sound which did not reveal a natural affinity with the instrument’s more usual function.  And obviously the lyrics are in that most typographically forbidding of languages, Finnish; they could be Joyce or they could be junk for all I know.  Yet Islaja’s music is so much more than the sum of its parts - as I said, I enjoyed the show, much as I enjoyed Islaja’s Palaa Aurinkoon from 2005; indeed that was probably my favourite record of the year, repeated listening opened up a parallel universe with its own laws and (il)logics. 

Not having any idea what to expect from the follow-up, I could hardly have been disappointed.  Ulual YYY opts to add darker colours to the palette – the unsteady, meandering guitar and vocal extemporisation remain in place, joined at suitably unexpected moments by keyboards, saxophone, sampled dialogue, and some spooky backing vocals. “Kutsukaa Sydäntä” opens the album with horror movie chords, and “Suru Ei” closes it with late night devil poker, sleepy she-demons clinking bone chips (despite the extra weight, Ulual YYY remains an album of little sounds).  In between the jazz influence is noticeable: “Muukulais-Silmä” builds Mingus-like from simple beginnings, with wordless wailing becoming caught up in an acceleration of bells and keys; and the sax squiggles of “Sydänten Ahmija” bring to mind some kindred Scandinavian spirits in Strountes (who welded Mats Gustaffson’s muscular parping to free folk undercarriage to sublime effect last year).   With Ulual YYY, Islaja has reaffirmed her right to be regarded as one of music’s true singularities.  It is slow to give up its witchy charms, but the persistent listener will be all the more rewarded for their efforts.

The Wire are streaming “Pete P“, and there is more at Fonal.com, who will also be only too happy to sell you a copy.  Islaja is playing St Giles again this year, along with Tony Conrad.  Wooo.

OK, so I’m such a latecomer to this record.  I could blame that on my confusion over the release schedule of Mego (or eMego even, that is how befuddled I am), which seems for long periods to be a steady diet of reissues.  More truthfully, it is just that I didn’t give it the attention it deserved when I first got my hands on it; listening to the lovely Moskitoo record recently rekindled my interest in Japanese pop-flavoured electronic music, and I dug this one again.  And then the sun came out, the UK got unseasonably warm, we all got our pale blue legs out for inspection by the rest of the populace, and I found myself strolling through the park listening to this in a summery reverie.  Damn it’s good.  I’d really been missing out.

Noriko’s latest is a delightfully sui generis piece of work in the way a Bjork album is (anyone heard any of Volta yet?  I’m straining at the leash to get a sniff of that); but forgoing those wild vocal flights of fancy with her own dreamy style. Beats are crisp, beats are sludgy; songs drift with drone, songs burst with melody; instrumentation is spare and sparse, instrumentation is full and fulsome.  It is off kilter, yet strangely accessible.

Highlights: “Let Me See Your Face” features Noriko’s vocal fragments emerging and coalescing from a sea of burble and whoosh;  “Saigo No Chikyu” has Noriko cooing over chimes and synth stabs; “Magic” features glorious tunefulness leaping from shuffly scratchy beginnings.  The programming is impeccable.  The album is a delight.  It’s all becoming clear.  Summer starts here. 

Swoon over “Let Me See Your Face” here.  Recover, and purchase it from Editions Mego.

Another week, another deliciously independent and vital arts and music venue veers towards the ditch.  After the demise last week of NYC’s cauldron of cutting edge creativity Tonic comes the sad news that one of my favourite London venues The Spitz has hit trouble with the landlords.  The property developers have deemed that a location this proximate to the big money swishing around Bishopsgate has no business enriching the nation’s cultural wealth when it could be filling their own pockets with the tepid overflow from the city bankers’ bonus pot.

The Spitz is always reliably eclectic; over the last year I’ve had a number of very enjoyable evenings at the venue, including performances by Keiji Haino and Chris Corsano, The Fence Collective, Susanna and the Magical Orchestra, and Noah Howard, as well as a few performances in the bistro (and more than a few fine Belgian and German ales).   The next week alone features experimental violinist Felix Lajko, some klezmer and some Nepalese music, as well as some gigs from their annual blues festival. 

This may all be gone in six months.  I’d advise those of you with an interest in such things to give the venue every chance of beating the axe by adding your name to the petition, and by getting down there to see some events in the near future.  Or just drop in for a pint and a mooch round the gallery.  Save the Spitz!

The greats of jazz have been dropping at an alarming rate this year.  I only mentioned him in passing last week (re Nels Cline’s tribute album from last year) but have been saddened today to hear about the passing of the extremely influential pianist Andrew Hill over the weekend. 

His run of fine albums for Blue Note in the 1960s, while not elevating Hill to the position of a Monk or a Tyner at the time, have belatedly come to be recognised as out and out classics: Point of Departure garners most of the plaudits, but Andrew!!! and Black Fire remain personal favourites, as does Compulsion! (see Destination Out for more on that release), as does the Bobby Hutcherson / Hill date Dialogues, and even the lesser-known Lift Every Voice’s kooky choral jazz has some stellar moments - try “Hey Hey” - and, well I could go on.  I read a typically impressive and impassioned personal tribute to Hill from Hank over at the redoubtable Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches recently, to which I humbly direct you for further reading and listening…this is a “Black Monday” indeed.  *Post-script - A few more words from Hank here*

From the moment the first notes of piano are pushed crustward from this sound world, this collaboration more than fulfils my weighty expectations.  Cendre is much closer in aesthetic to Sakamoto’s much-lauded previous collaborations with Alva Noto (on the Raster-Noton label) than to the earlier live recording with Fennesz (also on Touch); gone are Santa Cecilia’s abrasive surfaces, to be replaced by a calmer, warmer veneer. 

Where Noto punctuated the long gaps between Sakamoto’s notes with his imperceptible-to-those-of-a-certain-age high frequencies and clipped morse clicks, Fennesz floods the area around the piano, leaving it an archipelago in deceptively deep waters.  In contrast to the two performances I’ve had the privilege to witness over the last six months (one an all-too-brief solo spot, one a live collaboration with the visuals of Charles Atlas), which veered at times into exhilarating bombast, the Austrian cuts a figure of restraint on Cendre, leaving the guitar for the most part in its case.  Instead, he uses his laptop to create an ebbing ocean of drone, buzz, reverb and crackle, which at no point threatens to douse the glow of Sakamoto’s tender ache; instead it reflects it skyward, refracting as it does from pure white to brilliant colour. 

If Sue Lawley were to ask me for my Desert Island Discs, I’m pretty sure Noto/Sakamoto’s Vrioon would be on there.  That Cendre even merits being spoken of in the same paragraph as that masterpiece should be taken as massive praise.  Cut yourself adrift with it.

Listen to “Kuni” here; check out the Touch shop to get your hands on an actual physical copy of this magnificent record.

I’m not sure whether I want to fly-tip any more words onto the festering pile of articles which will have been written about Wilco.  The internet is getting pretty full now, and the backwash is causing people to come home from work to find track-by-track appraisals of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot lapping around their ankles.

I’ll keep it brief then.  The addition of the great jazz guitarist Nels Cline (I am by no means tired yet of his Andrew Hill tribute album from last year) and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansome to a line-up already featuring the inventive drummer Glenn Kotche has meant that Sky Blue Sky has a real sense of organic group chemistry, supplemented by some terrific instrumental work.  It takes until halfway through second track “You Are My Face” for the album to catch light with Cline/Tweedy Crazy Horse guitar interplay, and the chiming guitars of “Impossible Germany” bring to mind more introspective Moore/Ranaldo moments.  “Side With The Seeds” features Cline using weird improv voodoo to summon the spirit of the great Sonny Sharrock and persuade him to set fire to my stereo.  All of this throws the delicate likes of “Please Be Patient With Me” and “Leave Me Like You Found Me” into the sweetest of reliefs.

The fact that this is not to be their Ascension, Trout Mask Replica or Goodbye 20th Century will probably disappoint some – I must confess I was hoping they would get a bit more “out” more often.  It’s still a fine record to add to the run of fine records that are resulting from Jeff Tweedy’s ceaseless search to capture that sound in his head .

Listen to “Side With The Seeds” here. 

I’ve just returned from a wonderful two week holiday in Nepal, and still have the jetlag and dodgy stomach to prove it.  I’d like to extend my thanks to the automated review-writing robot which has been filling in for me for the last two weeks – I think the results have been pretty much indistinguishable from the real thing.  Couldn’t train it to post replies to all your comments on its posts (leaving comment moderation off may have been slightly risky, but seems to have worked out fine); otherwise it seems to have managed to maintain some semblance of business as usual round here.  I’ll melt it down now to provide the material for several dozen metal statues of Buddha to liven up this grey-looking place a little.

Before I went I decided on my return I would write something about Nepal’s musical culture.  Having been there I realise that this would be pretty impossible for me to begin to do it justice.  The demographics and topographics of the country mean that it is split into so many different ethnic groups each with their own local folk traditions.  Add to this the strong influence from neighbours to the north (Tibet) and south (India), and the position is muddied yet further.  Hence this is to be by no means an authoritative discourse on Nepali music!

The Nepali folk groups I saw in Kathmandu used tabla, accordion, wooden flute, funny little violins and tambourine; sometimes women would sing over the top in vocals sodden with reverb and at stratospheric pitch.  These are the same vocals you would hear drifting out of open doors all over the country from tinny radios, which somehow added greatly to the effect (the Sublime Frequencies Harmika Yab Yum compilation, while brilliant, doesn’t accord with my experience of what the locals were tuning in to).  And these were the same vocals you would hear from the local music video channels – three minute cut-price Bollywood, in which young women would wag their fingers furiously at their straying husbands. 

You would find it hard to walk down the street in Pokhara without hearing the strains of the Buddhist mantra “Om Mani Padme Hom” blaring from a Tibetan refugee’s craft shop.  The mantra is repeated 108 times (an auspicious number; I’ve never heard the word “auspicious” used as frequently as I have done over the last two weeks) over what became an increasingly tedious new age backing track.  Chanted prayers were de rigeur around the vast temple at Boudha; thankfully they were entirely a capella.  One Tibetan musical instrument (well, meditation aid would be more accurate) which did take my fancy was the ubiquitous singing bowl, which when rubbed with a stick builds a loud ringing drone like a little metal Buddha Machine.

I came across some of the Tharu tribe in the Terai, who as well as having developed complete immunity to malaria (no-one appears to have worked out how, I would have thought this would have been a priority for someone) have a neat line in musical performance (pictured above).  The men of the tribe have a brilliant ritual which involves co-ordinated fighting with sticks; all the more impressive when the power failed half-way through and yet they continued unabated without accidentally bashing each others heads in.  Tablas drove the music into rhythmic spirals over which war-like chants would repeat intoxicatingly.  I think that monkeyman may have captured a video of some of this, and if I work out how to do so, I’ll add it here.

(Oh, and I saw a young Nepali band covering “Another Brick In The Wall” in very earnest fashion.  They were quite adamant about their needs vis-a-vis education and thought control.  It was quite amusing). 

Listen to “Sorathi” as performed by Krishan Gurung and Jangal Singh here (amazingly, you can buy the compilation on which this features from dexohouse), and a track from Harmika Yab Yum, “Ram Saran Nepali”, here (you can buy that from boomkat).

Just how good are Battles live?  If you haven’t seen them do their sublime prog-math thing on stage by now, you must have been a hermit; I think they played about three thousand gigs in 2006.  They do the drummer centre-stage thing that Shellac - and probably some others, but I haven’t seen them - do, which works if you have a drummer as interesting to watch as Todd Trainer or John Stainer….those names…how odd….hmmm….anyway, Stainer has this thing that amuses me, a curious practice of suspending his cymbal six feet up in the air, and having to almost get out of his seat to smack it.  Maybe you have to be there.  Around his relentless rhythm the others are free to experiment, Tyondai Braxton in particular doing his dad proud (I’d hope) with his electronics, beatboxing and avant-fucking about.

And boy, have they experimented on Mirrored.  While the album opens and closes in the expected manner, with Stainer sounding like he is trying to smash his kit through the floor, some of the stuff in between is bonkers.  You have probably heard catchier-than-bird flu lead single “Atlas”, which sounds to me like a troupe of performing chipmunks covering Mudd and, having been roused from hibernation, the animals opt to stick around for the metallic dingbat “Ddiamondd”.  There is less getting into a groove and staying there than previously (nothing on Mirrored is as straightforward as the singularly angular riff of “Tras” from their B EP), Mirrored is more organic and improvisational, as if Battles were a modern - if decidedly less serious - This Heat.  Sometimes they’ll make odd choices, like the squidgy keyboard sound on the otherwise crunchy “Tij”, and I still can’t get with those chipmunk vocals, but for ambition, and for making me swat a six-foot high air cymbal, it can’t be faulted.

Have a listen to “Leyendecker” here.  It’ll be on sale here some time soon.

This is Carsten Nicolai’s first album proper for some time, and it has been more than worth the wait.  I bought this concurrently with the new Machinefabriek, and while both are superficially similar, this one scores higher for its cohesiveness and emotional resonance.    And for the packaging; while both come esconced in minimalist white cardboard foldout contraptions, the Raster-Noton release is most aesthetically pleasing, and as Colin discusses, the correlation between the label, the music and the object is thoughtful.

With Xerrox, Nicolai is embarking on yet another thematic series of releases - after the Transall EPs and the Sakamoto collaborations, this is reputedly the first of five.  Everyday samples (telephone hold music, jingles, light entertainment) are copied and processed, altered and distorted to the point where they are thoroughly disenfranchised from their source.  The process manifests itself in the perception of layering, tracks building as if transparencies with one word apiece are laid onto an OHP until whole sentences are formed.  As the traces of melody re-constitute from amidst static hiss, the longer pieces wander into territory which (pre-Insen) could once have been considered thoroughly alien to Nicolai – swelling, lush, affecting and very cinematic.  If they were to remake Taxi Driver (which they shouldn’t, obviously), and were to replace the Bernard Herrmann score (again, a ridiculous idea), they could do worse than having “Copy 3 (Paris)” accompanying the drive through the dark street with the rain beating against the windscreen/soul.

Listen to snatches of Xerroxes 3, 1 and 111 courtesy of Raster-Noton.  Visit them to hear more and to purchase.

Thoughts.  Images:

Slaap:  Ghost train passes through electrical field.  Passengers disembark into desert, watch oncoming train slam into station.  Tinder alights.  Blaze illuminates the sky.  Remembrance for all dead passengers.  Hymns are sung over the crackling fire

Zucht: Calm, blue.  Mist rolls down from mountains.  Things fade.  All is cloud.  Disorientation, fear.   Sense of hearing heightened.  Pulsing, may be internal.  Mist lifts, sigh of relief, walk to shore.  Floating, bobbing.  Undercurrent tugs.  Shore retreats.  Lethargic.  Drift off.  Calm, blue.

Still: Aboriginal winds carrying insect swarms.  Humming.  Buzzing.  Scraping wings, competing for airspace.  Fighting. Biting.  Massing in numbers.  Swooping.  Battering into metal buildings in their thousands.  Infesting the air conditioning with their near hellish miasma.

Listen.  Listen.  Listen.  Buy.

The wonderfully-titled Burning Off Impurities, the proper album follow-up to last year’s highly-rated Black Tar Prophecies 1,2, and 3 collection, is a mass funeral pyre built from elements of folk, sludgy metal, Indian drone, electronic composition, and windstrewn field recordings.  After the fire, all is charred and barely identifiable, sinking into the ground and decaying…

It is a diverse set that wouldn’t have sounded terribly out of place on Revenant (sitting next to the No-Neck Blues Band in the catalogue); “Dead Vine Blues” underlines their Faheyesque credentials with deft fingerpicking, slide guitar and a spiralling sense of doom.  Speaking of doom, the awesome “Silk Road” is the track that the four horsemen of the apocalypse will be dancing to down hell’s disco after they have finished their earthly business, scythes left with black shawls in the cloakroom; the track gallops along despite the unsettling relationship between its undeniable funk and its queasy eastern drone.   In remarkable contrast, “Drawn Curtains” sounds close in ethos to something on Type, or Miasmah – electrical distortion, spooky flecks of guitar, drowning strings. 

The ashes of these impurities turn into some sort of black gold.  This is heavy, this is toxic, this is dense, this is very very dark.  Whatever they are selling the mining rights for in Portland, now is the time to invest.

 Listen to “Dead Vine Blues” courtesy of Temporary Residence.  Buy it, buy it, buy it.

Well, pardon me for assuming the Farka Toure story ended last year with the death of the nimble-fingered genius Ali.  His son Vieux had obviously been hiding a prodigious light under the proverbial bushel; and with the death of the old man, he has opted to continue the familial recorded legacy. Thankfully, his debut is a triumph, more than strong enough to bear the inevitable comparisons.

Parts of the album sounds similar in style to some of his father’s later work - in particular the astonishing collaboration with Toumani Diabate on In The Heart Of The Moon; Diabate features on a couple of tracks here, and even gets one named after him.  On “Diabate” and “Toure De Niafunke”, Vieux riffs acoustically while Diabate spins his kora web all round and through his lines in the manner of that previous release; the instrumental interplay is intricate, the latter in particular as good as anything you’ll hear this year.  Elsewhere, disparate styles collide as Vieux searches for a voice of his own: the uneasy dalliance with reggae on “Ana” is followed by the exciting flute-driven desert funk of “Ma Hine Cocore”. 

Having endured the hardship of being a struggling musician, Ali had done anything he could to dissuade Vieux from following him, going as far as packing him off to the army.   Quality such as this is irrepressible, the inevitable was accepted with Ali’s contribution to the hypnotic, near-unstoppable “Diallo” (seven minutes, cut down from over ten).  The badge has been passed; musically at least, the town of Niafunke has a new mayor.

Listen to “Ma Hine Cocore” here, and more at Vieux’s website.  Buy it (and some nice t-shirts) from Modiba; ten per cent of the proceeds go towards fighting malaria in Niafunke.  I wonder if they are using those GM mosquitos I’ve been reading about.  Speaking of which, I’ll be in a malarial part of the world when Vieux plays live at the Barbican very soon, but you have no excuse for missing out.