Monthly Archive

I spent much of this weekend criss-crossing the Cotswolds in the pissing rain, from one sodden campsite to another, trying desperately to find a chink of dryness in the sadly  inevitable and seemingly never-ending deluge enveloping the south east of this (very green but suddenly not-so-pleasant) land over the bank holiday weekend.  To little success, obviously – my feet are still flapping around uselessly like two soggy bundles of newspaper tied to the end of sticks.

It was the first chance I have had to put le pedal to le metal (I was driving a Peugeot 207, petite French voiture fans) in over a year, which at least gave me the chance to crack out all my driving rock compilations.  Well, I didn’t quite go that far (in fact it only occurred to me belatedly, I was kicking myself) but I swear there was a moment twixt CDs when I was singing Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way” somewhere along the M40.  I had forgotten how great it was to listen to music in the peculiar acoustics of the car.  Bjork’s Volta sounded particularly meaty, and if Jeremy Clarkson is reading (I like to think he gets much of the inspiration for his newspaper columns from this website, what with all my ranting about French people and the Observer) I suggest using it in a montage of his favourite small family hatchbacks next series – I reckon “Declare Independence” would work really well if jump cut to footage of a giant tousle-haired xenophobe with a peculiar way of…emphasising words at the end of sentences, but I can’t imagine where they would find one of those . 

One record which made a big impression on me (somewhere in the vicinity of Banbury, if you have your map to hand) was Andrew Pekler’s Cue.  Something about the way the record’s swoosh was synchronising itself with my windscreen wipers, its clicks with my indicators, its fuzzy outlines with my bleary windscreen, its downbeat mood with my grumpy cloud-watching…the longer Cue went on, the more I found it difficult to distinguish between it and my little motoring bubble.  Listening to it again on returning, I find myself equally transfixed with this very Jelinek-esque record, and in particular with the second half – although I still worry about the pinking sounds in “Contact”.  Maybe I should pull over.

Listen to “On“, “Rockslide” and “Dim Star” courtesy of Kranky and Brainwashed.  Buy it from Southern.

With Guillermo Scott Herren’s albums under the Prefuse 73 moniker becoming increasingly dense affairs, stuffed to the gunnels with contrasting styles and collaborators, a new release under his Savath and Savalas guise is more welcome than ever.  It has gentle guitars, hypnotic harmonies, soft Spanish vocals, and most definitely no place for a guest spot from Ghostface Killah.

Jose Gonzalez, however, is permitted to somnambulate through “Estrella De Dos Caros”, fitting the prevailing mood so well that you barely notice him entering.  For the most part it is Herren himself taking the lead vocal, although “lead” may be putting it a bit strongly: the lyrics (in Spanish) could be a political polemic or thesis on quantum physics for all I know – to my ears they are a gossamer-thin patina glistening on top of a pot of soothing balm.  Albeit a deceptively deep pot – you can take as much or as little from Golden Pollen as you like, scrape a little from the surface or luxuriate deeply in the spellbinding attention to detail you’d expect from Herren – the skittery drumming on “Apnea Obstructivo”, the intricate yet delicate beats on “Paisaje”, the crunchy background electronic textures of “Concreto”, the orchestral swatches of “Mi Hijo”, or the fidgety clicks of “Ya Verdad”. 

It is the best Guillermo Scott Herren album in years, and if the last couple of weeks are anything to go by, it will be one of my most-played records of the year.  Golden Pollen is released June 18th, so you’ll need to pre-order.  And wait.

Kammerflimmer Kollektief’s previously releases have been an exercise in liminality; one one side restrained jazz and electronic background, on the other an incongruous skronky dissonance.  Jinx, their sublime sixth album, starts by tip-toeing gingerly along this fence, but by the end it is plying it apart with a crowbar and using the wooden fragments to crucify bunnies.

The bossa-shuffle of “Palimpsest” (seeing as Tim Hecker and Kammerflimmer have used this as a track title in the last year, I’ve now had to go and look it up: “A manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible”.  Oh.  I like that a lot, the impermanence of memory…now where was I…umm, ah yes) segues into Neu’s “Seeland”, or as it is known here, “Jinx” (the second, looser, version of the title track later in the album is more successful).  The saxophone is cracked out for “Live At The Cactus Motel”, where it scribbles its name colourfully on a wall of piano.  A drone begins to build from here, rising through “Gammler, Zen and Hohe Berge”, muzzling the baby talk of “Both Eyes Tight Shut”.  After that second “Jinx” (menacing clatter, fine free harmonium), there is brief refuge in “Nest”, and then the ten minutes of “Subnarkotisch”…there goes the fence…and the bunnies…the horror, the horror…

Listen to more at their website, buy it from a strangely underwhelmed other one.

I’ve totally lost track of all semi-official bootleg CD-Rs and whatnots that may or may not comprise the Sunburned Hand Of The Man canon*, but this one is probably more significant than most, being released on what is probably their spiritual home, Ecstatic Peace.  Of course when I say spiritual I mean shamanic.  If ever an album needed a front cover featuring a drum festooned with animal bones, it would be this.

5 tracks on Z, all given a multiple of infinity for names, and I can’t find the infinity key on my keyboard (logic suggests it would be as far away from the zero as possible, but that space appears to be occupied by the infinitely less useful “Esc”).  No matter; attempting to mark divisions between these feral howls would be like chipping scabs off the knee of the devil.  Any suggestion that Sunburned were ever part of the “free folk” movement is tossed into a fire, poked with sticks, and shouted at by some really very hairy men.  Instead they give us a pissed  (in both senses of the word) Magic Band, one of whom appears to be playing a vacuum cleaner, performing a live soundtrack to a badly scratched DVD of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom whilst in a helicopter.

If that hasn’t sold it to you, probably best not listen to this.  God bless Sunburned Hand of The Man and Ecstatic Peace (although I would not dare to specify which god).

*Finding this would have helped. 

It was a busy old weekend.  In between a visit to the Anthony Gormley fog-in-a-box exhibition at the Hayward (disorientating), watching the FA cup final (disenchanting), going to the cinema to see Zodiac (discomfiting), and a trip to London Zoo (ummmm, brilliant, actually, hooray for the spider monkeys!) I squeezed in this London Sinfonietta Ligeti tribute, which also had an art installation - pictured above - and a bit of Reich thrown in as a sweetener.

Ligeti’s Self-Portrait with Reich and Riley (and Chopin in the Background) had two pianists setting about each other with short, one-handed phrases, repeating and overlapping in the best traditions of the two avant-gardists mentioned in the title.  It was like a game of piano ping-pong, and looked like it would be thoroughly infuriating to play.  The Chamber Concerto was next, and I must confess I struggled to join the dots between the four clearly delineated sections of this piece, which swung wildly between quiet introspection and excited credit card-plucked strings and clarinet chirrup. 

I’m not sure what setting this next to Steve Reich’s Sextet was meant to achieve, as the irrepressible flow, boundless rhythm and good humour of that piece made me forget all about the Ligeti within minutes.  First time I’ve seen a bowed vibraphone too, which added long resonant textures under the drums and marimbas.  The players looked like they were having a blast, particularly the drummers, who appeared about to crease up laughing at any moment, and this joy was infectious.

My good mood was to be sustained for the rest of the performance, as the night closed with Ligeti’s nonsense pocket operas Aventure and Nouvelles Aventures.  Three vocalists singing gibberish - hissing, spitting, burbling, barking, laughing, yelling through paper loudhailers - over-acting wildly all the while, in particular the bearded baritone who was giving it the full Brian Blessed.  The “percussionist” ripped newspapers, beat carpets, and threw crockery around in dramatic fashion.   They laughed.  We laughed.  They left.  We left.

P.S. Photo above of Anthony Gormley’s Space Station, with thanks to the kind member of staff at the Hayward who turned a blind eye to me crawling about underneath it with my camera

Apparently composed with instruments they battered together themselves, Alog’s new album is an unexpected delight, betraying a depth only hinted at previously.  Alog’s previous three albums on Rune Grammofon are precise abstract electronic affairs which never entirely escape the atmosphere of the beat, but Amateur has a ramshackle found sound charm which defies all scientific principle to propel it skywards.

The new Alog find themselves appending Robert Wyatt soundy-likey vocals to the coda to“Write Your Thoughts In Water”, sprinkling twinkly percussion and fragments of words all over “Son Of King” (reminds me very much of one of Matmos’s surgical splice exercises), clip-clopping and strumming through “A Throne For The Common Man”, and recording their “Sleeping Instruments” for their own three-quarter length 4’33’’.  “The Beginner” sounds a lot like a more organic version of (my favourite track of theirs) “St Paul Sessions II” from Miniatures, all relentless desparate alarm guitar chime, while the ten minutes of “Bedlam Emblem” sounded even more claustrophobic and panic-inducing when I managed to get myself trapped inside my duvet cover a few moments ago.

This has actually been on sale over at Rune Grammofon for a few weeks now, bedecked in a typically pretty Kim Hiorthoy two-balloon sleeve, and I’m a bit mystified as to how I wasn’t all over it like a Italian man-marker right from the off.  I’ve been making up for lost time since. 

I’d been thinking that the reason so many people are covering Leonard Cohen songs these days has much less to do with the magical poetry of those lyrics, and more to do with the fact that someone with half a voice must reckon they stand a good chance of improving on the original.  Replace Cohen’s weary shrug and almost embarrassed hint at melody with some swooping melodrama, and you can’t help but improve on the original, can you?  Weeeeeeell, not so sure that is always the case, but I listened to Marissa Nadler’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” and thought I would be damned if that wasn’t better than Cohen’s.  So I went straight to Len’s version on the old magic music box, and lo, not only was it an improvement, but it sounded so different…so very different…even the words had changed…hang on a minute – ARE ALL MY LEONARD COHEN TRACKS TAGGED WRONGLY?  Apparently so.  “Last Year’s Man” was in fact masquerading as “Famous Blue”, which was itself luxuriating in the pseudonym “Chelsea Hotel No.2”.  When I eventually tracked down the recalcitrant track, I thought that I might might might just prefer the Nadler cover. 

Her voice wanders from a pure one similar to that of fellow Cohen-botherer Susanna towards the effortless breathy tones of the much-missed Hope Sandoval.  The album is black and white, from the cover to the stark and simple backgrounds, but the lyrics fleck it with the red of dresses, blood, painted lips, and of memories.  Probably my favourite singer-songwritery type release of 2007, if that helps anyone.

Listen to more tracks at her website and myspace; buy it from Boomkat

Blimey, that is quite a weighty title for a post.  After a bit of a hiatus, there has been so much going on over at Smalltown Superjazzz (I do like the third z) in recent months, I need to get something written down just to help me take stock and make sense of it all.

Original Silence are an overwhelming noise combo featuring avant-rock and jazz royalty in Thurston Moore and Jim O’Rourke of/ex of Sonic Youth, and Paal Nilssen-Love and Mats Gustafsson of The Thing, as well as a few other miscreants and ne’er-do-wells from the likes of The Ex and Zu.  This sort of (de)composition will be increasingly familiar to fans of extra-curricular SY activity, but is definitely one of the more thrilling and visceral of such releases.  Waves of electronics batter a shore of feedback, with Gustaffson waving not drowning in an Ayler fashion (doesn’t read well that: I mean he is playing like Ayler, not drowning like him).  It all gels together surprisingly well, no-one dominating, and all involved sounding like they are having a blast.

The release by Cato Salsa Experience, The Thing and Joe McPhee (Two Bands and a Legend they have called it, which seems accurate, both arithmetically and otherwise) is a riotous and at times ridiculous release, a raggedy-arsed mixed-origin bastard begat of unforgiving free jazz and bluesy garage rock parents.  It even goes as far as to cover “Louie Louie”, something I thought we all had to stop doing some years ago, and doing something new with it i.e. inserting an abstract skronk middle section.  The Nilsen-Love / Gustafsson axis continues to be super-strong, adding Cato’s Sonny Sharrock shredded guitar and Joe McPhee’s powerful tenor makes it near invincible.

Gustafsson also turns up on a very different release – a curious rhythm-free duo record with Yoshimi of Boredoms fame.  Words On The Floor sees processed saxophone trickery weaving around Yoshimi’s reverberating coos and hollers.  When it is quiet, like on first track “Soundless Cries With Their Arms In The Air”, I find it a bit spooky; when they get going, all clicks and wails, I find it a bit scary.  In fact it makes me feel like I am being abducted by aliens, they are all pointing at me and talking in a strange language I don’t understand, and gesturing towards some sharp metal objects.

Buy one, two or three at Smalltown Superjazzz.  Although if you buy all three you should be asking for a bulk purchase discount, I reckon. 

I’ve been besmitten and besotted by the latest release on the unimpeachable Kranky for a goodly number of weeks now.  It hovers spectrally and improvisationally in the void between Charalambides’ bewitched folk, Double Leopards’ buzzy drones, and Sigur Ros’s blurry wordlessness.

Anyone expecting “Vevor of Agassou” to be a tribute to a Glasgow Celtic centre-forward would be doubtless disappointed by the ambling acoustic guitar and ethereal cooing on show, not to mention the lack of boozy terrace chantability; although others (including those with less of an interest in the minutiae of Scottish football) will probably be more than happy.  “Faeries” is a beehive lullaby to lead into “Bune”’s nightmare (pitched somewhere in the vast spectrum between live Fennesz and live Hendrix).  The never dull eighteen minute epic with the t tl w th al th l tte s mi s ng is next, incorporating Fahey, tweeting, groaning, and some vaguely prog keyboard sounds, before “Sighns” collapses the delicate construct with an unwordly gust of tremulous guitar.

Lichens is Rob Lowe, ex-Ninety Day Men, sometime TV On The Radio collaborator.  Omns is his masterpiece, some time soon I suggest getting a copy.

I went to see the new Scott Walker documentary the other day.  Really enjoyed it, thanks.  The Drift was one of my favourite albums of last year, even if at no point did I get even close to writing about it.  I still wouldn’t know where to begin.  Sensibly, Thirtieth Century Man begins at the beginning, charting the descent of Scott Walker from the Walker Brothers era through the eponymous four, (ignoring the fallow decade to follow), reawakening with the where-the-devil-did-that-come-from Nite Flights, before wandering awed through the black three.

A career of such ludicrous contrast is well represented by some near-surreal juxtaposition: a performance on the Frankie Howerd show, Jacques Brel’s earnest emotion versus his faintly comedic sweaty visage, Lulu nodding along reverentially to Tilt’s majestic “Farmer In The City”, discussion of the bizarre video to “Sleepwalkers Woman” (“I don’t like to use the word comeback”) with Muriel Gray, Sting pontificating about existentialism, the first use in song of the word “pimpling” on the Jools Holland Show, Gavin Friday and Gavin Friday’s hair, and that footage of a percussionist punching a weighty slab of meat.

Scott Walker makes for a surprisingly frank and good-humoured interviewee, painstakingly wedded to an artistic vision that requires the construction of a giant pea and thimble game despite a keen knowledge of how ridiculous it will appear to an outsider.  Outsider?  What am I on about?  As if anyone could be more of an outsider than he is…

I don’t get angry very often.  Everyone knows that.  I did once kick a hole in a wall, but no-one was there to see it, then I covered the hole with a Robbie Williams calendar, and was gone before the end of December, so somehow that doesn’t count.  But I read a really frustrating review of Volta in The Observer Music Monthly (yep, that’s about often enough) a week or two ago.  My hair was ruffled all the wrong way by the reviewer’s apparent ignorance of Kinshasa’s finest, Konono No.1 (unexcusable, surely they have been the name to drop over the last couple of years; I would have imagined that was particularly true in broadsheet - or Berliner - music critic circles), and by his gloriously point-missing request for a few more things he could hum along to, probably on the walk from his office to the nearest wine bar.  OK, I may not be am not the greatest writer on the planet, or even in this postcode, or - I suspect - even in this house, but I guarantee you that if I have nothing useful to say, I either won’t say it (see, mum, I remembered), or will at least try to disguise my ignorance with some stupid humour, misguided and overelaborate sea metaphors, misdirection, or perhaps some choice insults.   That, dear reader, is my customer charter, and if I fail to deliver I will refund your entrance fee (minus a deduction to cover administration costs).  Starting from the next review, obviously. 

Here’s hope.  Good buy.

The Luminaire was packed out for this Leaf showcase, featuring two artists who don’t play in the UK often enough for my liking.  The Luminaire is a wide venue, but with the stage in an enclosed space in the middle, meaning it was a bit of a tight squeeze, and that you could be standing within two feet of someone without actually being able to see them.

Laptop artist Dave Miller (such an unimaginative name, I’m sure he could have done better than that) is a regular collaborator of Triosk and Pivot drummer Laurence Pike.  He played a short supporting set of burble and crunchy loops, sampling castanets and handclaps to make punchy hip-hop flavoured beats - at times it sounded a bit Mouse on Mars, at other times more like Prefuse 73, but without all the extra baggage that comes with his records these days.  It was certainly exerted a strong enough pull to get the head-nodders out from the corners of this oddly-shaped venue.

Another day, another Colleen review.  Ah, Colleen, lovely Colleen, with all her lovely records and lovely cello and loveliness.  Her set focused on the (lovely) soon to be released, reviewed here the other day, Les Ondes Silencieuses.  This meant a very organic, acoustic set, with Cecile playing cello, guitar, clarinet, wind chimes, and a music box; looping snatches barefootedly.   Her music was a lesson in elegant simplicity - no fancy playing, nothing too fast or intricate, even the spinning glitterball was felt to be too ostentatious and had to be extinguished - with the layers of the songs clicking into place with the utmost precision.   Entrancing.

I’m a big fan of Triosk’s recorded work, but I was entirely unprepared for how different they sound live.  While Moment Returns and The Headlight Serenade are both supremely restrained albums, on stage they really cut loose a  relentlessly hard-hitting jazz groove.  Laurence Pike really bosses the show, drumming like Andrew Cyrille sitting in with Autechre - slicing up the beat, squeezing rhythms between rhythms,  all in a blur of sticks, brushes and big hair.  Adrian Klumpes contributed electronic texture for the most part, but when he switched to keyboard he played the Keith Jarrett to Pike’s Jack Dejohnette.  Bassist Ben Waples joined in with some beefy, slow, repetitive figures like those played by Michael Henderson on Miles’ Jack Johnson.

Even the gentle (if skittery) centrepiece of their last album, “Lazyboat” was retooled, and booted to the front line for active service.  Their (well earned) encore appeared to be almost entirely improvised; Pike erected a tower of scaffold around a Klumpes drone, the structure eventually collapsing under its own weight, or failure to observe some fundamental engineering principle.  An energetic and thoroughly energising performance; I can only hope it isn’t too long before they return.

As this blog seems at present to be lurching drunkenly from leering unpleasantly at one foreign female musical iconoclast to another, its gaze would inevitably be attracted to Colleen.  Well, what with Bjork’s restraining order not expiring for another few days.  To give her some credit, Cecile Schott did a pretty good job of hiding, going as far as to ditch the clothing I was expecting to see her in favour of some fine renaissance period garb.

For Les Ondes Silencieuses (The Silent Waves, by my wayward reckoning) marks a significant change in the nature of Cecile’s recorded output.  Her first two albums on Leaf were outwardly electronic, albeit with acoustic undergarments.  The cloak is confidently tossed aside here, revealing an elegant chamber music frame; squint and you could be looking at a portrait from the era of King Louis the whatever it was (check the ornate “Le Labyrinthe”).  I adore “Blue Sands”, on which Cecile uses her viola de gamba to saw a maniacally repetitive figure into a base of…apparently more viola de gamba, but sounding like a completely different instrument, maybe a zither or harpsichord.  After this, the clarinet of “Sea of Tranquility” ushers in a stunning meditation, with strings fussing against each other into a trance. 

By stripping away the music’s outer layers, perversely Colleen has shown herself to be a musician of even more substance than I had previously thought (and I’m a big fan).  Les Ondes Silencieuses is a bold statement; not many people could carry off this look.

Listen to the wonderful “Blue Sands“, courtesy of Leaf, and more tracks at Colleen’s Myspace.  Purchase it from les ondes silencieuses de l’amazon.