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You could think of it as a mere entrée before the main course of the new Black Dice album (taster here), but the new solo album from member Eric Copeland is deceptively substantial (all to do with the size of the plate, most probably). It is released on Panda Bear’s Paw Tracks label, and if you cast your mind back a wee bit you would probably remember the two of them doing an enjoyable album together as Terrestial Tones. So it is all linked. And there is a new Animal Collective album out soon too, which proves my point, whatever point that was. Something about food, I think it was.
If you jabbed at my eyes with a wooden spoon until I was bleeding and blind and was screaming “GET THAT SPOON OUT OF MY EYES YOU FLOPPY TONGUED MOCKNEY CHEF OH GOD I CAN’T SEE”, and then played me this schizo sonic collage, I would probably have a guess that a member of Black Dice was involved with its creation – “Wash Up”, with those weird bird and monkey noises, would have felt right at home in the zoo that is Creature Comforts - but there is a whole load of other ingredients mixed in amongst its layers too. With all the crazy phasing and pulsating reverb throughout the album it can’t help but remind me of the illucidity of Growing’s dreamlike last album Vision Swim, while the keyboards on “La Booly Boo” sound as German as bratwurst mit kartoffelpuree und sauerkraut or, perhaps more accurately, as early Kraftwerk or Harmonia. Oh and “Green Burrito” is a leftover dish from Panda Bear’s extraordinary Person Pitch, which beyond any doubt proves that point I was making earlier. QED.
Hermaphrodite is available over at the Paw Tracks store.
There are lots of little people, about the size of ants, and they are having a little bit of a dance in my head. They did this last week, left loads of empty little bottles strewn about the place, it was a right little state I’m telling you. There they are, drinking their little ice-cold, fizzy beverages, and eating their crispy little finger-food (most likely, in fact, to be crisps). Check out the little DJ, with his little headphones on, turning down requests for little people disco cheese with a baffled “what? I can’t hear you little man”.
Frank Bretschneider’s Rhythm is just that, dance music (techno, dubstep) completely stripped back to an essential core. This leaves an impressively busy and thoroughly enjoyable little skeletal matrix of clicks, pops, and other electronic elements; tracks like “Other Days, Other Eyes” will, inevitably, keep the little people dancing all night. If I could disable most of the rules of both physics and biology in order to buy a ticket for the little club in my head, I swear I would. Bet my name isn’t in the door though.
Also out is Robotron from the world’s littlest supergroup, Signal (you take your Bretschneider, add your Noto, and then your Olaf Bender). It is inevitably a denser affair, but it is of course all highly relative…and speaking of relative, there is a distinctly familiar connection. It isn’t just the title that tips a little hat deferentially in the direction of the mighty Kraftwerk; some of the clipped little sounds in the mix of “Naplafa” also sound pleasingly familiar to the inhabitants of this particular man-machine-nightclub. It gets a bit rowdy at times (as on “Malimo”), scouring the inside of my head with the abrasive Pan Sonic minimalism, but the little bouncers seem to deal with it without breaking any little heads.
These little headphone treasures are available from the home of such things, Raster-Noton.
I’m off to Finland later today for a couple of weeks. I have just taken the automatic review generating robot out of his box (I can’t say he looks very happy about it), so there will still be stuff happening on this site in the mean time. I haven’t yet decided whether comments moderation will be on or off; I left it off while I was in Nepal earlier on in the year with no adverse consequences, but recently a few spam comments have made it through the improvised filter which I fashioned out of a used pair of tights. So, if I leave it off, I’m trusting you not to post anything stupid or illegal in the comments box. Actually, stupid is fine, knock yourself out. But if you see anything which looks like an advert for online gaming, or for some weird drug you’ve never heard of, for Santa’s sake don’t go clicking.
It may be quite hard to see the thread yoking together this seemingly random list of albums (other than that they are all very much approved round my way): Bjork’s Vespertine, Coco Rosie’s Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn, Bonnie Prince Billy’s The Letting Go, and Nico Muhly’s Speaks Volumes. The thread is silken, and visible only when the light hits at the right angle; it is manufactured by the polymathematical (producer, engineer, instrumentalist, label boss; tilting at Jim O’Rourke’s all-comers title perhaps) and quite probably multi-legged producer Valgeir Sigurdsson. You can hear various elements of this record haberdashery on Ekvilbrium, including the crystalline crunch of Vespertine’s electronics, Will Oldham’s gritty-yet-tender croon, and Muhly’s piano and orchestral flourish.
Ekvilibrium hangs together with classy electronic pop glue, but has enough substance to ensnare the less casual listener. Listen deeply to the precise programming under Oldham’s lovely vocals on “Evolution of Waters” as it rises to menace the storm drains, or the dramatic orchestration couching Dawn McCarthy’s jaw-dropping vocals on “Winter Sleep”. Wonder as I did at the prepared piano and pitter-pat patterns of “Focal Point”, an electronics-and-strings instrumental so good I feel like I’ve been humming it for years (seriously, has this been on an advert or something?). Follow dizzily the brilliant run of tracks which spiral out to the edge of this web: “Equilibrium Is Restored” rises sleepily from Miasmah-like rattle towards the chamber flourish of “Before Nine”; “Kin” sees one of Will Oldham’s best vocals caught between swooning orchestral reverie and encroaching nightmare; and the piano ruminations of “Lungs, For Merrilee” which build to and through oscillations vaguely akin to the title track of (Sigurdsson’s labelmate) Ben Frost’s Theory of Machines, before ascending skyward at the last.
Sigurdsson’s magic is in the instinctive weaving together of all of this musical gossamer to create a new work of beauty. If the wind blows the right way, getting caught in this may be inevitable. Don’t say you weren’t warned…
Ekvilibrium is available in September. You can order it from Boomkat.
So which way does the new Thurston record go? Down the shonkily-paved path of his most recent recorded output – the free noise fun house of the likes of Original Silence and Dream Aktion Unit – or in the more conventionally-floored direction of the last Sonic Youth album, Rather Ripped, and of his other solo album from over a decade ago, Psychic Hearts. Skronk scavengers may choose to avert their eyes now- it’s kinda the latter. But, hang on, come back – even if I too was perhaps secretly (well, I didn’t tell my mum) hoping for some solo guitar expedition, I’ve been enjoying Trees Outside The Academy massively.
The root cause of this spurt of enthusiasm is the cross-pollination of some addictively sweet melodies with the unexpected and quite delicious violin parts of Samaru Lubelski (MV/EE). The opening slew of tracks – “Frozen Gtr” (thumbs to p20 of the SY style guide; “yr gtr, never your guitar”, check) and “The Shape Is In A Trance” may be two of the finest straight-up pop songs Thurston has written, and following these with a duet with the honeyed vocals of Christina Carter is chasing down dessert with dessert wine. An interruption to this mood (“Wonderful Witches”, with Gown and John Moloney) irritates with its petulant juvenility, but I’m won back over with the delicate and dreamy “Never Day”, and the building SYisms of the instrumental title track, which features the the even more instantly recognisable by sound than by sight J Mascis – which is saying something – cutting in with some coruscating gtr.
The album closes with Thurston demonstrating his long-standing fascination with the possibilities of recorded sound…actually it does no such thing, it finishes with a 30 year old recording of him dicking about of with scissors and disinfectant. It does however throw into sharp relief the fact that he has just made his maturest-sounding record. It may also be one of his very best.
Track samples are from the Ecstatic Peace site, which also bandies about a release date of September 18th.
…was a rubbish suggestion of mine for a pub quiz team name, when we were going with a theme of inserting the names of things you would find in the kitchen into the titles of films. Others I can remember included The Collander Girls, The Italian Hob, Fridge Over The River Kwai, Sieve and Let Die, Spice Racks Like Us and, best of all, The Breville Wears Prada.
What am I getting at? Well, I just noticed that the one year anniversary of this blog residing at WordPress has just passed, and thought it was worth noting. After a nascent period tinkering about over at Livejournal, the first piece posted on this site proper was a review of the This Heat Out Of Cold Storage box set. It has all been downhill ever since, some would say. Anyway, I figure this gives me an excuse for some navel-gazing (I see no ships! Oh, wait…), and delving into a year’s worth of stats.
Top 10 most popular album reviews (by number of readers) in the last 12 months:
1. Wilco, Sky Blue Sky
2. Bjork, Volta
3. Joanna Newsom, Ys
4. Panda Bear, Person Pitch
5. Battles, Mirrored
6. Tim Hecker, Harmony In Ultraviolet
7. Caribou, Andorra
8. Stuart Staples etc, Songs For The Young At Heart
9. Animal Collective, People EP
10. Max Richter, Songs From Before
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the bigger the artist, the more readers (hmmmm, I hope all those people didn’t feel too short-changed by the Bjork review). Encouraging to see all those hits for Tim Hecker and Max Richter though; I wouldn’t have guessed at those being up there.
Onto the top 10 most popular live reviews in the last 12 months:
1. Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton at the RFH
2. Bonnie Prince Billy at Shepherds Bush
3. Fennesz and Philip Jeck at the Bedford Arms
4. Field Day at Victoria Park just last week
5. Keiji Haino and Chris Corsano at The Spitz
6. Matmos and Cornelius at the RFH
7. Supersilent and others at Cargo
8. Homefires 2007 day 2 (day 1 strangely unloved)
9. Tony Conrad and Islaja at St Giles
10. Tindersticks at The Barbican
I don’t really go to so many gigs by really big acts (too many people, too many queues, too far from the stage, too much security hassle), hence the list is a bit more varied. A well-attended event will of course still do pretty well – that Field Day review is only a week old (an amazing number of hits have come from people googling “field day queues”, funnily enough). At number three though…a gig in a pub in South London. That pleases me.
And if you want to see a sample of the best of 12 months worth of inappropriate search terms, they are over there at Page Not Found.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for all your comments, corrections and even insults over the last year. Keep them coming.
My first thought when I heard Grouper was “Oh my God, there is a girl trapped down the well”. She sounds hurt, she is moaning quite loudly, but no-one is doing a damned thing about it. Not even Sting. All just standing round, the lazy, selfish bastards. Of course, as with most bad things in life, I blame Thatcher and the culture of selfishness she inspired, as well as the fact(ish) that by depriving children of milk at school they had to dig wells in order to get a drink, with inevitable girl-down-a-well consequences. Still, she’ll be dead soon, most likely. I mean Thatcher, not the girl down the well, who will most likely go on to become famous via a spot on a reality TV show after a tearful appearance on the Jeremy Kyle show which launches herself into the nation’s consciousness. And who do I blame for these celebrity-fixated times? Damn right.
On the reissue of their 2005 debut Way Their Crept and very-limited new thingummy Cover The Windows And The Walls (I haven’t heard the new 7” Tried on Type yet), Grouper’s Liz Harris plays the part of the girl down the well with aplomb. Both are chasms of pulsation, reverberation, echo, pulsation, reverberation, echo, from which muffled Liz Fraser-like wordless vocals emerge. Most obviously like My Bloody Valentine, Seefeel or Slowdive but from a very long way away, possibly underwater and without the beats or the structure (i.e. not a lot like them at all really), but with a whole load more ambience and atmosphere. In fact there is definitely a resemblance to the work Machinefabriek does with Soccer Committee, I think I may have written about that somewhere. I’ve only just fallen in with Grouper (and am still – as you can probably tell – trying to unravel their chronology) but am finding it incredibly difficult to escape from their charms.
Listen to the title tracks “Way Their Crept” and “Cover The Windows and The Walls”. You can find some of this stuff, subject to availability, over at Boomkat. Grouper are playing the Whitechapel Art Gallery on November 9th; I’ll see you there.
The great jazz cull of 2007 continues apace. I’ve just heard that the legendary drummer Max Roach has died at the age of 83. Full obit from the new York Times here, while Darcy James Argue collates the thoughts of the blogosphere. Some suitable listening over at Destination-Out; I for one have been listening with heavy heart this morning to M’Boom and the still incredibly powerful after all these years We Insist! Freedom Now Suite (I swear I nearly wept during the “Prayer/Protest/Peace” triptych).
Cargo is one of my favourite venues (the memories of last year’s Supersilent performance still linger on in my singed synapses), although I can never find the place, resulting in me spending an unnecessary amount of time tramping about through London’s trendy Shoreditch in the very-much-du-jour pissing rain. The warm glow induced by this ATP-promoted avant-folk event soon dried me out though.
Hush Arbors is the trading name of sometime Six Organ Keith Wood. “Matt Groening!”, was Mandrew’s customary looky-likey contribution, although the helium-guzzling vocals brought to my mind Geddy Lee, and in particular Pavement’s curiosity as to the pitch of his speaking voice. Accompanied by Leon J. Dufficy who swathed the songs in a blanket of feedback, Hush Arbors were pretty fine, although suffered a little from being in the same two-guitar format (one traditional, one troublemaker) as the headliner, who did it with a bit of added excitement.
Anyone pining for a return to Six Organs Of Admittance’s Fahey-esque phase which peaked with the wonderful School Of The Flower should look away now: last year’s scuzzy The Sun Awakens appears to have been a signpost, not an outpost. Ben Chasny has now recruited Magik Markers’ Elisa Ambrogio to the band; Chasny is thus freed to concentrate on playing his electric quasi folk while someone else does the electric what-the-fuck?
Ambrogio spent half of the show on her knees, giving her guitar some real tough love (overhead, underfoot, upside down), creating a malevolent cacophony. By the end of the gig she was down to four strings, the other two lashing around like whip tails, but she continued to riff and slash and scrub, pausing occasionally to whisper surprisingly soft harmonies. As Chasny and Ambrogio eyed and circled and pushed each other, one couldn’t help but pick up on real frisson in the chemistry between them.
The new album Shelter From the Ash comes out in a couple of months on Drag City; I’m guessing most of the setlist came from this. A cut-to-ribbons “Home” from School of The Flower did feature towards the end, as did – or did I imagine this – a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “That’s Alright”. Just after I’d said to Mandrew that I was hoping for “The Chain” too…
More photos on the flickr
The new album from Deutschland’s Marsen Jules has appeared unexpectedly on radar as a bright green dot in a sketchily-charted triangle between Colleen’s Les Ondes Silencieuses, the wonderful spooky things by Greg Haines and Elegi on Miasmah, and the Alva Noto/Ryuichi Sakamoto masterpieces on Raster Noton. In fact lots of Golden sounds like a lot of other things, but it is put together with such fastidious attention to detail, and comes together so cohesively that I must confess to having enjoyed it enormously.
Like the aforementioned release from Ms Schott, Jules has made a clear decision to rein back in the electronics of previous albums in favour of a more organic sound; the opening track “Birkengefluester” illuminating the sky with glowing looped layers of classical-sounding guitar. “In Einem Raum Mit Dir” takes this guitar and supplements it with gorgeous spare piano, while the title track adds Reich-like shimmering string interludes and Noto-esque clicks. The same clicks can be just about discerned puncturing “Waehrend”, whose troubling found sounds are like something I could probably procure from a giant’s stationery cupboard; an outsized stapler or hole punch perhaps. “An Einem Wintermorgen” is the Vrioon-iest, with those unresolved Sakamoto piano phrases suspended over what sounds like Alva Noto’s ringtone (no, actually Alva Noto’s ringtones are here). If only “Von Hier Nach Dort” ha d vocals from the ubiquitous Antony (it feels like scarcely an album has been released this year without his emotings) it could have slipped unnoticed onto the deck of Current 93’s “Black Ships Ate The Sky”.
Genesungswerk have posted a ten minute mix of tracks from the album; have a listen and see what you reckon. Golden is available from Marsen Jules’ website; I recommend navigating in that general direction and locking on.
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