Monthly Archive

There have only been x solo female Wire cover stars, and over the course of this weekend I’ve managed to see (2/x*100)% of them, which isn’t bad going. PJ Harvey made up the second part of this double bill, taking the solo thing to its logical conclusion by playing with no support and no band, and starting at the leisurely-meal-in-a-restaurant-friendly time of 9pm. While I had been expecting a set based largely around her excellent new album White Chalk, instead we were treated to a selection from across her seven albums proper, and although I haven’t done the maths, the set list felt pretty evenly split across them.

She began with the tortured howl of “To Bring You My Love”, and continued on in a nakedly emotional manner for the next 90 minutes. The contrast between Polly’s urge in interviews to keep details of her personal life tightly locked away stands in marked contrast to her seemingly uncontrollable desire to lay her craft bare before her audience as she did tonight. The songs from White Chalk stood out tonight, including the standout first track “The Devil” and the intense illucidity of “When Under Ether”, with Harvey displaying surprising prowess on the piano as well as her unsettling upper vocal register. A little humour permeated the overwhelming catharsism when the drum machine developed a mind of its own and began spouting ridiculously inappropriate disco rhythms (”Play Love Shack!” came one quick-witted response). Ultimately the track, “Electric Light”, benefitted from the machine’s removal to the naughty corner, and he song’s necessary stripping back to bare skeleton.

The set ended with a devastating last pairing of songs - “The Piano”, with its shrieks of “Oh God I miss you!” and “nobody’s listening!” (untrue, clearly we were spellbound), and the quite acoustics of “Desperate Kingdom Of Love”. It was a very different show to the one I saw last night, and I can’t help but think that if I had been much closer to the stage I may even have enjoyed her tremendous performance even more - the sensation of watching this performance with so many others felt more than a little voyeuristic.

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Having missed Ms Newsom last time she played (had tickets, but wasn’t going to be in the country on the date, so a grateful milkman took them off my hands), there was no way I was making the same mistake this time.  At the Royal Albert Hall of all places.  Not being a seasoned flag-waving Prom-going right-wing berk, I haven’t been to the Royal Albert Hall in years.  It has a much smaller diameter than I remembered it, but makes up for it by being vertiginously tall, with sound-damping roof fungus dangling from the roof on long stalks. 

Early doors, a couple of Joanna Newsom’s friends from California, The Moore Brothers did a very brief (15 minute!) and wholly-passable impersonation of Simon and Garfunkel with one guitar and a bagful of harmonies.  They didn’t have a “Bright Eyes” though.  But then again, neither did Simon and Garfunkel.

Manc folk legend Roy Harper was on next.  I’d seen him play before at the 100 Club, an infuriating event which consisted of 60% hippy chuntering (war is bad, kids!) to only about 40% music.  This time, constrained by his 45 minute slot, he dispensed with the majority of these platitudes in favour of a gritty reading of his classic Stormcock.  It was a winning decision, and one which is bound to have won him a bunch of new fans tonight.  On “The Same Old Rock” and “One Man Rock and Roll Band” he elbows aside his colleague on guitar to dispense some thuddering playing of his own, and you can hear why the Zep were fans. The last of the four tracks “”Me And My Woman” is apparently one of Joanna’s favourites; with its seemingly unrelated sections and unannounced changes in tempo and key, Harper’s upper register swinging from those mushrooms on the ceiling, its influence on her style of song construction couldn’t be more obvious.

The moment the first note escaped Joanna’s lips was a magical one for me, confirmation of the hitherto-unreconcilable notion that that incredible voice really does belong to that person.  From that moment, the hall was a bowl of hush, punctuated by huge ovations after each song.  The band were a four-piece (including violin, banjo/tamboura and percussion), rendering those songs from The Milk-Eyed Mender less of a challenge – “Bridges and Balloons”, “The Book Of Right-On” and the spare, traditional sounding “Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie” were amongst the evening’s many peaks. 

The fact that there was no orchestra immediately stripped some of the Ys songs of perhaps my favourite component, Van Dyke Parks’ inspired off-kilter arrangements.  However, despite a couple of clumsy moments when some overly-loud tamboura would threaten to overwhelm the other instruments, for the most part the reworkings worked well.  The tempo of “Emily” was tinkered with, some sections slower and some faster than on record, while “Monkey and Bear” benefited from a big kettle-drum finale.  The transcription of “Cosmia” did not divest it of any its sense of drama; building perfectly to the squeaky emotions of the “and miss! and miss! and miss!” climax (I must add that it was at this point that I noticed that two members of the band looked – from my vantage point – like the Miliband brothers, seemingly unfazed by all the speculation about whether or not a general election is imminent).  The solo “Sawdust and Diamonds” was unaffected, and was utterly scintillating, Newsom’s hands grabbing skilfully and speedily at bunches of strings like she was in a flower picking contest.

The set ended with a new one – slow and sparse, with lyrics about “a beautiful town with rain coming down” suggesting that it could have been written in London at any point over the last six sodden months.  After an extended standing ovation, we were treated to an encore of extensive and extensively-rejigged epic “Only Skin” before, a Springsteen-esque (well, they are the Ys Street Band after all) two hours after she first appeared on stage, Joanna finally took her bow to some unrestrained adoration and well-deserved applause the likes of which aren’t observed all that often in the RAH’s stuffier events. 

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As Alex Ferguson’s forging of an Aberdeen side good enough to beat Real Madrid in the 1983 European Cup-Winners’ Cup showed, sometimes brilliance can be achieved from the most basic of raw materials.  Oren Ambarchi’s latest release on Touch, despite its glaring lack of a prosaic defender in the Doug Rougvie mould, is a fine example of such alchemy, as it turns a load of musical lumber into a virtual arboretum of sound. 

Opening track “Fever, A Warm Poison” sets the formula, as it suspends some typically slow and deliberate guitar amongst the treetops, over a sparse mulch of extreme bottom-end tones and clicks.  You can sense a hulking physical presence lurking in the shadows, pacing backwards and forwards, before the sun breaks through the canopy midway through second track “Inamorata” – an outburst of strings, melody struggles to break free of decaying drone, before it collapses back to the forest floor as darkness regroups and floods the available space.  The tumbling flecks of guitar that cascade through the closing “Trailing Moss In Mystic Glow” are infiltrated by hints of metallic percussion, and then a wordless tribal moan – indigenous company arrives to lead you back to the edge of the clearing. 

There is less going on here than on his previous album Grapes From The Estate, but such is the craftsmanship that I feel like I’m getting a lot more satisfaction from it.  You can wander through In The Pendulum’s Embrace at your leisure by buying it from the Touch Shop.

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Roger thought it was rather funny as, in his anger, Brian’s hair had become quite entangled with his telescope, and he was hunched over with his head somewhere in the vicinity of Freddie’s crotch.  However, there was a real sadness in the hopelessly-stuck guitarist’s voice as he moaned “aaaaaaaaaaw, Freddie…we thought that we had truly mapped the universe of operatic rock with our mystifyingly successful run of albums stretching back over a decade now.  But with this here “Barcelona”, you’ve shown us that this was but a mere Magellan cloud.  There is no way we can follow this.  Why don’t you fuck off and die, eh?”.  John went off to fetch some scissors to free the by now hopelessly-enmeshed Brian, and on the way decided he would quite like a cup of tea.

I’m pretty sure a similar scenario unfolded recently round at Animal Collective Towers.  There they were, still being attended to by the imaginary midgets carrying big bowls of drugs that their remarkable album Feels should rightly have afforded them, when their member Panda Bear snucked out and knocked out one of 2007’s most critically acclaimed albums of Beach Boys-inspired experimental pop music, Person Pitch.  Talk about pressure.  Surely they must have felt the pressure of following those two masterpieces?  Not a bit of it; in fact Strawberry Jam builds on them.  It retiles the walls of Feels with some of the sonic textures of Person Pitch, replacing any last remnants of their earlier folkish existence with insistent, choppy, reverb-heavy rhythms. 

The album sets off with a run of pop bangers so succulent you want to stick them on a stick, cook them over some burning sticks, and stick ‘em down your throat til you’re sick. From the whip-cracking glam stomp of single “Peacebone”, through “Unsolved Mysteries’” throbbing Ripper-nightmares, the dissolving word-tumble and guitar-tremble that is “Chores”, and up to the album’s twin highlights, the vertiginous pile of hooks, harmony and holler that is “For Reverend Green”, and the jittery hypermelodic sparks of next single (released on November 5th, gunpowder plotwatchers) “Fireworks”, it doesn’t put a single foot wrong.  With no disrespect to the slow comedown of the four that follow, I don’t think I’ve heard a finer sequence of tracks on any album this year. 

Once you’ve disentangled yourself, go get yourself some.  And yes, I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea.  If you’re making one.

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Not long back from a holiday in two countries neatly encircled by their impenetrable Finno-Ugric language barrier, with its comedy umlauts turning half of their letters into unblinking faces, and here I am falling in love with an album which appears to be set to a story which is all in that typographical Gordian knot, Russian.  I wouldn’t mind, but the story is about a man with an axe and some flying porridge, which sounds bloody great to me.  Oh, and as if that wasn’t enough to pique my interest, it’s on the fascinating Miasmah label.  So, translators needed: apply in the comments below (or directly to Miasmah, who wouldn’t mind having a translation themselves).

Gultskra Artikler is Siberian/Moscovite Alexey Devayanin and in the nineteen seamlessly-flowing tracks of Kasha Iz Topora he takes a boat down a river through his homeland.  You can hear him scrabbling about with the oars through the trickier sections as the wind batters him while he passes through white-topped rocks, and can feel the warmth as humanity is encountered in the traditional sounds of the village folk and classical musics.  What could be perceived as barren landscapes are in fact teeming with life and activity, as Devayanin manipulates threads of electronics, strings, piano and vocals into the fabric of the record.  The way that on a track like “Krovinka Moya” or “Mediscinski Rabotnik” he sculpts sound of such emotional resonance from such basic  components warrants comparison with the likes of William Basinki, Philip Jeck, or Todd Dockstader – yet different, a unique craft, although with all those scrapes, scurryings and scufflings under the deck to scare your, um, balalaikas off, it has undoubtedly navigated to a perfect landing spot on Miasmah.

According to Erik Skodvin, Alexey Devayanin is ”the most brilliant and unique musician out there”.  Find out why for yourself by purchasing Kasha Iz Topora from Miasmah (keep your eyes peeled for a homemade 3″ CDR EP coming soon too).

Ashley Wales’ Back In Your Town night continues to provide us with some of the most exciting improvisation to be found anywhere in clubland.  And I mean clubland; the Red Rose, situated on a most unappealing stretch of the Seven Sisters Road to the South West of Finsbury Park has the charm of a decades-old working men’s club.  But look between the multiple TVs tuned to Sky Sports and the chalkboards showing such endearingly precise prices as “Bitter £2.12″, and you will see the walls are festooned with pictures of performers - the room through the back is what you are looking for if you need a bit of free jazz or live comedy to lift your spirits in this part of North London.

As a prelude to the main act, Steve Beresford and Neil Metcalfe performed an excellent piano/flute duet.  The level of listening and the speed of the reactions to each other was extraordinary - whether Beresford would stumble upon a phrase, or Metcalfe chanced upon a melody, the other would take it, bash it around for a bit, and hand it back for further work.  It was probably inevitable given their respective choice of instruments that Beresford would excite most, leaping as he did from the thunderous rumble on the left to the flashes of lightning on the right, nearly falling off his stool as he did so.

Mark Sanders had barely managed to finish his thanks to those involved with the organisation of this tour (you can read a brilliant review over wordsandmusic of the Liverpool gig) when the impatient and cross-looking Gayle burst in with his white alto, leaving Sanders and William Parker tearing after him in chase.  Immediately, intensity levels were extremely high; at times all three musicians had their eyes closed in concentration, as they tried to align their respective cog with the revolutions of this great engine.

Parker was the first to be given a solo, a long (picture the impatient Gayle glowering stage right), fast (I had to check that he in fact has only five fingers on each hand) thing which seemed to be constantly fighting against an urge to develop some funk.  He took a glorious - and much shorter - arco solo later, deft as they come, and bursting with melody.  These were moments to savour - during the ensemble pieces the muscular Parker’s work became at times surprisingly buried amidst the hullabaloo beinig created around him.

Sanders’s moments in the spotlight were disappointingly brief: as I write, I’m listening to his solo record Swallow Chase on Wales’ Treader label, and he is clearly capable of creating sublime extended percussion pieces.  By some distance the youngest man on stage, he played a mostly subservient role, but played it with the utmost quality and consistency - marvellously responsive, switching between the sticks, brushes, and mallets, and using every square centimetre of every surface available to him to produce the fullest array of sounds, but in the most unshowy fashion.   Towards the end of a piece which had kicked off as an Ayler-esque march, Gayle and Parker lured him into a drums versus sax and bass showdown; Sanders fought his corner with aplomb, matching their knotty phrases with is own intricate shapes. 

Gayle’s sax playing was, as you would have expected, incendiary throughout the evening, featuring coruscating Coltrane-like runs into upper registers, all played with a huge, chewy vibrato.  However the quality of his piano playing was an unexpected surprise to me - he would feel his way in before playing with Bley-ish style, humming and singing as he went.  When, at the start of the second piano trio piece, Parker and Sanders led off at brisk pace, a grin broke out for the first time on Gayle’s face, appreciating the challenge he was being set, and responding with relish.  This image was in contrast to the stern, forceful leader we had seen throughout the evening, calling players in, before shutting them out with a blast from his horn.  After the evening faded out with Gayle playing a snatch of Tyner on piano (”Naima”, if I remember correctly, which would be a first), this stony facade was finally shattered by his humble and heartfelt thankyou speech.  As he signed off with “There may be three of us, but we’re a quartet - you are the fourth person”, suddenly he was once more just a thin, gaunt looking old man, and the fourth person showed their appreciation with a huge and massively deserved ovation.

There are more photos at the flickr.

Action Jazz, eh?  What does that mean?  Surely it can’t be an attempt to pick up the torch which has become close to fizzling out with the deaths of all those activist free jazz pioneers of late (such as Max Roach with his Freedom Now Suite)?  I mean the Norwegians don’t strike me as an oppressed minority or anything.  Maybe it is something to do with fishing quotas - how about Lift Every Plaice And Squid (hmmm…can anyone do any better?). 

Or just maybe this is Mats Gustafsson, Ingebrigt Haker Flaten, and Paal Nilsen Love’s attempt to reinvigorate the genre with their own powerful brand of bottled noise.  Credence to this is lent by the liner notes, which  display a fridge magnet manifesto, proclaiming “OUT OF THE SO CALLED EMPTINESS: CHANNELS OF ENERGY”.  As such, the name couldn’t be more apt – this is a restless beast of an album, which scarcely gives itself a second to draw breath as it gathers in source material from a variety of disparate sources, chews them up and spits them back out with a red-faced savageness.

Opener “Sounds Like A Sandwich” (by lablemates Cato Salsa Experience) sounds less like a sandwich than being caught amongst stampeding horses spooked by an earthquake, while Yosuke Yamashita’s “Chiasma” sounds more like a sandwich, bookending some guttural howling and tumultuous drumming between repetitions of a morse code theme.  Ornette Coleman’s “Broken Shadows” is reduced to a skulky Drum Thing, before a cover of Lightning Bolt’s (action rock?) “Ride The Sky” leaps out with murderous intentions, Gustaffson spewing glass fragments while Nilsen-Love nails his kit to the floor.  This sets the mood for The Thing’s own two-part “Better Living…Through BBQ” (which seems to me to be a rather different credo, and one easily tempered by the vagaries of an unseasonal summer) before this meaty, muscular brute of an album curls up to sleep amongst the trashcans with the metallic scrapes and foraging percussion of Gustafsson’s “Strayhorn”.

Make Action Jazz your raison d’etre with a purchase from the Smalltown shop.

I figured it was about time this place got a bit of a tidy up.  Like most such chores, I’d been putting it off for months, but then I found myself with something particularly boring to do at work, so learning a little CSS and mucking about with hexadecimals suddenly took on much greater appeal.

I had two primary aims:

1) To make the navigation easier - everything in the sidebar used to run together horribly, and people couldn’t find such important parts of the site like the “contact me” button.  Of course, now people will use it, and they’ll want to engage in some sort of dialogue with me, and I’ll get sociophobic and wished I had removed the button altogether.

2) To free up more room for photos - before they were quite squashed into a 400 pixel space, now they can relax comfortably in the first class leg room afforded by this design’s, um, 500 pixels.

And in truth, I was becoming a bit fatigued by the little Hungarian houses and their tangle of ex-Communist cabling.

I’m still tinkering with it a little, and I know it isn’t perfect (for example, I’m damned if I can put that comments link at the bottom of each post on the front page), but feel free to let me know what you think - either in the comments, or by using the now (too) easy-to-find “contact me” gadget. 

I nearly forgot to mention that I saw the Mercury Music Prize-nominated (I know, like that means anything..doesn’t even the titular Mercury relate to a now-defunct telecoms company sponsor?) at the National Portrait Gallery the other night.  I do enjoy seeing music in less-than-usual settings, hence I was more interested in checking out the NPG as a venue than seeing the band themselves.

I was a little disappointed with the space.  The concert took place in a sterile white conduit, a transient place filled with a constant stream of people shuffling through between other parts of the gallery (although the bemused faces passing up the sleek escalator did amuse me).  It was a bit busy, which I suppose could have been expected what with Basquiat Strings being the country’s designated flag-bearers for all music that isn’t indie rock, but this meant I was sitting on the floor, which was cold and hard.  An hour of that probably didn’t contribute to my appreciation of the venue.

Having said all that, I enjoyed the group more than I expected, particularly given that the big-haired clumsily-booked drummer Seb Rochford had managed to get his diary in a knot and wasn’t present.  Although they were coming from a more staid classical tradition, with only the (rather good, actually) substitute drummer allowed to veer from sheet music, I did appreciate their arrangements of some familiar jazz tracks.  In particular, their reading of the one-day-gone Joe Zawinul’s “In A Silent Way” had an obvious poignancy.

I must confess that when I first wedged this rainbow-scattering silver disc into the machine, and pressed the button that made the magical people inside it sing and make merry, I was pretty convinced that this wouldn’t be for me at all.  Not a bit.  All this happity clappity hippity dippity stuff reminded me of the Polyphonic Spree (“a lithium-fuelled explosion in a smock factory”, I called them in my less bitter days), and I felt I was being force-fed helium by a dancing clown and his loony grinning dancing bear.

It gets much better with repeat listens though, the funny little car explodes and strews oddly shaped scraps of plastic about the place like it was a map of Micronesia. Moments like the weird casio/echo breakdown in “Ed Is A Portal”, the backwards skronkiness of “Pony’s OG”, and the shouty tribal hoedown clearing uncovered in “New Ceremonial Music” make Love Is Simple sound more like the produce of that other Collective, the Animal one.  If you can stomach the sugar, you’ll find enough odd bitty textures in this jam to keep any travelling circus troupe you choose to care for happy, and their bread well spread.

Available now from Young God Records.

A broken consort is “an ensemble featuring more than one family of instruments”.  A Broken Consort are a broken consort in a sense – they have the requisite disparity of instruments - but they have only one member, Richard Skelton, and he can’t consort with himself.  He’d go blind.

Box of Birch is a magical construct, and by pulling a similar trick to the most confusing sorcery performed by airplanes it manages to be both floaty and dense.   It has none of that noisy rushing about that tends to come as part of the airplane package though; this is quiet and slow all the way.  Despite being made of many semi-diaphanous layers of lazily-threatening guitars, wandering piano, elegiac violin scrapes, and assorted who-knows-what, somehow it manages to retain an airy ethereal quality.  I can hear hints of A Silver Mount Zion and Boxhead Ensemble most obviously (I won’t say “ but on Miasmah”, as I’m saying that too often these days; instead just imagine that I had said it); and a touch of Ry Cooder’s bleak Paris, Texas bluescapes.  It feels very emotive and substantial while it envelops you, with an all-pervading sense of loss, yet somehow when you step back from the record at the end it fades like a dream, slipping from your mind like fog through a sieve; you’ll feel the loss and will want to slip back under the covers and its spell before you become too roused from your slumber.

Listen to “The Elder Lie“, and also to a selection of other tracks on the label (including A Broken Consort’s “Effacer“) over at The Wire.  This seriously wonderful record is available (theoretically) from Sustain-Release Recordings as “Two 8cm CDR’s - one silver, one white - wrapped in linen and encased in a black, jeweller’s box with individualised cover band. Inserts include six artwork prints by Louise Skelton, vellum parchment enclosure and a bag of birch twigs”.  Limited to, erm, 28 copies.   However, there is a second edition of 100, which comes in still-lovely personalised packaging, with a freshly pressed leaf.  Grab a copy of previous album The Shape Leaves while you are there, you won’t regret it…this is one of my favourite discoveries of the year.

My mental image of Magik Markers - as a bunch of Thurston-approved miscreants with little care for such notions as actually playing their instruments - was disabused by Elisa Ambrogio’s show stealing performance alongside Ben Chasny with Six Organs Of Admittance the other week.  Their own particular brand of sonic scuzziness has hitherto been documented solely on a series of CD-Rs, making Boss their first album proper and/or first proper album.  It is not at all what anyone would expect, and is all the better for it. 

Although perhaps expectedly, it does roll in on a wall of squall.  It  becalms upon a stoner riff, and then Ambrogio’s vocals surface atop, and suddenly I’m listening to Kim Gordon-sung Sonic Youth circa Sister – in fact, when during the frenetic “Body Rot”, she sings “I’ve got a…”, my inner Thurston steps in with a nicely timed “…catholic block”.  The similarity continues with the abstract poetry/nonsense – you choose - of the sprawling “Last of The Lemach Line” (“I am the secular pentocost squeezing out the blue snake!”…yes, and your specialist subject is what, contestant?).  A few tracks in, when I’m already feeling this is a more disciplined effort than I would have predicted, they nail my jaw to the floor and hammer a piano ballad to the inside of my skull – sweet, naïve and utterly charming.  After the drone piece “Pat Garrett”, they come back to finish me off with the Mazzy Star fuzzy loveliness of “Bad Dream”, which means I’m barely cognisant of the slightly disappointing haven’t-you-done-this-one-already sludgy stuff at the end.

Boss is available from the Ecstatic Peace store.

If it wasn’t for the fact I was just arriving back into the country on Saturday, I would have been very much up for the all-night Wayang gamelan and puppet performance in the Royal Festival Hall at the weekend.  Common sense prevailed, and monkeyman and me settled on Sunday for taking off our socks and shoes, sitting down on cushions, and banging away with a bunch of children on these gorgeous instruments in one of the RFH’s gamelan workshops.  Loads of fun.

(Ooh, bet that title made you groan.  Sorry about that).

I’m back from my sojourn in Finland (and a little bit of Estonia too, country-counting enthusiasts), and what a lovely green and blue, foresty and lakey country it is – albeit one with a thoroughly over-extended fascination with the solo works of Bruce Dickinson (oh yes, and local-boys-done-good Lordi – see picture above). 

I managed to hoover up as much of the Circle back catalogue as I could find/afford while I was there, including what I thought to be the latest – until the young shop assistant in Helsinki’s Popparienkeli informed me that there had been another one since then, and he’d sold out.  “Never mind”, he added, “there will be another one out soon”.  Obviously.  

The disconnection of the automated review-generating robot will take place soon, but it has those mad-looking red eyes, and is swishing at me with a rolled up copy of The Wire, so it may get to write one or two more yet before it can be lured back into its box by use of a bottle of Finnish stout as bait…

The Machinefabriek silly season continues apace, with an album of 26 remixes of one of his originals “Stofstuk” (drone, clicks, singing bowl).  Kruimeldief features Freiband (static explosion), Peter Broderick (space station on red alert), Jgrzinich (train station at night all lights at red), Kim Cascone (red planet wind and ghostly chatter), Greg Haines (orchestra emerges through a hole grated in a metal fence), Xela (held hostage listening to captors in the adjacent room), Mark Templeton (shuffled with packs of guitar, harmonica and clatter),  Jefre Cantu-Ledesma (terrifying near-silence), Mitchell Akiyama (whining guitar elegy), Aaron Martin (sheltering from the rain in a phonebox outside a TV shop), Strangelet (the TV shop has 2001 on each of twenty screens), Alva Noto (gets inside the bowl to sing a hymn), Luigi Archetti (helicopter feedback, sine waves), Lesser (murder on shingle), Jeroen Vandesande (metal on metal), Tim Coster (a last transmission, power failing), Pita (transmitter rebuilt reaching up to split-open sky), Svarte Greiner (knives sharpened on passing train, in slo-mo), The No (morse code transcription of suicide letter), Adam Pacione (witchy cauldron), Henrik Rylander (destruction by electric fire), Chris Herbert: (insectoid snacking), Julien Neto (enticing trace of melody escaping church window), Lukas Simonis (birth, monkey-like, from the elements), Gert-Jan Prins (abduction and operation), Steinbruchel (the bowl closes over, entombment).  Think that’s not enough?  There is a whole other CD’s worth of these up on his website featuring the likes of Fog and Jasper TX.  Think that’s not enough?  The collaboration with Aaron Martin, Cello Recycling (twelve stunning minutes of monstrous Godspeed sigh) / Cello Drowning (the same, but in the sewer with the ceaseless drip and the rat people) is out now on Tape.  Think that’s not enough?  There’s a live downloadable mp3 over at netlabel One, featuring two tracks, “Stuip” (not unusually, takes ten minutes to get going, but when it does it gets going in really harsh and abrasive waves which grate the skin from the inside of your ears in a surprisingly enjoyable manner) and “Staar” (when is Machinefabriek playing over here?  I’m first in line for tickets). Think that’s not enough?  Oh, go and see a doctor you sick freak.

Both Kruimeldief and Cello Recycling/Cello Drowning are available from the home of all things Zuyderfelt, Boomkat.  Stuip/Staar is dowloadable from One.

After a curious covers album which, despite some jaw-dropping reworkings, almost saw them labelled as a novelty act, Susanna appears to have split-from-but-remained-on-speaking-terms (it’ll never work) with her Magical Orchestra Morten Qvenild.  Her new found single name solo status is a brave move (and one which has thoroughly confused the Last FM tagging system which thinks I am repeatedly playing an album by a Boston DJ), but she has a strong enough collection of songs here.  Oh, and a more-than-able foil in Deathprod himself, Helge Sten, who produces and adds a little guitar.  So she’ll cope, I’d like to think.

Once you’ve got past that very odd little/big/space/song title, the first thing that is bound to strike you around the chops is how little music there is on it.  Sten has done a bang-up removal job around the place, stripping the album of all furniture to create a sense of openness and unclutteredness in which Susanna’s voice can repose and reflect, the musical sparseness mirroring beautifully the sense of loss and absence engendered by the lyrics.  Qvenild pops back on occasion to remind Susanna of what might have been, scattering a few piano notes around like petals ripped from a rose on a few tracks.  Susanna holds it together with an impressively contained and restrained performance – keeping the flashy “Hallelujah” voice well and truly locked up in the box, as if it would crack were she to attempt it.  “Where do I go from here?”, she asks towards the end on “Home Recording”.  As if I’m someone you should come to for advice on matters of the heart…

Here’s some advice I am (arguably) more qualified to dispense: share in this sweet sweet sorrow by buying the album from Rune Grammofon. 

I was speaking to the redoubtable milkman the other week about Murcof, and in particular whether he would be aware of the huge influence he appears to be having on the snowballing electronic/classical crossover scene.  I was asking this because I had read an interview with Erik K Skodvin in which he ‘fessed up to his debt to Fernando Corono.  In particular, Skodvin mentioned the epiphany he experienced when listening to Martes for the first time, after which, of course came Deaf Center’s stunning Pale Ravine, last year’s bewitching album as Svarte Greiner, Knive, and his stewardship of the impressive Miasmah label (I must confess to having had a similar awakening on my first listen, and am hence disappointed not to find myself in Norway, drinking black coffee and preparing piano strings whilst mulling over the terms of Greg Haines’ record deal). 

Anyway, the milkman asked Murcof about this, and received the mystical-sounding reply: “Yes, I am aware of my influence, some people have made it clear to me that I have influenced some of them, which of course is flattering, and more so when they take it to another level, when they add their own personal signature. One of the main reasons I do music is to transmit inspiration the way I receive it from other musicians, or from any other source for that matter, but as raw energy to be later sculpted in whatever form they wish.”  I suggest heading over to the milkman’s new place to read the interview in full.

Cosmos is possessed of a Gordon Brown-like brooding seriousness and huge black shadow, and like one of the PM’s speeches, it is pretty long, and builds to an irresistible droning intensity by the end (hmmmm, not bad, maybe I could start a political spin-off blog, give Guido or Iain Dale a run for their money…or maybe I’ll just stick to the space imagery.  Yup, that’ll be it).  The piano and slippery understated beats of “Cometa” sound most like his previous releases, but the album quickly plots a course for the dark matter.  I can hear Ligeti in the monolithic “Cosmos I” and “Cosmos II” - although after having watched 2001 recently, everything space-y makes me think of Ligeti at present - with their electronic murmur which decays on re-entry into red-hot Sunn 0))) drone.  But it is the gravitational pull of the weighty “Oort” which swings me neatly back to the question posed at the start of this piece (I hesitate, as always to call these things reviews).  It sounds much more akin to a Miasmah release than anything Murcof has released so far, full of unidentifiable instruments which sound like the world is folding in on itself, sucking the stars in towards the void it is leaving behind.

The stellar Cosmos is released on Leaf later this month.