Monthly Archive

I’m not entirely up-to-speed on the concept behind this evening, although I’m sure some of the cursory internet research for which this site is rightly lauded would have proved illuminating.  From what I gathered on the night it seems to have started with a film, some sort of Margate-set remake of The Wicker Man, and it spread to an album, and now to this show.  The dreich weather did seem suitably portentuous, however.

The first half of the show featured those original songs from the album, in the original order, although with some new arrangements and new performers – as, lets face it, the chances of getting Scott Walker or Robert Wyatt on stage these days are, sadly, pretty slim.  I wonder how Scott Walker is getting on with that “album he can tour” he has been promising us for about a decade?

Some highlights : King Creosote’s plague of  frogs, “Relate The Tale”, with the choir giving it a churchful of hallelujah in the background; the Wyatt-free yet still buzzy “Flies”; June Tabor (above) tickling the hairs on the back of my neck with her solo “Fifth Plague”; and the standout track from the original album “Hailstones”, which lacked some of the Tiger Lillies’ wracked vocals but was still a marvellously emotional thing.  Oh, and I nearly forgot: until tonight I had never heard Rufus Wainwright sing.  Honestly.  He isn’t bad, is he, this chap?  The fact that he was there performing “Katona” (with Imogen Heap) seemed to have attracted an army of fans, but it did end the first section on a gorgeous swoon of melody.

After a break for a leg-stretch and a loo queue, the second half of the evening comprised a new bunch of plagues, as if the Old Testament didn’t have enough already, or maybe they just weren’t menacing enough.  Doesn’t a slaughter of first borns do it any more?  I don’t know, people have become so desensitised; Halo 3 has so much to answer for.

Again, some good stuff here;  Phil Minton’s great hissy-babbly-whoopy Ligeti-style session with the choir; semi-naked show-off Patrick Wolf rubbing fake blood and paint into his skinny torso; and the finale, a startling knees-up-round-the-old-joanna-while-the-sun-sets-on-humankind from Damon Albarn and a children’s choir.  Just like with life itself, there is no encore, just a slow shuffle towards the exit, accompanied by a bunch of Patrick Wolf fans with brightly coloured shoes and glitter on their faces.

More photos on the flickr.

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I missed the start of this after arriving late back from a work trip somewhere way out West, which meant returning via Paddington’s irritating connections (the twin Paddingtons and twin Edgware Roads are a blight on the top left hand corner of the circle line, in my opinion; I feel Harry Beck’s pain) to the faded grandeur of Shoreditch Town Hall, with its lovely and rather appropriate crest. Plenty of power on display tonight, as well as some lights being whirled around by one of the most enigmatic of frontmen.

Such tardiness meant missing most of Michael Gira’s set.  A real shame – the two songs I heard were fiery, passionate affairs which would have called the bluff of most of the new weird folk movement (or whatever I’m supposed to call it these days).  I’d heard complaints about excessive chatter during his set in previous shows, but not here - check out the young disciple listening intently and reverentially in the picture above. If anyone had broken his concentration, I think he would have kicked the warm Carlsberg out of them.  I must say that I thought Gira’s hat and braces combination was a good look for the older gentleman too; I’m duly noting that one, it’ll come in handy some day.

Boredoms, or V(infinity)redoms, or whatever I’m supposed to call them these days, were playing “in the round”, which was the first time I’ve heard that expression used without the words “Rod Stewart” or “Bon Jovi” also featuring in the sentence.  So everyone had a pretty great view, although the sound probably varied a bit depending on which of the three drummers you were nearest two – “my guy” played with a whipcracking ferocity which was tearing at my ears by the end.

The Boredoms set has evolved over the last couple of years – last time I saw them it was pretty much one continuous flowing set of interlocked rhythms, while this time it was more clearly divided into discrete pieces – very complicated, knotty things which the band needed to work as one to unravel.  Eye marshalled these meticulous arrangements, signalling changes of tempo or rhythm with a yelp, playing – as well as his box of dials and some sort of crackling lightbulb – seven guitar necks arranged like a TV antenna, beating them somewhat dramatically with a big stick to produce reverberating space chords.

Towards the end, I thought a disco record was beginning to play from the speakers.  I quickly realised that this wasn’t a record, this was Boredoms letting their hair down.  Yoshimi swivelled in her seat to play keyboards and sing a melody, the other two drummers switched to a more comprehensible time signature, and everyone – band and audience alike – felt the love.  There was even an outbreak of freaky dancing from the fellow down the front with the luxuriant moustache.  At this stage in what is now a pretty long career, Boredoms retain the ability to surprise as well as delight.

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Another month, another two Sunburned Hand Of The Man releases.  Or at least collaborations.  Finnish “psych-kraut” pioneers and kindred spirits Circle join hands with them for The Blaze Game, while Kieran Hebden opts to put the safety of a pane of glass between him and them as he takes to the Teo Macero seat on Fire Escape.

My initial impression was that Hebden would seek to curtail SHOTM’s wild excesses, channelling them in a beatward direction; I expected more tracks like “The Parakeet Beat” with its M’Boom style percussive stomp.  However when I heard the rubbery funk of “Nice Butterfly Mask” being crudely curtailed by the sound of a man attacking an elephant with a garden strimmer I knew it wasn’t going to be that straightforward.  Indeed, half of the album is given up for an “Aumgn” style meandering soundscape; fifteen minutes of childlike piano, grunting, tuneless whistling and rattling, banging and scraping entitled “The Wind Has Ears”(hmmm, it is probably a fair bit better than I’ve just made it sound).  Available now from Boomkat.

The unimpeachable source that is Wikipedia makes this the sixth album Circle have been involved is in the last two years, and while their quality control has been on duty/off duty/on duty/off duty in fine French farmer style (Miljard and Tower are brilliant, Katapult and Panic…well, lets just say that they have their moments), the thought of this collaboration intrigued me greatly.  Thankfully, it is the Can-worshipping Circle of Tower who have turned up to jam with SHOTM, lending their hallucinatory percussiveness to their American chums’ evil weirdness.  After the spacious opener “Majava” the album catches alight with the incendiary build of “Heinahelvu” / “Vuoren Valloitus”, guitars piled up like bonfire wood.  “Yksi Hirvi, Miljoona Metsastaaja” may be the best thing either band have been involved with, sparking enthusiastically from Neu! timber.  Perhaps inevitably, I am compelled to say that The Blaze Game is grate.  Buy it from Conspiracy Records.

Where are the songs of Spring?  Ay, where are they?  Autumn didn’t so much roll in this year as drop from the sky like a cold lead weight, smashing the leaves from the trees as it did so.  I don’t care so much for its mists and mellow fruitfulness; however the camera appears to do so – that almost looks like a Touch album cover above, doesn’t it?  Hmmm, maybe Touch photographer (and label boss) Jon Wozencroft doesn’t have anything to worry about just yet. 

Not that I think this last year will have caused him too many worries anyway.  Tonight’s showcase at the Bedford Arms was the left-facing bookend - to go with the right-facing one I collected last year - of their silver jubilee celebrations.   And what a year they have had, with superb releases from Fennesz/Sakamoto, Oren Ambarchi, and Marhaug/Asheim amongst others.  The redbreasts or twittering swallows haven’t begun to gather yet, the label pushes on as strong as ever.

Chris Watson warmed us up (a particularly chilly venue this; fortunately I remembered that fact from last year and wore plenty of layers) with his “remix” of his new 7” Oceanus Pacificus, an aural snapshot of the Galapagos Islands.  The piece was seemingly recorded both above and below the waves simultaneously, with the muffly rumble at the bottom separated from the shingly scrapple at the top.  Dolphins circled, squeaking and clicking, cajoling and chiding me.  The visuals provided as an accompaniment were unnecessary; I closed my eyes, lay back, and floated away.

After some freaky fairground cut and splice from People Like Us, Watson’s collaborator on the Storm record BJ “Benny” Nilsen played a stunning set drawn primarily from his new album The Short Night.  It began with wind gusting up church organ pipes, ascending to the heavens where it coalesced and fell to the sky as rain.  The water began to lap at our ankles, before a biting autumnal gust scared some birds from the trees and into the air to sing, attempting to ward off the black of night.  The last tones had barely died out before I was at the stall buying a copy of the album.

It got a bit bitty for a while after that.  People Like Us showed off a fiftiescentric visual collage entitled “Work Rest and Play”. There was some ill-fitting (albeit brief) crooning from Zerocrop.  Wozencroft himself then wrestled with some malfunctioning equipment to provide a DJ set which included some Joy Division, and a new Fennesz single – the CD player drew the line at Judy Garland.

*Big ranty digression warning.  Rejoin again in a para’s time if you want to skip it*  That new Fennesz track was almost ruined by the swathe of chattering numpties in the crowd.  One photographer, whose name fails me at present, seemed not content with trying to disrupt the show for everyone by flashing his camera in the artists’ faces from about 6” away, just as he did last year – if he needs flash in those conditions I would suggest he probably needs a better camera, as well as perhaps a sense of shame – but stood talking noisily with his friend throughout, until someone sitting next to me pointed out to them that people were actually trying to listen to the music.   If I ever reach the point where I am so jaded or care so little about music that I will talk through a preview play of a new Fennesz recording then, dear reader, I will gladly pay for the gun with which you are to shoot me. *ends ranty digression*

Aaaaaaaaand welcome back to those who skipped that bit, you’re just in time to hear me discuss how Geir Jenssen broke the evening’s remarkable run of bald artists.  With his recorded output, I’ve always felt that the beats were the framework on which the rest of his music hung, but it was different here: the music was so dense, that the rhythms seemed to perch on top like a princess on a hundred mattresses, being distressed by an abstract pea at the bottom.  At times it felt like listening to a radio slowly retuning between stations; through layers of static, instruments and voices would appear and disappear, as the patterns around them shifted almost imperceptibly.  The end of the set was like one of those puzzles in which you have to make a picture by shuffling lots of tiles around, with the tiles in this instance being some skronky honks and parps, with Geir seemingly calculating furiously and just about making sense of it all before he ran out of time.  Everyone was quiet by the end, probably as their jaws were hanging agape at this magnicent performance.

To the last oozings: amongst a cacophonous coda from Autodigest I could just about make out human voices.  I couldn’t work out whether they were screaming in pain or baying for an encore; somehow both would have been appropriate for this harsh piece which laid waste to the immense beauty that had gone before.  Ah, Autumn – thou hast thy music too. 

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Imagine building yourself a huge Danish sandwich, with layers all piled high, cheese on cheese on salami on tomato on cheese on lettuce on pickle on grated horse…etc etc etc…all on bread.  Now imagine trying to pick that up, and eat it.  Without dropping any of it in your lap, on your top, or on your laptop.   And succeeding.   You see, I’ve been biting into Parades for weeks, and I’m still no closer to the bread, so numerous are the fillings toppings.  Let’s see, what have I found so far…luscious strings on rustic folk with home-cooked brass on extravagant choral salad on bite-size piano chunks all over fried electronics.  Under the weight of all this, it surely has to collapse, sending children running away screaming through the streets as rocket leaves and pastrami shower down upon their heads…yet somehow it doesn’t; there must be some javelin-sized cocktail sticks running through it. And the more I eat, the more amazing combinations of flavours I find.  And I keep eating, and I’m still barely making a dent.  Ever been to a restaurant, and gorged yourself on a dish, only to be told that that was just the starter?  I have (damn the Greeks and their endless mezze, like some sort of unannounced food decathlon.  There’s that javelin again.  Hang on, how do the Greeks keep getting in here?  Vikings repel these invaders!), and it kind of feels like that.  I’m watching Parades tick inexorably up my most played list, and I don’t feel I’m getting my head round it at all.  The only section I have purchase on is that “Step Up!  Saddle Up!” bit on “Caravan” which has melodic juice oozing down the sides of yet another Axelrod-like vocal section .  Seriously, I’m back to playing the first track again, and it might as well be the first time I’ve heard it, not the 12th.  I love albums like that.  Dense isn’t the word.  Dansk might be. 

Listen to last track “Cutting Ice To Snow” over at Efterklang’s website.  Buy it from Boomkat - I highly recommend it….I think…let me listen to it again…no, I’m full…or maybe just another bite…or two.  They are playing this live soon.  Won’t that just be the icing on the sandwich…

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After their terrific performance in London the other month, featuring some interesting inter-band chemistry, my anticipation levels for the new Six Organs of Admittance album went way, um, inter the red.   In case you don’t remember, I harped on interminably about whether Ben Chasny was going to retrace his steps back to his Fahey-esque fingerpicking roots, or whether he would continue on down the confusingly-signposted route away, over the rocks and between the trees, particularly now that his fortunes had become somewhat interlinked with those of Magic Marker inker-in-chief Elisa Ambroglio.  Are they to become the Sonny and Cher, the Kurt and Courtney, the Richard and Karen (oh, hang on, that isn’t right, is it?  Bloody hell) for our hoodie-shooty-stabby generation?

While I’m still mid-puzzlement, Chasny sees his chance and leaves me standing, skipping straight down the side of the hill, using both well-picked folk and some surprisingly restrained noise for balance, and in doing so produces his best and most focussed album.  While the opening track “Alone With The Alone” appears to have walked off the end of The Sun Awakens – drone fixated, with Tim Green of the The Fucking Champs scraping guitar excess into the gaps between Chasny’s fingers, but the next two tracks are suffused with melody and harmony.  “The Strangled Road” features the first appearance by Elisa, on skull-kissing vocal duties, while “Jade Like Wine” is a demonstration of Chasny’s new-found ability to tune a guitar in something approaching a sensible fashion.  “Coming To Get You” is lashed to a distant howl, with the exceptions of a couple of moments when Elisa’s cap is popped off and she is freed to daub her blurry slogans over the walls.  After a suitably reverent Sun City Girls tribute comes the spiralling epic “Final Wing”, recorded under a flight path it seems, and then the title track, with Chasny stamping all over the pedals for the first and last time.

I’m looking at the pile of unwritten-about CDs piled up next to my electro-typo-connectivity device, and to be honest, they’ll have to wait.  I’ve been playing this for a month now, but I’m going to play it some more.  You may want to join me.  Shelter From The Ash is released on 12th November.

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So you are a fledgling Icelandic label (come on, play along), three wonderful, progressive albums under your furry belt – one from the classical ingenue, one from the abrasive guitar-cruncher, and one from the knob-twiddling producer to the stars.  So, what are you going to do next?  Isn’t it obvious?  You haven’t done a folk album yet, have you?  Get yourself a banjo player and immerse him in the hot spring of talent bursting from your roster.

Sam Amidon’s All Is Well takes a trove of trad arrs, with contents reaching back to, and beyond, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, and rubs it till it gleams.  Over Amidon’s pure, languid croon and fingerpicking, Nico Muhly adds some sensitive arrangements – the tracks are not quite wrenched from their place in history, but more given a couple of sedatives and wheeled - slowly enough so as not to wake them - into the present day.  It appears that the bluegrass standard “Oh Death” still hasn’t learned that the grim reaper ain’t gonna stand for no cheap attempts at bribery (He’s death!  What is he going to do with your money?  Buy a nice semi in Croydon?  Take it down Stringfellows and stuff it in some lapdancer’s knickers?).  However he may be tempted to sit awhile and admire the cushion of violins that underwrite that ham-fisted bung; thank Muhly for buying some time with his pristine work  “Little Johnny Brown” is the best thing on here, worked up into a incantatory stomp with some thick bass and sawed strings.  However, without Dock Boggs’ ragged howl, “Sugar Baby” is somewhat emasculated; transformed into a pretty thing that could have sat next to the more reflective and wistful moments on the last Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy record (which was, of course, also produced by Valgeir Sigurdsson). 

All Is Well is a fine addition to the Bedroom Community canon, and in a sense, it fits right into the Chinese whisper tradition of this canon of song, passed as they are from hand to hand, acquiring new character and characters as they go.  But the talented Sam Amidon has taken them into a strange land that I’m not sure many of the ghosts who inhabit these words would understand, let alone choose to follow them into.

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I went along to one of the Barbican’s Ramadan Nights events on Tuesday.  Except it wasn’t in the Barbican, it was in LSO St Luke’s, an 18th-century Hawksmoor church reinvented as a rather posh concert hall. 

As is the way with any proper music venue, when it says 7.30 on the ticket, it means 7.30, and a slow amble from the pub further down Old Street with an arrival at 7.35 will mean you will miss the start, and they won’t let you in until the end of the song.  Thankfully, there was no epic half hour oud odyssey from Palestinian Moneim Adwan and his band, and I was in fairly quickly to hear his passionate songs about his homeland, supplemented by some sprightly and big-lunged wooden flute.  A bit samey and overlong, but oppression always is I suppose.

The Bedouin Jerry Can Band brought all manner of traditional Arabic instruments, including ney (a flute), simsimiyya (a lyre), and rababeh (a one-string bowed instrument) as well as some improvised instruments from the Sinai in Egypt. Vocal and dancing duties were swapped freely, although I was disappointed that the big Des Lynam lookalike in the tent at the back didn’t rouse from his sprawl to shake his booty.  One of the percussionists stole the show with an impressive solo which began on the ammo box, before switching to doumbek and then finishing on the clay jug.

Their bejumpered manager – think an Egyptian Louis Walsh, he damn near whipped out a chart with some sales projections on it – came on to give a speech and to join in the song about black coffee; they roasted up some beans (mmmm!  The aroma!) before distributing a mere half dozen cups to the front row.  They should have known not to tease a self-confessed caffeine addict like that.  I’m not sure if it was the fact that I missed out, or a niggling query as to whether this was in fact a slightly gimmicky and cynical venture which left me feeling, despite the band’s best efforts, a bit empty at the end. 

I don’t want to bang in about it, as I’ve given it a fair few column inches (Column inches? Column inches?  Who the hell do I think I am?  Clarkson?  Littlejohn?  Woodrow Wyatt - the voice of reason?) already, but the new PJ Harvey album really is a fine thing.  Not fake fine, as in “How are you?”/”Fine”. Or as in “Fine!  Take my money, my home, my children and the jewel-encrusted motorised tin –opener.  See if I care!” Or as in “PARKING FINE: £80”.  Proper fine.  Real fine.

Although White Chalk does produce a fine dust, that is fine in the slip-through-the-fingers sense of the word, but if you breathe too deeply, you’ll get some of it into your lungs and you’ll be coughing bilious clouds of chalk dotted with blood.  The childlike simplicity and the brevity of the songs belies lyrics of a more complex nature – the usual, Polly-esque mix of love, life, death (including murder and perhaps abortion), and longing, but the arrangements push them stage front and shine a spotlight on them.  There is consanginuity with Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, perhaps, another example of an artist stripping back the ephemera of their craft to produce an emotionally-draining piece of work – somehow undemanding and yet very demanding at the same time.  By the time “The Piano” comes round two thirds of the way through, I’m already shaky on my feet; one more slight push and I’m on my back.

White Chalk is, for me, her most consistently satisfying record since To Bring You My Love, all those many years ago.  It’ll get a purchase on your soul, no mistake.

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I can’t believe that after the punishment I put my ears through the other night that I would follow that with a performance of Glenn Branca’s Symphony #13.  Hallucination City, that is.  The one for 100 electric guitars.  As it was at the Roundhouse, I could at least dull my pain receptors beforehand with some rum cocktails from Cotton’s Rhum Shack over the road.  Mine’s a Jamaican Mule, thanks.  With a Barbancourt chaser. 

First, some numbers.  100 guitarists (each being paid, I believe £0), divided into 10 rows of 10, with different rows having their guitars tuned to alto, tenor, bass and baritone.  1 drummer at the back.  4 sections, entitled “March”, “Anthem”, “Drive” and “Vengeance”.  And the important one: 130 decibels.  As “March” is counted in by the conductor John Myers, the classicism of the piece is notable – there is sheet music, strict tempo, different rows being brought in and out of the ensemble by a flick of the wrist, and there is counting.  Lots of counting.  The conductor is counting bars to help everyone stay in the right place, and a couple of guitarists down front are mouthing their one-two-three-fours.

It starts to get interesting in “Anthem”, when a section of chiming notes is curtailed by another of furious guitar scrubbing (I’d like to see the transcription of that).  Myers is gesticulating wildly, every wave forwards and backwards of his arm seems to produce a roar of sound, the orchestra is very much his instrument.  “Drive” starts with some discordant notes; before the drummer drives the piece forward into a section of white-out noise, and for the first time the piece breaks free from its anchor, getting faster and faster, and louder and louder.  The volume is upped yet further on “Vengeance” after a period in which Myers exhorts the players to play as quietly as possible. The guitars crash back in like thunder, and the ensuing racket is ferocious.  It sounds like the most incredible hailstorm battering a corrugated iron roof; it is clear why Branca describes the Hallucination City orchestra as being like a nuclear weapon.  They do the shhhhhhh/RAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRR thing once more, just to make sure you got it, and then it is finished, the last notes decay to a ringing in my ears.  The floppily-haired Branca lolloped up on stage to give us the briefest of waves (and his guitarists the gratefulest of gratitude), but I was too busy clapping to get a picture of that. 

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Wandering into Conway Hall last night, I found myself surrounded on all sides by menacing looking banks of speakers.  Given the line-up for this event, I was more than a little frightened, and was beginning to have images of me dragging myself out of the Hall by my fingertips with blood streaming out of my ears.   For the first time, I even wished I had brought those orange earplugs the Wire sent me some months back.  When the lights went out, and the room was silent but for the tssssssssssss of a pretty ineffectual smoke machine, my hands went clammy, like I was on a plane, on a runway, with the engines just about to kick in.

Haswell and Hecker’s Xenakis-inspired set (they use his graphic-input “UPIC Music Composing System”) began by testing out the bottom end of the speakers and, by virtue of the fact that I was sitting on the floor, the bottom end of me. They switched to some head-spinning high notes, before bringing it all together in pummelling waves of sound.  Green lasers picked out the glitterballs twirling from the roof, scattering light into every corner of the room that wasn’t already full of noise.  Strobes bleached walls which were already scorched by the abrasive textures emanating from all those speakers (I noticed Russell Haswell had his eyes closed during these moments, obviously like me he isn’t too keen on strobes – ooh they make my brain hurt).  I felt like I was strapped to the undercarriage of a train, rumbling over some very uneven tracks at massive speed, feeling every bump and twist.  It was quite exhilarating.

After H&H had finished with us Pan Sonic reintroduced us to the concept of rhythm, and my ears soaked it up like a dry sponge would do water.  Ilpo Väisänen was picked out in front of a live oscilloscope projection of the waveforms they were creating, with Mika Vainio skulking in shadows at the side.  They played some patterns recognisable from their recent (and much-loved here) album Katodivaihe, including “Virta 1”, but the tracks were stripped of all extraneous material, and the gaps between the beats were refilled with liquid metal and grit.  During “Lahetys” it was easy to imagine that we were in trenches, with a cinstant background buzz of gunfire, and grenades detonating all around.  It was so loud that it became as much a physical experience as an aural one, the shock waves pounding my stomach and chattering my teeth were as vital as those entering my ear canal.  Those waveform projections looked like a dense swarm of fireflies by the end, as if the rules of physics had been shattered and thrown mockingly into the sky, where they could float free of gravity.  As the last grain of sound slipped through, I could just about make out someone shouting “Not loud enough! Rubbish!”, which sent me home with a smile on my face.  When I finally got there, I threw out those earplugs.

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Like a Russian plane meandering across Alaska, I’m surprised this one wasn’t picked up on radar sooner.  Despite featuring on Stefan Betke’s ~scape label (I’m damned, as ever if I can find that “~” key), and featuring members of Pivot, who feature the drummer from Triosk, who features on the last Savath and Savalas album, it hasn’t featured in enough press for my money.

The awkwardly named Roam The Hello Clouds are an Australian three piece: Laurence Pike on drums, Phil Slater on trumpet, and Dave Miller filling the gaps on laptop.  Near Misses feels like an imaginative continuation of Miles Davis’s fertile 1968-71 period; indeed its construction (or re-construction) is Macero-like, spliced together from a day’s worth of improvising.    Slater rolls out with the languor of Miles on In A Silent Way, rising to some ragged frenetics on “Sprinter” and “Uniform 64”.  My admiration for Pike is already on record – he is relentless, reinventing and reshaping the beat even more forcefully than Jack Dejohnette would have done (I don’t think Miles ever played with Andrew Cyrille…now there’s a thought).  His percussive work is peerless throughout, but on “Geoff As The Hulk” and “Sprinter” he takes the rhythms out for a walk deep into Autechre country.  Dave Miller contributes the remainder, which includes a whole lot more than Jarrett/Corea sonic burble and Michael Henderson-like one note bass patterns; grinding textures and sounds from outwith the jazz spectrum into the grooves.  “Death and Possible Dreams” builds from the last post intro to a fearful climax with singing bowls and evil hiss, while the bells and samples on “Pretender’s Hand”, when nailed to one of Pike’s more regular drum patterns, could easily pass for one of Prefuse 73’s more interesting moments. 

Near Misses is on the money, on the corner, and should be on your wishlist, not on your blindside.  Now, on your way…

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I had my second stint on Resonance FM as part of the gLASSsHRIMP collective last night.  What do you mean you missed it?  Oh, you would have loved it.  We played The Thing, WZT Hearts, Bob Devereux, Kevin Ayres, Robert Wyatt, Nub, Roam The Hello Clouds, James Blackshaw, and Crescent, amongst others I’ve forgotten, and Howard Aggregate did a lovely reading of some book shop “staff recs”.  All of this endearingly shambolic aural goodness was topped off with a faintly surreal conversation in which Kev told us about his last two weeks following the mighty Rush on tour around the north of England.  

gLASSsHRIMP: Resonance 104.4 FM Monday nights, 9.30-11pm.  It’s for your ears, apparently.

That was quite an interview with Robert Wyatt and his partner-in-all-senses Alfie Benge in the Wire, wasn’t it?  It peeled back the onion-like layers of the music (once again, his new album is a blur of collaborators and styles) to get at some of the core issues which have been at the core of Comicopera’s creation.  The track in question was, to be fair, my favourite even before I had read that interview, but the additional poignancy lent by that interview redoubles its status.   “Just As You Are” is a dialogue between a woman and her alcoholic partner as they survey their crumbling relationship, wondering if the love they share is strong enough to keep it together.  A musical and lyrical half-cousin of “How Insensitive” (as covered on his last album), it must sit at the top of his canon, far above from the jukebox-bothering bothering stuff to which his surname has mischievously been taken as a verb.

Elsewhere, business as usual round Bert’s place.  Which is great for those of us who would like nothing better than put the entirety of Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard on down their local, before running screaming through the streets of East London being pursued by loads of red-faced shaven-heads branding pool cues.  As you would expect, some hilarious lyrics which strike a chord: kebab shops with their “shiny pictures of food” (I was astonished to find that photographers paint food before they take these pictures – food doesn’t look real enough when you photograph it, apparently), envy of the religious – “it must be great to be so sure” (I agree, it could help me in my more indecisive moments – I mean it was only yesterday that I was in a quandary about whether or not to covet my neighbour’s oxen.  Decided I should.  Regret it now,  oxen take up so much bleeding space).    Musically it lurches from the raw blues of “Be Serious” to the fussed textures of “Stay Tuned” (muted brass, voice like a saw) or “Cancion de Julieta” (great ominous-sounding strings).  While The Wire interview talked about the Charles Mingus workshops, the brass, big thwonking double bass and noticeable latin influences remind me of Charlie Haden’s classic Liberation Music Orchestra – perhaps unsurprising, given the strong Bley/Mantler axis cutting across both.

There is little in the way of musical progression on Comicopera, but given the variety of sounds and influences which characterise a Wyatt album, there is no need.  Despite the earlier lyrical hints of turmoil, Comicopera is a wonderfully enjoyable and ultimately life-affirming record.  Available now from Domino.

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I stood on top of Greenwich Hill for a while, overlooking the park and Royal Naval College below, with the Docklands stack looking withered and puny in the distance. It made me feel like a giant, as if I could just reach out and skittle the towers with the back of my hand and stomp off grumpily like I’d lost a game of chess to a five-year-old.  The green laser beam that marks the meridian was tracing a path into the sky, reaching out towards where, fifty years ago to the day, the satellite Sputnik was tossed into orbit by the Russians.   The importance of this event can easily be gauged by the fact that Google even customised their front page to celebrate it, and let’s face it, Google don’t just do that for any random anniversary/national holiday/saint’s day/dog’s birthday, do they? 

The launch of Sputnik was the ostensible reason for the timing of this event, featuring the Mexican Fernando Corona, better known as Murcof, playing his stunning new album Cosmos inside London’s newly-opened Peter Harrison Planetarium.  The Planetarium itself is a large and ominous-looking shark fin-grey funnel rising from an eerie glowing circle amongst some beautiful old museum buildings.  Inside, there are all manner of lumps of meteor and astrological gadgets to keep you amused in the no-man’s land between work ending and gig beginning.  Head finally full of space-related trivia, I headed for the main room, where I found myself reclining and staring up at the inside of a vast dome.  After a brief speech about how moon dust can rip the inside of your lungs to shreds, which brought on a strange tickling feeling in my chest, the lights went out.

We were strictly forbidden from taking photographs inside, but they wouldn’t have done it justice anyway.  As the opening of “Cuerpo Celeste”  rumbled from the speakers like aircraft engine mixed with air-con, we were soon heading for the stars which were drifting slowly across our “sky”.  The moon drifted into sight, and then in the evening’s first moment of awe-inducing synchronicity, we flew right up to it as the track’s towering keyboard motif leapt from the speakers.  For a couple of minutes we sat studying the moon, with it studying us back.  To the crisp pulsing of “Cielo” we roared back away, and instead observed the farcical patchwork of constellations (scorpions chasing house plants over centaurs) and elliptical paths of planets, all banded by the ragged cummerbund of the Milky Way. 

Our space odyssey reached 2001 with a disorientating middle section which overlaid some vectors over the sky.  We were spun around a motion-sickness inducing red-shifted wall of death, before the stars were stretched to infinity, forming lines pointing back to the big bang, with us swooping through their trails through space-time.  I was gripping my arm rests with my jaw agape bythis point.

The finale blasted us back to the edge of the solar system, where we were picked up by the sun’s gravitational pull.  As the cosmic wind of “Cosmos” howled around us, we shot past Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus, the unearthly sounds rising and falling in intensity as we skirted each. We skated over Saturn’s rings, and quickly became embroiled amongst Jupiter’s satellites; the giant planet filling the screen around us, the urge to reach out and touch it was hard to resist – an incredible moment.  We picked up speed, pinned to our seats as we tore past Mars, with the electromagnetic interference by now howling around us; as we reached the monstrous sun itself we were scoured by a looping pink solar flare.  Slingshot onwards, we passed Mercury and the sad, dead Venus, before drawing to a halt in front of a homely-looking blue and green globe. The engines shut themselves down, and the lights were tuned back on.  I sat there for some time, before turning to the milkman, who was sitting next to me, equally stunned.  “I feel very small”, I said.

Coming soon to a planetarium near you.  Keep your eyes on Murcof’s website for more.  Go if you can.  This is very very special.

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Over the course of their previous seven albums (or five, if the concurrently released first three count as one, or four if you somewhat pettily classify the live DVD elsewhere) Supersilent have developed their own language from what appeared initially to be the most abstract of Scandinavian typography.  In between releases, the four members’ extra-curricular travels meant that with each release they brought new-found grammatical rules and logics back to this otherwise hermetically sealed world – in fact their by the time of their last release they had even managed to incorporate huge amounts of rhythm, even if it was a rhythm unlike anything I’ve heard before.  Given the nature of some of their recent work away from the collective (in particular Arve Henriksen’s solo releases and some of Helge Sten’s production work on the likes of Susanna’s recent album), the dichotomic nature of 8 could perhaps have been predicted.  If anything the wholly-improvisational Supersilent did could ever be accused for being predictable, that is.

There is little on this planet as thrilling as hearing (or better still, seeing and hearing) the recombination of the four respective parts of Supersilent, and the beautifully produced 8 doesn’t disappoint in this regard.  It begins with the sound of the four well-worn cogs meshing together, teeth missing, snatching at and grinding against each other, with the sparks of Sten’s guitar illuminating the dark, and giving sight of some ominous-looking shapes ahead - it takes a while to get there though.  After the Stale Storlokken-dominated 8.2, 8.3 reprises the falling-down-stairs drum rhythm showcased so heavily on 7.  The next two are surprisingly melodic; 8.4 wanders through the icy landscapes and cold breathiness of Henriksen’s excellent Strjon, before - after a terrifying dalek-voiced intro – the beautiful 8.5 flows glacially, with Sten playing some fuzz-guitar chords over delicate keyboard, cymbals and trumpet.  The mood continues with the burbling meltdown of 8.6, shades of Aphex/Autechre lightened by Henriksen’s vocals soaring above.  However those earlier flecks of guitar should have been a warning; as if offended by this slide towards conventionality, Sten burns some incendiary metal into the album on the facepunching 8.7 as the rest of the band jerk and moan around him, after that the fading sounds of 8.8 are mere death throes.

Edging towards the middle ground at such a rate and from such a distance, expect Supersilent to discover the three chord thrash somewhere by Supersilent 108.  For anyone not yet versed in their language, 8 is a good point to start learning some of their most irregular verbs and imperfect tenses.  Lessons are available from Rune Grammofon.

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Apologies to those Londoners who heard what sounded like a drunk Scotsman coming out of their stereo last night.  You may have just stumbled upon my live radio debut, as a guest of the gLASS sHRIMP collective on Resonance FM. 

If you didn’t hear the show, you missed out on an interview and a spoken word piece, as well as some terrific new music: Efterklang, Vashti Bunyan, Gultskra Artikler, Beirut, Prefuse 73, A Broken Consort, Six Organs of Admittance, something from the new Soul Jazz Brazil 70 collection, and a track from the new project of Brian Chippendale (of Lightning Bolt infamy), Black Pus.  As well as some mucking about with Buddha Machines. 

The gLASS sHRIMP show is broadcast on Monday nights from 9.30 to 11pm on Resonance FM - 104.4 for those in London; alternatively you can stream it from the Resonance website.