It was an icy, bright winter morning somewhere in central Finland. The sun hung low in the sky, tentatively looking out over the frozen marshes, snow-burdened trees, and lonely drunks crawling out of lonely bars. It would only be a couple of hours before the sun said, “fuck this,” and went away again. As sharp shadows lengthened across the snowdrifts in his yard, Jan Anderzén had an idea. While the weather is this good, let’s have a yard sale.

He went to the attic and rounded up every piece of junk in sight. Lots of crap had been lying around, he realized: rusty bicycle parts, broken door bells, squeaky dog toys, old pots and pans, even a busted-up old pinball machine. He laid it all out in a proud, meticulous display in the garden. At a balmy minus-10 Celsius, it was a fine day for outdoor shopping, so in due course, the villagers gathered in Jan’s yard to see the wares. But nobody wanted to buy anything. A young woman in a tank top and a scarf picked up Jan’s old toy melodica, played a single note, and smiled sadly.

“What’s wrong?” Jan asked. “Don’t you want it?”

She sighed. “It’s perfect. But none of us can afford anything in this recession.”

Jan nodded. It was true. He was just as skint too. Still, with the whole village gathered thus, it seemed like a waste to just pack everything back up.

“Hey gang,” Jan offered, “forget about the sale. Let’s take all this stuff to the forest, smash it to pieces, and set whatever’s left on fire, all the while chanting about lingonberries and piles of old stones.”

It was the perfect entertainment for a peaceful winter’s day, the villagers agreed. And so off they went, creating an oddly harmonious, joyful racket along the way. Jan was pleased he remembered to bring a tape recorder.

A few weeks later, Jan sat down on the floor in the Fonal Records office with his old friend Sami Sänpäkkilä. “So when are you going to get some chairs in here?” Jan asked.

“As soon as you give me a hit record,”

“I’ve got it right here.”

Sami played Jan’s tape and lay back on the pine floor. He was transfixed. “You Kemialliset Ystävät have really outdone yourselves this time. This is like listening to the leaves, or watching a campfire, or floating down a babbling brook. Playful and light, colourful and textured, infectiously percussive, this is effortless effort, wu-wei, not-music-yet-music. Just one suggestion: Translate the title from the English Attic Fire to the Finnish Ullakkopalo. That way it will be sure to shoot straight to the top of the charts internationally.”

“Of course, sensei.”

Just then, a tall, strange woman floated in through the window, wailing darkly. Jan and Sami ducked in terror.

“Merja!” Sami cried. “It’s you! We were scared half to death. Where the hell have you been anyway?”

“Please, call me Islaja. I had to leave the forest many moons ago. I’ve mostly been in Hong Kong and Berlin.

“What’s that under your arm?”

“Keraaminen Pää.”

“You brought us a ceramic head?”

“It’s the name of my new album.”

The experimental music mogul couldn’t believe his luck. Two new albums on the same day? Sami rubbed his hands. “Let’s have a listen.”

And so Sami Sänpäkkilä, Jan Anderzén, and Merja Kokkonen settled down together on the floor and listened to the new Islaja record. Merja’s ghostly voice seeped into the corners of the reverberant room. The office boomed with dark, chilly synth chords. Heads bobbed to chopped up beats. A piano forlornly but authoritatively sounded dirge-like melodies while Merja’s voice gathered strength, rose up and rang out through the walls and flooded the wintry world beyond. And… was Sami hearing things, or were there hard pop structures lurking beneath the menacing miasma? The big city had indeed changed the former freakfolk queen. Not all of the old hippies would be happy, Sami thought, but Keraaminen Pää was like an exquisitely crafted obsidian dagger. It was Islaja’s most polished and dramatic work to date.

Sami sat up straight. “Islaja, your album is as dark and fierce as Kemialliset Ystävät’s is light and friendly; it is as tight and urban as Ullakkopalo is chaotic and rural. And yet both are sublimely beautiful. There is some essential, dialectical truth about contemporary folk music–and by extension, modern society itself–embodied in these two records. I’m pleased you two came to me today. I think we definitely have a pair of No. 1 chart toppers on our hands. You’ll be bigger than Kanye and Taylor put together.”

Neither Merja nor Jan were sure about that last part. But Sami had been blowing minds running Fonal since 1995, and they weren’t going to argue with the boss in an optimistic mood. “This calls for a celebration,” Sami decided. Outside, darkness fell once more as a fresh dusting of snow deepened the heavy blanket of white. A biting wind blew cruelly off a nearby lake and froze Sami’s exhaled breath solid. “Let’s go get ice cream. It’s on me.”

Terry Riley’s ‘In C’ (1964) is a curious piece of experimental noise consisting of 53 musical phrases that exist for no specific length of time as defined by its composer. It’s a pretty remarkable piece of noise that brings immediately to mind Steve Reich’s ‘Music For 18 Musicians’, but Riley’s piece is altogether more obtuse and rustic. Though Riley suggested the pieces be simultaneously and repetitively played by a minimum 35 musicians, it’s been performed by as many as 100. According to Wikipedia, this makes ‘In C’ ”a semi-aleatoric musical piece,” which basically means that it’s mostly without structure.

So, if Arandel’s album title is a reference to ‘In C’, it should be bonkers and extemporaneous. And, to an extent, it is. For starters, each of the nine tracks here are – as the title suggests – in the key of D. Not that that makes any difference to the variety of In D, as Arandel brings his melee of sound cohesively together over the running time of 50 minutes. Each track is titled anonymously and non-sequentially (#1, #5, #6, #7, #9 etc,) and is built under a strict ‘sound dogma’, which means that all sounds are created by the artist – so there are no samples here. So perhaps ‘sound dogma’ means ‘not hip-hop’. I don’t know.

Pretensions aside, In D is an eclectic mix of electronic avant-garde noise, classical composition and minimal techno. One could compare Arandel to Murcof, but really only for tracks ‘#1′ and ‘#7′. Elsewhere, and Arandel can sound like Richard D. James attempting to emulate The Beatles; particularly on ‘#10′ where reversed piano notes collide with sitar twang and ambient recklessness. Speaking of those Beatles, ‘#9′ channels the breakbeat styles of DJ Shadow and the post-rock crescendo of Mogwai, but semi-aleatorically. It’s adventurous stuff, though obviously tempered.

With little known about Arandel, his sound is typically European (specifically, French) – and that’s immediately discernible from the warm quality of the sound production, choice of instrumentation and perhaps even the toccata piano running through ‘#8′. In one respect, it’s a shame Arandel reveals so little about himself and offers no textual analysis other than ‘In D’, and yet it’s a tried, tested, liberating mechanism to allow the listener to move away from the determinism of titles.

In D is an exciting, occasionally intoxicating and spirited album that owes as much to the spirit of its influences as it does to the desired mystery of its creator.

Hailing from the pretty canal-bound town of Market Harborough, Leicestershire, Black Carrot use the “sounds like” section of their MySpace page to describe themseleves as resembling “a weary ex-boxer, once proud and strong, now feeble and confused. Reduced to eating Hoisin Duck Pizza without the aid of teeth or eyes.” This kind of wilful oddness is, of course, omnipresent on band MySpace pages these days. Hundreds of bands categorise themselves as “easy listening”, “children’s” or “calypso”, as if the joke is either original or hilarious. It is neither.

Somewhat surprisingly, Black Carrot categorise themselves quite acurately as “alternative / experimental / live electronics”. If we want to move beyond these vague terms and nail the band down to a more specific style, we’ll struggle. Reviewing their last album Drink the Black Forest, TLOBF’s own Adam Nelson described them “as one of the few bands who genuinely defy classification, who simply refuse to be pigeon-holed.” This even more strangely-titled followup Milking Scarabs for Dough reinforces that judgement, as Black Carrot manoeuvre smoothly from one bewildering musical expedition to another as the album progresses. A sinister-sounding harpsichord dominates the brief and quietly clattering ‘Magnets’, while ‘The Queen of Protest’ is a sparse, hesitant piano-based piece and ‘Blackmail’ together with ‘The Detonation Tonight Will Be S-Ray-20′ represent the album’s forays into off-kilter rock.

Despite these frequent variations in style, there’s still a great deal of consistency across the twelve tracks. The paranoid-sounding, shaky vocals reappear often, and one distinctive instrumental feature that permeates most of the tracks is the particularly highly-mixed, persistent bass. Lyrically, the album is a rich vein of ideas that are at once nonsensical and somehow beguiling, a fusion of simplistic chants, Carrollian nonsense verse, and pure madness. “Laugh we did, until we cried” Black Carrot proclaim on ‘…S-Ray-20′, “laugh we did, until we almost died”.

Everything changes, though, on the fascinating final track ‘The Top of the Hill’. Over a cyclic bass riff accompanied by echoey guitar licks and mournfully chanted backing vocals, our narrator tells through spoken word the deadly-serious story of shackled-together khaki-clad figures travelling through some hellish location. It’s cryptic and vague, but it’s a deeply intriguing change of pace, a world away from the rest of the album that precedes it. Whilst sometimes definitely enjoyable, Milking Scarabs for Dough is perhaps a bit too self-conciously weird to really thrill. What it always consitently is, though, is interesting and challenging.

The front cover of Location Momentum has a ghostly image in night-vision purple, somewhere between folds of fabric and coils of smoke. Suitably dark and mysterious, it straddles the barrier between the tangible and intangible, between the real and the imagined, much in the manner of the sound it contains. The twelfth release by the individual lurking behind the Eleh name – and you’ve got to wonder just how much longer they can keep up the secrecy – is a continuation down the same path right into the heart of analogue sound. Except that he/she has chosen for the first time to release it on a digital format. The honour of releasing the first ever Eleh CD falls fittingly to sonic obsessives Touch, who also released his/her Observations and Momentum on a split LP late last year.

The change in format feels like some sort of concession to the listener, permitting deeper inspection of the precise application of Eleh’s modus operandi, revealing fresh levels of detail amongst these drones. The preferred method of listening to Eleh is, as ever, to play it loud, letting the waves flood in and fill the space. The sound takes on physical form, a towering structure that the listener can explore at leisure. And what a structure it is: opening piece ‘Heleneleh‘ feels like an entire church, with the millisecond after the organist has stopped playing stretched out to twenty minutes. The reverberations shift and mutate at a speed that even death would consider a bit on the unhurried side, occasionally vibrating nearby objects (in my room? In that church of my imagination? Just in my imagination?), causing them to shiver and groan. After this meditative magnificence, the hard hand on the volume control of ‘Linear To Circular/Vertical Axis’ feels particularly brutal, snapping the track into equally-sized but entirely different-sounding slices. Recent Eleh releases have started to hint at an interest in not just sonic phenomena, but in the sonic phenomena of nature itself. ‘Circle One: Summer Transcience’ takes some of the high-pitched insect-like chirp last heard on Retreat/Return and sets it amongst the most gentle gasps of wind, before these mutate into sinister-sounding gaseous hisses on ‘Observation Wheel’. Such interests make his/her – and I’ll tire of writing that before too many more releases – current relocation to the Touch stable, where they will share hay with the likes of Chris Watson and BJ Nilsen, seem all the more appropriate.

The release of this collection of microscopic events is an event in itself, for given that this will be the first full Eleh album not given a hideously-limited release, it is likely to be the starting point for many. It is an excellent introduction to someone who has risen with utmost stealth and secrecy to a position of pre-eminence in his/her (sigh) field, for there is no-one else who can make so little sound like so so much.

When music inspires, evokes and, indeed, provokes, it’s at its very best. Pressing play can open up a world that, until now, might have been completely unexplored. A world that, for whatever reason, has felt out of touch and distant. On Close Proximity and the Unhindered Care-all, Celer manage to create an almost alternative world, like exploring the travels and experiences of your day, but through someone else’s eyes. Like Alice Through The Looking Glass, everything feels similar yet oddly different.

The three pieces of music that make up the album each last around the 20 minute mark. Opener ‘Culling The Past From Unsentient Weeks’ is the most impressive. The swirling and looping rumbles of music are hooked around sounds that bring to mind walking through a park, birds chirping and gravel crunching under foot. There’s a section where you can hear the morning arguments of a household, as if you’re peering over the garden fence, watching the breakfast table as the momentum of the day takes hold. It feels oddly perverse and voyeristic as the voices continue, oblivious to your presence. In fact, the swirling synth feels like your soul floating through this morning scene, taking you on a journey out of your body and away.

‘Indentions On Summits Of Hands’ brings to mind Aphex Twin’s early, ambient, work. The flowing bass line acts as an anchor to the elaborate and floating sounds arcing through it. Gone are the “found sounds” of the opener, but this doesn’t stop this from still feeling organic. As it unfirls, the static builds and reminds me of the sounds of a waterfall, like the one gracing the cover art. From there, it moves a little more skyward. The tones and loops feel very “001: Space Odyssey. ‘Tended Pouring’ brings us back down to earth though, as the everyday sounds scuttle around the building waves of tones. The way the album progresses like this, it’s almost like a dream. You wake up, go to work, day dream at your desk, then head home to your more rooted existence. I’m not sure if it’s depressing or inspirational. I’m erring on the latter, as the album ends on a wave of noise and euphoric notes… as if you’ve just broke through the surface of the usual hum drum of existence into the light.

Close Proximity is a gentle, haunting and evocative piece of ambient music. Whilst it becomes increasingly difficult to make a name and a definitive sound for oneself in this genre, Celer have found the key part: inspiration. Each time I play this album I catch other sounds and movements, my mind is brought to different memories and places. In the end, this is the most basic, but also the most important, ability that music confers.

John Updike once said that the reason for his prolific nature was that he was still working at the problem of the ‘mystery of being me.’ Faced with fact of Dieter Moebius (who is 66) and Hans-Joachim Roedelius (who is 75) – two ageing musicians who are still working, prolifically, hunched over synthesisers and oscillators – one wonders if the same conditions apply. What’s behind this investigative drive? Habit? Or is this a now near-perpetual exploration of the mystery of the self? The more I listen to Qua the more it reveals itself to be less about any form of affect-driven odyssey of discovery, and more about a continuing modernist fascination (obsession?) with the infinite sonic possibilities of machines, and our relationship with machines. In reality Qua is set of almost totally affectless miniatures, a series of small vignettes that seem to have no higher purpose than that of documenting a processural relationship.

Qua stands and falls on the very fact of whether or not this documenting process is an engaging and interesting enough one. And in truth, if this weren’t such a seminal duo, I wonder if we’d pay much attention at all. Placed in the context of what Cluster (and Kluster before that) were a part of, and what they set in process, this feels a little incidental. The drift from those early spooked music concrete constructions to the later bucolic ‘70s albums such as Zuckerzeit and Sowiesoso that had a hand in the ‘creation’ of ambient music, is a well documented one – and from this distance it might be crass to impose a linear narrative, but there does appear to have been a purpose, a definite arc, even something as banal as a simple inward retreat. And it’s this weight of the past that makes listening to Qua such a strangely unsatisfying experience, because here there is no true sense of direction beyond the purely sonic. Which would of course be fine if it were not, as a collection, so easy to let slip by.

The odd thing is that the intimations of potential are all there – with nods to their own expansive past (both as a duo and in their solo work and collaborations – lest we forget Harmonia and Eno) to other gathered electronic tropes: the production (by Tim Story) is bright and sharp, there are synth-led ‘80s soundtracks on ‘Na Ernl’, ‘Formalt’s’ Burial-like vamps, ‘Stenthin’ almost Wobble-esque dub deeps, the propulsive warble of ‘Malturi Sa’, the more Geir Janssen than Geir Janssen glacial sweep of ‘Gissander’ and at times an overall queasiness that feels like Cluster refracted backwards through an Aphex Twin distorting mirror. And yet, here I am, a month into living with it and I’m no nearer to recommending it to anyone. The experience has been so overwhelmingly neutral that I’m a little confounded. The neutrality might be an aesthetic in itself, but not one I’d particularly care to pursue. Interesting then, but not essential.

Buy the album on Amazon |[itunes link="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/flutful/id318328088?uo=4" title="Cluster-Qua_(Album)" text="iTunes"] | Rhythm Online

Cormac McCarthy has a lot to answer for. Since The Road made it to the big screen almost everything seems to have taken on an apocalyptic feel. It’d be easy to blame the economic crisis and various disasters, but it is so much easier to find someone to blame, so step forward Mr McCarthy and look at what you’ve done.

As it turns out Mr McCarthy should be taking a bow, after all it’s not necessarily a bad thing for music to explore the darker side of life, and with Become Secret, Picastro are most certainly dealing with sounds that evoke a haunting presence.

The Road was apparently an inspiration for much of Become Secret (so McCarthy is directly responsible here) and its influence is clear from the opening notes of ‘Twilight Parting’ to the closing bars of ‘The Stiff’. If Nick Cave and Warren Ellis hadn’t been on hand to provide the soundtrack for the movie, then Picastro would surely have done a wonderful job.

Become Secret is a deeply unsettling album that draws on European folk, Post Rock, and vampiric Chamber music. To say that it tip-toes in the dark waves of the avant garde would be a fair assessment.

These sparse songs predominantly feature cello and piano played sparingly leaving plenty of room for your mind to fill in the gaps. The downbeat nature of what unfolds is likely to inspire the darkest recesses of your mind to come galloping to the fore.

Simplicity, repetition and natural reverb all have a part to play in ensuring that Become Secret is one of the creepiest sounding records you’ll hear this year.

The natural piano that introduces ‘Twilight Parting’ rings out as if it is being played in an abandoned musical hall, when coupled with Liz Hysen’s somnambulant vocals, it becomes ridiculously sinister. The piano on the instrumental ‘A Dune A Doom’ fluctuates between basic staccato patterns and booming bass notes underpinned with a scree of electronic noise. Each and every note is filled with a sense of foreboding.

Picastro go onto toy with traditional folk on ‘Pig & Sucker’ and ‘Neva’. The latter begins with a simple acoustic guitar line and Liz Hysen’s vocals fill the void with a lament that sounds like Joan Baez singing a last will and testament. Cellos then take over cutting though the song like rusty saws digging into bone, and despite some clever light electronic touches, the song is enveloped in an ominous fug.

The most haunting effort here is ‘A Neck in the Desert’. Vocals swirl around the speakers like ghosts harmonising the rigours of their purgatory as the strings and piano mourn their passing. An incessant bass note drives the song with some urgency as the strings rise and float away. Against the odds, there’s something oddly invigorating about the whole experience.

Become Secret might well be one of the more dour records ever made, but for all of its haunting qualities, there is something strangely beautiful in the natural sounds of the instruments. The swell of the cello is as comforting as it is threatening, and in Hysen’s delicate vocals, there is always something to cling to in spite of the desolate music that her voice inhabits. Picastro have made a record unremittingly bleak, but it is nevertheless a constantly rewarding listen.

Red Sparowes return. The LA-based instrumental group, consisting of current and former members of Isis, Halifax Pier, Pleasure Forever, Angel Hair and The VSS, are readying a new album.

Called The Fear Is Excruciating, But Therein Lies The Answer, the album will be released on CD and LP via Conspiracy Records on 5th April 2010. I’m counting down the days…

track listing :
1) Truths Arise
2) In Illusions Of Order
3) A Hail Of Bombs
4) Giving Birth To Imagined Saviors
5) A Swarm
6) In Every Mind
7) A Mutiny
8) As Each End Looms And Subsides

Released under a pseudonym of instrumental artist, Richard Skelton, it’s perhaps best to let Skelton explain the chequered history of his latest record:

“There’s actually two ‘Crow Autumn’ EPs on Sustain-Release [his own label]. ‘Part One’ (A Mercy Kill) was released in late 2007, and ‘Part Two’ (Mountains Ash / The River / Beneath) was released in March 2009. This later release was written and recorded after ‘Landings’. My idea with the Tompkins Square release was to bring these two recordings together, rework them, and then add more material. The resulting album, ‘Crow Autumn’, has the track list : “Day Reveals / A Mercy Kill / Like Rain / Mountains Ash / The River / Beneath / Leaves””. (Source: The Line Of Best Fit).

With this 2010 release following on, chronologically at least, from his superb Landings record, Crow Autumn demonstrates how Skelton has gained ground within his own unique sound. Though played from a polycarbonate disc that comes sheathed in a digipak of card, the recorded matter of Crow Autum is (once again) binding, organic and dramatic.

As readily discussed amongst writers, describing Skelton’s music is like describing the indescribable to an audience steeled for misunderstanding. Each person, once brought into contact with the hooded and occasionally malevolent sounds that consistently comprise a Skelton piece, will undoubtedly report a highly individual emotive response: one based on sense and emotional memory.

With every record dedicated to the memory of late wife, Louise Skelton, it is impossible to deny the sadness shrouding a majority of Skelton’s output and yet, with Crow Autumn, there is something almost uplifting and wondrous contained within. ‘Day Reveals’ opens with the first distinctive major chord I have heard on a Skelton album and, though that theme continues across ‘A Mercy Kill’ and ‘Like Rain’ (which run together as one track); ‘Mountains Ash’ takes on a more sombre, ethereal tone. It is to Skelton’s credit that he is able to conjure such magically different tones by utilising the same instruments (primarily violin, guitar, piano, rising cymbal crashes) and similar constructive techniques.

Though created within a deep English landscape, the 2009 recordings take on a more mystic, phrygian calm which in turn give way to images of meditatively thrummed tamburas; prayer; spiritualism and, indeed, mountains. ‘Leaves’ does not so much tie these two periods together as drift between the years, tugging at each with passionate grace.

Buy the album from Amazon | [itunes link="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/day-reveals/id351978488?uo=4" title="A_Broken_Consort-Crow_Autumn_(Album)" text="iTunes"] | Rhythm Online

Irrespective of the number of scientific theories that exist to explain how music works, how it affects us and its very reason for being; there is music outside the religious realm: a music that searches for deep spiritual and emotional connectivity. Within all that is the deconstruction of music by philosophers and critics alike – though, clearly, neither profession is linked by interest.

Recorded by Emeralds’s John Elliott in 2007, originally released on cassette in 2008, and now re-released on extremely limited vinyl, Imaginary Softwoods is a concatenation of amorphous, atonal and arrhythmic pieces of ambient drone that shift from metallic dissonance through to soft analogue idling. Perhaps the least convincing description to buy (or even to seek to listen to) any record, yet Imaginary Softwoods has the potential to expose its listener to the wonders of musical implication and emotional awaking.

Each of the twelve pieces are untitled, thus offering opportunity to interact with the music on strict, individual terms. Perhaps best categorised as fine art, the energy and subtle movement contained within is entirely self-sufficient: never requiring a response to anything other than what each systematic mechanical noise has already called for. With a limited range of instrumentation (analogue synth, some warped, barely discernible guitar), there is nothing here for the casual listener with little time to invest; but for those with inclination, vision and imagination, there are plenty of real and fabricated rewards to be found here.

The tracks bifurcate into a chiming sense of euphoria – one that hurtles through rusted pipes – and a minimal, less noisome (yet equally introspective) theme, where soft minor thirds shift to augmented fourths and diminished fifths with all the speed and beauty of a glacier. Because this occasionally abrupt album of mysterious groaning and warm nostalgic shimmering opulence has no immediately determinable reference, Imaginary Softwoods will live long within the bodies of those that wish to imbibe its pure and natural harmonic qualities.

An album to love for personal reasons, and not simply because obvious musical rule dictates.

Buy the album on Boomkat

It must be hard to shroud yourself in mystery in the 21st Century. The internet, for all it’s amazement and wonder, has made it increasingly difficult to hide oneself. A few acts have managed, but only until, like Burial, the pressure to reveal yourself as something real has taken it’s toll. Searching the internet for any information about Zelienople, the project of Matt Christensen, throws up very little; a lovely little website and (oddly) a Myspace page. But all this is merely functional – there’s no background, no filler – only dark, coarse sketches of a life.

It shouldn’t, and of course, doesn’t, make a difference. The music is what really matters, and Give It Up is testimony to that. This dark, brooding and sinister album would make a perfect companion piece to Mark Hollis’ (Talk Talk) self-titled solo album. It would, of course, be it’s darker, eviller, twin. But, nevertheless, it would complement Hollis’ experiment with popular sounds and free-form musical expression. Opening track ‘Aging’ is the sound of a great, giant Oak tree growing in the dark confines of a forest. The instruments are dusty, the music aches from their every fibre, Christensen’s voice a muffled echo. ‘Can’t Stop’ shuffles more light into this crowded undergrowth of sound. There’s the noise of wildlife, running water and the most gorgeous piano refrain percolating through, exciting the senses. The vocals are once again muffled, and barely audible, but they actually hint and some kind of optimism. Which is quite rare on this record. Even the album title itself, Give It Up, is dark, fractured and there’s a feeling of hopelessness that prevails. This is an album to echo the cold, dark evenings of the winter. The instruments sound deep, the rhythms guttural and monastic.

As each piece of music flows into the next, your emotional core is challenged. ‘Water Saw’ resonates to circular noises, the sound of a life slowly disappearing down a hole. The almost religious echo of the organ used is like a call to forgive and “Give It Up” – submit and lose yourself to the external pressures of your life. Stop fighting and embrace the darkness. Limited editions of this album come with a free CD that’s the soundtrack to Donald Prokop’s film ‘Gone’, which sounds like another dark, brooding film of despair and the link between the two is quite easy to see.

And yet… and yet… there are beacons of light in the darkness. ‘I Can Put All My Faith In Her’ wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Talk Talk’s Colour of Spring – the rippling guitar riff and watery rhythms hint at an optimistic future, an anchor of hope in the cruel tides of despair. But, no sooner do you get lifted, your dragged back under with ‘Little Little Eye-Full’. The previous rhythms replaced with a metallic rapture and low level drone. Christensen’s vocals at his most prevalent, but still mumbled and full of hurt. ‘Flurry’ and ‘All Planned’ finished the album off in similar style, slowing the pace down but picking more subtle rhythms off which the rest of the songs hang, precariously and delicately.

For some, this might be a little too much to take in one sitting. But, for those that can embrace the darkness and hold it close without getting too disturbed, then this is an album of dark and hidden beauty.

Buy the album on Boomkat

Marc Richter, dronemeister of the Black Forest and übercurator of much that is ambient, dark, and tape-loopy on his Dekorder label, isn’t exactly a pop type of guy. The German noisenik’s solo albums as Black To Comm–a name copped from the MC5–have suggested what would have happened had that band really kicked out the jams, motherfuckers, and dispensed not just with verse-chorus-verse songwriting, but with their instruments, their whole sound, and indeed their careers. Black To Comm is the sound of punk dropping out, moving to the forest and learning how to gather field recordings and conduct tape-splicing experiments. Like the Unabomber, but with less mass killing.

Something is afoot with new Black To Comm album Alphabet 1968, however. From the dissonant horn climax of ‘Forst’ to the melodic hallucinations of ‘Traum GmbH,’ tracks carry momentum and develop with dramatic purpose; damaged melodies emerge from a fog of folk-drone and float their way into your brain. Wobbly pianos and homemade “kitchen gamelan” (which literally includes the sink, from what I can hear) clatter, plonk and twinkle appealingly, like snow falling in an enchanted wood. It’s almost catchy. The work here–not just of Richter, but of pianist and sometime murmuring vocalist Jonna Karanka–is arresting, accessible even, and quite easy to like. Has civilization seduced Black To Comm? Is the freedom of the freaky forest subtly succumbing to the agreeable, if regimented, pleasures of the pop city?

I wouldn’t be too sure. Thoughts of rapprochement between town and country go out the window when we hit “Houdini Rites’ and all hell breaks loose with that kitchen gamelan–like an alarm sounding to summon the native villagers. At this rather late point in the record you start to feel like you’ve been lured into a trap, like Sergeant Howie in The Wicker Man. Menacing penultimate track ‘Void’ appears to confirm the worst. ‘Hotel Freund’, the stunning closer, starts in a similarly dark vein, blaring and brooding. But then something really strange happens: The song—and more than any other Black To Comm track, it feels like a “song”–positively flowers with bursts of strings. Chimes sweep in, offering both hope and mystery. A kind of warmth returns; destruction and creation are held in a tenuous balance. It is a spine-tingling conclusion for Richter, for whom this fragile, tense coexistence feels like the way forward.

Buy the album [itunes link="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/id332543171?uo=4" title="Black_to_Comm-Alphabet_1968_(Album)" text="iTunes"]

It’s been a good five years since we last heard from Austrian experimental trio Radian, purveying processed electronics and avant funk in 2004’s cool as a cucumber Juxtaposition. In the postrock firmament of Vienna, however, they’ve hardly been at rest. Drummer Martin Brandlmayr, keyboardist Stefan Németh, and bassist John Norman have been indefatigable culture workers, tending to solo material, other bands, label business (Németh’s own Mosz Records) and the odd video art project. Brandlmayr, in his work with Autistic Daughters and Polwechsel among others, has solidified a reputation as one the finest, most relentlessly precise percussionists around.

With so much musicianship and production chops at Radian’s disposal, one’s first impression upon hearing the harsh, cut up notes and static that kick off ‘Git Cut Noise’, the bracing overture for new album Chimeric, is that these three gentlemen have made a concerted effort to dirty up the signal path. “Chimeric is not a polished album”, say the liner notes, attributed to all three musicians. “Within our context it is raw, broken,” they write, before adding with considerable understatement, “even dark sometimes.” You don’t say. The epic ‘Feedbackmikro/City Lights’ begins as if in an abandoned factory with indeterminate slime dripping from disused machinery. Brandlmayr’s hypnotic clang pattern propels us deeper into some kind of boiler room where the aura of menace is palpable. Then somebody switches on the machines, and we realise we’ve stepped into a lift. As Radian loudly pull us up the scaffolding, crossbeam-impeded vistas of a nocturnal, quite possibly on-fire metropolis rattle by.

This sort of cinematic drama marks a step away from the clean (if still sometimes abrasive) laptop jazz of Juxtaposition and 2002’s rec.extern, and an even greater distance from the chilly minimalism of their 2000 full-length debut, tg11. Yet even with its heightened sense of narrative, Chimeric lives up to its name, evoking a jumbled composite beast that, as on previous Radian releases, is the product of many hours of editing after the fact. The result can feel randomly put together at times, as chimeras must inevitably be to some extent. As a North By Northwest cropduster buzzes overhead toward the end of the title track, for example, a blast of synth and percussion suddenly rushes underfoot; we’ve just stumbled near the edge of a great chasm. It’s a confounding moment of startling beauty, and not a little fear. As dark and mixed up as Chimeric is, it couldn’t work any other way.

Buy the album on Amazon | [itunes link="http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewArtist?id=5510316&uo=4" title="Radian" text="iTunes"]

Steven R Smith’s back catalogue is a thing of bright wonder. Since 1995, as a solo artist, as part of the Jewelled Antler collective, in a number of groups (Mirza, Thuja) and under various pseudonyms (Hala Strana, Ulaan Kohl) Smith has been on something like 30 releases – all pushing at the boundaries of psych, folk, post-rock and drone music. With that amount of music behind him, exploring his stuff becomes like picking your way through a landscape, a theme that the material on Cities also naturally conjures up, albeit a wounded, decaying landscape.

The main sonic fabric of Cities is provided by Smith’s guitar – a mournful sounding thing whether treated, whining with a kind of suppressed feedback, or bowed and scraping. It provides the backdrop for most tracks, though in many places it is unrecognisable as an instrument, or is obscured by other washes of sound, be they flayed cellos, the ancient sound of a psaltery or otherwise unidentifiable organ drones. But where many other similar projects tend towards the epic in terms of song lengths, Smith – on Cities at least – is very economical, preferring painterly touches and lightly drawn motifs. As such, the album tends to have a mosaic effect, its quiet beauty coming through as a whole picture only after numerous listens.

Another artist I’m reminded of is Richard Skelton (who has recorded under various guises such as A Broken Consort or Carousell), who seems to treat his chosen subject – again, generally nature and landscape – with a similar reverence, and draws his aural sketches with a haunted, mournful brush. The fact that Smith’s chosen subject here seems to be the decay of cities – as opposed to the pure appreciation of nature – only adds to this sense of mourning. There is something of the return of nature here though, the continual recourse to bowed sound effects (as on ‘Black Paper Scrim’ for instance, or ‘The City Gate’) creating an effect of wind through ruins. There is also a cinematic quality to many of the tracks, as though you were walking through a nature-reclaimed post-apocalyptic landscape, the only remnant of civilization a tolling bell… This is particularly true of a track like ‘Distance and Passing’ where Smith sounds at his most Godspeed-like, sombre and vast.

‘All is One One is One None is All’ ends things with a dense fuzz, sounding close to some of Belong’s whiteouts – but this has the feel of a nascent song, and perhaps points new forms that Smith may be heading towards. On this, and past, evidence, whatever he touches will be worth hearing. Here’s to the next 30 releases…

You can get hold of this by contacting Immune Recordings.

Steven R Smith on MySpace

Six Organs of Admittance, better known as the ineffable and extremely prolific Ben Chasny, is in many ways the backbone of the new folk revival of this millennium (what better time to revive it!). In the words of Devendra Banhart, when talking of modern folk music; “Six Organs are the garden and I am the slug eating the lettuce”.  You only have to listen to Chasnys back catalogue (in awe, I might add) to see where Banhart is coming from. It’s become increasingly difficult to shed any new light on this folk tradition. But if anyone is going to freshen things up it will be Mr Chasny of course.

The regularity and incomparable consistency of Chasny’s works deserves him a place as a somewhat guardian, playwright or composer of the new folk chapter. Let us not forget he also makes music as part of psyche rock powerhouse Comets on Fire, as well as Current 93 and many other collaborations arriving from here, there and everywhere. Luminous Night stands up to Chasny’s past in somewhat expected fashion, there’s no way he was going to make a bad record – impossible really.

There is a definite identifiable theme running through Six Organs music. That of the American Wild West, the lone ranger, the gunslinger… a hitman! Chasny is the one man and his guitar; Lonesome on ‘Acteons Fall (Against The Hounds)’, the drifting flute and viola harmonies and finely picked guitar hinting at themes of the drifter; Mystical on the quite fantastic ‘River of Heaven’; at times Tumultuous as on the brooding drone of ‘Enemies Before the Light’. There are influences from the great Western composer Ennio Moricone, whether that be intentional or subconsciously on his part. The guitar playing is melodic precision that is simply out of this world. However, it is the new weight of production that came into play on Shelter From The Ash, where Chasny started recording albums in a studio rather than his usual 4 track, that has opened up a new vastness for him, a pallet that Chasny has explored before but never with such might.

All in all Luminous Light is another step of crafty perfection that has become synonymous with Six Organs. Another triumph for Ben Chasny as he crafts his landscape of palatial dream.
70%

Six Organs on Myspace

32 instruments are employed on this record. 32? To be honest it’s a tall order to name that many, let alone use them all on one album. However, when you consider that a Nutella jar and a door have been utilized somewhere along the way it’s not really a such difficult task. Suddenly any household object you can to mention has musical possibilities.

There’s nothing as crazed as Matmos’ use of sound/items on Patrick Kellher’s album though (you know the kind of thing – plastic surgery procedures, semen hitting paper, snail triggered lasers) and before too long you’re not concentrating on what instrument made what sound but simply on the ambience of each of these carefully constructed songs.

Pieced together in a couple of home studios, You Look Cold is as lo-fi an album as you might expect from something that employs a chocolate spread jar as percussion. This is a record full of ideas that frequently head off in dizzying directions creating something of a feel of unease at times. Strangely, these ideas never clash heavily enough to give the impression that the album has been hastily pasted together with scotch tape and whatever software was available at the time.

‘Not Leaving Town’ gets things underway in understated fashion. A thrum of electonics churns away like a washing machine on a never ending cycle and Kelleher drones his vocal over the top in a manner that suggests he’s taken a few lessons from a catatonic Bobby Gillespie.

‘Coat To Wear’s’ simplistic 4 note motif is far more interesting, coming across like a heavily edited Mike Oldfield off-cut. From here, Kelleher layers up instrumentation and percussion with a steady hand, never laying it on too thickly and allowing his virtually spoken vocal room to become effective.

‘Wintertime’s Doll’ takes us off in an entirely different direction. This time an electronic metronome beat stands guard as a basic blues pattern is slowly enveloped by a gang of marauding violins that gain a more psychotic edge as the track progresses. As the track closes, you rather suspect that ‘Wintertime’s Doll’ might just have been kept on the shelf somewhere in Norman Bates’ motel.

Things are kept at a fairly leisurely pace which threatens to turn You Look Cold into a somewhat one dimensional effort at times, in spite of the abundant creativity on show. It’s not until ‘He Has To Sleep Sometime’ that we get something with a bit of urgency about it. That this urgency should come in the form of a song that sounds as if it has been exhumed from the 80s is in keeping with Kelleher’s tendency to shift across styles with apparent ease. It’s all simple keyboards, skittish drum machines, and determined singular bass and something of a welcome relief.

The apparent need to constantly shift shape finds us later indulging in the curious casio doo-wop of ‘Until I Get Paid’, which appears to drift in and out of time frequently and challenges the listener to stick with it by allowing things to shift in to the regions of the off-key. Then there’s the low rent gothic lunacy of ‘Blue Eyes’ to take us into the darker corners of Kelleher’s imagination. His voice hidden under a veil of distortion, this is pleasingly creaky stab at being creepy, so much so it’s like a sonic version of Plan 9 From Outer Space. It’s also practically impossible not to fall in love with the escalating drum speed at the song’s conclusion; which sounds as if a younger relative snuck into the studio as he was recording and wedged their thumb firmly on the + key on the tempo setting.

You Look Cold is an enjoyable album, but at times it slightly lacks in focus and probably only really hints at what Kelleher is capable of too. You sometimes wish he’d dispense with the wilfully out of tune instrumentation that graces the likes of the folky ‘I Am Eustace’, but it does at least add a human element to the album. It’s this willingness to leave mistakes in that distances him from other bedroom dabbling musicians. It’ll be interesting to see what he comes up with next as there’s clearly a great deal of potential here.
64%

Patrick Kelleher on Myspace

Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know, a new album from Icelandic experimental pop collective múm is due out on the 24th of August. We were keen for a few hot tips on Icelandic music and curious about how the múm project was developing. Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason kindly answered a few of these queries for us.

Congratulations on the new album. From your own perspective, how would you say it’s different from your previous works?
Well, it’s lucid and straightforward…. not that our other albums haven’t been that, but maybe this one is spoken in a simpler language. Go go smear the poison ivy and Summer make good were quite complicated affairs. Even though it might not seem like it. Hmmmm… to tell you the truth, I don’t know the answer to this question and I’m just pretending. It’s calm, that much I know, but it’s still on different level and layers and dimensions.

How have things changed creatively as people have come in and out of the Múm collective?
We thrive on that, we come from a big group of friends of musicians in Reykjavík where the biggest influence on everyone is each other. This might sound incestuous, but it is a great situation. Everyone is always trying to entertain and surprise each other and this is mostly the base for what happens in our múm musician collective, we all feed of each other and it’s a creatively dynamic relationship.

Múm always seem to have interesting ideas and projects on the go, what kinds of things have you been up to between Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy and Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know?
We did some radio theater, which we enjoy very much. It’s a dying form of art and we enjoy working in it, because it fits very well to the way we do things. We also recorded some old múm songs with a mixed choir called Balsis in Riga, Latvia. We recorded at the National Radio and it was a magnificent project and now we are pretty much waiting to see what we do with the recordings. We would also like to do this live with a big choir at some point, so we are waiting for the perfect opportunity to do it.

How do you feel the new material is shaping the live experience for fans?
We’ve only played it a couple of times, but it was very heartwarming to feel the songs manifest in front of us. Chills, shakes, delirium tremens and watery eyes.

Are you excited about the way the band’s sound is developing from album to album? Do you find the changes to be an organic process?
It’s like being on a boat on a river, we do a bit of paddling now and then, but mostly we are just excited about where it’s taking us. We try not meddle to much with where the music is going, but it’s definitely going somewhere.

How do you feel about the way things have changed up until now, are any of the changes deliberate?
Like I said before, we don’t struggle too much. All the changes in this group, the changes in the music and the changes in life have all happened without much help from us. Life has a life of it’s own it seems, and there is no point in struggling.

Where do you find inspiration in other mediums? Art, literature? Are there any particular works that influenced the concepts on Sing Along..?
Literature, films, nicely arranged fruit, a grammatically wrong sentence or an old wheelbarrow or just about anything will inspire us, we are very open to most things. Hmmm…. specific things that influence Sing Along? Well, there’s a bit from Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars, there is an estonian sauna, the themes from the life of fish, Childhood by Leo Tolstoy and obviously some confused singalongs.

What experiences have inspired you with your writing recently?
Traveling and meeting new people. Having a baby was a big thing for me personally, it obviously changes everything in a way you cannot explain.

There have been some quite notable musical successes out of Iceland in the UK recently. Do you feel that these are particularly exciting times for Icelandic music?
Yes, the last ….. let’s say 15-20 years have been very exciting in Icelandic music and it just keeps getting better and new bands start up every day. And why not? There is not much else to do.

Who are your favourite Icelandic artists at the moment?
Sin Fang Bous, Hjaltalín, Retro Stefson, Ólöf Arnalds, FM Belfast, Reykjavik!, Gylfi Ægisson & Horse Marley just to name a few. Iceland is full of hot fresh shitake mushrooms.

Where in the world have you had your most memorable moments playing live?
It’s always great to go play somewhere far from your home, seeing something new and I particularly like playing in Asia. We played in Singapore last year and Taiwan before that and it was really an adventure. Playing in unusual settings is always a hoot, we have played a few castles in Italy and Switzerland and we really like those kind of experiences. Last year we played a synagogue in Washington DC and the Brooklyn Masonic temple, which were both very great places, because they were not the usual places to play.

Can you give us five Icelandic words that you associate with beautiful music?
Vatn, trall, söngl, bergmál and ómur.

Can you tell us what the most beautiful lyric you’ve ever heard is?
“Blue moon, you saw me standing alone, without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own. Blue moon, you knew just what I was there for, you heard me sayin’ a prayer for, someone I really could care for.”

What are the things that you’re most looking forward to for the end of the year?
We will be playing quite a lot concerts, so obviously I am looking forward to that. But most of all I look forward to not knowing what happens next.

múm on MySpace

Describing a Thomas Truax gig is a difficult task that sometimes requires some serious ethical thought.

On the one hand they are magical affairs that capture the imagination, and you feel that everyone should know about him. On the other, they are magical affairs that you feel would be ruined if you describe them in too much detail or actually mentioned him at all. Maybe it’s just best for people to stumble across him.

With all that in mind, if you’ve never experienced Truax before, take my word for it – you’ll love it. Regardless what kind of music you like/prefer this is the kind of live experience that is impossible not to enjoy. Find a date, track Truax down and go see him, you won’t be disappointed. If it’ll be your first time you should stop reading now…

Tonight sees Mr Truax on the first date of a UK tour that finds him covering music from the films of David Lynch. It’s a match made in heaven, with the peculiar instruments that Truax creates and uses, there’s probably not another director that’s suitable for such a treatment (with the obvious exception being Tim Burton).

Awaiting Truax, stage right is Mother Superior, a drum machine fashioned from bicycle wheels, spikes, tiny robotic drums, and for some reason, what appears to be a trombone horn. Stage left is the Hornicator, a brass horn with various accessories that can be played as a rudimentary guitar, hit and then sampled for drum patterns, or simply bellowed into as a kind of loud hailer.

There’s no String-a-Ling tonight, but we can make do with the Back-Beater; a Sputnik like contraption that Truax straps to his back, which whirls frantically creating another set of drum patterns.

Finally, standing centre stage is Thomas Truax, looking the part in a white shirt, skinny black tie. He’s got a dobro guitar strapped on and an old fashioned microphone in front of him, with a haze of smoke billowing around him; it’s almost perfect. A particularly nice touch is the light bulb that dangles from an open briefcase full of various instruments. Every time the light catches his face it calls to mind Dean Stockwell’s Ben from Blue Velvet singing ‘In Dreams’.

Later, he’ll play ‘I Put a Spell On You’ (from Lost Highway) which seems pretty relevant as Truax starts the set scrabbling around trying to make everything work before he can begin, it’s as if he’d been cursed.

When he finally gets going he seems distinctly shaken, and ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ doesn’t fire in the way it probably should. That said, he still finds time to nonchalantly drop parts of the ‘Pink Panther’ and the ‘Bond Theme’ into it.

It takes him some time to find his feet with ‘Audrey’s Dance’ seeming pretty shakey too, but by the time he gets to ‘Black Tambourine’ and the ‘Twin Peaks Theme Tune’, he’s on fire.

He takes time to spin out a couple of his own tunes ‘Why Do Dogs Bark At The Moon? Part One’ being a particular favourite with the audience, and sparking a series of howls. The answer to why dogs bark at the moon, is presumably because it’s fun.

As the set edges towards a climax, Bobby Vinton’s ‘Blue Velvet’ gets the Truax treatment, which is considerably more traditional than you may imagine. For all the contraptions and clever use of sampling and delays, he keeps things pretty true to the originals. The treat with Truax is the magical nature of his instruments, his stories, and his affable nature.

The difference between him and Lynch is menace. There is darkness at the heart of most of what Lynch directs. It’s there in Frank Booth and it is below the surface in the town of Twin Peaks. You get the feeling that there isn’t a bad bone in Thomas Truax’s body, and if there’s one detail missing in the delivery of these songs, it’s the sense of brooding violence. That said, the weird nature of what Truax does is spellbinding, and surely it’s only a matter of time before he finds himself with the Hornicator stuffed on his head in the background of Lynch’s next project. Here’s hoping.

Thomas Truax on MySpace

I was a relative latecomer to the sparkly synth-led delights of Baltimore native Dan Deacon, having only uncovered the marvellous Spiderman of the Rings at the tail-end of last year. A schizophrenic hodgepodge of lo-fi electronica and more complex, if light-hearted, keyboard-heavy compositions. His ambition sometimes exceeded his ability to deliver, but when it hit the mark it truly took the breath away. What it lacked, however, was focus. Ideas were flung all over the place without any real rhyme or reason, and as good as individual songs were, it didn’t hold up too well as an album. It’s an issue the follow-up has done much to address. As a result Deacon has created, not to put too fine a point on it, a f’in masterpiece.

Bringing his classical musical education to the fore this time round, Bromst has a sense of completeness and structure that perhaps was lacking in its predecessor. ‘Built Voice’ nicely sets the tone. A slowly crescendoing mass of synths punctuated with trumpet, quasi-mystical chants and the trademark smorgasbord of twinkly pianos and glockenspiel. The steel-drum/pitch-shifted vocals combo of ‘Paddling Ghost’ and the insanely hyperactive keyboards of ‘Woof Woof’ hark back to the manic Spiderman days and that’s fine and dandy, but far more interesting are the slower, more considered songs that see Deacon add a surprising amount of compositional sophistication to his technicolour brew. ‘Slow With Horns/Run For Your Life’ is a case in point – an instrumental that starts off exactly as the name suggests, before segueing into a cavalcade of cascading, intertwining piano lines that‘s more modern classical than madcap electro-pop. And of course there’s ‘Snookered’, the coalescing of all of Deacon’s most engaging musical qualities into a song of quite astonishing magnificence. Sublimely effervescent, yet tinged with an implacable sense of melancholy, it sweeps its rainbow palette across the eardrums and renders certain music reviewers unable to convey its brilliance without sounding like a gushing fanboy. Needless to say it’s already my front-runner, by several light-years, for Song of The Year.

Bromst is certainly not for everyone. If you find Animal Collective irritating, you may want to give it a wide berth. The chipmunk vocals, hyperactive bleeping and unforgiving density will grate on some like a giant cheesegrater of doom. It’s not perfect either. The charge could be easily be levelled that Bromst is essentially “Variations On The Theme Of Wham City,” and I’d be hard-pressed to argue . The chord sequences, the structures of the songs, the instruments used aren’t particularly varied and when he tries something radically different (the Arabic-style chanting of ‘Wet Wings’) it doesn’t really work. That said, quibbles about diversity seem moot when a formula is utilised as perfectly as it is here. At turns gorgeous, manic, ambitious, infuriating, majestic and totally joyous, Bromst is an almost impossibly sumptuous feast for the ears that makes most of this decade’s musical efforts seem lustreless in comparison.
91%

Dan Deacon on Myspace

Walking around last years ATP’s Nightmare Before Christmas festival there were an abundance of ghoulish people donning Zu hoodies, their emblem being a blood dripping axe. I’d foolishly already missed these guys in action. Luckily I’ve got a hold of their latest record. Carboniferous is a deluge of sound; murderous violence reaping out its revenge. Huge Godflesh like bass lines throb over psycho terrifying sax solos, whilst incorporating almost rave beats, like on opener ‘Ostia’; the heavy trembling bass is almost as if Lightning Bolt and Holy Fuck have gone to hell and back with a sax. So there is some definite heavy groove in there fleshed out amongst the strange, morgue lingering world. It is brilliantly experimental, in a John Zorn head fuck kind of way. There are no side orders of salad with this record, it is pure meat, dripping slabs of malevolence, and, what appear to still be living bits of gristle and sinew, bones and fingers, writhing in madness in front of you, and creeping behind.

Formed in Rome in 1997, Zu have released 14 albums, and are very much collaboration enthusiasts. Sir Mike Patton himself guests on this record, check out ‘Soulympics’, he digs out all his best squeals for this one. Zu are an obvious inspiration of his and musicianship is the key, and this three person horror film is grounded in composing and theatre. Each track has muscle beyond belief, ‘Chthonian’ moving seamlessly between head crushing bass to eerie shadow worship in a second. If you sleep with the light on this isn’t for you. Carbiniferous is the onset of a nightmare, building in dramatic blows to the head, through the slap bass craziness of ‘Beata Viscera’, the industrial monster ‘Axion’, where the sax sounds like it is being bludgeoned, then strangled. To play a sax so imperfectly takes more precision than doing it right. It’s noise rock, brutal metal, experimental jazz, all in one pot. Take a dip, you’ll feel the bloodlust soon I’m sure.
72%

Zu on MySpace

One of the joys of being a full time stoner is exploring the virtues of conspiracy theories. One of the best ones involves the Bilderberg Group, Bohemian Grove, and an Owl burning ritual. As you stick together skins on the gatefold, and start dropping weed into what will be a rough approximation of a Camberwell Carrot, consider this – why on earth are some of the most powerful men getting together in a forest clearing and worshiping at the sight of a fiery bird? Doesn’t make sense does it? I mean an owl is hardly a symbol that signifies power and strength – wisdom maybe, but wisdom’s never been high in the attributes of world leaders has it? So why not pick a panther? Or a tiger? Or a vampire bat? Those a far more the signifiers a group of power hungry lunatics are after. An owl? Apart from a pretty impressive twisty head and the ability to emit pellets, there’s not an awful lot going on there is there?

Unless of course it’s some kind of weird owl with a speaker in place of a sphincter, a hash leaf patternation on its feathers, and a hoot that manages to mix together the best qualities of prog, psych, and stoner rock. Then, and only then would you have an owl worth worshiping.

Such a weird owl does exist it would appear, and Ever the Silver Cord be Loosed is its first pellet to be emitted, its first hoot into the night, and the initial honk from its peculiar sphincter.

Probably best enjoyed whilst floating around the ceiling, Weird Owl’s sound comes from several ages at once. Most obviously they are rooted in 60′s psychedelia, but there’s also a strong surge of 70′s rock pushing through much of the album. There are influences of blues and Americana to be found in the slide guitar playing on ’13 Arrows, 13 Stars’ while the pomp of Ted Nugent can be found slinking around on the outskirts of ‘Flying Low Through The Air After Thunder’.

Names such as Lynyrd Skynrd, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin spring quickly to mind as ‘Ever The Silver Cord’ passes by in a fuggy cloud. It’s most certainly a dated sound, but then that’s no bad thing, after all OM are hardly distant cousins to what Weird Owl are doing here. They too take great stoner riffs and build on them until they form huge grooves of repetition; the only difference is that Weird Owl are quicker to change between riffs and their vocals are more Neil Youngesque than the religious drone found on ‘Conference of Birds’.

Indeed if you could level one criticism at Weird Owl it’s that sometimes, they lose the thread/cord occasionally and their jams lack focus, making it hard to concentrate for the duration of the album. That’s more time to consider the image of John Major in a cowl flapping about at the altar of a burning bird of prey though, so it’s not all bad.

At their best Weird Owl are hypnotic and spell binding, as on the fabulous hazy dirge of ‘Tobin’s Spirit Guide’ at their worst, they simply meander about like a hippy trying to come to terms with the consumerism of the 80′s (that short period of time just before joining the capitalist gang-bang obviously).

Not quite an Owl worth worshiping just yet then, but in time, they could just develop a cult of their own. Now roll another fat one, and play it again.
72%

Weird Owl on MySpace

This double CD epic slice of Six Organ of Admittance grandness, RTZ, is named after the button on a Tascam 484 that “returns to zero”. This suggests that we’re looking backwards, rather than forwards here. It squeezes together several lesser-known pieces from Six Organs early years into a colossal arc of drone influenced folk that might test the patience of even the most hardened fan. I’m not sure I can delve into the guts of which track did what to whom and when… there’s plenty of explanation on the website. I’m just going to concentrate on the music.As a collection of old material, this doesn’t really sit squarely on the back catalog front. Previous album, Shelter from the Ash, was a slow burning, less experimental offering that saw Ben Chasny embrace more of the work seen on his side projects like Comets on Fire. What I can say though, is that both The Sun Awakens and School of the Flower are some of the best free, experimental alt-folk recordings you can buy. Wondrous slices of music that flirt with dozens of genres, never quite finding a perfect home, but wooing you with each step that it took.

Where their previous work has seen them embrace the more folk and rhythmic side of life, the collection of music that forms RTZ is completely disconnected and abstract. There’s SPACE at work here. Sounds floating around a goldfish bowl of dust. Which I guess makes sense. The individual “movements” here have been forced together, sequenced to try and flow, but in a way that isn’t entirely natural.

After persevering with the opening ‘Resurrection’, 18 minutes of not very much, you’ll be thankful for the rather upbeat ‘Warm Earth, Which I’ve Been Told’. The semi-religious chanting floats over a nicely twisted guitar line which sounds sharp and focused through the blanket of vocals and resonating chords. This shifts into a pure organ, simple chords played over the sound of sharpening guitar strings and bricks before returning to it’s opening theme of simplicity.

‘Punish The Chasms With Wings’ is the central movement, and epic brilliance, of the record. Exploring the edges of drone, it’s heavily influenced by the desert sand and far eastern sounds. The name of the track actually sounds like music itself. It opens with swirling, dusty speckles of noise as a far away echo of piano twinkles like the first rays of sun light. Out of nowhere comes this crackling noise of guitars; one acoustic, one electric. Dueling for space, the feedback of the electric peeling off the face of the twitching strings of the acoustic. This is great, charged stuff. It’s just a shame that the music around this, book-ending RTZ as a whole, is a bit of a slog.

The three pieces that make up ‘Nightly Trembling’ are slow, medieval influenced ramblings. Filled with monk chants, jarring acoustic guitars and the sound of ghostly voices coming out of the gloom. Unfortunately, the gloom is just a little too, well, gloomy. At least the three tracks become shorter over the central arc – the first piece clocks in at a sweltering 18 minutes.

Perhaps, now that Chasny has got this out of this system, he can work on something altogether different and have a fresh start. Cast off the shackles and embrace the influences and ideals that initially made him one of the most experimental and challenging performers that I’ve had the good fortune to find. RTZ acts as a nice compilation, but it’s best avoided by newcomers and embraced by completists only.
68%

Six Organs Of Admittance on MySpace

The UK seems to be a hot bed for experimental music at the moment. Last year so the rise of Fuck Buttons from a promising live band to a full fledged, Guardian backed, wonder. Tweaking the same thread of electronic influenced experimentalism are Three Trapped Tigers. A mesh of poptastic drums and scutterling keyboards are all tightly woven around a fiercely rhythmic drive. The tracks on their Myspace page have been keeping me sane during this month of solitude and financial ruin. Track ’1′ is available for download below whilst their debut EP is for sale direct from their Myspace page.

In a bid to find out a bit more about the bands roots and influences, we got Tom from the band to answer the following questions:

For people out there that have never heard of you. Give us three reasons why they should…
1. we have an alliterative tiger-based band name which makes us very fashionable
2. our myspace has a snazzy pattern which should be visually stimulating should the audio fail to please you
3. our music is catchy

Can you recall the moment when you first decided you wanted to become a musician?
Er not really. I recall a lot of time spent playing the piano as a kid, and so it didn’t really occur to me to do anything else.

Where do your songs come from? What’s your inspiration?
My songs normally come from either improvising on my own or listening to my ipod and picking 3 or 4 songs and trying to jam them into one another. After that, I go to the rest of the band who then add their layers and so by the end it doesn’t sound anything like the original ideas.

The general inspiration is to be a band that performs live electronic music that is more song-based and that still has a rock element to it. Within that, we’re always trying to do something that doesn’t sound too much like anybody else, and trying to do something interesting with form. Normally, the inspiration from other sources consists mainly in listening to other music and thinking what I could do with it.

Name your Top 5 records.
This is just speaking for myself as I’m sure the other two would disagree and speaking for right now as these things always change:
Stevie Wonder, Talking Book
Aphex Twin, Richard D. James
DJ Shadow, Endtroducing…
Bruce Springsteen, Born In The USA
Talk Talk, Spirit of Eden
These aren’t the 5 best ever, they’re just my 5 favourites at the moment.

What was the first gig you ever played and was it a success?
First rock gig I did was in a Led Zep covers band when I was 15 and yes it was a great success in that I managed to sustain a conversation with a girl for about 5 minutes after I came off stage. Lesson learned.

What one piece of criticism has stuck in your mind and was it justified?
Self-indulgence: noone wants to hear that, and it is entirely justified and still applies to some extent. In this band, it’s the hardest thing trying to keep everything balanced without it spiralling uncontrollably into improvised prog.

What one thing has caused you to waste your free time in the past 6 months?
Probably watching sport. I’ve always been a keen football, cricket, rugby follower, but 2 years ago I suddenly got into tennis quite obsessively, ie. not just Wimbledon but watching all the masters series events at whatever time of night. Fortunately, my new house doesn’t have a TV let alone Eurosport so no more of that.

If you weren’t making music, what do you think you’d be doing?
I’d like to be a sports commentator but I’d blatantly suck so it’s more likely I’d be a civil servant in the department of transport.

What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?
I’ve done a fair few office jobs which were boring but weren’t really that bad. The worst would have to be lounge pianist at the Great Northern Hotel, Peterborough. They fired me for being ‘too jazzy.’

We’d like you to make us a mix-tape. Pick five tracks with a theme of your choice.
5 great first generation synth pop tracks:
New Order, Thieves Like Us (single)
Talk Talk, Time It’s Time (The Colour of Spring)
Neil Young, Transformer Man (Trans)
Skinny Puppy, Blood on the Wall (Bites)
Kate Bush, All The Love (The Dreaming)

mp3:> Three Trapped Tigers – ’1′

Three Trapped Tigers on Myspace

Animal Collective, thy name is pretension. Previously a niche concern, their star is in the ascendant with new LP Merriweather Post Pavillion already being hailed as an “Album of the Year” contender from mainstream and indie press alike. But the Baltimore-based avant garde psych-noise-pop outfit don’t make it easy for the audience at this much-anticipated release-date show, eliciting equal measures of bliss and bemusement with their relentless experimentalism.
Eschewing the normal approach to setlists, Animal Collective’s performances are an hour-and-a-half of almost uninterrupted music, songs flowing and merging into each other in a miasma of fragmentary sounds. They take a similarly unconventional approach towards the material itself; some songs remaining relatively faithful to their album incarnations, some twisted into entirely new forms. (Even the hardcore fans had trouble identifying a completely reworked ‘Winter’s Love’, which only lightly touched on the melodies of the original.) It’s an interesting approach which sometimes bears fruit but more than once you’d wish they’d quit faffing about and be a bit more straighforward.

Anyone whose ever listened to an AC album will be aware that they’re all about their thickly-layered slabs of psychedelia-infused noise. However, troubles with the bass amp coupled with the Koko’s inherent rubbishness meant the sound was never as dense as it should have been. The proggy, mystical ‘In the Flowers’ teased with almost-crescendos but it never captured that explosion of glitchy, glorious sound of the recorded version; the shimmering ‘My Girls’ similarly came close to brilliance but ached for a celebratory climax that never came. Rarely-played ‘Slippi’ was a lively and propulsive highlight, but the lack of Strawberry Jam material and a tendency to shift their more upbeat songs downtempo impacted on the show’s fun factor. Fugs of Deerhunter-ish melodic noise are fine (the languorous ‘Banshee Beat’ was a treat), but by underplaying the pop sensibilities that add a light-hearted edge to their self-indulgence, they squandered some of the performance’s potential. That said, ‘Lion In A Coma’ was fantastic, brought to life courtesy of Panda Bear’s impassioned military snare-drumming and day-glo album highlight ‘Brothersport’ was truly magnificent, a joyous distillation of AC’s fun side and the one moment where a nay-sayer may have been able to see what the fuss was all about.

An intense if unimaginative light-show added an effective visual element to the performance, but didn’t quite alleviate the perennial problem with electronics-based gigs: that watching three guys twiddle knobs (stop the sniggering back there) for 90 minutes isn’t the most engrossing experience in the world. Energy levels did pick up on the occasions they picked up actual instruments, or when Avey Tare unleashed his trademark full-throated guttural shrieks (sadly employed too rarely) but those expecting something life-changing (a feat the band achieved at Primavera, according to several of my acquaintances) will have left slightly underwhelmed. Sometimes excellent, often infuriating, but always intriguing, Animal Collective’s performance was certainly no big disappointment. But neither was it the celebration of their new-found success so many of us were expecting.

Women exist somewhere that is nowhere, and they’re apparently going to be huge. Or something. Underground-huge. Cryptic and spindly and slanted and enchanted and inverted and noisy and warm and fuzzy and lo-fi and subtle. And everywhere, and nowhere all at once. Where are these songs even happening? The titles all so suburban and forgettable, and its impossible to tell how many members they have playing or even singing at any one time. Half of the songs seem like extended no-place guitar workouts recorded in a hole in someone’s garage. And its fucking brilliant by the way.

I think there is still a latent tendency malignant in some people to think that lo-fi isn’t quite “doing things properly”- same with technical skill on one’s instrument(s), but the production on Women is a work of perfect art, precision-engineered to creep perfectly through the hiss, like all the tapes have been damaged and bits of the songs taken away, but not in a Times New Viking sort of way, in a way that actually complements the actual songs. These aren’t songs fucked with or ruined or damaged by the by-choice ricketyness of their production process. They actually wouldn’t be half as good without it. The album as a whole is a gem. The sort of gem that actually absorbs light rather than reflect it back at you so you can’t quite see it except in cracks and if you squint at it hard enough or put different lights on it, recovered. Like a photo of that gem. 

But that’s not to say that Women can’t write songs. I defy anyone not to give their souls to the garage band total pop of ‘Black Rice’ forever and ever with its glockenspiel and girl-group drums. (which is all you ever need in a song, really, well not ever but you can certainly go a long way with just that as your mileage). On the whole though this is not really a song-based album. It’s a coherent, 29-minute whole that you can either listen to or just let sort of drift by, and either option is pretty much good (though listening to it is best). You can miss a lot of it and it doesn’t really matter, you still get some of the magic in you, and that’s because of its light-reflecting qualities mentioned above. 

In fact, the only thing that is even remotely bad about this album is that it was released in America last year and so lots of people already have it, only come the end of this year it’ll be on loads of end-year lists, causing confusion like The Hold Steady did a while back, or HEALTH. The Fuckes. Don’t they even know how this whole process works? Well either way I’m totally jaded on the whole list system anyway, so what do I care? Get this before everyone else does and it just feels like the same old crap, or actually it probably won’t because its nothing less than utterly masterful. 
90%

mp3:> Women: ‘Back Rice’
mp3:> Women: ‘Group Transport Hall’ 

Women on MySpace

While it’s unlikely that Animal Collective‘s ninth will be revered to the same extent as Beethoven’s, they both share a  healthy dose of boldness. About as weird as you’d expect of an album named after a Maryland outdoor music venue with a potentially headache-inducing optical illusion for cover art, Merriweather Post Pavilion is an early candidate for being one of the most discussed weird albums of 2009. Exploring the borders between out-and-out psychadelic chaos and pop accessibility, the album is rarely less than challenging, and isn’t neccesarily the kind of album you’ll be listening to on repeat – at least not at first. It certainly isn’t for everyone – those who like their music a little more anthemic and more overtly based on hooks may find it a frustrating listen, for example – and while that’s often a fair criticism that can be leveled at it, MPP will, conversely, appeal to many for exactly that reason. The album frequently uses more subtle ploys to draw its listener in.

Not always, though. The wonderful “My Girls”, a real highlight, is riddled with lyrical hooks, an epic in minutes that skips along a retro synth line on a simple, engaging beat – building gorgeously and then fading away when its job is done. Its vocals are one of its most striking features, which is true of several of the songs here. Often, they are densely layered, offering an expansive, even choral feel. Elsewhere, they consist of lines breathlessly stitched together, creating a sense of hectic urgency. There’s always a lot going on in the album; these songs sometimes seem simple at first, but repeated listens unveil myriad tiny elements scuttling around in the background, from little beeps to off-kilter stabs of percussion. In keeping with that, MPP is an album which will definitely benefit from being heard on a decent audio set-up, incidentally.

Being so dynamic and varied (and yet surprisingly cohesive), the album will have different highlights for different people. “Bluish” is a personal favourite, driven by its sugary chorus embellished with echoey keys and the woozy, wobbling sonic sludge that pervades throughout. Then there’s the wild and tribal-sounding “Also Frightened”, the curious looped didgeridoo of “Lion In A Coma” nailed to a oddly perky chorus-of-sorts, and the more reflective, stripped-back and down-tempo “No More Runnin”. The fact that the songs often bleed quite extensively into one another is possibly a signal of how cohesive the album is meant to sound, despite the varied texture, instrumentation, and pace.

The album ends with the thoroughly surreal but fun singalong “Brother Sport”. It represents ending on a high note, as the song towers alongside “My Girls” as one of MPP‘s primary achievements. Starting with dominating, irreverant vocals soon joined by fast-paced shuffling beats leading into a lengthy instrumental sojourn and then back onto the beaten track (or as close as Animal Collective tread), it ticks a lot of the boxes of a stealth club hit, dare I say it. Inclusive, enjoyably and deservedly repetitive, it deserves to be heard a lot – like the rest of the album. In fact, for many, this is a record that they will need to listen to repeatedly so as to unravel the best of its esoteric delicacies. I’ll repeat that this won’t be for everyone, but it’s something that everyone should at least try – the more Merriweather Post Pavilion is given a spin, the more likely it is that its charms will coax you in.
85%

Animal Collective on MySpace

My experience with the university town of Manchester, England is about as reductive as you can go without sounding like a complete outsider, or buffoon (take your pick). Links are few but pictures of students punting about the River Cam, Slyvia Plath’s motionless head in an oven, Nick Drake’s plaintive folk music, Pink Floyd, and Robyn Hitchcock don’t provide a particularly happy or fair picture of the place. Beyond that, in the contemporary realm there’s Muse and you know they love to sing about apocalypse don’t they? Just to make sure, I’m not slighting any of these people or Cambridge itself (well, maybe Muse just a little). I’m just setting up the dark and beautiful mood for Fuzzy Lights’ debut album. You know, they call it the introduction and this one is getting way too long.

So what’s an American to do when he picks up a copy of said album, A Distant Voice? Like any instrumental music that uses guitars Fuzzy Lights is sure to get slapped with the post-rock tag before I end up going on a aesthetical tirade about how the music resembles the beauty of the dark and tranquil River Cam. After some research I find out The Cam’s water isn’t murky at all and is pretty darn clean, from its source to its confluence at the Great Ouse to support fish! Well, that argument deserves a watery grave (haha) anyway. Like the laguid river, A Distant  Voice revolves around its central elements. This music is more ambient than post-rock in that sense.

Opener, ‘Blackout II’ is revolves in a smooth reciprocating motion that calms the pulse despite its ominous atmospheres and growling guitar denouements. Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s ‘The Dead Flag Blues’ is brought to mind when a creaky violin floats out of “Blackout II”‘s thunder cloud of and pealing reverb and drifting organ drones. Elsewhere,’Eastern Winds’ blasts clarion call My Bloody Valentine while glam rock solos muffled under the reverb. Critics are notorious for just describing without contextualizing but you can’t help with such vivid tone poems. ‘Capturing Shadows’ is a kinetic thunderstorm while a killer is on the loose. ‘Bells Chiming in an Empty House’ replaces the bells with a testy web of guitars and drum fills – the storm’s stuck inside a dusty attic now. ‘Colour of the Sun’ takes the show on the road through the high desert’s sun.

In dealing with such recondite music you are bound to visuals. Voice only receives a true vocals on ‘Colour of the Sun’ and ‘Safe Place’ but the instruments do a lot of talking themselves. The comically titled ‘Something to Do With Light’ and triumphant capstone, ‘(When We Reached the) Mountain Top,’  sound like the group didn’t want to pigeonhole themselves too much and decided to do some upbeat indie rock tracks. Their yearnful screes work as well but not quite like the dark swells of soft and quiet before them.

I guess I take refuge in my outsider (and heavily skewed) perspective of Cambridge. A place where Sylvia Plath wrote some of her brilliantly devastating confessionals, Pink Floyd hailed from, and where Nick Drake went to school. It’s a tight box and some of the other band’s on Manchester’s Little Red Rabbit Records could be crammed into perhaps, but Fuzzy Lights deserve something a little better. A Distant Voice is dense music that pulls at tiny crevices in your soul, slowly unfolding before you. And if that’s murky as hell, well I’m not from around here. Someday I hope to listen to this while on The Cam. At night. ‘Reflective Surfaces’ will sound that much better. What do I know though? I’m an American who’s a sucker for post-rock (or whatever it is).
80%

Fuzzy Lights on MySpace

It is always good to try something new, and I have to admit having never heard of The Uglysuit when passed a copy of this, their debut album. I’ve worn a few ugly suits in my time, but that’s about as far as it goes and these Oklahoma noise freaks were a very pleasant surprise. They do share some similarities with Oklahoma’s other famous sons, The Flaming Lips, as there is a psychedelic edge to their music. Thankfully though, this does not cover up the craftsmanship of their songs. There are some great melodies here, enhanced by the off kilter moments rather than smothered by them.

Opening track ‘Brownblue’s Passing’ is a real case in point, with an extended guitar break caressing you with wave upon wave of glorious sound. ‘Chicago’ is also an excellent song, a sun-soaked tribute every bit as spacious as the city itself. Piano and keyboards also play a key part in this album, in the simple introduction to ‘Brad’s House’ and the swirling carousel sounds of ‘Anthem of the Arctic Bird’, a musical waltzer of tight rhythms and tapped drums.

The high spot though is the glorious ‘…And We Became Sunshine’, a long rambling song full of ideas. It all sounds so American, and could belong to any era of music from the past 40 years, a timeless blend of hazily stroked guitars and patterned piano. At the midway point the track builds and builds, colliding with itself into an absolute treat of a song. This album belongs to the summer, and the winter months unfortunately don’t do it justice. It is the sound of warmth, the sun of your face and the roar of the ocean, and a very fine debut indeed.
71%

The Uglysuit on MySpace

In our review of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s album Fordlândia, we called it his greatest work so far, high praise indeed for the Icelandic composer responsible for some of the most chilling and haunting pieces of the last decade. Fordlândia tells the tale of the Brazilian workers, forced into work by Henry Ford in the 1930′s to produce rubber on the plantation land bought for his company. The workers were treated as near slaves, all vices forbidden, their way of life threatened by the American way. We were fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to met with Jóhann, where we learn about his childhood in Iceland and encounters with the boffins at CERN.

What was the inspiration for the album Fordlandia?
I read an article about it years ago, and then found a Portuguese novel that uses the story. But, it was an image of this old Ford automobile bogged down in the rainforest, stuck in mud. That image worked as a spark for the album.

What lessons do you think we can learn today from the failed utopia of Fordlandia?
I don’t see it as a lesson or in any way didactic, but the album is a little bit about hubris – like in ancient Greek drama, this idea that excessive pride and defying the gods will bring about downfall and retribution. But it’s a hopeful album – I think it’s about the possibilities that arise out of failure and disaster. A thing that’s needed in Iceland at the moment.

Does Iceland inspire you?
I don’t think my surroundings directly inspire me, it tends to be books and ideas or a film or a piece of art. Your surroundings are always a part of you though, so there’s an element of it somewhere, I’m sure, but I think that’s true for all artists.

Did your childhood have an impact on your music?
As a child I listened to my parent’s records, which were classical but also brass band music as my father played in a brass band, so John Philip Sousa was an early favourite. My sisters and my sisters’ boyfriends had some interesting records, and I got an early taste for 70s experimental rock through them, some Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and King Crimson.

So is the music you compose the kind of music you listened to growing up, or were you interested in more contemporary sounds?
I got into shoegaze and things like Jesus and Mary Chain later on. I was always studying piano, so there was always other kinds of music, loads of classical as well as film music and other things like metal which I’ve always liked from a distance. I have fairly wide tastes in music, perhaps because of these diverse early influences.

Your previous album “IBM 1401 – A User’s Manual” was inspired by your fathers work with mainframe computers in the 1960′s – has he and his colleagues of the time given it their approval?
Yes, in fact a team of veteran IBM programmers got in touch when they heard of the album. They’re refurbishing an old 1401 in the museum of computer history in Mountain View in California. They asked my father to contribute to the project. They were I think quite pleased with the album and they invited my father and I to come visit the museum – maybe we’ll do it soon, it would be a nice little pilgrimage.

Have you had any comments from IBM nuts about the music on the album (in particular Part 2 – Printer)?
We showed the dance piece that the music was written for originally in Geneva and some engineers came over from CERN, where they have the Large Hedron Collider. They came because of the title, and were intrigued. I think they liked the piece. It’s great to get reactions from people who worked with this technology and most of the comments I’ve had were pretty kind.

When you started IBM 1401 – A User’s Manual did you always have a trilogy in mind?
I knew there was material and ideas I wanted to explore further, sure. I think all my albums are linked in some ways, but I felt there was a stronger link between this one and IBM and three is a nice number so it seemed logical to announce it in this way. But the world is filled with uncompleted trilogies – so don’t count your horses just yet.

Can you give any hints as to what the third album might be about?
No, but it will involve more singing.

Your music seems to have grown over time, starting with a string quartet on Englaborn, to a full orchestra on IBM 1401 and a choir on Fordlandia.
Fordlandia has some more stripped down moments, sometimes there’s only a piano, or a clarinet. I just use whatever colours the music demands, but I also like to try things I haven’t done before and to try different things with each record.

You seemed to have managed to avoid any comparisons with Sigur Ros – do you think the two of you share any common ground?
We kind of came out of a similar group of artists and musicians, although I didn’t run into them until 1998. They were active in some of the Kitchen Motors projects and Jonsi got me to record Virthulegu Forsetar, which was an old piece I had done years back that he really liked, so he’s kind of responsible for that. I think we share some sensibilities, and we were influenced by some of the same people I think.

Have you any further plans to write soundtrack music, be it for plays or films?
Yes, there are some film projects coming up. I do less theatre music these days than I used to, but if the right project comes along I would do it. I tend to choose my projects carefully, there has to be something that really excites me.

What do you think the future holds for you? More collaborations, or are you content to work as a solo composer?
I really like collaborating, with other musicians – I think I would be really bored working on my own all the time. So there are always some projects going on, like Apparat Organ Quartet and Evil Madness, which are a nice way of working with musicians I like. But obviously I’m very focused on my solo stuff.

Fordlândia is out now, on 4AD
Jóhann Jóhannsson on MySpace

“Black Carrot play fierce, abstract, improvised, experimental jazz/rock/folk music.” This is what I’m told. If you want to describe yourself as abstract, or even experimental (how do you experiment with music anway? And then how do you decide to give your “experiments” a release on an indie record label complete with deluxe digi-packaging?) you’ve got to really earn the right. Straight away Black Forest are presenting their case: the artwork is devoid of either the name of the band or the album, instead adorned by Quentin Blake-style cartoons, and bizarre non-sequiturs and nonsense phrases the likes of which Lewis Carroll himself would be proud of. “Flares? No – Cloven Hoof!” could almost be the fittingly abstract title of the album, instead it is merely the front cover’s caption.
You have to earn the right to describe yourself in those terms, and Black Carrot certainly do. Much of the album channels Captain Beefheart, but lacking in the occasional flashes of pop-sensibility that made albums like Trout Mask Replica such an essential and engaging listen. That’s not to say that Drink the Black Forest isn’t engaging: it is, just for entirely different reasons. Black Carrot replace traditional hooks and song structures with sheer unpredictability, and it’s for exactly this that you keep listening – you can never quite be sure where they will take you next. Croaked and gargled vocals sparsely decorate the delicate “Doves Fly Ahead of Me”, which is followed by an improvised free-jazz track featuring a recording of the band talking about the “Archriderferlisa – a mad fish with ten wings, speaking in Elizabethan tongues.” This kind of wilful obscurity and desperate “quirkiness” would usually cause me to reach for the stop button, but Black Carrot have the charm, and certainly the talent, to make sure that not only does it not start to grate after fifteen minutes, it continues to be both interesting, and, most importantly of all, enjoyable, for the whole forty minute duration. “Genre-blurring” is a vastly over-used phrase, but in times where it is used to describe anyone daring enough to use a blues riff in a rock song, Black Carrot represent one of the few bands who genuinely defy classification, who simply refuse to be pigeon-holed.

73%

Post-rock giants This Will Destroy You tore up the Music Box in Manchester last month. Here, our photographer Dan Austin, gives you the view from the front.

This Will Destroy You on MySpace

Everything/Everything is the third studio album from London based composer and performer Leo Chadburn, under his nom de guerre Simon Bookish. Famously evasive in his influences and techniques, Chadburn’s output has skipped between dancefloor friendly electro-pop, ambient composition and abstract spoken-word infused electronica. 

Everything/Everything is a watershed; a long awaited reconciliation with the many facets of his musical character. The complex backing arrangements are played on saxophones, brass, piano, harp and Farfisa organ and scored so tightly that when played live, the musicians visibly break out in sweat. They swirl in rapid syncopated eddies, mimicking the busy bleeping of Chadburn’s previous work. This is electronic composition reinvented and reframed within a live context that relates to jazz as closely as contemporary classical and lounge crooning.

The lyrical content of Everything/Everything is also something of a departure from previous works such as Trainwreck/Raincheck. Emerging from the ramparts of arcane cultural reference points and surreal abstraction, this album feels altogether more personal, weaving encoded thoughts, ideas, sharp flashes of wit and autobiographical strands into an intoxicating whole. Ostensibly about living in the age of information overload, it’s nonetheless a lyrical opening up for this most elusive of musicians. Chadburn has finally found a palette for expression he feels comfortable with, and this album feels immeasurably more assured as a result.

Channeled through Chadburn’s sternly intellectual aesthetic, this “big band song cycle” is at times overwhelming, awash with timing changes, alive with discordant challenges at every turn, and chittering with the dissonant overlap of sounds colliding and shimmering with strict precision. It’s a brave, ambitious, teetering construction of gravity-defying sonic pointillism that creates the disconcerting and exciting effect of an aural Bridget RIley.

This is one of the finest albums of the year, and another step in Simon Bookish realizing his potential as one of the most consistently creative, challenging and interesting contemporary UK solo artists working today.
95%

Simon Bookish on MySpace

Right. I’ll put this out there, for all of you. I bloody love 60s/70s British TV Shows like The Sweeney, The Avengers, Man In A Suitcase and films like Bedazzled, The Rise And Rise Of Michael Rimmer and any James Bond film from that era give me a big old entertainment based lob on. There’s something about them that just seems so nostalgic, so perfect, even though i wasn’t born until half way through the following decade. Everything just seems so happy and full of cliched goodness. And the soundtracks, well, they’re just incredible aren’t they? Grainy by way of sound, well written, often instrumental but always interesting enough to hold focus. So when i put ’4′, the new release from Dungen into my CD player and started it off, you can imagine the smile that instantly spread its way across my face. Well, maybe you can’t, as i haven’t reviewed this album yet. But you can guess why.

Thats right kids, 4 sounds just like the songs contained inside were cryogenically frozen around 1975, and then recently unpacked and released in 2008, still shaking icicles off their crotchets and minims. Its positively leaking that jazz laden cool throughout the whole album. However, ’4′ still finds the time to indulge in some amazing guitar wig-outs, especially the solo in ‘Samtidigt 1′, which channels the pure powerful essence of Hendrix through the Swedish fingers of guitarist Reine Fiske. Not personally one for solos, i couldn’t help but rewind to the start of ‘Samtidigt 1′ just to hear it all again. Back to the album as a whole,its clearly evident that there are millions of separate elements littered throughout this album that make it so special, but they all work in true harmony thanks to the guiding eye of main Dungen man Gustav Ejstes. Gustav has clearly taken a lot of time and effort to hone his and his troupe’s sound, in both production and performance, to a point which truly amazing music can be created, such as the kind found on 4. The sound of the drums on album opener ‘Satt Att Se’ are so perfectly done and the co-operation between the piano line and the bass so tight that it leaves me with no other words to use as a description other than ‘far out’. And it is far out, in a more literal sense. It’s almost beyond comprehension how one man and his band can get a sound nailed down so much as to fool my ears into thinking they’re four decades behind the current date on my calendar. Evocative isn’t even a starting point for 4, in terms of creating a timewarp of musical space. Further into the album, ‘Der Tat Tid’ sounds like the music playing in James Bonds’ ears as he winds his way through a beautiful mountain range in an equally beautiful car, with a lady next to him that is one part stunning, one part deadly. ‘Fredag’ is music for John Steed to whack people around the head with his umbrella to. By the time ‘Finns Det Nagon Mojilighet’ hits, we’ve crossed deep into the 70s, and things are showing a slightly more progressive tinge. Well thought out strings and a just-right crunchy guitar rhythm propel this track through near 4 minutes, leaping over skittish drums and intense feedback hurdles. This is music to be cool to, oh yes. ‘Mina Damer Och Fasaner’ shows the technical grace and skill of all the musicians in Dungen at once, and still finds time to throw in some cheeky wind instruments. ‘Samtidigt 2′ is unsurprisingly exactly the same as, and just as good as its numbered counterpart, and ‘Bandhagen’ closes it all off in style, pulling the album right back to the start in musical style terms. A subdued organ echoes the main melodies at exactly the right volume, with chord progressions that could best be described as authentic. That or amazing.

I probably couldn’t put into words how much i like this album. Gustav Ejstes, Reine Fiske, Fredrik Bjorling and Mattias Gustavsson, I salute you. You are incredible musicians, and 4 is an incredible album. If you like a band, one song, ANYTHING from the 60s or 70s, or if you just like good music, get this album. So what if its sung in Swedish, it doesn’t matter! ’4′ will drag you into another world, and refuse you exit until you use the word ‘groovy’ and mean it. It really is that good. End of. It’s the perfect realisation of Dungen’s initial intentions, and for that it deserves every percentage of its score.
90%

Dungen on MySpace

This is a great idea, this album. Zac Pennington’s coldly, chillingly close-to-the-bone, androgynously written-and-delivered lyrics atop a background of sumptuous pop-classicalism arrangements oozing like some sort of strangled 1950s housewife’s radio, Lolita and Bacharach all in one, ravished on the patio or the front lawn. A great *idea*, but sadly only mediocrely (is that a word?) realized.

I was really looking forward to this record. The prospect of it was introduced so wonderfully, with ‘A Song For Ellie Greenwich’, in all its ‘Close To You’-envoking urgency. And what’s more I’d just finally gotten ‘Safe As Houses’, Entanglements‘ at-times-unspeakably-magnificent predecessor, having been in love with ‘Love Connection Part II’ for ages and ages and ages. ‘Safe As Houses’, for the unaware, is a *really* amazing, mostly worth getting for the songs on it where it really, really works, like the aforementioned ‘Love Connection’, and ‘I Was A Dancer’ and closer ‘Stolen Children’ as well, but also the rest of it is really good… but I guess I still figured it was a record they could improve upon, you know. Shifting like, the entire musical approach of the band from Xiu Xiu-style avant-glitch-pop sort of stuff (only I guess when the ‘pop’ part of that hit, it hit in a different way) to the lavish chamber-pop arrangements found here seemed only a step in the right direction.

When Pennington’s words hit on ‘Safe As Houses’ they really *hit*, in a, well like I say above, chillingly close-to-the-bone way. A concept album about mothers’ relationships with their daughters, lines like “I was the dancer / My head filled with laughter / And then the disaster / You came sometime after” made me collapse into myself on trains and stuff, they’re just… *right there*, you know. Sadly on Entanglements, nothing stands out quite as much. Well, maybe there’s *something* there at work on ‘Ellie Greenwich’, but… its not as eminently quotable, its all in the delivery. And yet most of the songs here are built around Pennington’s lyrics, often at the expense of musical hooks- the arrangements just sort of track what he’s doing, which would be fine if what he was singing in that strained, feminised mewl was as powerful as most of what he sung on ‘Safe As Houses’, but… its just not. Maybe if I had a lyrics sheet to pour over I could pick out some really powerful lines, but that’s moot point, because on record- *its just not* (do proper copies of this album come with a lyric sheet? Oh like any reviewer *really* knows what’s going on with packaging nowadays). I mean at first it sounds like its working- opener ‘Four Words’ is a joy, for example, and sometimes a part of the arrangements will really hit where everything opens up and it all seems alright again, and ‘Ellie Greenwich’ is still amazing, if somewhat anachronistic in amongst the altogether somewhat more mild-mannered songs on most of the record, but by the time you’re halfway through (or, well, the halfway through that isn’t ‘Ellie Greenwich’, that is), its just a little *dull*. Which is pretty unfortunate for a record that’s only 32 minutes long.

Entanglements is nowhere close to being a bad record. It has some very good moments and a theoretically perfect sound all of its own. Its just that it seems, in perfecting this perfect, *perfect* sound, Pennington and co forgot to write a record’s worth of good songs. Oops.
68%

Parenthetical Girls on MySpace

NYC is Kieran Hebden‘s (aka Four Tet) fourth collaboration with veteran jazz drummer Steve Reid and while I won’t pretend that I have heard the other three, the word in the blogosphere is that this is the most equal of their partnerships, with Hebden given much more license to stamp his mark on the record. Certainly fans of Fridge and Four Tet would be foolish to overlook this, a beautiful and intensely atmospheric mini-album. Although I didn’t have the cover artwork to hand at the time of writing it is impossible to listen to NYC and not picture a seething, rain-lashed megatropolis. It’s a murky, cavernous record easily redolent of old Scorcese films: steam rising from man hole covers, pimps lurking in shadows, dealers dealin’ (to borrow from Bobby Gillespie). The percussive energy and gently building tensions and atmospherics make it less wilfully difficult than such jazz-electronica collaborations might lead you to expect.

It is interesting to note that while Four Tet’s most recent EP Ringer sidestepped into more synthetic soundscapes, NYC is very much in line with the textures that made Hebden’s name: scuffed, jazzy rhythms; heavily-reverbed splices of acoustic guitar and piano; and a mulchy organic quality that once inspired the horror pigeonhole ‘folktronica’. But folk this isn’t, this is tranced-out bebop – rollicking, sweaty jazz augmented with synths and echo effects. It’s the kind of fuggy cinematic brew that should entice fans of David Holmes circa Let’s Get Killed, early DJ Shadow and DJ Krush (minus the hip hop esoterica), Amon Tobin, and Four Tet disciples from Pedro to Nostalgia 77.

The murky opener ‘Lyman Place’ is a bit of a red herring, as it’s probably the most abrasive track on the album – a pressure cooker of grinding bass loops and rusted-metal percussion. It’s a mood revisited on the dank, clunking ’25th Street’, which sounds like a network of subterranean pipes rattling and hissing into life, evolving into a lolloping groove. ’1st & 1st’ sounds like a gritty 70s cop show theme tune pulled apart and doodled over with freestyle drumming and lots of electronic, dubby ephemera. ‘Arrival’, the album centrepiece, is a meditative, awakening but somehow urban piece, augmented by shimmering synths, vibrating drones and Reid’s scattershot percussive improvisations. This stunning high is sustained into the bustling ‘Between B & C’ in which Hebden showers sparkling, sped-up synth fragments over a gorgeous piano groove. ‘Departure’ is Four Tet all over: loops of chime-like textures which simmer and subside while Reid grooves sporadically over the top, and occasional beams of pure Bladerunner synth shoot out from the speakers. It’s wonderful, heady, spectral stuff that gets better and better, both throughout its recording time and with each listen – an unexpected delight.
82%

Kieran Hebden on MySpace

Virginia-based Pontiak showcase their heavy but slow sludge rock sound on Sun on Sun, which seems to be one of those neither-one-nor-the-other mini-album projects. Although this is a record built almost entirely around a fairly conventional guitar-based rock setup, there are lots of faces to the band displayed here – opener “Shell Skull” is a brooding, methodical slow-builder which vaguely brings to mind Black Sabbath, but immediately following it is “Swell”, a curious but ultimately pretty redundant instrumental piece which sounds a bit like what I would imagine being stuck in a U-boat during a depth charge attack would sound like – there’s something very nautical and yet mechanical about it, it’s like a jam at crush depth.

Some vague psychadelic elements are in evidence in places, too – the title track is a 9-minute epic with some intriguing and quite philosophical lyrics. “White Hands” starts off with a subdued but still punk-like rumbling canter, but soon drops this taut focus in favour of a much slower, wriggling trawl. This music seems to be all about sustained, yet low-level menace – Pontiak don’t so much rock out as slowly grind along, sounding powerful but not always as purposeful as you’d hope.

The closing track “The Brush Burned Fast” surprises us with its sudden appearance of acoustic guitar, which makes a dramatic contrast with the rest of the record. The vocals here are clearer, too – it’s a major change in direction. After the song is over, we’re left with an odd feeling. There’s something quite affecting about Sun on Sun, especially after repeated listens. It’s not easy listening by any means, but there are some very interesting ideas at play here.
71%

Pontiak on MySpace

We at TLOBF have a lot to thank Fireworks Night for. Among their most recent achievements, their label Organ Grinder Records helped bring Left With Pictures to us and Firworks Night themselves played TLOBF’s Ill Fit club night just recently, which I understand was rather good. Their current offering though, is this new EP (or mini-album, if you like 28 minutes and six songs, it’s quite a beefy EP) A Mirror, A Ghost.

First up is “You, Holding.” One of the first things you notice is the curious, half-spoken vocal style which dominates the album. The song is a haunting affair, a slow descent into a yawning abyss, which gradually and patiently grows in intensity before everything is stripped away again – maybe we reached the bottom?

“The Shiver In Your Bones” is much more in-your-face, driven by aggressive, pounding percussion and honky tonk piano. Later, soaring vocals are adopted – “I never loved you, la la la da…” The lyrics mention a carnival, and the song does evoke a kind of creepy, twisted carnival atmosphere as it lurches around.

I think that A Mirror, A Ghost (and arguably Fireworks Night in general) is going to be quite divisive. That odd vocal style I mentioned will be loved by some but I can see it being a bit turn-off for others – especially in the long, sparse sections present in songs like “The Fire” and “Down to the Lake”, when we’re basically alone with it. When the band are at these extremely sparse ebbs, they skirt worryingly close to being genuinely boring, but luckily something more interesting is almost always just around the corner, whether that be a quickening of pace or the introduction of some lovely backing vocals, which are quite a key facet of the sound here.

Another splitting factor, I think, will be the quite obtuse lyrics, which are always off-kilter, usually interesting (“hold you one hand at a time”) and sometimes raise an eyebrow (“the tube in your mouth, like a fish on a line”). So, a mixed bag then, and one on which the listener’s personal prejudices are going to bear heavily. Give Fireworks Night a try – they might just be the thing for you, even if I find them a little alienating.
67%

mp3:> Fireworks Night: ‘You, Holding’

Fireworks Night on MySpace

By now we all should know the genius that is Tom Jenkinson, aka pusher of squares, and by now it has become almost a given that whatever he releases is going to be taking music in a new direction such is his unrivalled ability (have you seen that man play bass! It’s beyond comprehension), and his determination to make music that shifts the map. Along with Aphex Twin, Squarepusher is definitely one of the pioneering forces behind electronic music in the last 10-15 years.

‘Just a Souvenir’ is, as expected, a mish mash of styles that all seem to gel into a twisted cohesion. “This album started as a daydream about watching a crazy, beautiful rock band play an ultra-gig” explains Jenkinson on a quote from his official website. Noticeably he has gone more in an experimental rock direction, but rock as you’ve never heard it. Take Delta V, a lesson in how to riff out on bass, it is a very immediate and in your face. It seems as if Tom is having a jam session, on another planet. The album opens with ‘Star Time 2′; a song that sounds like I’ve landed on Planet Zelda and Sonics spinning the rings. Its as if ‘Red Hot Car’ has morphed into something altogether more funky.

Often Jenkinsons music has suffered from being cold and, at times, too mechanical, chopped and patched together with precision but sometimes lacking soul or trying too hard to be experimental or progressive. Just a Souvenir breaks that tradition with a far more colourful soundscape, leaning to something Daft Punk esque. There are more elements of electro and acid funk, along with his affection for Jazz breaks and a far more heavy rock sound. But as ever there really isn’t a way of describing what Squarepusher does. He defies explanation, logic, and expectation. He has definitely gone for a more melodic sound, even if melodic, in Squarepusher universe, is still some mutant hybrid of a thousand different styles. He’s doing for bass guitar what Hendrix did for guitar. Obviously there’s a massive time difference, but if we juxtapose the innovation of each artist there is a definite path between the two. The groove is definitely there.

Nothing sums up Squarepushers eccentricity more than ‘A Real Woman‘, a track that sounds almost comical; the strange vocal effects are something that Jenkinson has always loved to noodle with, and it makes for an odd listen. It has a child like playfulness to it. This is candy for extreme candy poppers. With every record the square man puts out he dives into new territory and comes out on top, owning and completely realizing new rhythms and vibrations.  Taking on from his last effort Hello Everything but more psychedelic than anything he’s done before I’m wondering how this would work with a head full of hallucinogens – I know I’d be listening to ‘Planet Gear’ over and over. As for ‘The Glass Road’: dark mystical genius. Not only is he a bass terrorist, but he’s a sweet jazz soliloquist. Just have a listen to his classical guitar on album closer ‘Yes – Sequitur’! Yeah we knew he could play guitar, but it’s always nice to mention his skills off the bass.

When I listen to this record first thing I think is where do his ideas come from? How did that rhythm come into being, where is this man from. Middle England or the centre of the universe! There isn’t anybody coming close to doing what Tom Jenkinson does, not only on the bass, but his whole pallet of musical textures, his direction and commitment to experimentation. Just a Souvenir proves that he is top of whatever game he chooses to be in, and he’s so far out of sight that you’ll be blinded.
85%

Squarepusher on Myspace

They make a noise and our own Catriona Boyle wasn’t all that sure what to make of LP3, Ratatat’s latest album, and yet she loved it. So, let’s see what goes on inside their minds… if we dare. We caught up with one half of the of duo, Evan Mast, to get him to answer our fiendishly fiesty 20 Questions… Just don’t tell him your hungover.

1. Describe your sound in 3 words.
Abungent, parnch, Franco.

2. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it?
‘He’s the DJ, I’m the rapper’ by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. I bought it used on cassette from a shop in Ohio where I grew up.

3. What’s the best cure for a hangover?
Fruit smoothie, punch in the face.

4. What’s on your rider?
PB twix, bubbly water.

5. How do you get ready for a live show?
2-3 hours meditation.

6. What’s your favourite song to play live?
Endless drum solo.

7. What’s your guilty pleasure?
Ryandan.

8. Who would win in a fight, a stoat or a goat and why?
The goat’s got size on its side, although I don’t really see why these 2 should be fighting.

9. Who’s your favourite new band at the moment? Tell us a bit about them.
White flight aka moses aka justin.
Justin travels all over the world following inner visions and mystical guidance. He mediatates for weeks on end, participates in medicine ceremonies and then brings all his knowledge and experience back home and
puts it into supercharged pop songs.

10. Who would play you in a film based upon your life?
Ice cube.

11. Dead or alive, what 5 acts would you have play with you at a festival?
Chemirani
White flight
E*rock
Boredoms
Bach

12. If push comes to shove, what is your all-time favourite album?
Arthur by The Kinks.

13. What’s your most memorable on the road story?
Mike snorting like a pig in the back of the van for an hour straight on the way to the hotel.

14. If your life flashed before your eyes, what would be the highlights?
The moment each of my little children were born.

15. What’s the best piece of advice someone has ever given you and did you take notice?
Buy the SPF 40 sunblock… no I didn’t.

16. If you had to leave a body part to science, what would it be?
Knuckles.

17. What’s the best book you’ve read and film you’ve seen in the last 6 months?
A collection of maori folktales: The Man Who Loved Women – Truffaut.

18. What three things could you not live without?
Knuckles. Fruit smoothie. Tips.

19. Tell us a fact about yourself we probably don’t already know.
I used to be a pro ice-hockey player.

20. And finally, we’d like you to make us a mix-tape. Pick five tracks with a theme of your choice.
HAMGLIDE SWITZERLAND
White Flight – Pastora Divine
Piero – Mi Viejo
Squarepusher – Journey to Reedham
Kinks – Mindless child of motherhood
Springwater – Stone Cross

Ratatat on Myspace

In a year that’s brought us a whole host of great experimental noisey buggers, Crystal Antlers still shine out. The Californian band have started to be whored around the internet, their infectious grooves and whig-outs and garage based fun allowing this writer to proclaim them his “New Favourite Band”. I caught up with bassist and vocalist Jonny Bell to find out more…

For people out there that have never heard of you. Give us three reasons why they should…
Don’t really know what to say to this, just go buy the record or illegally download it, then continue reading…

Can you recall the moment when you first decided you wanted to become a musician?
When I was Twelve years old & I heard “Overnight Sensation” by Frank Zappa.

Where do your songs come from? What’s your inspiration?
Straight from the heart. The inspiration is mostly the impending Apocolypse, but also Love.

Name your Top 5 records.
For Today, in no particular order:
- Sleepers “Seventh World”
- Plastic Ono Band “John Lennon”
- Getto Boys “We Can’t Be Stopped”
- Roland Kirk “Volunteered Slavery”
- Al Green “Lets Stay Together”

What was the first gig you ever played and was it a success?
Our friends band & us played a birthday party for a 16 year old boy, about 100 miles away from home. There were only about 6 of his friends there and all they really wanted was to ooogle the girl in the other band. We played in the living room to our friends in the other band, while the birthday boy & his pals played pinata in the back yard. By no means was it a success, but it wasn’t a total loss cause we stole a lamp they had that was made of deerhoofs.

What one piece of criticism has stuck in your mind and was it justified?
I try not to pay attention to reviews, but my friend always likes to bring it to tell me about the negative things she reads. Apparrently we’ve been called “Sweaty” a lot, & that’s completly justified.

What one thing has caused you to waste your free time in the past 6 months?
My Computer. Always a complete waste of time.

If you weren’t making music, what do you think you’d be doing?
Working on producing a reality/animation show about my Job Chimney Sweeping with an ex-bankrobber, a junkie punk-rocker, & aninsane-acid-casualty boss.

What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?
The job I still have Chimney Sweeping…

We’d like you to make us a mix-tape. Pick five tracks with a theme of your choice.
The theme is B-sides of Less-Successfull R&B & Rap singles produced by
Russel Simmons in the late 1980′s:
1. Oran “Juice” Jones- “Your Song”
2. Alyson Williams- “Yes We Can Can (Dub Version)”
3. Run DMC- “Christmas in Hollis”
4. Davy D- “Let’s Rock”
5. Hurricane- “Super Fight”

Crystal Antlers on Myspace

For those not up to speed heres the down-low on Mr. David Grubbs. A former member of ‘Squirrel Bait’ and ‘Bastro’, he is probably best known for his collaborative work with Jim O’Rourke in Gastr Del Sol. (If at this point you are asking ‘who?’ then I direct you to ‘Camoufleur’. You can thank me later.) Since Gastr Del Sol broke up in 1997 Grubbs has released numerous solo records, soundtracks and collaborations. He is also an assistant professor of Radio and Sound Art at Brooklyn College.

Grubbs previous records have previously been easy to divide into his interests: certain records explore his more structured songwriting, while others reveal the sound art and experimental side of his work. On ‘An Optimist…’ Grubbs has managed to combine the two, fusing his delicate, sparse guitar work with drones and free jazz drumming, as evidenced on the title track. As one of the people who set out the rules for this type of music it seems harsh to turn around and accuse this record of being generic, and it is not necessarily meant as a criticism. Rather, with it’s stripped, sparse guitar work and eerie resonances and suspenseful chord changes this is instantly recognisable as Grubbs’ work. You can draw a line from what is here all the way back to early 90’s Chicago, where Grubbs worked with the likes of Bundy K Brown and a pre-Tortoise John McIntire.

On ‘Eyeglasses of Kentucky’, things become a lot darker, the staccato notes chiming out like a stripped down Shellac, Grubbs flattened tones resigned compared to Albini’s righteous indignation. In comparison, ‘Holly Fool Music’, is relatively upbeat, showcasing Grubbs’ talent for a melody, while calling to mind latter day Sonic Youth (the pop side at least).

The album closes with the 11.50 of ‘The Not So Distant’, a series of drones, tones and noises that feel out of place within the context of the record, but certainly not out of context with the rest of his recorded output. There is much to admire here, and while it is unlikely someone will stumble open him anew as a result of this release, if they do they will find it a soothing and accesible, if not groundbreaking listen.
73%

David Grubbs on Myspace

Ok, so this is a bit of self-publicity I guess. We’ve got our very first TLOBF Gig evening TOMORROW and none other than Vessels are headlining. We loved their debut album so much, we HAD to get them to play live for us. Anyways, as a little taster before the main event, we got Martin from the band to answer our 20 Questions, just to get to know them a bit better…

1. Describe your sound in 3 words.
Delay, Distortion, Reverb

2. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it?
I can’t exactly remember, but glancing through my tape collection it was probably a Nirvana bootleg, probably from Streetwise Music in Cambridge.

3. What’s the best cure for a hangover?
A massive greasy mofo of a fry up, followed by a pint.

4. What’s on your rider?
Beer and dinner. We can’t get away with asking for any more than that.

5. How do you get ready for a live show?
Stretch our arms and wrists to avoid early-onset-arthritis / repetitive-strain-injury / carpel-tunnel-syndrome.

6. What’s your favourite song to play live?
Right now its ‘Wave Those Arms, Airmen’, simply because we’ve only managed it three times, so it’s kinda exciting to see what will go wrong with the equipment each time.

7. What’s your guilty pleasure?
I’m partial to the occasional bit of A-Ha – Take On Me

8. Who would win in a fight, a stoat or a goat and why?
A stoat, clearly. Predator vs herbivore=no contest.

9. Who’s your favourite new band at the moment? Tell us a bit about them.
The Pattern Theory. 3 graduates from Leeds College of Music. About to migrate to Germany. The most rewarding live band I’ve seen in yonks. Ridiculously tasteful.
http://www.myspace.com/thepatterntheory

10. Who would play you in a film based upon your life?
I’d like to think it would be Burt Reynolds, but it would probably be Tom Selleck. As long as they’re sporting a ‘tash, I don’t mind.

11. Dead or alive, what 5 acts would you have play with you at a festival?
I’m gonna go for the dead ones, as there’s still an opportunity to see the living ones, yeah?
1. Jimi Hendrix
2. Otis Redding
3. The Beach Boys
4. Nirvana
5. Miles Davis

12. If push comes to shove, what is your all-time favourite album?
Portishead Live in NYC……………… or Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream

13. What’s your most memorable on the road story?
Probably the time when we left a guitar, not even in it’s case, on the floor of a car park in Doncaster and drove off. Managed to get it back the next day, though. Score.

14. If your life flashed before your eyes, what would be the highlights?
I crashed my car on the A1 a few years ago, and all I saw flashing in front of my eyes was the A1. So I guess that’s my answer – the A1.

15. What’s the best piece of advice someone has ever given you and did you take notice?
The best bit of advice was probably – “Don’t listen to anyone’s advice”.

16. If you had to leave a body part to science, what would it be?
My knees. Man, I’ve got some great knees.

17. What’s the best book you’ve read and film you’ve seen in the last 6 months?
Book – ‘Musicophilia’ by Oliver Sacks, a Neurologist’s account of the psychology of music. Fascinating stuff.
Film – ‘Heima’ Sigur Ros. Sweet.

18. What three things could you not live without?
1 – A mouth
2 – An arse
3 – The bit between the mouth and the arse

19. Tell us a fact about yourself we probably don’t already know.
I’m short sighted, both in my eyes and my actions.

20. And finally, we’d like you to make us a mix-tape. Pick five tracks with a theme of your choice.
Theme = Songs containing references to Horses
1. PJ Harvey – Horses in My Dreams
2. Tori Amos – Horses
3. Belle and Sebastien – Judy and the Dream of Horses
4. Portishead – The Rip
5. The Rolling Stones – Wild Horses

Vessels on Myspace

This is nice. An opportunity to interview High Places, the somewhat inscrutable duo of Mary Pearson and Rob Barber, whose totes proper debut album has just been released (and reviewed here to some large acclaim by THIS VERY WRITER WHAT IS WRITING THIS RIGHT NOW). Marvel as they give some really quite interesting answers to the questions I e-mailed in to their publicist.

What inspires you most, musically?
Mary: I’ve been really inspired by the recording quality of old blues recordings lately. I love how blown out and tinny those recordings are. Good hip hop beats amaze me in the way they make you involuntarily dance.
Robert: I love hearing different types of unidentifiable music playing really loud, but far away from me. I love the aesthetic of music mixing with the rest of it’s environment and bouncing around. I was at a party in LA the other night in a rather hectic neighborhood, and it was a bunch of really different sounding punk bands playing. Next door was an even bigger party featuring a Mexican dance with a twelve piece brass-based banda sinaloense. The pa they were playing through was enormous. We got there and heard a punk band playing, then suddenly, the banda started, but with just a vocal part. It was the loudest recorded vocals I have ever heard. When the sousaphone kicked in with the percussion, it was knocking over bottles. Then when the horns kicked it, it was the most powerful band ever. Hearing this band bouncing through the buildings and mixing with all the other sounds of people getting loose, will always be a really rememberable and inspiring experience.

How did you come together as a duo to make music? Do you have similar tastes and ideas or is your songwriting process more of a clash?
M: We were both performing as solo musicians and we wanted to try fusing our ideas into a duo. Rob and I were pen pals while I was finishing up music school in Michigan, and I moved to New York after graduation so we could start High Places. It was a very impulsive move, but one I’ve never regretted!
We have pretty different approaches to composition, but we have gotten really accustomed to writing and recording together. It is a very democratic process with lots of give-and-take and compromise. We are quite yin and yang in so many ways. I love immediacy, complex meter, and minimal ambience. Rob tends toward unconventional phrasing, major key melodies, and layered maximalism. Rob’s approach to music-making is often more like a visual art approach. He deals with colors and environments and textures. I am a bit more concerned with structure and time signatures and counterpoint. We listen to a lot of the same music, mostly because we spend so much time together.

If you could be in your ideal band would they sound like High Places, or something else entirely?
M: It’s too hard to be objective about my own musical projects. I could never listen to them and separate myself from the equation. My ideal band would probably have a female dancehall DJ, my sister Laura, Rye Rye and Steve Reich making some disjointed, minimal, repetitious, lyrically-driven dance jams.
R: I already am in my ideal band!

There is something about High Places’s sound that I can’t quite place in any real tradition- elements of sound from all over the place, immediately recognisable sonic signature possibly all of your own, where would you place it?
M: I think our sound is intentionally a sonic scrapbook. We don’t like to feel limited by instrumentation or tunings or subject matter. But on the other hand, we’re constantly returning to this idea of familiarity, and figuring out how to make a strange instrument sound expected and appropriate.
R: I think we don’t try to recreate something we hear and get excited about. I think we often work in the spirit of something in particular. We usually come up with most of our sound palette by experimentation and just generally messing around until something starts to peak our interest..

How do you feel your music has progressed in the time from ’03/07-09/07′ to ‘High Places’?
M: We’re learning not to force things; to let the compositions evolve in a more natural way. This has often resulted in slightly longer songs. I think of 03/07-09/07 as short experimental sketches, and the self-titled album as more of a complete work, like a novel with cohesive chapters.
R: I don’t think feel the need to embellish the songs with more and more layers, but still managing to keep it dense and enveloping of the listener..

Both ’03/07-09/07′ and ‘High Places’ have been about the same length, but do you think there is something about ‘High Places’ that makes it more of an “album” than its predecessor, or is it just all in the conception?
M: 03/07-09/07 was never intended to be an album. It was merely a way for us to catalog and to make available hard-to-find shorter recordings. We gave the collection the super dry title 03/07-09/07 to eliminate some confusion with that. The self-titled album is an intentional full-length; our first foray into the full-length world. We are such 7″ kids. It took us awhile to feel ready to tackle the intimidating task of crafting a complete, congruous longer format work. We weren’t interested in creating a concept record, but we wanted there to be an overall sonic and thematic tone to the album.

What was the writing and recording process for the album like?
M: We write and record simultaneously, so the album just kind of emerged out of the madness, taking on a tone and sound neither of us imagined before we began. Our process is quite meticulous and tedious. We would take breaks to walk around the neighborhood. As we got closer to finishing the record, the walks would get longer and longer as our insanity grew. I remember walking like 40 minutes (each way) to this ice cream shop that carries soy ice cream. We just had to clear our heads and talk about things other than music. We would often work into the wee hours of the morning; piecing together little snippets of sound, recording guitar duets, writing vocal parts, squinting at a computer screen. We both got new glasses when the record was done.

The cover art for your album is pretty amazing. Who did it?
M: That was a total Rob brainchild, although I believe I actually took the photo of the baby, and I might have initially suggested the ocean images for the inside gatefold. The back image is a self-portrait we took in a park in our neighborhood.

Mary – you appeared as a guest on the (IMO, fantastic) Hawnay Troof album recently. What was that like? What other artists are you particularly friends with/admiring at the moment?
M: VC (Hawnay Troof) is such an inspiration to me. That guy is always working so hard and he’s incredibly talented. I recorded that stuff while we were on tour in California and staying with VC. I feel pretty lucky to have a bunch of creative, prolific friends. It keeps me motivated and encourages me to work through my creative ruts. I recently recorded some vocal parts for Fred Thomas’ new project City Center. Also hailing from Michigan, Fred has always been this total musical powerhouse shaman to me. I would be interested to know just how many songs that guy has written. I know there was one day alone when he wrote 30 songs.
R: City Center, Silk Flowers, Soft Circle, Lucky Dragons, Crash Diet Crew, Grouper, KIT. THese are people who I have spent tight times with, and love and adore.

What’s your day-to-day life like as member of (Pitchfork-hyped, no less) musical sensation High Places? Amazing arty romp of wonder or fairly predictable grind?
M: When we are home, a typical day involves lots of talking to and snuggling with our cats, lots of food preparation and consumption, and lots of walking and biking around New York. We write emails and make phone calls and run errands like normal people, and that eats up several hours a day. We also collaborate on all kinds of projects: drawings and music and videos and paper snowflakes. We like to engage in some (incredibly mediocre, at least on my part) skateboarding. When we’re on tour, we try to schedule in days off to swim and hike and explore new towns. We like to sleep and take vitamins and eat healthy food. We’re totally not crazy ragers on the road.
R: I always feel like I’m trying to catch up to my brain, which is like 15 steps ahead. I feel overwhelmed a lot, but I am happy and stoked with my day to day life.

What are your plans for the future of High Places?
M: To continue to be best friends. To grow creatively together. To travel to crazy places.
R: New frontiers in vegan cuisine!

High Places on Myspace

Earlier this year, High Places, aside from touring to great effect with Liars and Deerhunter and picking up a good slice of Pitchfork hype, released (and I did a pretty rubbish review of, because I liked it but couldn’t think of anything significant to write) 03/07-09/07, essentially an expanded EP collection and precursor to this, their debut album proper, only admittedly one that is only 2 minutes longer than its ‘not quite proper’ cousin, just scraping the 30 minutes mark with 10 (same number as 03/07…) tracks worth of simple, cooing dub-pop songs.

Well, I say dub. High Places have lots of dub-sounding effects going on but none of that echoing bassiness whatsoever, just a drifty, drowned-nations bits-of-rainwater-dripping-off-massive-leaves-and-exotic-insects-frolicking incandescentness. When you break it down to its basic elements its almost shockingly simple- Mary Pearson singing sweetly over Rob Barber’s vague mix of processed slit drums-and-probably-over-stuff-too percussion, and then also theres some loops or something there too.

And what’s more it works. It really, really works. When it all comes together its something properly beautiful and absorbing, like going to an acquarium and then, even though its aimed at children, you know you see all these beautiful fish and it really *hits*, and when you were a kid you’d just go and run around and you wouldn’t really be all that interested in the fish, at least not the non-dangerous ones, but then you’re just there and here they are, these fish, and (like I said) it really hits. And you just get this amazing sense of the beauty and intangibility of nature, and how you can’t really explain or touch it, but just how much wonder and brilliance there is in creation. And that’s what High Places sound like. Closer ‘From Stardust To Sentience’ is just one affecting loop-as-key-to-perfection. And see *that’s* fantastic simplicity in action. The cover art is also spectacular. Looks a bit like the Fuck Buttons artwork. Only better.

Basically this is a really consistently ace and occasionally amazing album- perfectly short and addictively repeat-listenable, a soothing herbal ear-bath of comfort and fun. On the other hand, its almost exactly the same album as 03/07-09/07, just marginally tightened up. But still, don’t want to leave the review on a negative- I really like this album lots. How great is ‘Visions The First…’ too?
87%

High Places on MySpace

We liked them on record. But we loved them live. Wildbirds & Peacedrums occupy their own time and space, an amazing blend of folk tinged wonder with ethereal, almost chant liked vocals… We caught up with the duo of Mariam Wallentin and Andreas Werliin to find out if they could hack our 20 Questions…

1. Describe your sound in 3 words.
Free, raw, powerful.

2. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it?
Mariam:- Europe ” The Final Countdown” when I was 5 with my mother in the food store.
Andreas:- Michael Jackson “Dangerus” at the recordstore in Strömstad.

3. What’s the best cure for a hangover?
Fat food and coke and sleep and then another party.

4. What’s on your rider?
Nuts, fruit, red wine, local beer in bottles, lots of waterbottles and a vegetarian dinner.

5. How do you get ready for a live show?
Feeling out the space, getting a grip on it, so you feel that you can fill it up. Not eating to close to the show, that makes you to heavy and sleepy. Maybe a glass of whiskey. And a bit of focus and privacy like 1/2 hour before the show.

6. What’s your favourite song to play live?
A:- There is No Light
M:- Doubt/ Hope

7. What’s your guilty pleasure?
A:- I’m totaly hung up on racer bikes right now and have it on my mind all the time.
M:- Buying too many stockings in different colours.

8. Who would win in a fight, a stoat or a goat and why?
The goat, cos it have horns and can make a bloody mess with them.

9. Who’s your favourite new band at the moment? Tell us a bit about them.
A:- Orthodox – new spanish splendid band on Southern Lord.
M:- Little Dragon – groovy beautiful Gothenburg band.

10. Who would play you in a film based upon your life?
M:- a gorgeous manga cartoon girl.
A:- A musical with Christopher Walken.

11. Dead or alive, what 5 acts would play with you at a festival?
Maria Callas, Earth, Albert Ayler, Ornette Coeman and Mats Gustafsson Trio, James Brown, Diamanda Galas with a Big Band.

12. If push comes to shove, what is your all-time favourite album?
A:- Second half of Revolver.
M:-  Joni Mitchell Blue.

13. What’s your most memorable on the road story?
After our car burned down on an island outside Estonia, we had to drag the trailer by hand on to the boat to Finland.

14. If your life flashed before your eyes, what would be the highlights?
M:- Every cat I have ever met.
A:- My first handrail with skateboard.

15. What’s the best piece of advice someone has ever given you and did you take notice?
A:- Lean your back to anything and put your both feet to the ground, always.
M:- Breath.

16. If you had to leave a body part to science, what would it be?
A:- my feet couse they look so strange.
M:- my brain couse I’m so smart.

17. What’s the best book you’ve read and film you’ve seen in the last 6 months?
M:- book: Frida Kahlo (Walker Art Center), movie: BBC:s Planet Earth (DVD-box).
A:- book:The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector (Mick Brown), movie:BBC:s Planet Earth (DVD-box).

18. What three things could you not live without?
M:—pretty shoes—crispbread—my friend Malin.
A:—ipod——nail scissors—Nils Oscars brewery.

19. Tell us a fact about yourself we probably don’t already know.
M:- I’m lefthanded.
A:- I had to wear a canvas helmet when I was a kid beacouse of my uncontrolled running.

20. And finally, we’d like you to make us a mix-tape. Pick five tracks with a theme of your choice.
Guest apperences & collaborations of 2
Elvis Costello & Burt Bacharach – Close to You
Ornette Coleman & Joe Henry – Scar
Sunn O))) & Boris – Etna
Asa-Chang & Junray  -  Hana
Nancy Wilson & Cannonball Adderly – Old Country

Wildbirds & Peacedrums on Myspace

Is there a ‘Xiu Xiu scene’? You know, Xiu Xiu, Parenthetical Girls, The Dead Science… all distinct, yeh, but all still on some level cut from the same basic template- mewling feminised vocals, sense of high drama and trauma, atonal, often counter-intuitive arrangements… you know what I mean. But in the same way that Parenthetical Girls have a sumptuous, sickly, almost *poppy* allure that Xiu Xiu probably won’t ever have, so The Dead Science are the totally killer rock band that Xiu Xiu can never hope to be (and, in this case, I suspect they might even *want* to be, or at least that’s what they seemed to aspire to live).

Basically, I guess what I’m saying is that if there is a ‘Xiu Xiu scene’, then this is almost certainly the year they get overtaken on all fronts by their ideological cousins. I mean, ‘Woman As Lovers’ was good but it was nothing like as consistently dark and epic and *focused* as Villainaire here, and obv ‘Safe As Houses’ beats all anyway, except possibly the forthcoming ‘Entanglements’ which if ‘A Song For Ellie Greenwich’ is anything to go by should be the best record ever ever. But this isn’t a Parenthetical Girls review… (despite whatever shared members, naturally)

So anyway yeh like I said Villainaire is a pretty big album. ‘Monster Island Czars’ is pretty much where avant-rock and Stravinsky meet and start to beat each other up a bit as someone howls about the end of the world in the background. (PS: please don’t call me out on that Stravinsky reference if its hideously accurate, I actually know dick all about classical music) Opener ‘Throne Of Blood (The Jump Off)’ sounds like Xiu Xiu trapped inside the Doom soundtrack or something. Well, after the harp bit at the very start. ‘Make Mine Marvel’ recalls nothing so much as a man screaming at the edge of a cliff in a storm. The record is consistently, light-absorbingly dark (gold-on-black cover art so dizzyingly appropriate), the band themselves a tight core in the middle of a cast of some 12 guest musicians.

The arrangements are really quite fantastic actually. Occassionally something really alarming good will happen like the ‘dododododo’ weird… something (saxophone?) sound in ‘Holliston’ or how ‘Black Lane’ starts so pleasantly and flowingly with all the harps and jazzy drumming and then how Sam Mickens almost ends up sounding like Morrissey on it at times (“dililililling)”. Or just the mere fact the album is “dedicated in word and deed to the Wu-Tang Clan.” That’s interesting actually… I mean its hard to really see the *direct* influence of the Wus here but I guess its just as light-absorbing as ‘Liquid Swords’.

But, you know, I’ve given it nothing but praise thus far and still my score’s only 80%. This is because the score actually reflects how much I actively *enjoy* listening to the album which is quite a lot but not as much as I am impressed by it. Oh and it ends a bit abruptly too. So yeah. It’s a really good art-rock record anyway.
80%

TheDead Science on MySpace

John McEntire of The Mountain Goats once said of Bellafea‘s lead singer and guitar player; “You don’t see a stage presence like Heather McEntire’s more than a few times in your life, she’s unbelievable”. Quite a statement, coming from the great man himself. A perfect candidate then for our revealing 20 Questions.. Bellafea’s sonically intense new album Calvacade is out now on the fabulous Southern Records. You can download the album track ‘Depart (I Never Knew You)’ from our recent Southern Records compilation here.

1. Describe your sound in 3 words.
Dark. Dissonant. Driving.

2. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it?
The first cassette tape: Bruce Springsteen “Born in the USA”. It was given to me as a birthday gift. The first CD: Little Texas “Big Time”. I bought it in South Carolina at Camelot Music in the mall. Yes, I am admitting this.The first vinyl record: Carole King “Tapestry” and The Bee Gees “Best of – Vol. 1″. I bought them both at a thrift store.

3. What’s the best cure for a hangover?
Kombucha tea, Advil, and a run.

4. What’s on your rider?
That two thirds of us are vegan.

5. How do you get ready for a live show?
I stretch a lot. Drink tea. Warm my fingers up on the guitar and get my voice bending a bit. Then I’ll have a soda before I play for a some caffeine. Drink more tea. Watch the band before us.

6. What’s your favourite song to play live?
Probably a new song we’ve written that will be on our next album, called “Red Light”. Off of Cavalcade, I’d have to say “Walking Distance”.

7. What’s your guilty pleasure?
Disco. But I don’t feel so guilty about it these days.

8. Who would win in a fight, a stoat or a goat and why?
I don’t know what a stoat is, so I will say goat by default.

9. Who’s your favourite new band at the moment? Tell us a bit about them.
The Curtains of Night. They are from Chapel Hill, North Carolina too. I’ve been listening to them a lot lately because the label I co-run (Holidays for Quince Records) is releasing their debut record this fall and we’ve been earing the mixes. They are an incredible, doom-sludge metal duo. Nora and Lauren. Totally fierce.

10. Who would play you in a film based upon your life?
Well, I had a hard time answering this question since I mostly watch Ken Burns documentaries and couldn’t remember the name of the one actor I thought might have a fighting chance at figuring me out, but I asked my co-worker and she says Elijah Wood would make a pretty good Heather McEntire. Or maybe the scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. Shrug.

11. Dead or alive, what 5 acts would you have play with you at a festival?
Neil Young, Aislers Set, Nina Simone, Sleater-Kinney, The Bee Gees

12. If push comes to shove, what is your all-time favourite album?
Maybe it’s cheating, but I’d say Neil Young Decade.

13. What’s your most memorable on the road story?
On our first US tour back in 2003, Bellafea shared a van with Dear Nora and it broke down outside Colorado Springs, Colorado. We rented a van and made it to our Sante Fe, New Mexico show, but a couple of us – including me – volunteered to return the rental van to Colorado and pick up our van from the shop. About an hour into our drive back to New Mexico, the van broke down again – this time at 5pm on a Friday evening so all the mechanic shops were closed. Katy (Dear Nora) and I had no choice but to stay in this tiny town called Walzenberg for the weekend. The people there were so nice to us and put us up in a motel room for free and invited us to their town dance, which happened to be that weekend. We had so much fun! It was an incredible experience, even though we lost a lot of money on the van repairs and had to cancel a couple shows.

14. If your life flashed before your eyes, what would be the highlights?
Winning the local 4-H disco dance competition when I was 15, falling in love, meeting my best friends, starting a record label, learning from my grandmother Celia May Blackwell, being able to tour the world by playing music.

15. What’s the best piece of advice someone has ever given you and did you take notice?
My dad has always told me that as long as I have my health then I don’t have much to complain about. It’s kept my chin up in the darkest of times.

16. If you had to leave a body part to science, what would it be?
My lungs might be most useful.

17. What’s the best book you’ve read and film you’ve seen in the last 6 months?
Best book: Joan Didion – “The Year of Magical Thinking” Best film: John Cameron Mitchell – “Short Bus”

18. What three things could you not live without?
Running, the people I love, lessons learned the hard way.

19. Tell us a fact about yourself we probably don’t already know.
I love fried pickles.

20. And finally, we’d like you to make us a mix-tape. Pick five tracks with a theme of your choice.
This is coming straight from my Itunes and is completely random. I typed in “wait”, so the theme is “Waiting”. First five tracks:
1) Waiting ‘Round To Die – Townes Van Zandt
2) Martha – Tom Waits
3) How Long Do I Have to Wait – Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings
4) Wait Forever – The Swirlies
5) I Wait Around – The Clean

Bellafea on MySpace

A strange one this. Dianogah have spent 12 years doing mostly instrumental material headed by a two bass attack, throwing in some quality novelty song titles in along the way. “Indie Rock Spock Ears”, Check.Err… “A Bear Explains the Right and Wrong Ways to Put on a Shirt, Shoes, Pants and a Cap”. Check. Having not released anything since Millions of Brazilians way back in 2002, you could have been forgiven for thinking that they had ceased to be. It seems that after a rethink the band are back, this time with singing, a distortion pedal and a bunch of friends along for the ride.

Having built a reputation for their intensity both on record and on stage alongside the likes of Shellac, The Shipping News and Don Caballero, qhnnnl sees the Dianogah sound diversify. Opener “OneOne” is still anchored in the angular math rock of their past records, all layered bass and drums cutting through with Jay Ryan’s straining voice accompanied by pretty guitar lines. However, it is the triple whammy that follows it that shows the new found maturity in Dianogah. “A breaks B” begins with a looping bass motif and the signature taut drumlines before a half whispered, half spoken joint vocal begins. The delicate whisper of guest vocalist Stephanie Morris really lifts the songs here and gives the band another dynamic that has been missing from previous releases. Add to this the mournful strings supplied by Andrew Bird and you can see how far Dianogah have come. In counterpoint to “A breaks B” is the distortion laden “qhnnnl”, the heaviest thing Dianogah have done by quite some way, a big dumb thrash-out filled with pummeling bass lines. Following this with the delicate, Andrew Bird led “Andrew Jackson” serves to make the ferocity of “qhnnnl” even more apparent, as the delicate calm of Bird’s swooping string loops and gentle pizzicato couldn’t be further away from the thrashy noise that proceeds it.

Dianogah’s trademark bouncy bass lines re-emerge later in the record on “You Might Go Off”, which comes on like a more fun Fugazi, complete with chanted gang vocals and harmonized distorted bass solo. In “Puma” and “Song You Hate” this muscular and discordant interplay continues, the two basses competing with squalling dischordant guitars, whiIst all the time being kept in check by the phenomenally tight drumming. You could be forgiven for thinking this sounds overly serious, but when the band stops and break down laughing during “Song You Hate”, it is clear that they aren’t taking themselves too seriously. For a genre that has a propensity to be quite sterile, Dianogah have managed to stay true to their original sound, while incorporating new elements and layers that only add to the overall experience of the record. That they manage to make it sound like a great deal of fun in the process doesn’t hurt either.
78%

Dianogah on MySpace

Way back in time, before the BBC pilfered the charts for its incidental music, before The Lightning Seeds became the soundtrack to Goal of the Month on ‘Match of the Day’, and Sigur Ros soundtracked every other emotional experience pouring out of our screens, there was the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Set up to provide idents and atmospheric pieces for the radio, the assembled group were often called upon to create sounds that simply weren’t existent using traditional instruments. A burgeoning interest in tape manipulation, electronics and the ideas of musique concrete drew together some like minded individuals, including the likes of Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, David Cain, Bryan Hodgson and John Baker. Existing at a time where the UK and the world were simultaneously cautious about the outside world, and looking to the stars in both the space race and for entertainment, the strange, echoing, unearthly sounds coming out of the Radiophonic Workshop were perfect for the mood of the time. Although it is perhaps Derbyshire’s composition using a plucked string, 12 oscillators and a whole heap of tape manipulation that became the Workshop’s most recognised piece in the form of the Doctor Who theme, it often serves to belittle the important and innovative work coming out of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop at the time. The influence of their experiments in sound continues to echo through much of the electronic music we hear today. These two volumes of John Baker’s work represent the first major retrospective of a BBC Radiophonic artist.

Unlike some of the other members of the Radiophonic Workshop, John Baker was a classically trained musician, graduating from the Royal College of Music in 1960. A jazz pianist and composer, his background and interests made his productions some of the most melodic output of the workshop. In fact, he was privately critical of Derbyshire’s more academic approach, believing her to be more a mathematician than a musician. Volume One of this extensive collection focuses on Baker’s work with the Radiophonic Workshop between 1963 and 1969. Including a multitude of idents and themes from ‘Barnacle Bill’ (or, to many viewers ‘the theme from Blue Peter’) to the magnificently eerie ‘Dial M for Murder’, the fantastically named ‘Vendetta: The Ice Cream Man’ to ‘Women’s Hour (Reading Your Letters)’, which features the theme and Baker himself explaining how it was made using a sample of water being poured from a cider bottle, then cut and spliced together.

The explanations are fascinating, and only lead you to marvel at the ingenuity of the man, and the experiments in sound he was conducting. It is easy to forget, listening back 45 years later, that at the time this was THE cutting edge of music technology. In fact, many of the sounds and techniques pioneered here by Baker can be seen in the works of Aphex Twin, Fortet and the like, while Broadcast and Stereolab also clearly took a keen interest in his output. Although due to the short nature of jingles and idents this can make a slightly disjointed listen, it is a fascinating artifact, and essential listening for anyone remotely interested in electronic music.

Volume 2 collects Baker’s Soundtrack, Library and Home recordings between 1963 and 1975, as well as a collection of his Ad work. Less oppressive than the often brooding pieces in Volume 1, Volume 2 is a more personal affair, allowing Baker free reign to let loose his experiments, without a specific goal. Where Volume One shows techniques developing but often with naive, jaunty melodies, as befitted Radio programming at the time, the series of ‘Electro-’ are far more experimental and allowed to go for longer. With acid attacks, intricate loops and found sounds, as well as dub grooves and feedback experiments, in this collection Baker more or less runs through the entire experimental scene, just 40 years earlier.

Once again the likes of Squarepusher, Venetian Snares and Aphex would kill for some of the beats and squelches here. It is almost frustrating at times that such sounds are still treated to such ‘twee’ melodies occasionally, but the innovation behind the melody is clear. The experimental dubs are just dying for someone to sample for a killer hip hop jam. While Volume 1 was interesting as a collectors piece, Volume 2 works better as an album, with its longer periods of experimentation placed alongside Baker’s piano and jazz workouts, and the occasional frippery of an advert for ‘Omo’ Washing powder or the neo-classical take on ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’, which comes across like the Morecombe and Wise ‘Andre Preview’ sketch. That is not to take away from the quality of Baker’s jazz work however, as it is clearly accomplished. The fact that it is his jazz work that has been chosen to close the collection reflects Baker’s love for the genre. Also included here is an interesting obituary from Radio 4’s brief lives, which gives an insight into the man himself, the highlight being the revelation that in protest over the commercialisation of Christmas he made a recording of ‘Oh Come all Ye Faithful’ using only a sample of a cash register (although why this recording isn’t included in this collection is a mystery, and a frustrating one at that).

These collections show a visionary composer, years ahead of his time, as well as serving as a fascinating audio insight into the visions of the future of a bygone age. For anyone with a passing interest in experimental or electronic music these are essential purchases. On this evidence we can only hope their is more material to come.

Volume One: 88%
Volume Two: 90%

John Baker Tapes at Trunk