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Fortune exists as both a film and an album. It is an expressive portrait, but doesn't adhere to any obvious narrative; rather, it's a comfortable space that the viewer can move in and out of, dreamlike and immersive. The 11 new songs on this LP or CD don't require visual accompaniment - Damon & Naomi have constructed the sequence to communicate through sound alone - but at upcoming performances the duo will be presenting them live as a soundtrack to Naomi Yang's "silent" film.
People often talk about Damon & Naomi as if they’re the raw infrastructure that remained after Galaxie 500 fell apart, a steel skeleton still stubbornly standing after an earthquake. But when Damon & Naomi began a new project, they weren’t adjusting so much as starting from scratch. By the time they released More Sad Hits, they had grown enough as musicians and songwriters that they didn’t need to lean on stark sincerity and reverb-drenched emoting. Instead, they reined in their sound, favoring acoustic over electric, building more complex and specific textures, and exploring smaller sonic spaces. If Galaxie 500 was ahead of its time, Damon & Naomi are prescient in their own way, firmly rooted in the early ‘'90s but hinting at things to come. The project provided a necessary platform for the pair to focus, hone, and build on the groundwork that they laid for themselves, peeling away layers to reveal a shy closeness that Galaxie 500 never could.
The pair’s latest project, Fortune, is an LP released in tandem with Naomi’s video piece by the same name. Naomi Yang refers to the work as “a silent movie,” though the visuals are so bound up in the music (and vice versa) that it’s more of a long-form music video, a visual poem set to the metronome of a textural score. She conceived of the piece to explore conflicting feelings surrounding her father's recent passing; Yang was suddenly burdened with a massive archive of his artistic work (her father was a photographer), as well as the ongoing aftermath of flawed parenting. Her use of the term "fortune,” then, is tinged with sardonicism but also with nostalgia—portraits from the 1940s and '50s painted by protagonist Norman von Holtzendorff’s father (also recently deceased, and who also left his archive in Norman's hands) feature prominently. An ongoing tarot card motif ties in another facet of the suddenly slippery term "fortune," using Damon & Naomi's now familiar brand of close, acoustic warmth to explore the past’s bearing on the future: "I want to be over / To touch and be gone / Forget this amnesia."
More information can be found here.
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WIRE
Blogging 3:46 // Shifting 3:17 // Burning Bridges 3:17 // In Manchester 2:42 // High 1:52 // Sleep-Walking 7:31 //
Joust & Jostle 2:12 // Swallow 4:17 // Split Your Ends 3:31 // Octopus 3:16 // Harpooned 8:23
As some might have noticed "on the internet", Wire are announcing a new album — simply called WIRE — for release on 13th April [UK] and 21st April [USA].
The album features songs which you may have heard at live shows, along with some brand-new ones.
You can stream the track "Joust & Jostle" on pinkflag.com and pre-order from pinkflag mail order. The album will be available on CD and vinyl.
Here's the press release
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Right from their inception in 1976, back in the first stirrings of punk, Wire went about making music in a subversive, conceptual way, setting themselves apart from both their peers and their influences.
“I had this idea that I wanted to avoid things that had a particular kind of tradition,” explains singer and guitarist Colin Newman. “I thought the three-chord trick was too simplistic and that the one-chord trick would be better. Or the two chord trick where the second chord is definitely not the right chord.”
Bass guitarist and vocalist Graham Lewis identifies another trait that has run throughout the group’s lifetime. “People said we were mysterious, arch and dark. But the only way of doing that successfully, is by also having a sense of humour. You have to have that balance. With Wire there’s a peculiarity, a contrariness and that can be funny."
This questing approach has permeated Wire’s songwriting, their onstage presentation, even the decision, back in the 80s, for Robert Grey to strip his drumkit down to just bass drum, snare and hi-hat. And it has served them well in guarding against repetition and cliché. In context, Wire’s last album, 2013’s aptly titled Change Becomes Us was another case of “Expect the unexpected”, as it found them extensively reworking a rich cache of material abandoned amid a temporary break-up in the early 80s.
Their 13th studio album - simply titled Wire – comprises material that was written with the album in mind, but toured extensively first, as well as songs that Newman introduced to the group in the studio just prior to recording. The idea was to get the most spontaneous reaction possible from the musicians, and far from the rough and ready results one might expect from such a tack, Wire is full of swooning pop melodies with a 60s tinge and an irresistible, near motorik rhythmic momentum. One can recognise certain melodic inflections, guitar and bass motifs, and drum rhythms from Wire’s idiosyncratic vocabulary but it has a remarkable freshness.
The basic tracks were recorded at Rockfield Studios near Monmouth, with overdubs added at Brighton Electric last December following the group’s DRILL : BRIGHTON Festival. The 11 tracks selected for release were the ones that came together most naturally.
From the outset Wire was an alliance between four very different characters and continues today with the addition, in 2012, of It Hugs Back guitarist Matthew Simms, who is around thirty years younger than the other group members. “With Matt there was a really new dynamic that had appeared in the group’s sound and that was something we wanted to capture, utilise and be creative with,” says Lewis.
Wire is the first album where Simms has been involved in formulating the material from the ground up, but when the group’s particular chemistry starts working he is now very much part of the process.
“With ‘Sleepwalking’, I don’t think we even ran all the way through it before we recorded it.” Newman says. “Wire do this thing so well and there’s instant atmosphere. There’s my rhythm guitar, Matt playing lap steel, Graham (Lewis) playing bass with effects – there’s as much effects as bass - and Rob’s tolling drumming. It was already almost sustainable for six minutes with just that.”
Lewis also provides most of the lyrics for the album, their subject matter encompassing love songs, cryptic narratives and coded messages. One time, Newman asked Lewis to send over some unfinished, unformatted text so he wouldn’t be bound by what to use for the chorus. This material spawned two songs written on the same day, ‘Split Your Ends’ and the droll ‘In Manchester’. The latter has one of the album’s loveliest melodies, but it’s no coded paean to the city in its Baggy heyday. Instead this process led to the disorientating and rather absurd situation of having “In Manchester” as a soaring chorus, when the song is not about Manchester beyond a single line in the lyric.
As the album progresses, some of the sunlit pop tunes become more shadowy and it ultimately plunges into the musical black hole of ‘Harpooned’, eight churning minutes of the group’s darkest, most abrasive music to date, and a favourite in live performances since 2013.
Big money offers have been made to Wire to become part of the Heritage Rock industry, to get the original line-up back together and play only 70s music. These have all been unequivocally turned down. Fun though that might be, why plant yourself firmly back in the past when you are making new music this potent with the promise of more in the future?
“The point where our personal narratives meet is all about change - moving on and keeping it interesting for ourselves,” says Newman. “We’re in it for the long haul and this is a one-way trip.”
Wire will be launched by the fourth event in the band's DRILL series entitled DRILL : LEXINGTON - five nights (14-18 April) at the Lexington in London with Wire headlining, plus a different "curated" support each night. This will be followed by a UK & US tour. Further dates & events will be announced soon.
Text - MIKE BARNES
DRILL : LEXINGTON
Can you believe we are already on the fourth incarnation of the DRILL : FESTIVAL? So far we DRILLED in London, Seattle and Brighton, hosting over 150 artists, including Swans, Savages, Toy, Earth, British Sea Power, Courtney Barnett, Youngfathers, Helmet, These New Puritans, and many young, upcoming bands. DRILL : FESTIVAL is, we think, unique in that it has no specific location, timing or format, and so we can encompass multi-venue, wristbanded events like DRILL : BRIGHTON and single venue events like DRILL : LEXINGTON. Presented by WIRE in conjunction with The Quietus & The Lexington (the team that brought you DRILL : LONDON), the concept is Wire headline every night with a different and carefully chosen support that will give each date a different flavour. This harks back to the event which spawned the whole DRILL : FESTIVAL concept: two nights in the Lexington, in November 2010, with Factory Floor and Lonelady. DRILL : LEXINGTON runs from 14-18 April at The Lexington, London.
We will be announcing the full line-up of DRILL : LEXINGTON towards the end of the month. Meanwhile, tickets are already on sale here.
6- MUSIC FESTIVAL
As well as all this activity in April, May and June, there will be a short burst of live action from the band this month with three UK dates culminating in an appearance at 6Music's festival. The festival appearance will be in the main concourse at the Sage in Gateshead. Tickets are already long ago sold out; however, as Wire are playing on the main stage, we will be filmed for red button and BBC YouTube inclusions. Anyone who knows 6Music will know they make a very big deal of their festival, so expect to hear rather more of Wire on the staion than you are accustomed to! Colin will alo be appearing on their show The First Time with Matt Everitt. The show is broadcast on Sundays but will be recorded in front of a live audience at the festival on Saturday, February 21st.
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And finally…
This newsletter and the website are complementary resources. To keep abreast of Wire and all its doings, we recommend checking Pinkflag.com regularly as well as being signed up to this mailing list.
All the best,
Pinkflag
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"That's the most intense fear and feeling--when you go to a show and you're actually scared," says Oliver Ackermann, guitarist and frontman of Brooklyn trio A Place To Bury Strangers.
"Or you can palpably feel the danger in the music," adds bassit Dion Lunadon, "Like it's going to fall apart at any moment and the players doing it are so in the moment they don't give a shit about anything else. They're just going for it. It's a gutter kinda vibe; everything about it is icky and evil and dangerous."
The same could be said the band's fourth album, Transfixiation. Rather than fixate on the minute details like they may have done in the past, the group, rounded out by drummer Robi Gonzalez, trust their instincts and try to keep things as pure as possible. Music is much more exhilarating when it's unpredictable even on repeat plays, and this is very much an unpredictable record. Gonzalez makes his recording debut with the band here, and it's obvious that he's helped pushed the band's recordings closer to the level of their infamous live shows.
"The one thing we have in common is this fire when we're playing," adds Gonzalez. "I don't know; it's real intense."
More information can be found here.
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Live Knots, Oren Ambarchi’s first release for PAN, presents two live realizations of "Knots," the epic centrepiece of his Audience of One (Touch, 2012) release. Built on the interplay between Ambarchi's swirling, guitar harmonics and the metronomic pulse and shifting accents of Joe Talia’s DeJohnette-esque drumming, the piece merges the organic push and pull of free improvisation with an overarching compositional framework.
"Tokyo Knots" presents the complete recording of a duo performance of the piece by Ambarchi and Talia recorded at Tokyo's legendary SuperDeluxe in March 2013. The performance builds gently on the foundation of Talia's insistent ride cymbal and the shifting tonal bed of Ambarchi's rich overtone-drenched guitar, eventually going into a free rock free fall of buzzsaw harmonics and crashing drums. From within the maelstrom, Talia picks up a pulsing motorik rhythm that leads the piece back to where it began, with the addition of the shuddering, elastic tones of a hand-played spring reverb unit.
"Krakow Knots," recorded live at Unsound Festival in Krakow in 2013, works with the same basic structure but stretches it out to nearly twice the length and adds strings played by the Sinfonietta Cracovia, led by Eyvind Kang on viola. The strings expand the piece's textural range with lush chordal blocks, uneasy dissonances and occasional Ligeti-esque swarms of micro-activity, the swelling string tones intensifying the ecstatic nature of the piece as it moves towards its mid-point crescendo in which Ambarchi unleashes a particularly malicious continuum of stuttering harmonic fuzz. The strings then enter with a series of swelling chords, announcing the piece’s final movement, and reaffirming the uniqueness of the tonal and compositional language that Ambarchi has patiently developed over the last two decades, in which the influence of post-minimal composers such as Alvin Curran, Gavin Bryars and David Behrman can be felt alongside the inspiration of raw free jazz, harsh noise and academic psychoacoustics. The final moments of the performance pit Talia and Crys Cole's amplified objects and spring reverb textures against a field of gently gliding string glissandi before the audience erupts in much-deserved applause.
– Francis Plagne
More information can be found here.
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Behold is the second collaborative release from Oren Ambarchi and Jim O'Rourke following on from the 2011 release Indeed. Seamlessly blending field recordings, electronics, guitar, drums and other acoustic instruments into a subtle combination of Krautrock, minimalism and classic free flowing electronics.
Side A takes the listener into the Fourth World adventures pioneered by Jon Hassell whilst the flip seems like an unlikely pairing of Krautrock aesthetics and the slow building repetitive structures of The Necks.
This is sharp, focused contemporary music, one where minimalist motifs meet maximalist tendencies. Behold is another landmark recording made by two of the most enthusiastic experimental explorers active today.
More information can be found here.
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Konsul Gnadenwalze is the alter ego of two gifted musicians. On stage they combine energetic live shows with minimalistic visuals. Aside of the performances they are creating their own elaborate Konsul Gnadenwalze universe. A lovely mixture of pseudo-scientific and poetic references. They create dub-wise broken beat abstractions, beautiful and brutal, organic and mechanized at the same time. Each successive listen reveals new depths, pulling you further into the world of Konsul Gnadenwalze. A wired carousel ride with the ancient question of whether we revolve around our environment, or our environment revolves around us.
More information is available here.
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TL/DR - this is what I do for fun. Don't stress on it.
Six years ago I took stock of the vampires and creeps that populate the 'independent' music industry and figured that there was nothing there for me anymore. The whole thing could blow it out its copious arse.
Thing is, music industry isn't music, which I love and need and would still make if the last person on earth. So that wasn't going to stop.
I love these guys, but they get all anxious if you mention any year past 1980 something and, you know, I ain't dead yet. So I just did my music. The weird thing being that I started to get jealous of my old self.
Man, that guy got all the praise, the smug bastard.
Maybe I should have been working on some grand project that would throw music into the future but I like to listen to strange pop songs and so that's what I have made. For the longest time I didn't think they were worth sharing and then realised that was more pretentious than just putting them out here.
In a industry where every fool claims to be a genius all I am going to say is here's my new tunes. I have reworked them 1000x each and have to stop.
I also have to warn you I have had time to set up some puzzles and hidden things to find!
More information can be found here.
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Western Songs marks the first time Nathan Amundson is releasing music under his own name. This record is his first for Silentes, and features two side-long late night instrumental guitar jams evoking the vast, arid landscape surrounding his home state of Colorado.
More information can be found here.
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Rick Bishop picked up a new guitar in Switzerland, and by the time he got to Tangier, these songs fell out! Of the moment and in and out of time, the Tangier Sessions demonstrate how far a guitar can carry a man who knows how to ride one.
More information can be found here.
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Soul Jazz Records' new "Punk 45" album charts the rise of underground punk in the midwest city of Cleveland, Ohio, which for many people is the true birthplace of punk music in the mid-1970s.
Featuring a fantastic collection of punk 45 singles from Cleveland groups including Pere Ubu, Electric Eels, The Pagans, Rockets From The Tomb, Mirrors, X–X and more.
The album comes complete with extensive text written by Jon Savage as well as exclusive photos and original record artwork. CD comes with large booklet and thick slipcase. Vinyl edition is on deluxe gatefold double-vinyl complete with with free download code.
The album follows on from Soul Jazz Records' earlier Punk 45 albums about USA and British punk (Kill The Hippies! Kill Yourself! and There Is No Such Thing As Society), pre-punk (Sick On You! One Way Spit!) as well as the deluxe cover art book Punk 45.
Extermination Nights in the Sixth City coincides with the release of as a second album about Ohio’s early punk scene, Burn, Rubber City, Burn! – featuring the music scene of nearby Akron.
More information can be found here.
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Lee Bartow, the de facto head of Theologian (and previously Navicon Torture Technologies) has never shied away from creating intense music. The newest release, the two disc, two and a half hour plus Pain of the Saints is daunting in both its sound and its epic length. With regular members Matt Slagel and Fade Kainer, Theologian includes a variety of collaborators on this set, resulting in a complex, sprawling bit of sinister noise.
One aspect of Bartow’s work as Theologian distinct from his time as NTT is a greater sense of composition and structure, and amidst the darker, chaotic moments of this record lie some conventional melodies and rhythms.He blends distorted rhythms in the layers of aggressive noise on "Of Foulness and Faithfulness," channeling the earliest forms of industrial before blowing things out with harshness. The churning low end and martial rhythms of "Redemption is an Impossibility" at first are in league with the early 1990s Tesco sound, before Theologian shifts things at the last minutes into a rhythmic EBM sound that sound like an excellent tribute to Skinny Puppy circa 1987.
Much of these two discs lie in some realm between ambient film score and harsh noise, fitting into neither category too easily."Iron Pierces Flesh and Bone Alike" has Theologian leading off with sweeping, film score like synths and buckets of reverb, shifting into a harsher conclusion with a bit of percussion thrown in.On "With Eternal Derision", the open ambient electronics get paired with a dentist drill blast of electronic noise, which stays grounded in dissonance, made more intense by the heavily processed vocals.
The most effective pieces are, for me, the ones that see the project channeling the religious/blasphemy themes of the album most overtly.On "Piss and Jism," Bartow and company bury a dour melody under an overdriven grind, like the profaning of holy music."Their Gelded and Rapacious Hearts" also effectively functions as a mixture of light, almost reverent music with dark, distorted noises and sinister sounds.The set closer, "Self-Flagellation as Faith" (featuring Barren Harvest’s Jessica Way on guest vocals) presents her heavily processed voice and live percussion.The first segment, led by Way, has a more liturgical feel, while the latter half, with Bartow's vocals, goes entirely demonic.
Even at this massive duration, there are few moments that feel like filler or unnecessary.Some of the pieces, such as "Gravity" or "Suppuration" are more than competent synth heavy noise works, but when compared to the more innovative and unique moments throughout the set, they are less captivating.
Pain of the Saints is gripping for almost all of its long duration, and it definitely makes for an intense record.Again, Theologian is one of the projects that disprove that myth that all noise music is just distortion pedals and screaming.It is a rich and devastating record that works brilliantly, with Theologian mixing a variety of textures and moods, though the latter are mostly variations on dark.Coupled with a strong sense of composition on the part of the artists, it makes for a brutal, yet wonderful work.
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