- Matthew Spencer
- Albums and Singles
Every music city in America has a group like the Second Family Band. Musicians will go to each other’s shows, hang-out, tour together, and maybe share rent on a house or practice space. Eventually they all end up in the same room together, jamming. Someone sets up a microphone, turns on the tape recorder and soon thereafter another album of "shadowy" group improv is set loose on the world. The Second Family Band matches the pattern, but with an important distinction: Their music is worth listening to.
Theorists would have us believe that improvisation is a democratic art, built on consensus through musical dialogue. It’s a wonderful ideal, but if a band isn’t air-tight there’s usually one or two musicians tasked with holding back anarchy. On Veiled Gallery the distinction goes to the banjo player and drummer (The musicians are not credited with any specific instrument).Together they supply the backbone of the album, an interlocking exchange of hypnotic riffing with the metronomic thud of a floor-tom. The arrangement is spacious, giving momentum while allowing the rest to drone, bleat, and squawk their heart’s content.
Typical to these communal jam-sessions is the drifting coherence and shaky performances that crop up occasionally on the album. This is not to say that Veiled Gallery is a mess. The recordings was edited by someone with an ear for the band’s strengths as wells as a sympathy for the audience. The Second Family may play on with ecstatic abandon, but the listener is, for the most part, spared from having to hear the musicians run out of inspiration.
Releasing improvised music used to be more of a gamble, but the proliferation of new distribution and recording technologies has lifted cost and labor barriers, making it easy and cheap for any odd group to get together, hash together a few songs, and then throw out product into an already saturated market. The Second Family Band avoids that cycle by judicious self-editing. When so many groups today trade in images of mystery, it’s good to listen to one that believes some things are best left unheard.
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- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
The title and content of this EP could be interpreted many different ways. For one, the seven short tracks were all built using a single household implement, such as a rubber band or metal pan. Second, the sparse, short pieces are prime sampling material for DJs and other artists, making the disc a "tool" for recycling. Regardless of its potential uses, the material makes for a compelling example of Ielasi’s ability to turn the mundane into the extremely listenable.
Although a simple premise, Ielasi needs only the most basic of editing to coax complex, rhythmic tones and textures out of his slew of non-musical instruments.For "Rubber Band," the simple plucks we’ve all played around with whilst bored at school or work are transformed into a snappy bass sequence that could be gleaned from a classic synth."Cooking Pan" develops into a deep, muffled, nautical beat that could be pulled off an old Monolake album, and "Aluminum Foil" utilizes the tiniest bits of metallic noises, panned around and cut into frail snare drum sounds, to rival some of the best glitch artists.
The final two tracks especially sound the most fully fleshed out, with layers of sound that ape real instruments very well."Tin Can" focuses on deep, echoed clinks to make the kick drum rhythm, but other sounds are nicely molded into reverberated snare hits."Paper Lamp" develops an organic, bassy percussion sound onto which high pitched echoes and squelchy sound effects are put atop.How this is all sourced from a paper lamp is a head scratcher, but I have no reason to doubt the artist's honesty.
It is rare that such an intentional concept piece such as this can make for a purely pleasurable listening experience, but Ielasi manages.Without any knowledge of how this was created, one would think it was a subtle, but complex suite of rhythmic electronic music.Knowledge of how the sounds were created simply adds to the pleasure and appreciation of listening, but is surprisingly unnecessary.
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On his second album, this young Russian artist, a.k.a. Marat Shibaev, continues his infatuation with the sparse, dub infested blend of minimalist electronic music popularized by the likes of Porter Ricks, but with his own personal touch. The result is just the right balance of repetitive electronic thump and abstract textural explorations.
Odysseia is heavily based on muffled, repetitive analog kick drum thumps and bassy synth pads, creating a murky nautical sound that feels as if it’s being played deep under the sea.The opening "Abyss" exemplifies this, with wave-like reverberated noises with the buried analog drums, but dynamic improvisational squelches present as well.The clash between the repetitive beats and ambience with the vibrant, abstract rattling creates a powerful synergy in which the track becomes repetitive without being dull, and chaotic without being formless.
Minuscule clicks and oceanic organ passages on "Polaris" keep this vibe alive, tossing waxy random sounds in amongst the otherwise repeating beats.Even the venerable 808 hand-clap sounds make an appearance in "Researches of Depths" within the deep kick drums and subsonic bass line.
While there is a comfortable familiarity with the 4/4 bass drum programming, Shibaev isn't afraid to tinker with the formula to try new things.The erratic rhythms and less obvious sounding drum hits of "Immersing" sounds more like an intentionally random scattering of sonic fragments within the sea.The more spacious "Solar System" focuses less on the rhythm and more on the textures, with wavy noise stabs and raw analog synth notes defining the piece."Mermaid" is similar in placing a greater emphasis on the deep minor chords, creating a darker, more claustrophobic sheen over the track.
Amongst the final two songs is where the dub influences shine through most."Spirits" is first and foremost a rhythm based piece, with the ambient textures scaled back to display the complex programming of the beats, utilizing appropriate amounts of echo and reverb.The closing "Reverberation" feels like a return to the surface after the deep explorations prior, with the less murky synths allowing the light to shine through.The result is not only more upbeat, but its treated rhythms and shaker percussion resemble dub in its most traditional form.
While the songs here do feel as if they have a definite formula to them, it is one that accommodates enough variables to allow them to develop their own identities, creating an album that feels thematically cohesive, but not overly repetitive.The rhythm programming is perhaps the most static element here, but even that has enough variation to keep the album fresh.What's here has been done before, but here it’s done well enough for this fact to be irrelevant.
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Unlike his previous works, which were often emphasizing sine waves and other synthetically derived sounds, Kosame is all about the world around us and the sounds of everyday life. Combining recordings of opening windows and boiling water with home made instruments and classic synthesizers, the result is a world of sound that may not resemble "songs" per se, but instead an aural study of our surroundings.
Ikeda has created this album to explore the concept of "yuragi," which roughly translates to "fluctuation."In this case, fluctuation in the sound of society, as well as fluctuation of instruments:the varying tonality of home made rubber and wood instruments, as well as the unpredictability of analog synthesizers.On "Kosame (Drizzle)" the various nuances of the human voice is used:Ikeda's reading of the novel Mizuumi is cut up and spliced to focus on the movements of the mouth and the sounds of saliva more than the voice being extruded.
On "Hakuchu (Daylight)," the old creaking sounds of the window in Ikeda's childhood home create the primary texture, mixed with birdlike flutters and clipped fragments of static bursts.With the frail strums and sparse arrangement, there is a nostalgic but sad color to the sound.The same emotions appear in "Marebito," which is dedicated to Ikeda's late grandmother.The bird-like synth chirps and mournful string plucks create a dynamic, but sorrowful series of textures.
Tracks like "Mikazuki (Crescent)" have a less emotional color to them, but provide the same quality of sound exploration.In this case, an empty champagne bottle is used like a miniature gamelan, creating percussive clinking sounds, and also as a reverb chamber to turn dripping water into cavernous noises, combined with hissing sounds from blowing on the bottle.The result is a sonic microcosm derived from a single instrument.
While "Seijaku (Stillness)" is based upon a singular common sound (the boiling of water), here it is juxtaposed with a variety of other effects and instruments to create a broader spectrum.The rattling and bubbling noises of boiling water change in consistency throughout, but are paired with tentative string notes from homemade instruments and the occasional bleeping synthesizer.The boiling is the focus, becoming more and more forceful as the piece concludes, but never overshadows the other sounds.The closing "Tobira (Gate)" uses the field recordings of Ikeda walking around, picking up wood and nails that are used to create an instrument used during the piece, leading to a subtle collection of friction sounds created between strings and nails. While it can be a challenging listening experience, Kosame on the whole is definitely a rewarding one.
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Guano Padano, assembled by Alessandro Stefana, features guests Alessandro Alessandroni (renowned whisteler of the immortal Ennio Morricone western soundtracks), Gary Lucas (Captain Beefheart/Jeff Buckley guitarist), Chris Speed (clarinet player with Tim Berne, Uri Caine, John Zorn etc.) and, last but not least, the legendary Italian singer Bobby Solo.
Guano Padano’s music is a kind of road movie, unfolding between the scorching asphalt of Highway number 4 and the juicy smells of the peasant festivals so common in the Pianura Padana. It’s a dreaming
mixture of rock, psychedelia, folk and country, jazz improvisations and Morricone hints. Alessandro "Asso" Stefana and Zeno de Rossi started to work together some years ago while playing in Vinicio
Capossela’s band, of which they are still steady members. For this trip they are joined by Danilo Gallo, a double bass player with a dark, meaty, gutsy style, who has shared with Zeno various adventures
merged in El Gallo Rojo collective, one of the most interesting experiences of Italian underground and independent jazz.
LP version limited to 500 copies.
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Featuring Can’s Jaki Liebezeit on drums along with Helmut Zerlett and Dominik von Senger amongst others, on Phantom Band’s eponymous debut they try to bring the new musical frontier of '70s Germany into the then sprightly '80s with varying degrees of success. This mixed bag of krautrock-cum-world music lacks the punch of their Freedom of Speech album but acts as a fitting introduction to the group’s brief career.
Liebezeit’s fondness for Jamaican-inspired rhythms and instrumentation are apparent from the offset with "You Inspired Me," which sits somewhere between Westernized exotica, saccharine lounge jazz and a krautrock drift. The end result is not as unpleasant as the previous sentence reads; despite it sounding dated, the band play with enough feeling to not upset the music. The same can be said of most of the album, although occasionally the Phantom Band dip into some cheesy self-indulgence such as some of the guitar playing on "I am the One" or "Rolling." Even within the most cringe-worthy moments, there is still something worth latching on to. In the aforementioned "I am the One," von Senger unleashes a beautiful guitar solo just over halfway through that is worth any amount of unnecessary noodling.
Liebezeit’s brief moment to shine occurs on "Phantom Drums," a dizzying array of overdubbed percussion which takes in as many unusual and unique sounding percussive instruments in its brief existence as possible. This leads into the album’s zenith, "Absolutely Straight," which sees all of the Phantom Band lock into a serious, meaty groove. The bouncing bass line of Rosko Gee anchors the soaring guitars to the unearthly pulse of Liebezeit’s drums. The same levels of excitement are captured in the dying moments of the album with "Pulsar" which sounds the most like what modern ears would consider krautrock but with a more fashionable production for the time.
Overall, this album is enjoyable but sounds very much of its time from the production down to the instrumentation (particularly on pieces like "Without Desire," which is almost painfully outmoded). This is not necessarily a bad thing but I must admit I find it a little too '80s for my tastes. At times I feel like I am listening to a recording for a particularly adventurous set of session musicians who have been given some studio time in exchange for playing Phil Collins' backup band. However, knowing that the fantastic Freedom of Speech was also created by the same players reveals this album to be a dress rehearsal for the real performance.
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I am ashamed to say that I slept on this volcanic French ensemble's woefully underappreciated and face-melting debut album when it came out, but I have since embraced them as one of the finest purveyors of squalling guitar noise around. With this, their second formal full-length, the quintet expand the borders of their expected firestorm into some darker and more idiosyncratic territory. Such an excursion deeper into the outré is hardly surprising, however, given that Joëlle Vinciarelli collaborated with My Cat is an Alien just a few months before this album was recorded (it is impossible to imagine that anyone could spend time with the Opalio brothers and not emerge with some interesting new ideas about how music can be made). The results of that evolution are a bit of a mixed success here, as the band's more simmering and lysergic side yields some interesting results, but sacrifices the awesome visceral power of their more explosively kinetic moments.
The album opens in extremely promising fashion, as the title piece erupts from the speakers with a flurry of skittering drum fills, blown-out bass rumble, and a howling cacophony of guitar noise.I am always a huge fan of wild, virtuosic drumming and Talweg's Eric Lombaerd absolutely kills it on "A Quiet – Earthquake Style," unleashing an absolute earthquake of his own on the kit that would make Chris Corsano proud.With that totally unhinged foundation, the rest of the band could probably play just about anything and it would sound cool as hell, but the full-on noise assault that results is a particularly impressive one rich with scrabbling strings and strangled feedback.There is one twist that separates the piece from characteristically explosive business as usual, however, as there are some queasily hazy and swooping vocals that are reminiscent of Roberto Opalio's voice-as-instrument falsetto.That touch only surfaces on this one piece, though a MCIAA-esque use of toys as a sound source surfaces throughout the album as well.The latter fits quite seamlessly into the band's sound, however–far more significant is the decision to eschew drums on "Heavens Cover The Abyss" and "Memory Awake."I can understand the motivation for that decision though, as Lombaerd's hurricane of limbs makes it impossible for the rest of the band to explore nuance and subtlety.When Lombaerd's drumming is absent, I definitely miss it, but "Heavens Cover the Abyss" is nevertheless an eerily haunting and ingenious foray into ritualistic-sounding drone, as the central theme of dissonantly wraithlike guitars moaning and keening above a murky throb is bleakly beautiful.
The following "Some Ghastly Fright" continues that flirtation with vaguely ritualistic and occult-sounding drone, as a chant-like voice drifts over a smoldering ruin of shuddering and sputtering guitar noise.Lombaerd returns to his kit, but in conspicuously restrained form, embellishing the smoldering sea of distortion with a slow-motion tumble of thumping toms.It is quite an excellent piece, inverting the band’s characteristically feral formula into a slow-burning rumble that culminates in a crescendo of grinding and crumpling metal.The closing "Memory Awake" is the most dramatic departure of all, however, as squiggling and squirming synths unfold and distort like a deeply lysergic horror movie soundtrack.It actually sounds like the work of a completely different band altogether, which is a bit perplexing, but it is a strange and intriguingly hallucinatory piece nonetheless.
A Quiet – Earthquake Style is generally more of an experimental and transitional work than an unambiguous success, but I definitely appreciate that La Morte Young have avoided repeating themselves and found some curious and unexpected ways to expand their aesthetic boundaries.They were just a bit too ambitious in those regards than would be ideal, as most of the album conspicuously avoids playing to band's strengths.I have already mentioned my appreciation for Lombaerd's virtuosity, but Thierry Monnier and Pierre Faure (both from Sun Stabbed) are truly gifted architects of sculpted guitar noise and all three seem to focus their talents elsewhere for much of the album.That said, I still enjoy A Quiet – Earthquake Style quite a lot, as La Morte Young seem to put a lot more work into their albums than similar bands.That is not to say that I have any problem with Keiji Haino's passion for spontaneity or The Dead C's deliberate slovenliness, but it is a legitimately pleasant surprise when a noisy band makes such a concerted effort to edit and mix their cacophony into something that feels like a thoughtfully constructed album rather than a mere document of a performance.La Morte Young are an excellent band and they record all too infrequently, so I am glad they are so focused when they surface.As far as I am concerned, their first album remains their definitive statement (and an underheard classic), but Earthquake Style is an appealing and welcome broadening of La Morte Young's scope.
 
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The news of this intriguing collaboration delighted me, as Klara Lewis has carved out quite a wonderfully idiosyncratic and incredibly constrained niche over the last few years by largely avoiding any recognizable instrumentation. Consequently, I had no idea at all what would happen when her surreal collages collided with Simon Fisher Turner's formidable talents as a composer. As it turns out, a pure collaboration resulted, as Care does not particularly resemble either artist's previous work. Instead, it feels like several divergent albums have been deconstructed, warped, and obliterated to leave only some lingering shards in a shifting and hallucinatory fantasia of drones, textures, and field recordings. That fundamental disjointedness can admittedly be a bit challenging at times, but Care ultimately comes together beautifully with the lushly rapturous closer, "Mend."
From the first moments of the opening epic "8," it was abundantly clear to me that Care was going to be quite a bizarre and disorienting experience that would sidestep just about every expectation that I had.That statement is not meant as unambiguously rapturous praise, as my mind was not instantly blown or anything–the album simply takes a very different path than I imagined.For example, I have always found Lewis's collages to be tightly and meticulously crafted, yet "8" is an extended dive into a fog of amorphous, drifting, and abstract phantasmagoria.It does not have anything remotely resembling a conventional structure or even anything resembling an unconventional structure, as nothing is constant at all.Instead, it feels like I am floating weightlessly through an ether of ghostly drones, vaporously indistinct voices, and submerged song-fragments that is unpredictably and jarringly disrupted by stuttering and jackhammering deconstructions of sultry dance anthems.I doubt I would even describe it as having "dream logic," yet it is still a strangely compelling piece solely because the duo manage to make seemingly benign snippets of pop music feel lysergic and haunted.While I have personally never died, "8" feels like an eerily uncanny evocation of what the final mental spasms of death might be like: near-silence mingled with occasional intrusions of real ambient sounds like voices and birds, as well as colorfully vivid and ephemeral blasts of disjointed memories.
The following "Drone" is considerably less of an uncategorizable mindfuck, initially resembling a brooding and throbbing dip into Fisher Turner's soundtrack work.At some point, a strange harmonica- or hurdy-gurdy-like motif emerges and it seems like something more significant might cohere.That proves to be an illusion, however, as the piece instead dissolves again into a mysterious coda of crackling noise.Elsewhere, "Tank" takes a somewhat similar trajectory, blurring together moody cinematic atmosphere with eruptions of noise and dreamlike snatches of field recordings from far-away places.Of the two pieces, "Tank" fares a bit better at achieving a kind of "hallucinatory travelogue" feel, but I still cannot escape a nagging desire for the duo's fragmented entropy to cohere into something more structured in a lasting way.Instead, Lewis and Fisher Turner just conjure up the occasional fleeting glimpse of a surreal and vivid vista that quickly dissipates back into abstraction.The album's sole exception to that tendency is the swooningly lovely closer "Mend."Like the rest of the album, "Mend" is composed of just a few simple pieces precariously held together, but differs from them in that the woozily squirming central theme is quite a strong one and it remains constant.In fact, it even steadily builds as the piece unfolds, gradually transforming from an undulating, liquid drone into a vivid crescendo of swirling and howling tendrils.There are also some crackling and enigmatic radio transmissions in the background to deepen the experience, but the real magic is the main theme itself, which constantly heaves, shudders, and sways like a massive, slow-moving snake.
I am always a bit confounded when an album features one piece that this on a completely different plane than all of the others, as I tend to wonder if an artist just decided to release an album to showcase that one piece or if the other pieces were also intended to be great in a way that somehow eludes me.Given the caliber of the participants here, I have to assume it is the latter, especially since "8" displays an extreme attention to detail and sound design.The uncharitable interpretation would be that Lewis and Fisher Turner had some excellent but divergent ideas and the only way they could seamlessly bring them together was by completely obliterating them into kaleidoscopic fragments.The alternate possibility is that the duo set about making a boldly experimental headphone album that feels more like a memory virus than a series of structured compositions: intriguing, sharply realized forms erratically appear only to disintegrate, dissolve, or get pulled apart until they are just another part of an enigmatic and living fog of real and imagined sounds.If so, that was a great idea, though I remain perplexed by the execution.For now, I merely like that unapologetically abstract side of the album, while I absolutely love the more conventionally structured "Mend," but I am open to the possibility that the rest of the album will someday grow on me if I immerse myself in it long enough.
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Ghostly International Signs Justin K. Broadrick's (aka Jesu/Godflesh/Techno Animal) New Project Pale Sketcher; Album Due August 24th
ARTIST: Pale Sketcher
ALBUM TITLE: Jesu: Pale Sketches Demixed
CATALOG NUMBER: GI-118
LABEL: Ghostly International
FORMAT: CD/Limited LP/Digital
RELEASE DATE: August 24, 2010
01. Don’t Dream It (Mirage Mix)
02. Can I Go Now (Gone Version)
03. Wash It All Away (Cleansed Dub)
04. The Playgrounds Are Empty (Slumber Mix)
05. Tiny Universe (Interstellar)
06. Supple Hope (2009 Mix)
07. Dummy (Bahnhoff Version)
08. Plans That Fade (Faded Dub)
For fans of heavy music, Justin K. Broadrick is a household name. After stints in seminal UK grindcore band Napalm Death, industrial/metal outfit Godflesh, and dark dub duo Techno Animal (with Kevin Martin of The Bug / King Midas Sound), Broadrick re-emerged in 2002 as the leader of Jesu, a shoegaze-like metal project. Broadrick’s newest–and, to many purists, most controversial—venture is Pale Sketcher , in which the artist replaces guitars with synthesizers and drums with machines, but maintains his penchant for bleakly beautiful sounds.
Ghostly International is proud to release Jesu: Pale Sketches Demixed, the debut full-length by Justin K. Broadrick's Pale Sketcher alias, on August 24th, 2010.
Pale Sketcher didn’t begin to manifest until the 2007 Jesu release Pale Sketches, which compiled an album’s-worth of tracks that didn’t quite fit the Jesu mold—skeletal, synthesizer-laced compositions that relied more on subtlety and atmosphere than guitar-based sturm und drang. Broadrick continued to tinker with these songs, “de-mixing” them until they barely resembled their originals, forging a sound that was unlike anything in the Broadrick universe.
Interestingly, as Broadrick has moved from more traditional signifiers of heaviness (aggression, guitars, volume) towards their opposites (melancholy, computers, texture) his music has only gotten deeper and more affecting. In that way, Pale Sketcher may be Broadrick’s heaviest work to date.
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Freedom of Speech bursts with tons more energy than the group's debut. Whereas the first Phantom Band album seemed to meander with more style than substance, here the group have a target to use the sharp edge of their music on. Although not a perfect record, this is head and shoulders above their debut as they finally manage to fully integrate their new world music influences into their tight, groove-based music.
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Freedom of Speech bursts with tons more energy than the group's debut. Whereas the first Phantom Band album seemed to meander with more style than substance, here the group have a target to use the sharp edge of their music on. Although not a perfect record, this is head and shoulders above their debut as they finally manage to fully integrate their new world music influences into their tight, groove-based music.
Immediately a thundering, military rattle on the drums heralds in "Freedom of Speech" which features some mind-boiling electronic murmurings in addition to an instantly untrustworthy monologue which promises that "your government will not interfere." Cold War paranoia and Orwellian fears permeate the music, giving it the gravity it needed badly. "Brain Police" throws an idea of Frank Zappa's into a completely different perspective in the context of the time and place in which this album was performed. Just across the border, the Stasi were acting out the nightmare hiding in Zappa’s words.
Unfortunately, Freedom of Speech is not without its faults with my chief concern being Sheldon Ancel’s vocals which sometimes seem passionless compared to the music being put out by the rest of the band. On "Relax" he attempts to (hopefully) lampoon those creepy self-help cassettes that thankfully have seemed to have disappeared. However, all he manages to do is ruin a fantastic piece of music; the drifting guitar and synths cascading over of Liebezeit’s heartbeat-like drumming. On "Trapped Again," Ancel sounds like a bad actor, again detracting from what would be a better instrumental piece. Yet, despite my misgivings with these pieces, Sheldon does a great job otherwise. His delivery on "No Question" brings to mind Ian Curtis’ early demo recordings with Joy Division, full of vigor and vitriol and on top of the post-20 Jazz Funk Greats pop of "Dream Machine," it is hard to imagine another singer doing a better job.
Much like Phantom Band’s first album, Freedom of Speech sounds of its time. However, although I can place it in a timeline based on how it sounds, it rarely comes across as dated. The group tapped into a mood which echoes on today: an oppressive curtaining of Europe which cut friends and family from each other, a wall both physical and political. The music resonates in the same way as the first wave of krautrock captured the revolutionary feeling of the late '60s and early '70s. The actions are long consigned to history but they reverberate on in the art of the day.
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