30 May 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

The album starts with a soda can being opened: the click of aluminum as the tab is pressed down, the tsssh sound of carbonation being released into the air, the hissing fizz of cola. It ends with the sound of the can being crushed and thrown to the ground with a rattle and clunk. In this caffeine-fueled, densely layered and politically charged audio collage, we are taken on a ride through the billion-dollar advertising campaigns for Pepsi and Coke, the vagaries of the cola wars, celebrity endorsements, and torture. While Negativland are not generally known for their catchy hooks, upbeat rhythms, and memorable lyrics, Dispepsi remains a great "pop" album.

Seeland Records

Negativland are known best for their visceral reinterpretations of the media sphere. Their sample-based masterpieces, heavy on the spoken word, are gathered from every conceivable source: broadcast radio, television, movies, commercial and promotional recordings, homemade family tapes and other even more obscure sources. These are handled with the same meticulous precision as a surgeon or forensic pathologist. The metaphor of pathology is an apt one as much of their creative energy has been used to dissect the psychotic and antisocial tendencies of gun toting capitalists, corporations, and media conglomerates. When Dispepsi came out in 1997 it was a focused critique against the advertising campaigns and policies of soda giants Pepsico and the Coca-Cola Company.

On the cover and spine of the album the title "Dispepsi" is not displayed coherently. The letters making it up were discombobulated into anagrams including "Pedissip" and "Ideppiss." A 1-800 phone number was given in the liner notes that had a recording where the proper name of the album could be heard. All this was a safeguard, albeit a thin one, against trademark infrigement and the possible law suits that might ensue had they shown the actual title. Amazingly enough this is one album the copyright critics didn’t get sued for.

While there are plenty of moments of noise, weird sounds, and chaotic collusions on the record, the majority of songs are marked by strong hooks and catchy melodies that get stuck in my head as easily as the advertising jingles they mimic and mock. I am glad Negativland are engaged in subverting corporate messages. They have spent so much time denouncing the culture of advertising that they have a thorough grasp of its mentality. This psychological knowledge could have been more profitably channeled towards selling useless products, instead they spent two and a half years crafting an album that has given me countless hours of pleasure. I listened to it repeatedly just after it came out, and I still put it on a few times a year even now. When initiating new listeners to the vast territory that Negativland has explored this is an album I always start with.

"Drink It Up" paints in the greater landscape of pre-packaged beverages with lines like "when Diet Rite to me is wrong, my Country Time’s expired, my Minute Maid is an hour long, my Maxwell House won’t get my wired, when my pet milk turns on me, and my Five Alive is dead…" on through numerous other permutations. Then the triumphant chorus rings in, "and my mind just turns to Pepsi, and I think of it a lot, my Swiss Miss wasn’t pure, and Kool Aid isn’t hot, when a wall of smoothies rough me up, I’ll turn to a bigger cup of Pepsi, drink it up." One of the main themes on the album is the use of celebrities in advertising to sell products. This starts on "Why Is this Commercial?" with the voice of Michael J. Fox saying, "Hi I’m me, I’m using this to sell you this." It loops and repeats, lodging deep in my mind. The song continues to describe the corporate policies that determine how advertisements tend to use African-Americans in only traditionally perceived roles that are by extension racist—hence Uncle Ben and Aunt Jamima—that white people can remain comfortable with, but not in those that expand the parameters. It continues with a sample of athlete Herschel Walker and ends with a quote that Michael Jackson was paid five million dollars to star in two 90 second ads.

The cult of celebrity is explored in even more depth on "Happy Hero," a song that was remixed and included on the thematically related Happy Heroes EP. Thanks to Mark Hosler this tune has an almost country-western vibe that casual listeners would find appealing. The lyrics, however, reveal a deep concern with how superstars and other famous people can be convicted of atrocious crimes—both public and private—while still retaining the naïve loyalty of a fan base who are always willing to overlook the fact that these people beat their wives, have sex with underage children, or commit murders. "The Greatest Taste Around" has a wonderful children’s rompous room beat as the voice of Dick Lyons, reads out fun lines like, "I got fired by my boss" and then a loudly sampled "Pepsi" interspersed, before saying "I nailed Jesus to the cross" all in a happy tone that makes me thirsty for soda. Another highlight of the album is "Aluminum or Glass: The Memo," where the Weatherman poses as an ad exec coaching his underlings on how to shoot the perfect commercial, or what he calls "a heightened reality vignette." The videos made for some of these songs on the DVD Our Favorite Things are likewise continuously entertaining.

At times the music of Negativland can feel suffocating as it is so saturated with media samples. I can only imagine how painstaking the process assembling it all together was for the band, but it was certainly worth the effort. Other ambitious concept albums have floundered, this one remains strong, and its artistic statement ever more pertinent in a world flooded competing commercial messages. Dispepsi has a smooth and satisfying finish that has yet to go flat truly making it "the choice of the Negative generation."

samples:

• Happy Hero
• The Greatest Taste Around
• Bite Back

 

30 May 2010

John Kealy

Albums and Singles

This split 10" EP pairs two great examples of contemporary bands carrying the grindcore torch into the 21st century. Both Drainland and Grinding Halt modernize the genre in different ways; one slows it down to a menacing crawl and the other keeps the tempo up while challenging the genre’s clichés. Together, the two sides of this EP make for some heavy and thrilling listening.

De Graanrepubliek / Shove Records / React With Protest / Suburban Mayhem

The crushing grind of Dublin’s Drainland has gained significant momentum since my last exposure to them (2008’s cassette release Year One). While the influence of Swans has always been apparent—the band are named after one of Michael Gira’s solo albums—only now has it been fully subsumed into Drainland’s messy assault. Like wading through quicksand laced with broken glass, tracks like "Rebuilding Salem" are difficult to get through but exhilarating when you find yourself on the other side, safe and relatively unscathed.

However, Grinding Halt from the Netherlands offer nothing in the way of asylum. While their name might suggest metal of a plodding nature, in reality their music is quick and turbulent. The three songs included all threaten to mangle the stylus of my record player with their violence. While I do not speak Dutch, I find the vocals fantastic and delivered with such fury; the singer is far from being simply another "extreme vocalist."

I usually find split records to be fairly one-sided but in this case, both bands bring a lot to the table. The only problem with this 10" is that there is not enough of either band, I want more of both.

 

23 May 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Prins Thomas's solo debut full length is a long, evolving, synthesized dream shuffle through some heady landscapes. His expertise makes sense of the fluid mind-body connection in the music of dance, psychedelia and German electronica.

 

Full Pupp

I can't pretend to be up on all the roots of this album, so those who want a map leading from the influential dance music producers in Detroit, or NYC, across the UK, through the myriad side-alleys of so-called rave or house culture, and all the other sub-genres, to this Norwegian craftsman have come to the wrong place. Prins Thomas creates great clarity from disparate sources and manages to let some of the reference points in his music remain elusive. He layers and mixes sounds in a way that is far from obvious. Part of the fun is in allowing the mind to wander beyond the obvious beats to a place where his little nods to, say, surf guitar, Tamla Motown, 1960s French pop, space rock, or film music, may reveal themselves.

If this music does indeed belong on a dance floor, then it is one which resembles one of those moving walkways at airports, except that this walkway extends for miles, into and out of darkness and through a terrain that is always evolving. I stress the headphones and trippy qualities of this album rather than the party-starting capabilities, because these sounds mostly take my mind anywhere but to a dance floor. Instead, they pick me up and dump me down wells, at sex change operations, on the autobahn doing 140 mph, and at dull suburban barbeques. Most of all they put me back on the night shift at a cookie factory making robotic movements near a conveyor belt but with my mind travelling anywhere else: along wet leafy paths, into lovely dark pubs, up huge sand dunes, out into a crisp bright winter day, into someone's arms, on ferries, up some ancient stone steps, away from it all.

The album begins strongly with "Orkenvandring" appearing to lead to a weirdly fluid world where The Archies have fused guitar tones from Roxy Music's "Avalon" onto the "Sugar Sugar" beat and invited Neu! around to speed things up. The good thing is that Prins Thomas doesn't repeat that exact same trick. For contrast, he often includes a minute of fade out or a few seconds of compressed sound at the end of these long tracks. This acts as a palate cleanser for the next piece. Thus, the handclap rhythms on "Uggebugg" stand out, snap the potentially catatonic state, and prepare us for transportation to an eight minute tribal gathering where bush-bound African ghosts beat on wood as they watch surfers glide across waves, clouds and off into space – or something like that.

"Slangemusikk" (or "snake music") weaves tapping and slippery synth rhythms to conjure how I imagine falling down a bottomless well might feel: at first dark and disconcerting but giving way to a feeling of almost slowing down as eyes adjust and observe impossible carvings or gummy footed creatures on the passing bricks. "Sauerkraut" starts out over-repetitive and flat. Doubtless that gut feeling or subliminal neck-jerk came from some bad experiences with the actual vinegary mush swilling around inside, because the track very quickly evolves into a satisfying dish of multi- rhythmic sumptuousness, seasoned with some lovely splashes of guitar, trumpet and clavinet. Like several of the songs it maintains a constant pace yet also seems to alter speed, getting faster in a lovely way reminiscent of the drumming at the end of Scott Walker's "Such A Small Love."

The first three minutes or so of "Wendy Not Walter" are a bit of a dull throb best forgotten: the musical equivalent of a discussion about golf or hunting with a group of loud men in ill-advised shorts at a mind numbing social gathering. The track is obviously a nod to the gender alteration of W. Carlos and, sure enough, several minutes of twinkling synths follow and bring about a satisfying change. The pace picks up and new elements are revealed; a rescue of sorts from the trapped-with-bores-at-the-barbeque feeling.

After five tracks (and more than 40 minutes) of all this rolling around in psychedelic shimmering shape shifting beats, "Nanosket" has a welcome heavier beat and also (discounting some indistinct moans in an earlier track) a warm, human voice humming along. After three minutes or so, the piece begins a slow dissolve into a brief fading dream of pedal steel guitar. This bleeds into the twinkling guitar and gently gurgling intro of "Attiatte" which has such a clear resemblance to Kraftwerk's "Neon Lights" that a nostalgic teary feeling bubbled up inside me. The audio clip (included) cannot do justice to the wallop that this piece eventually packs.

If Prins Thomas's music lacks anything it is perhaps a sense of sex. No offense to any emerging class of artificial intelligence but while these rhythms do have a robotic grace and are adorned in some alluring mystery, something raw and beautifully flawed may be missing. Of course, at times humans appear to behave like machines and sometimes want music to match. The mirror image of this is that the robotic sounds can seem more human all the time. But even if that image looks great, you probably wouldn't want to sleep with it.

samples:

• Slangemusikk
• Uggebugg
• Attiatte

23 May 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Diane Cluck seems like more of a force of nature than a mere singer/songwriter. She is the rare archetypal artist (without ironic quotes) though whom something pure and true flows, a category in which I’d also include folks like David Tibet, Jandek, and Christina Carter. It doesn’t quite matter which genre such people inhabit, as the sheer force and otherness of their personalities is enough to be compelling regardless of how they cloak themselves in artifice.

Important

2003’s Oh Vanille/Ova Nil was Diane Cluck’s fourth album and her reluctant first for an actual label.Prior to its 2005 reissue on Important, all of her albums were self-released with handmade packaging, an arrangement she was quite happy with.Recording and selling albums is quite simply beside the point for Diane, as she is perfectly content to record only when she feels inspired and derives much more satisfaction from playing live anyway.

I can certainly see her point, as the first time that I saw her live I was utterly transfixed (a truly rare accomplishment for someone holding an acoustic guitar).Nevertheless, her recorded work enables her to use multiple vocal tracks to harmonize with herself, which is one of my favorite elements of her work.She has such an unusual and powerful voice and such an intuitive understanding of how to wield harmony that she can transform seemingly mundane lyrics like "you belong to no one, you are easy to be around" into something fraught with urgency and hidden meaning.Notably, Cluck did not waste any tracks during the recording of Oh Vanille on fleshing out the instrumentation: the vocals are the song, and her acoustic guitar merely serves as its skeleton.It’s a smart move aesthetically, as music like this needs to be raw, intimate, and organic to connect with maximum impact.Also, using only an acoustic guitar creates an illusion of detachment from the present time that serves the music quite well.

The aforementioned "Easy to Be Around" is the album’s most immediately gratifying song due its incredibly strong melodies (it even somehow managed to wind up on the soundtrack to Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding).Atypically, however, that song is great despite having lyrics that aren’t among Cluck’s best.In general, the most stunning pieces are those where the melodies and the lyrics both connect.The finest example of this is "The Turnaround Road," which manages to make simply sitting at the edge of a road sound like something incredibly dark, harrowing, and profound ("There are snakes I have been warned about, there's rattlers in this roundabout- they come in from the chaparral, they crawl beyond the gravel now").At such times, it doesn't seem like Cluck sat down and wrote a song, but rather that she was absolutely consumed by a feeling that she later managed to shape into something song-like.The final two tracks ("Yr Million Sweetnesses" and "Wild Deer At Dawn") are also quite wonderful, though less cathartic.In fact,"Wild Deer" even shakes up the instrumentation a bit, adding a somber harmonium for the crescendo.

Of course, being a great artist is not necessarily the same as being an infallible one.Sometimes Cluck is able to articulate her intensity to devastating effect, sometimes she misses the mark (though she is never, ever trite or lightweight).Also, listening to an entire Diane Cluck album from start to finish can be a pretty draining and uncomfortably intimate experience ("Have I told you how I like to see a man submit to ecstasy, with all his inhibitions free, and moaning like his mother?"). On a song-by-song basis though, she can be absolutely untouchable and Oh Vanille/Ova Nil contains some of her finest work (though Countless Times makes a strong case for itself as well).

Samples:

• Easy To Be Around
• The Turnaround Road
• Wild Deer At Dawn

 

23 May 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

After years of hearing about the mythical NWW but never actually hearing them, I finally broke down and ordered this album (then an expensive import) when I was 19. Despite the kitschy title and cover art, I was still completely caught off-guard by the cartoonish and self-indulgently absurd music within and immediately dismissed it as something so dreadful that probably only a Zappa fan could like it (I remember trading it to a used record store for a Carcass album or something later that same week). Many years later, with a somewhat broader mind and some increased context, I decided to give it another chance.  I still find it cartoonish and willfully annoying, but it's also kind of crazily inspired.

Untied Diaries

The scene that Sylvie & Babs most consistently evokes for me is this: I’m at a somewhat upscale party in the 1960s.I’m dressed (quite suavely) in a tuxedo, sitting at a table in a shadowy corner sipping a martini while watching happy couples dance.About halfway through my drink, the room begins to swirl and the sounds of the party around me begin to warp and bleed together and I realize that I have been poisoned.As I slump from my chair and consciousness ebbs, everything around me becomes increasingly hallucinatory and fractured.As I fade further, my increasingly misfiring synapses begin to trigger all kinds of irrational memories and nonsensical impressions, ranging from chicken commercials to Frank Sinatra to the goddamn "Dragnet" theme.Then it all goes black. End of album.

My original (and current) impression of this album was that Stephen Stapleton just cobbled together a bunch of discarded snatches of unrelated recording sessions and unified them after the fact with a previously thought-up fictitious big band concept.The "big band" in this case being The Murray Fontana Orchestra.Given the improbable size of the "orchestra" (almost fifty members, including folks like Edward Ka-Spel, pre-Foetus Jim Thirlwell, and William Bennett), it seems pretty unlikely that the album was pieced together entirely from actual "Sylvie and Babs sessions."More likely, Stephen just looked around his studio one day and started incorporating bits of stuff that he liked into his current work from the mountains of tapes surrounding him, both from his own work and from various formal and informal collaborations (cannibalizing 1984’s Nylon Coverin’ Body Smotherin’ EP in particular).Of course, it is fun to imagine that there were actual full-band sessions and that dozens of underground musicians and artists descended on Stapleton's studio en masse for the explicit purpose of making a surrealist tribute to the Rat Pack era and that he then hacked the resultant recordings into unrecognizable, disjointed oblivion.

Regardless of how it all actually unfolded, the album was originally intended as a perverse collage plundered from samples of much-maligned ‘50s easy listening and exotica.Stapleton spent a lot of time scouring used record stores for raw material, but ultimately wound up using very little of it (though "The Monster Mash" makes a conspicuous appearance).Instead, the final product seems to be a disorienting mixture of seemingly random samples of commercials and songs, deranged off-key recreations of various standards, anachronistic field recordings (jackhammers, pigs, etc.) and general NWW studio detritus.This is a very much an "everything but the kitchen sink" album: somewhere along the three-year recording process, Stephen decided to abandon thematic consistency in favor of just tossing in literally anything that amused him.

Yet somehow it all seems to work: many people have incorporated Dadaist absurdity and surrealist jump-cuts into their music in the 25 years since this album’s release, but no one has quite managed to shape them into such an oddly mesmerizing flow as Stapleton has here.Whether he threw all the elements together randomly, intuitively, or according to the rules of some mischievous surrealist game, it is obvious that Stephen cared about the material and sincerely wanted to make a good album rather than mere dumping ground for odds and ends.It must have been an extremely long and frustrating endeavor to hack and sculpt the massive, jumbled mess into something (relatively) coherent using early ‘80s recording technology, but he managed to pull it off to quite an impressive degree.

While a bit primitive and half-baked when compared to more fully realized later works like Soliloquy for Lilith, Sylvie and Babs is nevertheless one of the most memorable, playful, and fascinating albums in the NWW oeuvre (though a decidedly unrepresentative one).The sped-up classical music and "Dragnet" snippets still strike me as a bit stupid and overly slapstick, but they also serve to show a side of NWW that has seldom surfaced since.It may be a bit flabby and unfocused at times, but few (if any) other artists could’ve woven capricious contrarianism, low humor, bad puns, endless non-sequiturs, and chaos into such a satisfying whole.

Samples:

• You Walrus Hurt the One You Love
• Great Balls of Fur (excerpt one)
• Great Balls of Fur (excerpt two)

 

 

23 May 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

The methods used by Jonathan S. Podmore and Peter Hope on Dry Hip Rotation were quite oblique as far as strategies go. Storming the studio with little more than a few scrounged AKS synths, a violin, harmonica, and whatever else happened to be lying around they managed to smash together their art punk masterpiece in a mere six days, presumably so they could rest on the seventh. The majority of the music produced on the album does not even come from sources generally thought of as musical instruments. Everything from a Creda 400 tumble drier to toilets and scaffolding pipes are used (Joe Meek would have been proud). The outstanding lyricism and vocal performance of Peter Hope coupled with Jonathan’s tape loops (several meters in length) make for a riveting listen.

Klanggalerie

Formerly a vocalist for The Box (members from Clock DVA) Peter Hope circulated in the same Sheffield milieu as did Cabaret Voltaire. In 1985, the same year The Box became defunct, he recorded the 12" Leather Hands with Richard H. Kirk. As fun as that was he was still looking for a sound he could call his own, something totally original. Jonathan S. Podmore showed up right on time, on Saturday the 14th of June 1986 to be exact. Peter had been invited to sing at a show that night. In an introspective mood he sat despondently on the steps of Sheffield City Hall, lamenting the fact that there was no suitable music to accompany his poetic vocals (think of a bard who sings not of the old gods, goddesses and heroes, but of dreary canals, murdered husbands, needles, knives and fatal workplace accidents). Jonathan approached Mr. Hope at this moment with a tape in hand. Somewhat of a stalker (or maybe just rabid fan) he said, "I have secretly followed your career and feel this may be the time for you to consider the music I have composed." The humble cassette was passed to Peter, in a scene reminiscent of two Freemasons shaking hands, only in this case it was not the grip that was secret, but the sounds on the tape. "I shall meet you here again in two hours - if you wish," Jonathan said before disappearing. Two hours later he returned having listened to the sounds that Jonathan S. Podmore had produced with his arcane METHOD. A friendship had been forged, and Peter now had the accompaniment he needed for the evenings performance, a Rock Against Racism gig featuring New Order and Cabaret Voltaire.

A record company had offered Peter a grand to cut an album, which he accepted. What is amazing is that he was left to it without any oversight. I am glad there wasn’t any because it surely would have interfered with the unrestrained creativity that Jonathan and Peter exhibit on Dry Hip Rotation. The limitations imposed on them by a shortfall of equipment pushed them forward creatively as they experimented with what was readily available. The opening "Kitchenette" is barbaric, murderous, and lots of fun. The rattle and clatter of percussive cutlery and baking tins gives the song a propulsive drive. Disturbing sounds, suggestive of a garbage disposals whirling blades cut through the mix, as Peter sings "disposing of the husband while consoling the wife" with redolent charm.

The next song "Canal" begins with a slurch of dirty water. TV voices full of tinny chorus fade in, creating a sense of dread isolation. (A television is on in the background to fill the silence of a flat. News shows are watched for entertainment but the fear they provoke exacerbates the disconnection people already feel between each other.) Meanwhile some others drift down a canal whose banks are made of paved concrete on a raft "lashed together with chicken wire." Multi-tracked vocals allow Peter to sing in the round with himself as the boys "go into the tunnels". Listening to this song I can become an urban explorer and spelunker without any of the nasty bits: rats, rusty nails, foul water. "Dry Bone" is a more sparse arrangement with only a few treatments added to a recitation that starts off slow and proceeds towards the spastic, as Peter hits notes more shrill than usual for his low deep voice.

"Needleheat" is the perfect antidote to the current plethora of advertisements for antidepressants that have become so ubiquitous, as he belts out "pills for ills and ills for pills. Pills to alleviate the drug induced ills caused by those who make these pills". The prepared piano tinkles away in a mode that is as manic as it is minimalist. Other bell-like sounds chime away in a pleasantly unnerving melody. "The Unknown Industrial Fatality" is one of the most memorable songs of the disc. The gregarious saxophones bubbling throughout imprint the piece with a happy go lucky feeling made all the more ironic by a vocal style suitable for infomercials and slick advertising. (Peter Hope could be a good voice over artist.) The sound of whirling blades returns and synthetic metal grinders as he describes the danger an industrial worker could be in if his attention slips from the dangerous processes at hand. Suffice it to say that when the frayed edge of his clothes gets caught in the blade the worker meets his grisly end.

By working their own method this album from 1986 has weathered very well. It was reissued at the tail end of 2009.

samples:

• Kitchenette
• Needleheat
• The Unknown Industrial Fatality

 

23 May 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Taken from a live performance at the impressive St. Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh last year, this collaboration sees Colin Potter teaming up with Michael Begg to create everything from a rich, heavy blanket to a delicate spider web of sound. Over the course of the performance, they continually force us to shift our attention as they move across a range of soundscapes. Unnatural vibrations collide with vaguely recognizable field recordings, making a sublime hybrid between the real world and a fantastic alternative to day to day listening.

Omnempathy / ICR

The recording manages to convey the echoing environs of the performance; the reverberation in the cathedral nearly playing as much of a role as either performer. The sounds generated and processed by Potter and Begg are exaggerated by the acoustics of the room and illusions are commonplace. The apparent church organ that appears early on in the performance during "Carnethy" may instead be a disguised guitar (as alluded to by Begg in an interview prior to the performance). These illusory tactics go further than the sounds on the album; the picture on the cover depicting stylish lampshades turns out to be a bunch of men’s vests with light bulbs shoved inside them.

At times, the music accumulates into a thick black rain cloud, promising to unleash an unearthly tempest. On "Braid," the sound of running water and the bass-heavy drones together sounds like a bonfire burning and we are stuck at its center as listeners. Yet, it is not all a foreboding storm as the duo sculpts delicate forms out of the found sounds and instruments at their disposal. The melancholic, deconstructed guitar of "Harper Rig" snakes around itself to produce a twisting and gorgeous mass of sliding notes; sitting somewhere between the soundtrack without a film beauty of Stars of the Lid and the grittier explorations of Begg’s main project Human Greed. The way the duo dance between these disparate moods without breaking the flow of Fragile Pitches is not surprising considering their previous work (both apart and together with Fovea Hex) but it is still impressive.

The limited edition of Fragile Pitches comes with a bonus disc containing the pre-recorded music that was played in the cathedral before and after the live performance. At over an hour long, it is a substantial addition to Fragile Pitches but by no means prolongs the album to the point where it is an endurance test to listen to it all. "Lymphoy: A Precise Flight" lacks the rounded edges of the cathedral’s acoustics but allows a clearer look at Potter and Begg’s compositions. Reminiscent of Nurse With Wound’s The Memory Surface, there is less variation here compared to the actual performance but the focus is now on the microscopic textures that give Fragile Pitches its personality. The gradually evolving and slowly moving waves that underpinned the live performance are given the spotlight and they are as interesting like as they are buried under the various other sounds that the duo used.

Although it is a live album, Fragile Pitches never truly feels like it happened here on earth. It has a wobbly, hazy presence throughout as Potter and Begg straddle the border between here and a place where an M.C. Escher drawing is taken as a blueprint. Each time I finish listening, I feel like I have been on a journey but like a dream dissolves upon wakening, my memories of where I have gone dissipate into the void Potter and Begg have just vacated.

samples:

• Carnethy
• Maiden's Cleugh
• Lymphoy: A Precise Flight

 

23 May 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

For their latest full length album, the Ohio trio have nudged the controls of their vessel and changed course for new sonic territories. The character of their music has remained unchanged, they use the same synthesizer and guitar set up, but the form in which they present it is not the familiar waves of cosmic debris that populated albums like Solar Bridge or What Happened. Here they have adopted a more melodic style which has resulted in a more accessible but equally thrilling body of music.

Editions Mego

Two things stand out on Does It Look Like I’m Here?: firstly, the trio has opted for many shorter tracks in place of their usual long form approach to writing music. Secondly, whereas before the synths and guitar melded together with only the occasional separation of the instruments, here they occupy their own distinct places in the mix. Together, these alterations to the Emeralds formula have resulted in a distinct shift in style and mood with surprisingly miniscule loss of the group’s musical identity in the process.

The first few minutes of the album are a surprise as, in lieu of the krauty waves of synth, Emeralds instead sound like the music that accompanies the menu of a video game like Final Fantasy VII or the old Zelda games from when I was a child. On "Candy Shoppe" there are simple melodies, clear notes and a bright, cheery mood permeating through the music. This is not the Emeralds I know but I am still drawn in as I have been many times previously. This happier side of Emeralds runs throughout Does It Look Like I’m Here? as pieces like "Double Helix" (which sounds like the ecstatic offspring of Tangerine Dream’s Ricochet and Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygène) and "Now You See Me" explode with colour and joy.

Both John Elliot and Steve Hauschildt’s skills have developed a lot over the last couple of years; the more complex arrangements of the synth elements of the music bring a huge amount of depth to this album. The glistening keyboard shimmer of "Genetic" stands testament to their skill. It is hard not to become hypnotised by these gorgeous tones and just when it feels like it cannot get any better, Mark McGuire’s perfect guitar lines come in to complete a picture that defies the laws of geometry.

When in full swing, Does It Look Like I’m Here? is tremendous and certainly ranks among the trio’s best work (it impresses me how they keep raising the bar with each release). Even the patchier moments pale only in comparison to the rest of the disc, on an older Emeralds album they would fit in better. "Shade" is a case in point, it is fine by itself but does not have the same vigour as most of the other pieces on Does It Look Like I’m Here? Yet despite these occasional missteps, there is little here to find fault with as the group have successfully developed the remit of their music beyond drones and washes of sound.

samples:

• Candy Shoppe
• Genetic
• It Doesn't Arrive

23 May 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

On his second album, Andreas Brinkert (aka Bipol) is clearly working in a modern industrial context, but one that is somewhere between the experimental abrasion of the "true" genre and the more popularized distortion-and-drum-machine set as well. The outcome is one that is caked in the dirt and muck of noise, but has a definite beat and occasional melody slithering through.

Ant-Zen

Like many people (I'm assuming), my introduction to this deep, dank world of experimental and noise music began with the likes of Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly, and other artists that became labeled "industrial" with the passage of time.So, I do feel a twinge of nostalgia when I hear what sounds like a broken 808 clicking alongside the buzzing chaotic noise of "In The Name of the Workers," and the junk metal percussion sounds and almost melodic synths only add to that feeling.The rhythm of "My Challenge" sounds like an '80s synth pop track re-sequenced to a complexity the hardware probably couldn’t have handled 25 years ago, and pulls it under a bed of grimy keyboards and indecipherable voices.The result is a dense, heavy mix of sound that is definitely a lot to take in, but not alienating or overly challenging, just complex.

The air-raid siren melodies and crusty bass drum pulse of "Talk About My Scream" alongside vocals screamed to the point of absurdity do feel more in-line with what the kids these days are doing with their industrial music, but the structural complexity keeps it from being just bland jackhammer noise."Confusion" does the aggro-industrial thing as well, mixing gurgling bass lines, broken voices, and drum beats that sound more like kung fu flick sound effects than anything else.Conversely, "In My Hand"'s rudimentary heavy rhythms and careful use of abstract noise channel the early industrial of Cabaret Voltaire or SPK (before either one went the club-friendly route) to great effect.

While the album never really relents, "It Makes Me Sick" allows for a bit of breathing room, even amongst the metal-tinged percussion and brittle synths.The sparse, but heavy rhythms of "The Menacing Kiss" somehow manage to be both abrasive and ambient:it's a whole bunch of noise, but in such a way that it's not fully dominating the mix.The album's weakest link, in my opinion, is "Contest of Devotion."Beginning strong with obtuse steel drum passages, dramatic synth flourishes, and a bit of glitch texture, the track feels like it never hits its stride, as if it’s ready to break out any time into a great blast of electronic aggression, but it never does.

This definitely is an album that commands full attention, because the amount of shit being thrown out at any given time is occasionally oppressive, but never uncomfortable.While some music can be comfortably be playing whilst reading or writing or conversing, this isn’t one of those discs.Instead, the noise and chaos, but all presented over a complex rhythm and structure, are simply too much to ignore, but is well worth focusing on.

samples:

• In the Name of the Workers
• Talk About My Scream
• Confusion

 

23 May 2010

Albums and Singles

It's a good thing for this album that Ellen Allien is in control of what gets released on the Bpitch Control label, had anyone else submitted this snooze-fest as a demo it undoubtedly would be rejected. Were Berlinette not in my personal top five or so faves of electronica albums of the last decade I probably wouldn't be so harsh, but Dust truly is a stinker.

Objectively Dust suffers from an identity crisis. It's an album molded to the pop format: 10 songs that average about 4.5 minutes each, but stylistically it's attempting to be a collection of music for the dancefloor: faithful beats with very little instrumentation and vocals. Subjectively Dust is plagued by compositions that are weak, bland, uninspiring, and forgettable. There's no hooks here: nothing to hold on to, and while that may work with the most minimal melodies, the tunes here are simply amateurish and dull: the album consists entirely of filler.

Preceding Allien's fifth solo full-length album are a couple singles.