07 March 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

“Is that goo or tears coming from your eyes?” Is that noise or music coming from my speakers? This incredible overview of Smegma’s early work is a bounty of strange sounds, haunting atmospheres and some of the weirdest music put on tape. Across 6 LPs and a DVD, Smegma’s formative years spill out like maggots from a freshly disturbed corpse. Yet each of the maggots grows and becomes one of a plethora of magnificent, bizarre chimeras. This is gloriously wild stuff.

 

Vinyl On Demand

The first LP collects their Glamour Girl 1941 album and the Pigface Chant and Flashcards 7” singles. To say that these recordings were revolutionary does not even come close, even today they have lost none of their impact despite so many artists like Nurse With Wound, Merzbow and Wolf Eyes building on different aspects of their work. Glamour Girl 1941 begins with the jazzy “Deference,” Smegma sounding like a particularly unwieldy artist on the Impulse Records roster. Based on this first piece, it is impossible to tell what would come but from “1980 A.R.” onwards, the tone for the rest Smegma’s career is set. The rest of Glamour Girl 1941 introduces the outsider vocals, the warped found sounds, the free noise and the unhinged temperament which has prevented them from ever becoming close to being accepted by the mainstream.

Throughout this stunning album (which takes up most of the first LP) they develop an approach to free improvisation which sounds a world away from what Derek Bailey and pals were up to around the same time on the other side of the Atlantic. Equally, their contemporaries outside the Los Angeles Free Music Society scene like Frank Zappa and The Residents were all charting completely different areas in the realm of oddity. Smegma’s music is all about unnatural collisions and sometimes these collisions explode like two atoms in a reactor. In fact there must be radiation involved somewhere as only that can explain their mutant sounds.

The second LP includes the album Pigs for Leper and a bunch of oddities from other sonic depositories. Compared to the first LP in this set, this is more of a mish-mash of solo material than traditional Smegma compositions (whatever “traditional” might mean), wilder improvisations rub shoulders with music that could almost be described as beautiful such as Ju Suk Reet Meate’s rumbling “Mr. Potatohead’s Flotation Ex” (before it goes all Texas Chainsaw Massacre that is). However, the centre of gravity around which the Pigs for Leper album, and by extension the rest of this LP, hangs is “Bubs Medley.” A ferocious collage of some of the most inhospitable sounds and riotous vocals captured on vinyl, “Bubs Medley” is the sort of music that will lose friends at parties but gain a friend-for-life with that weird guy in the greasy jacket who keeps touching himself inappropriately and spits when he speaks.

Smegma’s musical range is cast wholly into the light on the double live cassette Spontaneous Sound which is collected here on the third, fourth and half of the fifth LPs in the box. They spread their wings by beginning with a truly hilarious set of drug fuelled country songs before launching into some ferocious jams that sound like The Velvet Underground if Mo Tucker played all the instruments; “Get Away” pounds with the same urgency as some of The Velvet Underground’s finest live jams. Elsewhere, “I Used to be a Rock’n Roll Star” sees Smegma take a not very funny joke, push it to the point of extreme annoyance and then go even further to make something genuinely and absurdly great out of it.

The remainder of the LPs collect compilation appearances from Smegma from the appropriate time period. Having all these obscure recordings all collected into one place is a blessing. Granted that some of the pieces are not as stellar as the previously discussed material but there are diamonds in the rough. “Grass Glob Ball War” and “Dancing Hairpiece” in particular standing out as being fantastic examples of Smegma in full swing, both pieces showing decidedly different sides to their chaotic improvisation. I would wager that what I am discounting now as being less than exciting pieces may prove to be far better than I give them credit for. They may only be dim in comparison to the rest of I Am Artist because of the fatigue of listening to so much Smegma in one week; I imagine I will find a lot more in these rarities in the coming weeks that my tired ears are missing now.

Finally, also included is a DVD which features their 1983 VHS First Ten Years along with a couple of short bonus videos. The video footage is definitely not essential and much of it looks quite dated now, cheesy early '80s computer visuals and crude video effects not helping in any way. The music, however, comes across as the vibrant and exciting noise that it was. Yet for so many years their music has existed for me as an abstract document and seeing Smegma perform is a demystifying experience; none of them are ogres or aliens but normal looking Americans, albeit badly dressed. The shorter films, “NWAW 1978” and “Clockwork Joe’s 1980,” stand up better compared to the main feature but again. The whirlwoodwind that is “Clockwork Joe’s” above all justifies the inclusion of this DVD but unfortunately is all too brief.

Like last year’s Nurse With Wound Flawed Existence box set, Vinyl On Demand have packed loads of music onto the LPs, many of the records going up to around 30 minutes a side. However, as with Flawed Existence the LPs sound great despite the amount of music packed onto them. The vinyl is thick, pressed to the highest standards and the box itself is as attractive and as sturdy as everything else from this great label. “Hopefully it won’t sound like anything you’ve heard before.” (It doesn’t.)

This box set is currently vinyl only, so unfortunately there are no sound samples at this point in time, apologies!

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07 March 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Scott Morgan is something of an anomaly in the field of ambient music for having a simple and clear purpose: releasing a consistent stream of reliably good albums. He has no clear avant-garde pretensions, nor any reliance on high-concept philosophical underpinnings or improvisation. He just turns out dense, composed, and immersive washes of sound, year after year. Anyone that has heard Loscil before probably has a pretty good idea of what Endless Falls sounds like, but there is an unexpected surprise at the end that may signal a bold new direction.

Kranky

Loscil’s fifth album takes its theme from rain; a natural choice given the reputation Morgan’s hometown of Vancouver has for precipitation.It generally fits the tone of the album too, as it is impossible to describe Endless Falls without relying on endless water metaphors.However, while the feel of the album certainly approximates the soothing sadness of a rainstorm, the girth and complexity of the album seems much more evocative of deep, dark waters and slow-moving currents.This is not an album of floating, wispy, inconsequential sounds—Endless Falls is both massive and deliberate.Scott makes everything sound simple and effortlessly flowing, but that illusion is built upon a very meticulous layering of many constantly shifting tracks.

Scott Morgan has a strong intuition for pace, sequencing, and variety.He also understands how far he can push his sound without breaking its hypnotic spell.It is a treacherous path to navigate, as a too-memorable melody or a too-prominent beat can easily derail an ambient piece into the realm of song (which would be distracting), while doing too little results in a boring album.This is not boring album.As expected, the most memorable works on Endless Falls are those that push the envelope of the Loscil sound to its farthest possible edge, such as the shambling, crackling "Dub For Cascadia," which betrays a heavy influence from electronic dub artists such as Pole."Lake Orchard," on the other hand, bolsters its spacey shimmer with an insistent throb, but forgoes percussion.In fact, percussion of any kind only appears again in very odd and subtle ways (like the rhythmic pops and clicks in "Shallow Water Blackout" or the chimes/bells in "Showers of Ink").While that is not inherently odd for an ambient album, Endless Falls is markedly less rhythmic and dub-influenced than its immediate predecessor (Plume).Also, Scott’s day job is playing drums for Destroyer.

Morgan continues his fairly recent trend of enlisting a small group of talented collaborators to flesh out his sound, though pianist Jason Zumpano is the only familiar face from earlier albums.In particular, the inclusion of violinist Kim Koch was an especially inspired idea, as her melancholy scraping and bowing provides a very effective textural foil to Morgan’s watery shimmer on the opening title track.That said, the big news is that Destroyer frontman Dan Bejar turned up to provide a quietly intense and enigmatic spoken-word monologue for the closing "The Making of Grief Point," the first ever appearance of vocals on a Loscil album.Notably, it almost did not make the final cut, as Morgan was trepidatious about "changing the listening perspective from abstract, ambient music into foreground, conscious listening."His concern is certainly understandable, as Bejar’s strangely halting, stream-of-consciousness rambling ("the answer to the making of Grief Point is picnic baskets filled with blood") easily steals the show.However, it is simply too great a track to leave on the cutting room floor and actually allows Morgan to have his cake and eat it too: Endless Falls is an excellent ambient album, but it is appended by a creepily memorable "single" that easily stands with Destroyer’s best work.

Samples can be found here.

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07 March 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

This compiles 14 rare tracks from innocent, energetic and progressive 1960s and early 1970s Cambodia; a time which Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (with plenty of help from Western friends) would attempt to obliterate.

 

Minky

Dengue Fever Presents: Electric Cambodia blends Western guitar pop and Eastern traditional folk music. The whole album swells with joyous lively life-affirming twanging and spirited wailing in vivid contrast to the somber fact that several of the artists, such as Pan Ron, Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea, were victims of the Year Zero genocide in Cambodia.

The singing on some of these pieces is extraordinary. I particularly like Ros Sereysothea on “Cold Sky,” “I Will Starve Myself To Death,” and “Flowers In The Pond.” Her voice is simultaneously cool and yet slightly raunchy, albeit suggestive of a raunchiness which perspires rather than sweats. Pan Ron is devastating on “I Want To Be Your Lover.” There is also “Snaeha,” a Khmer version of Sonny and Cher’s “Bang Bang,” which is hard to hear without either detecting (or projecting) traces of Morricone. Similarly, “I Want To Shout” is inspired by the Isley Brothers’ early hit “Shout” most famously covered elsewhere by miniature sex-bomb, Lulu.

Western influence is easily spotted; indeed an alarming hint of Santana rears its head once or twice along with surf and garage sounds. Other passages are gloriously otherworldly, though, and tracks which may at first sound like a band fronted by a duck with an effects pedal and a gargling hyena quickly become familiar and affecting.  Most of the accompaniment is pleasantly sparse allowing both instrument and voice to enjoy plenty of space. “Hope To See You” has an early psychedelic feel with shuffling drum, wobbling guitar to the fore and minimal organ adding depth. The title of that piece is poignant as is the credit to Unknown Artist. The album also has one Pan Ron track missing its title but otherwise all has been identified by the elder sister of Dengue Fever’s Chlom Nimol.   

Electric Cambodia demonstrates that the will and innocence of people cannot be destroyed. Totalitarian regimes may grind bones, burn flesh and hair, drain blood, and demand silence, yet something will always remain.  And, of course, the story of what happened to some of these artists and millions of other people isn’t as simple as Henry “Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?” Kissinger would have us believe.

Pol Pot was a murderous individual and his Khmer Rouge regime did many evil things, but as John Pilger has written “Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge would be historical nonentities—and a great many people would be alive today—had Washington not helped bring them to power and the governments of the United States, Britain, China and Thailand not supported them, armed them, sustained them and restored them.”  Cambodia suffered a US land invasion in 1970 and from 1969-1973 was secretly bombed at the behest of Nixon and Kissinger killing approximately three quarters of a million people. “Phosphorous and cluster bombs, napalm and dump bombs that left vast craters were dropped on a neutral country of peasant people and straw huts.” According to declassified documents, these acts gave the Khmer Rouge it’s best recruiting tool and platform for the revolution which began on April 17, 1975. Just after sunrise on that day, Pol Pot’s notorious Year Zero began a repugnant and still scarcely believable era of “purification,” slavery, and extermination that claimed at the very least another two million lives.  

Unfortunately, the Cambodian Holocaust has a third stage. In January 1979, tired of attacks across their border, the Vietnamese liberated Cambodia and the bloodshed and suffering should have ended there. But “Commie” liberators were too much for the US and its allies to bear. Vietnam had already ousted the US from their country and this was a time when the domino theory of countries falling under Communist influence was prevalent.  As Pilger reports “The Khmer Rouge were restored in Thailand by the Reagan administration, assisted by the Thatcher government, who invented a "coalition" to provide the cover for America's continuing war against Vietnam.”  Reagan’s administration swiftly began backing Pol Pot in exile. The US and the UK used the United Nations to construct a blockade making Cambodia the only Third World country so isolated. The special relationship between Reagan and Thatcher also extended to having the CIA and the SAS train the Khmer Rouge in Thailand and Malaysia.

John Pilger’s writing for the Daily Mirror and an ATV documentary he made with David Munro brought forth an unsolicited response from ordinary people in Britain. Single mothers gave their meager savings, workers sent their weekly wages and £20M was raised for aid. Reports suggests that those actions defied the blockade, supporting orphanages, restocking hospitals and schools, restoring clean water and clothing.

Proceeds from Dengue Fever Presents: Electric Cambodia will benefit Cambodian Living Arts which is devoted to traditional and forward looking performing arts and creative expression. The album was compiled by Dengue Fever from cassette mix-tapes circulated from friend to friend.  As someone who used to make and send compilation tapes it is impossible to imagine the widespread murder of those friends and of the artists whose music we shared. Also of note is S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, a documentary by the Paris-based Khmer director Rithy Panh, whose parents died in the terror. The film brings together victims and “the ordinary and obscure journeymen of the genocide" (as Panh calls them) the torturers and murderers.  

samples:

• Pan Ron - I Want to be Your Lover
• Ros Sereyesother - Flowers in the Pond
• (unknown artist) - Hope To See You
  

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07 March 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

On their debut collaboration, percussionist Steven Hess (Haptic) and Reto Mader (Sum of R) create brilliant film score-ish compositions that, on the surface, are as dark and bleak as any that can be imagined, but the structure and instrumentation used give far more depth and variation to what otherwise could be mundane and trite.  The result is a diverse set of pieces that prove there are a wide gradient of shades of gray.

 

Utech

While there is definitely a horror movie feel to the pieces on this disc, most of them would work just as well within any dark, drama framework given their lush, somewhat obscure construction and tense atmospheres.  The opening “The Lights Would Stop Flickering” is the perfect introduction, with its slow, bowed cymbal backing and broken church organ crawl, together mimicking a funeral march even when delicate chimes arrive.  

“Voices From The Room Below” follows a similar path, mixing indecipherable sound squeals into an abstract dark cloud of murkiness, with gentle wind chimes and distant, indecipherable voices appearing to add to the feeling of disorientation.  Similarly, “Pendulum Impact Test” allow somber melodies to resonate through empty halls, with pieces of what may be voices arising occasionally before everything is engulfed by a beautiful noisy squall of warbling sound.

Some of the tracks actually allow the instrumentation to shine through rather than keeping it within a dark mire:  “Theme of the Paranormal Feedback” mixes a queasy organ and a raw viola scrape drone (think John Cale on “Black Angel’s Death Song”) representing both gentle and harsh ends of sound, all of which is met with clattering metal percussion before everything soars into a dramatic, almost symphonic ecstasy of sound as the track winds to a close.  “Don’t Eat Carrots, My Little Ghost Horse” focuses on largely untouched guitar playing, mixed with amplifier hum and ghostly ambient textures that swirl around below.

Tracks like “Forlata Jag” embrace the horror movie ambience, with its minor key organ progressions and noisy swells, but the track is pushed along by traditional drumming (I assume by Hess) that feels a bit less abstract than the aforementioned tracks, but still nothing easily categorized.  Between the drums and the somber, depressing sound, there is perhaps a bit of Goblin influence, though not directly.  The long “Stumbling Upon Blood and Mercury” opens with static guitar noise and feedback, but is soon bolstered by a tortured guitar squeal and somber, marching drums that plod along painfully.  The closing “Mathieu 2004-2009” is structurally similar, opening with a sense of menace via restrained reverberated drone and deep resonating tones that are later met with drumming, all of which reaches dramatic zeniths before ending in subtle shimmers of sound.

While most definitely “dark” in its overall approach, that is too simplistic of a label in my eyes.  The complex layering of instrumentation and mostly somber sounds do create a mood, but when tracks like “Theme of the Paranormal Feedback” and “Mathieu 2004-2009” launch into dramatic sweeping pastiches, the sound is far less bleak and much more nuanced in approach.  It is an engrossing debut from these two established artists.

samples:

• Theme of the Paranormal Feedback
• Forlata Jag
• Mathieu 2004-2009

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07 March 2010

Creaig Dunton

Albums and Singles

On this combination CDR and 7" single, Crumer continues to demonstrate why he’s so highly regarded in the noise scene.  The 7” channels the best elements of the junk metal and maxed out overdrive pedal style, while the CD takes a slow, droning direction to nicely contrast the cut up harsh stuff.

 

Small Doses

On the vomit swirl colored vinyl, "Exile Pursuing Abyss" begins with a scraping/grinding metal loop that builds in complexity, found sounds of junk being layered atop one another before launching into pure workroom chaos, with tools and metal buckets being thrown about in a fit of rage before the electronics kick in.  There’s what sounds like an occasional digital stutter, but for the most part there’s a purely analog vibe here.  No way in hell this could be labeled anything but "harsh," but it stays away from the impulse to just peg everything into the red:  there is a great deal of activity going on here that repeated listenings can reveal. 

The flip side, "Old Country Buffet Incident" opens with a similar junk metal grind, but quickly segues into electronic noise.  Here the sound is more cut and paste, with lots of quick cuts and edits, with layers building upon each other and then tearing apart, all with the interspersed rapid-fire machine gun type drum machine beat.  In the latter half, the overdriven noise is met with distant pure tonal drone to create a great dichotomy.

On the CD is a single 77 minute track, "A Personal Hell," that goes for the more "sustained noise experience," developing from a slow reverberated crawl into shimmering electronic drones interspersed with basic analog noise.  The sound swells up into low end scraping noise that is allowed to slowly decay and collapse, leaving basic echoes and ringing tones to linger in the frozen air, just to get noisy again.  It works far better as a drone piece, because it lacks the dynamic range of the 7" single, but still makes for a nice blast of cold sonic air.

Between the two formats, Crumer covers the variations and nuances of the noise scene expertly.  Personally I favor the material on the 7" record, which is as active and diverse as any of the best noise releases, but the long piece on the CD is no slouch either.  While I didn’t try it out in time for this review, I can imagine there’s a world of sound and variation that can be found by playing both the vinyl and the CD at the same time, which I think I’m going to go do now…

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07 March 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Towards the end of his career, Soleilmoon put in a request to the late Bryn Jones to put together some material that was conventional enough to allow some crossover into the electronic and dance scenes.  This wasn’t an absurd request, because at this time his work more than flirted with dance and hip-hop beats, but often it was just as likely to slide into harsh, abrasive textures.  The proposed 12" requested by the label was delivered as a 90 minute DAT, all of which is reproduced here.  It is two discs of the most ass shaking, head-nodding material he ever did that conjures images of burka clad women shaking their asses, Miami bass style.

 

Soleilmoon

The original DAT was cut up and released as a 12" single of the same name (consisting of tracks 1, 5, 8, and 13), with two more being added to the release of Hussein Mahmood Jeeb Tehar Gass, but here it is being released in its entirety for the first time.  Unsurprisingly, the material doesn’t sound like a conscious attempt by Jones to make headway into the clubs, but more an emphasis on the conventional elements of his sound;  it’s unmistakably Muslimgauze.

The overall vibe of the album fits with the time it was released:  the emphasis on hip-hop breakbeats goes along with the ambient dub and illbient scenes that were winding down at the time.  However, while those two subgenres of subgenres were focused on mixing rhythms with otherwise sparse instrumentation, Jones is still more than happy to layer the tracks with various loops, albeit with a bit more restraint than usual.  "Uzi Mahmood 3" for example is based on underlying raw vinyl surface noise, with subtle Middle Eastern singing and horns low in the mix, but slow, echo chamber hell reverberated dub beats up front.  The emphasis is definitely on the beats, but not at the expense of other elements of the track.

Listening to both discs as a whole, it does seem pretty obvious that Jones hadn’t intended for this to be released unedited, because he recycles a lot of elements from track to track that, if spread across multiple albums or singles, wouldn’t be as notable, but back to back, it becomes obvious.  Loops of record scratching, reggae organ stabs, and radar blip-like rhythms are recurring motifs throughout.  For example, both "Uzi Mahmood 5" and "Uzi Mahmood 10" use the reggae organ stab sound, though the former is overtly dub influenced, while the latter goes the hip-hop route with loud, big drums and record scratching.

"Uzi Mahmood 1" fully embraces the hip-hop elements of the Muslimgauze sound, using the same record scratching over a slow Dr. Dre-esque beat and massive ass-shaking sub bass.  The long "Uzi Mahmood 9" (and its alternate mix, "Uzi Mahmood 13")  lifts a beat that could have been pulled off any early 1990s "positive" hip-hop album, but mixed with Jones penchant for erratic stop/start rhythms and layered abstraction, it takes on an entirely different character.

"Uzi Mahmood 7" is a slightly different beat, with a more subdued mix, pared down to the barest essentials and a very analog, blip-centric rhythm is far more electro than anything I’ve heard him do before.  Also a bit out of left-field, "Uzi Mahmood 11" uses a raw drum ‘n bass inspired rhythm (albeit slower than others in the genre), that makes it stand out more than the other tracks here, as well as the other beat-centric releases out there.

Considering I have always favored the hip-hop rhythms of Muslimgauze compared to his more overtly Middle Eastern tracks, I definitely am pretty fond of what’s here.  The tracks occasionally go on a little too long and get repetitive:  I’m guessing the label usually edited them down on the traditional albums released, but perhaps it was Jones’ commentary on dance music, they are still rather solid.  Muslimgauze releases have been far more harsh and abrasive compared to this one, but never does it descend into boring Starbucks "world music" faux ethnicity. 

samples:

• Uzi Mahmood 1
• Uzi Mahmood 7
• Uzi Mahmood 9

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07 March 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

As I grow older and more culturally saturated with each passing year, my capacities for surprise and wonder have become nearly non-existent.  Nevertheless, 2006’s Ys completely floored me and has been very firmly entrenched as one of my favorite albums ever since.  Given the stunning beauty and imagination of that album and the enormous progression that it displayed from The Milk-Eyed Mender, my expectations for its follow-up were impossibly, crazily high.  Unsurprisingly, they were not met.  Have One On Me is an enjoyable and accessible album, but it is a decidedly anticlimactic one.

 

Drag City

I have long maintained that triple albums are never, ever a good idea at all under any circumstances.  Nevertheless, I was uncharacteristically optimistic when I heard that Joanna Newsom was planning to release one.  Her singular aptitude for epic song-forms and compelling narrative lyrics, coupled with the fact that it has possibly been in the works for four long years, seemed to indicate that the groundwork for a truly staggering and ambitious opus was in place.  As it turns out, I was at least half-right, as the sprawling Have One On Me is inarguably ambitious in scope:  Newsom wrote a lot of songs (for her, anyway) and has made quite a few significant changes to her sound.  There is no overarching concept uniting all of the songs together though, aside from the fact that the lyrics invariably address the very Newsom-esque themes of doomed love, dangerous escapes, horses, spiders, and redemption.  Also, whereas Ys was a very focused, coherent, and perfectly sequenced artistic statement, the 18 songs here seem to be the more diffuse, searching sound of Newsom trying to figure out where to go next.

The most immediately striking quality about the album is that Joanna’s vocals are generally much more restrained and conventionally melodic than they have been in the past: there are even some hints of a newfound influence from early gospel/traditional spirituals.  This will probably come as a great relief to anyone that has previously found her singing to be annoying, but I find it to be a bit of a mixed blessing.  Another notable change is that nearly all overtly autobiographical vestiges have departed from her lyrics.  Instead, the songs are all self-contained, mysterious and oft-fanciful vignettes culled from an unpredictable array of times and places.  Then again, maybe she has just become better at transforming her life into art.  As always, her words remain wonderfully evocative and clever and her colorful vocabulary does not seem to have atrophied at all either (not many people could toss out a phrase like “faultlessly etiolated fishbelly-face”).

I suspect that this is an album that will take a while to make its full impact, due to the sheer volume of material present.  Also, the densely narrative lyrics seem pregnant with the promise of secrets and beauty that may take a while to fully flower in my consciousness (that is my hope, anyway).  Nevertheless, there are a number of excellent, instantly gratifying songs strewn throughout the three beautifully packaged records.  My two favorites (at the moment, anyway) are the sparse, lilting “’81” and the languorously soulful “Baby Birch,” the rousing outro of which notably boasts the album’s most successful incorporation of drums.  For the most part, it is the more stripped-down songs that are the most striking (such as the similarly excellent, but impossible sad, one-two punch of “Jackrabbits” and “Go Long”).  The pieces that adrenalize Newsom’s sound with brass or a groove (such as “Good Intentions Paving Company” and “You and Me, Bess”) leave me pretty cold though.  Thankfully, they are in the minority. 

Nevertheless, this album is ultimately a bit of a disappointment.  The main reason is that the songs blur together a bit.  This is largely due to the 2-hour-plus running time and the fact that almost all of the songs are built around very similar central components, but there are some other key contributing factors as well.  For one, Ryan Francesconi’s arrangements are a bit too straightforward and safe for my taste (though the end of “Does Not Suffice” gets a little wild).  While there are some occasional unexpected flourishes and unconventional instrumentation (such as Bulgarian tambura, kaval, vielle, and rebec), the arrangements largely serve only to beef up what Newsom is playing.  I realize that this is the whole purpose of accompaniment, but it often has the unintended effect of softening Newsom’s edges and making the songs seem less intimate.  While Van Dyke Parks’ work on Ys was quite polarizing and viewed by some as too intrusive, I personally loved it and thought it was essential, unpredictable, and an appropriately quirky and elevating foil for Newsom’s odd songs.  No one will claim that the accompaniment on Have One On Me is intrusive, but it does not achieve much more than adding density and subtle color.

My other main issue with the album is, quite unexpectedly, Joanna’s singing.  From a musicianship and melody-writing standpoint, her vocals have probably never been better.  Unfortunately, I do not love Joanna Newsom for her ability to hit, sustain, and flow effortlessly between notes, I love her for her oft-brilliant lyrics and her idiosyncratic passion.  The increased emphasis on actual singing comes at the expense of enunciation and greatly downplays the role of her words.  Also, her characteristic tendency to yelp and squawk like a feral kitten or precocious child is now largely absent.  While it was admittedly an acquired taste, her wild, raw vocals played a crucial role in the blunt emotional power of early classics like “Peach, Plumb, Pear” and “Cosmia.”  This new batch of songs sounds very assured, nuanced, and pleasant, but simply does not pack the wallop of Newsom’s alternately fragile and cathartic past work.

That said, Have One On Me is a still very good album.  I wanted it to be a brilliant one though.  There are some great songs and excellent lyrics, but there is a real and tragic dearth of gut-level emotional power.  Fortunately, there is no indication that a creative downslide has begun in any way (though the unfortunate spectre of “maturity” may have crept into the picture a bit).  Instead, Newsom is merely experiencing the inevitable growing pains of trying to evolve upon near-perfection without repeating herself. 

Samples:

• ‘81
• Baby Birch
• Does Not Suffice

 

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07 March 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Charlemagne Palestine's monolithic 71 minute organ riff is a sensual, pleasure inducing drone. The crisply sparkling sonority creates a sense of drift, a foreword carrying motion propelled by colliding tones. Buoyed by slow changes that create illusions of movement, the experience of listening to Schlingen-Blangen is one of floating between parallel worlds of harmony and noise.

 

New World Records

Schlingen-Blangen evolved out of a number of events Charlemagne held in L.A. in 1970 and ’71 that he called “Meditative Sound Environments.” In these performances he would sustain a chord on an organ in a Unitarian church by inserting pieces of cardboard between the keys and letting it play all night, adjusting the stops here and there to make only slight changes. In this recording, dated from 1988 and made in the church of a small Dutch village called Farmsum Delftzijl on the North Sea, the same approach is used. An initial chord and its timbre was chosen and then left to sing for the duration of the recording.

If this was the kind of organ music played during church I might be persuaded to attend. There is a sacred feel to it and it has certainly done more for my spiritual well being than most sermons ever have. While meditative, it isn’t exactly calm, though it has a calming effect. It demands attention and gets it by pushing aside the chattering thoughts of the trivial everyday mind. While it does change, it makes an impression of constancy because Charlemagne never gives the organ a chance to breathe. The organ is continually exhaling a propulsive blast of oscillating timbre, filling up space, seeping into everything. It starts abruptly and ends abruptly. In between there is a quick arc of sinuous consonance, meted by an ennervating discord, and finally, release. The raw physicality of the work stimulates the senses of the body while the mind trying to probe it intellectually remains embroiled in paradox; these are the twin joys of the piece.

samples:

• Schlingen Blangen Excerpt One
• Schlingen-Blangen Excerpt Two
• Schlingen Blangen Excerpt Three

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07 March 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

One of the first images I remember associating with Coil is the sticker that asked, "When you listen to Coil do you think of music?" After listening to Gold is the Metal many times, my answer remains a strong "no." In a discography filled with bizarre and bewildering recordings, this collection of odds and ends still stands out as one of Coil's most difficult and oblique.

 

Threshold House

I don't think I've ever been more confused or disappointed by Coil than when I first heard "The Broken Wheel." After hearing the original on a mix tape, I was expecting to get more of the driving rhythms and blaring sound effects that characterized the original, but what I heard instead was a perverse and playful recreation that annihilated both and made good on the title's promise. Where I wanted a steady beat, I got a number of false starts and where I hoped there would be layers of sound, there was only fragmented portions of melody and miscellaneous noise. I was even more put off by the absence of John Balance's voice, which is replaced by a comically exaggerated exchange between two very eager and unusual lovers. After falling in love with the songs on Horse Rotorvator, all of Gold is the Metal came as a great shock. And ten years after hearing it for the first time, I'm still a little confounded by its twists and turns. It helps to keep in mind that the record is a reflection of Coil's cutting room floor: unused loops, awkward allusions, failed variations, and sketches make up most of its content. The rest is filled by unused songs that were intended for some record or another or simply forgotten amid the chaos of samples and demos that John and Peter left in their wake. Not every song is a success, nor is every experiment all that interesting, but Gold is the Metal does yield several pleasures, not the least of which is the aforementioned version of "The Wheel."

Besides defying expectations and obliterating conventions, with Gold is the Metal Coil provides plenty of insight into how they wrote and produced their music. Samples used in both "The Anal Staircase" and "Penetralia" appear on songs that are otherwise unrelated to either, and ideas eventually fleshed out on "Ravenous" and "Slur" make an appearance only to be swallowed up in unexpected tangents and unfamiliar noise. "Cardinal Points" features a string arrangement by Bill McGee intended for Clive Barker's Hellraiser. On its own it is a complete and gorgeous slice of orchestral soundtrack work, but there are enough similarities between it and "Ostia (The Death of Pasolini)" or even "Chaostrophy" that I'm inclined to think of it as a precursor or distant cousin to those songs. Throughout the record there are familiar references and unmistakable semblances that call to mind a multitude of their other recordings. That networking quality has the added effect of deepening and exaggerating Coil's already daunting and seemingly bottomless discography. Some of these recordings are probably just early versions of other songs in disguise and it is likely that even more unreleased versions of the same thing exist somewhere. There are also several original and unfamiliar songs tucked away among the familiar. A couple point backwards toward Scatology, like the absolutely stellar "For Us They Will." Others point in the direction of Love's Secret Domain by way of The Dark Age of Love, like "Aqua Regalia" and "Paradisiac."

These mixes are a good reminder that Coil's acid-soaked follow-up to Horse Rotorvator was originally a kind of sequel to that album, with big Fairlight horn sections and apocalyptic gusts of noise. How it transformed into Coil's "dance" record is all the more mystifying after listening to Gold is the Metal. With blatant bouts of nonsense and fun-house melodies vying for center stage, it is a small miracle that portions of the record actually sound continuous or work together at all. In general, the transitions and changes in style from song to song are quite severe and highlight that this is just a collection of outtakes.  By casting their net so wide, Coil broke up their already damaged record into even more unnatural shapes, which sometimes causes me to question the integrity of the entire project. I can understand wanting to collect unreleased songs in one place, but each of the Unnatural History releases is more cohesive than this is and they compile music that spans decades too.

That has always been my biggest complaint about Gold is the Metal: unlike most B-side and remix compilations, it includes a lot of warts and unfinished sketches, which can make the whole thing sound like a sketch instead of a complete or finished statement. None of their later records, not even collections like Stolen and Contaminated Songs, are as dense and inscrutable as this. The liner notes to the CD version of the album include a proclamation describing some of the songs as "disappointments" and "discarded shards." If that's truly the case, I have to wonder why such failures were included at all. Demos and outlines might interest dedicated fans and close listeners, but for everyone else they're distracting and only serve to muddy already dark waters. The CD pressings also intensify the disorder by mangling the last three songs on the album. Two extra songs are added, one from The Unreleased Themes for Hellraiser and the other from either of the 7" singles for "Keelhauler" or "The Wheel." Both manage to fit in with the rest of the misfits (if only because nearly anything would fit if one pushed hard enough), but neither are indexed correctly. Thanks to this goof up "The First Five Minutes After Violent Death" also starts at the wrong time. Without reference to Coil's website or to the original LP, one might be left wondering why two completely different sounding songs are squished together on one track. 

Typically, such mistakes and inconsistencies would be enough to frustrate me into submission, but I find myself returning to Gold is the Metal now and again. This is due in part to the album's fractured gems and genuinely enjoyable failures (the insertion of "Greensleeves" into "...Of Free Enterprise" and "Aqua Regalia" comes immediately to mind), and in part to its proximity to Scatology, Horse Rotorvator, and Love's Secret Domain. It both shines a light on the best albums from Coil's first decade and manifests some of the spirit inherent in each of them. For that reason, Gold is the Metal can't help but be appealing to a Coil fan. But with so many playful passages and intentional mistakes writhing about on the same record, it also can't help but be one of the most idiosyncratic and trying records in my or anyone else's collection.

samples:

• For Us They Will
• The Broken WHeel
• Chickenskin

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06 March 2010

Administrator

Albums and Singles

This has always been a hard record for me to understand. It's not a typical long-playing album but it feels like more than just a collection of four singles. The botched track listing on my CD didn't help matters. As a product of remix culture, it's a far-reaching experiment that runs the gamut from funky breaks to outright noise.

 

Sweatbox (EU) / WaxTrax! (US) / Mute (reissue) / Run (remastered reissue)

Storm the Studio was released on the cusp of the DJ record/remix fetish of the 1990s. By the early '90s it wasn't unusual to see maxi-singles with seven or eight mostly superfluous remixes of the same song cluttering up record bins. Every once in a while an act came along that brought together an interesting group of remix collaborators, but for the most part the remix boom was just an excuse to repackage the 7-inch edit and the 7-inch radio edit and the 12-inch instrumental of the same song for completists. Even though Storm the Studio only has four songs listed on the sleeve, it's about as far from a remix 12" as possible, and that's one of the reasons that the record is so enigmatic. There's a thread that ties "God O.D." parts 1-4 together, but taken out of context, the end of part 4 is completely unrecognizable as a descendent of part 1. And so it goes with "Re-Animator"—part 1 is the funky club track with vocals and by part 4, we're into psychedelic dub territory with a half-time rhythm layers of tape noise, reverberating voices, and feedback. Sometimes a bass line or a sample repeats, other times, it doesn't. Most of the record works through free association to connect the dots.

"Strap Down" (the only song on the record to feature less than four parts) starts off with machine gun drums and looped insanity that sounds like a marching band fighting with a circus over a break beat. A few minutes of bass bursts, "Danger" samples, the words "strap down," and rhythm changes later and the song gives way to part 2 that is an entirely different animal. At seven minutes, the breakneck pace of "Strap Down part 2" is a bit of an endurance challenge, but the song never gets boring. In fact, it kind of turns into a third song at the six minute mark with the apt promise of "annihilating rhythm." That break is all a part of "Strap Down part 2," however on my vinyl copy of the album, there are three tracks for "Strap Down," a fact that is corroborated with the remastered reissue. It's understandable that I've been lost all these years. "Strap Down part 3"? That's a song I've just discovered, and just heard for the first time even though I've been listening to Storm the Studio for two decades!

To confuse things further, half of the "I Got the Fear" parts repeat the words "Re-Animator" or "reanimate," turning the record into a kind of mobius strip of samples and themes. If Jack Dangers isn't literally sampling himself here, he is quite figuratively doing it by recycling his own ideas from one track to the next without any regard for which sounds or ideas belong to which songs. I think that this is why this record never made sense to me. It can't be approached as a traditional album or as pair of singles. The track titles seem intentionally misleading and sometimes we have to take the composer's word for the fact that the parts are related at all. In retrospect, it feels very much like a deconstruction of the DJ culture, but it predates a lot of that nonsense so that explanation doesn't really fit. Besides, Meat Beat released a remix disc in 1991 cheekily titled Version Galore. 

One possible explanation for all of this is that the boys in the band were just having a laugh. Some artists call every piece of work they produce "Untitled," so why not give the tracks names that don't signify anything? If these were just straightforward pop songs, all of that ambiguity would come off like New Order, but because the album is constantly folding in on itself from different directions, somehow getting lost in it makes a certain amount of sense. It doesn't help a DJ to remember which cut to play, but maybe that is even part of the charm—part of the point. More long-lost versions of "I Got the Fear" and "Re-Animator" showed up on later releases (Original Fire and the Brainwaves compilation respectively,) so whatever was going on, it's clear that the basic foundation of Storm the Studio was fertile ground.  With its disparate styles and memorable lead ins, Storm the Studio is the perfect DJ tool except for the fact that it's almost impossible to know what the record is going to sound like wherever you drop the needle. I love that this record takes so many strange turns, even if I've never known quite how to navigate through them.

samples:

• I Got the Fear part 3
• Strap Down part 3
• Re-Animator part 3

 

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