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The disc is split between four tracks by the Kommissar, and three from Mama Bar. Their work follows a similar strange road, so they never sound completely independent from each other, but both have their own styles and approaches. The core concept on most of these tracks are simply using the mundane things everyone experiences as source material for deranged sonics. The opening "HJCVGrimmelshausen" is pure spoken word, though the unnatural breathing strategies and cut-up approach are anything but a narrative in the traditional sense.
"Meine erste Zeitmachine" is similar, though here it is a narrative piece of fiction by Hjuler describing how the world we know today is the result of him traveling through time, all of which is recorded in the basement of an old police building, which oozes with its own environmental sounds and cues. "de nye Rigspolitichenfen" is another cut-up, this time with the Kommissar reading an article discussing Danish policing reforms. Conceptually the most "out there" Dadaist piece is "Lauf in Eine Herde," which is a field recording of running into a herd of cows while wearing a red shirt. The cows were frightened and ran off, leaving only breathing and sparse nature sounds. It is a field recording that, like the actual act, nothing happens in, which is what makes it so great.
Mama Bar’s pieces also hinge heavily on the use of her voice, though in a less abrupt and jarring manner. "Lichtblicke" is all tape-stretched voices, what sounds to be a looped car alarm in the distance, and the occasional bit of singing (which could be coming from a nearby shower). The long "Ehrfurcht" glides on layered female voices, some gentle and singing, others more absurd and silly. The singing continues throughout, eventually contrasting the rattling and clattering sounds so often heard on various electro-acoustic works, becoming more complex and varied as the track continues its 25 minute duration. The source of this material? A tape recording of Mama Bar taking the duo’s son for a bike ride, along with a tape recorder for good measure.
The most fascinating part of this compilation is definitely the way it was constructed. There are many complex tape collages and MFA theses out there based on the lengthy study of Pierre Henry or Iannis Xenakis that come out sounding like the suburban banalities that are documented here. But rather than a 30 page score or long winded manifesto of the symbolic meaning behind the music, here it is simply a duo who is having fun with tapes. It’s intensely cliché to say, but it does demonstrate the limitless potential for sound that is around one’s life at any given time, and the reasons why it should not be ignored.
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The disc opens with Volcano the Bear's five tracks, whose sumptuously layered take is, comparitevely at least, the more palattible of the two. Not that that means much here. "Our Number of Wolves" drifts from concrete scratch to ultra-slow New Orleans funeral music as covered by European avant-improvisers, while "The Boy with the Lips Inside" presents a spare beat and odd hummed melodies that trickle outward like some hi-fidelity field recording from hillsides yet uncovered, never presenting too much or getting carried away.
This comfort working with a single idea can be seen throughout here, as the extended "The Open, the Closed" presents sputtering synth lines and odd feedback that grows, shrinks, and grows again over its eight elliptical minutes. It is a compelling and, as is typical for the group, exceptionally well paced sonic descent before "Death Sleeps in the Ear" and the cosmically titled "The First Circle is the Eye" see the group moving deeper into the abyss.
La STPO, a relatively large ensemble of like-minded musical players (and I mean that in both senses) takes over from here, displaying their knack for oddly orchestrated mini-symphonies on tracks like "Guayaki," which could just as well be a meeting between gamelan classicists and early Zorn game pieces, and "Les Oreilles Internationales," whose silly and sputtering stop-starts, overrun with vocal antics, lunges deeply out of sync with any conventional genre trappings.
"Invalid Islands," opening with bent reed and string slides, eventually drifts into a kind of ether-drenched poetry before turning around and harkening toward a downtown aesthetic that's as much Pere Ubu as it is Branca, let alone Material. The closing "Colonies" is just as chaotic, jumping between sytles and approaches at a moment's notice while remaining entirely together and cohesive.
Given the strength of the music here, and the vast potential of such a tag-team as this, it seems a shame almost that the split wasn't done track by track. Given the world music influences, open sonic stances and moment's notice phrase changes of both groups, it seems like, rather than splitting the disc down the middle, this offering could just as easily alternate every other track. While the relationship of both groups is highly apparent here, perhaps there would be even more to discuss were they presented side by side and title by title. That said, this works too.
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It is always a difficult job task to listen to foreign music without bringing too many cultual expectations into the mix, but here most of those expectations are shattered in seconds. Immediately identifiable as an import, the work manages to erase any preconceptions, meeting its audience well beyond the halfway point and, arms folded, declaring itself with confident poise. From the opening "Leh Jani," whose snaking synth lines are met by Souleyman's instantly catchy melodic chanting, it is clear that this is a wholly conceived and realized musical approach.
That approach is marked by a dichotomy between the spare instrumental presence—most of it being played with only an accompanying synthesizer, guitar and drum machine, it seems—and the full, even over-the-top quality of the sounds used. Used in conjunction with traditional sounding melodies only deepens the strength of these works. "Dabke 2001," for example, presents frantically melodic arpeggiations engaging in a call and response with the singer as a steady up-tempo pulse pushes the whole thing forward. With synth tones resembling computerized guitar shredding, the piece is at once a kind of low-tech dance music and, conversely, a hyper-futuristic sounding space serenade.
The slower numbers are just as strong, often providing even more space for the eccentricities of the sound to come to the fore. "Atabat," an eight-minute mostly instrumental excursion, has a tempo so slow that the pitch-shifted melodies bring out the distintive potential of playing music whose melodic content extends beyond the limitations of the keyboard itself. Odd chirps enter and accentuate while the guitar frenetically dances above, further developing the content present throughout.
The nearly psychedelic beginning to "Bashar Ya Habib Al Shaab," with foreboding synth lines and Souleyman's echoing vocal refrains, is at once grating and cosmically attuned, relentless in its power before hastening the pace over halfway through to take part in a kind of droning rap. "Don't Wear Black, Green Suits You Better" continues in the poppier end of the program with more interlocking lines between the three main melodic providers.
Known for the dark sunglasses he adorns nearly always, Souleyman is a true Syrian legend who, we can hope, will finally have a chance to be appreciated outside of his homeland. Given the immense versatility of his outfit and the undeniable power of his vocal delivery, perhaps this is Souleyman's opportunity to extend his listenership. For now, Highway to Hassake is a fine intro to the singer's enormous output.
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I like Hecq's music and find it interesting but I have a hard time connecting to it emotionally. In some way, that may be part of the point. Hecq is detailed and precise in the way that he puts sounds together, but his approach creates some distance from any emotional core. He's a bit like a master draftsman who can render a beautifully complex drawing of a building that elicits awe or even careful reflection, but a perfect drawing can often be more detached than something rougher and more impressionistic. Sometimes I want a quick scribble that tells me how the artist feels about the building, but that's not much of a part of Hecq's work.
Steeltounged is another fine example of digital drums and atonal drones poking out of the darkness to create tension. That tension is rarely resolved, so the album overall feels a bit uneasy. Part of me wants to say "get to the point," but then when I listen to the album as a whole, I realize that the point may well be this vague discomfort. Nowhere is this notion better supported than in the track "I Will Survive," featuring Nongenetic from Shadow Huntaz. From what I can hear of the vocal, Non has delivered a strong anthem about creative persistence in a music industry riddled with sameness, but the vocal is so abused, tweaked, scattered, and removed from its natural habitat of a hip hop track that it feels like a struggle. It's as if Hecq has found the disembodied voice from a hip hop record and he has dissected it, rearranged it, and run some tests against it to see how it works. The result is fascinating if bizarre, and even when the beat kicks in, it always feels alien and disturbed. Maybe this is what hip hop would sound like if the vocals were left in time capsules for some future race of producers to play with.
On the other hand, the second disc of Steeltounged is a completely different story. By handing the title track over to a cartel of remixers, Hecq effectively gives up his style and perspective and lets others bring some variation. I'll admit that a single disc featuring twelve remixes of the same song didn't sound like a good idea when I saw the liner notes, but because Hecq's original is so vague in its intent, the remixes sound nothing alike and for the most part they sound nothing like the original--and that's a great thing. The remix disc winds up sounding like a great mix curated by Hecq instead of a self-indulgent tribute to a single song. Xabec turns in a strong and melodic take on the theme while Mothboy's grimey bass and Team Doyobi's complete reworking are both fantastic. Oddly, the remix disc may give us a little more insight into Hecq the man and the artist than the disc of originals. Together, the two discs add up to something more than their parts, and for once the remix album serves a purpose beyond being mere promotional filler. I needed something more human than Hecq's detached lens on the world provided, and in the remixes, I found it. I'll be interested to see if any of that energy translates into Boysen's future work, or if he'll continue to peer at us through his particularly controlled pinhole.
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With a title like The Surveillance Lounge, this might suggest that the (un)easy listening style employed on Huffin’ Rag Blues has persisted but that is not the case. When elements of easy listening music do appear, it throws a sinister normality amidst the even more sinister strangeness. On "Yon Assassin is my Equal," the introducion of a relatively inoffensive lounge rhythm puts me on edge; Stapleton and Liles combine the annoyance of being stuck in a waiting room with an existentialist anxiety. Claustrophobic and paranoid, the music and incidental sounds haunt the listener, creating the sweaty discomfort of a bad dream. The nightmare continues with “The Golden Age of Telekinesis” where there is a fabulous, violent midsection featuring a demonic auctioneer that suddenly cracks open into a quiet, disorientating abyss.
Elsewhere, disembodied voices speak in French and German, bringing to mind the regrettably underexplored Echo Poème Sequence releases. In these moments, the unearthly beauty of Stapleton's audio surrealism come to the fore. Yet no matter how wonderful parts of The Surveillance Lounge get, the dripping dread is never far away. Stapleton and Liles conjure up an surreality where the sublime is dangerous and the benign is unfamiliar and threatening. The whole experience recaptures that early obsession with Le Comte de Lautréamont’s Maldoror and the darker moments of that novel are mirrored in the viscous quicksilver of “Close to You.”
The other two discs in The Memory Surface are dedicated to earlier versions of The Surveillance Lounge. The album started off as a soundtrack to F.W. Murnau’s Der Brennende Acker before evolving into the album described above. The soundtrack version of the album is a different beast altogether, the vast majority of the music bathed in vinyl surface noise like a fog obscuring a landscape. The effect is reminiscent of Philip Jeck’s work, crusty old records being given a new life in an unintended way. It is impossible to tell how much (if any) of the material is vinyl-sourced but the alien nature of the sounds suggests that whatever sources were utilised have been completely shorn of their original contexts. Elements are recognizable from The Surveillance Lounge but there is a large difference between it and the music created for Murnau’s film.
Also included are early mixes of “The Golden Age of Telekinesis” and “Yon Assassin is my Equal,” which are familiar sounding but still a far cry from the finished versions. They are different enough to warrant their inclusion but overall they lack the intensity of the The Surveillance Lounge versions and the atmospheric allure of the older Murnau soundtrack versions. However, from a phylogenetic standpoint they allow a glimpse into the fossil record (as it were) and provide the missing link between the soundtrack and the album.
The Memory Surface is well worth buying over the standard version of the album. While a lot of Nurse With Wound special editions are aimed at the hardcore fan, this is one instance where the special edition trumps the standard version hands down. What Second Pirate Session did for Rock’n Roll Station, The Memory Surface does for The Surveillance Lounge.
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Technically, Worthless is the sequel to the first Misogynist album, Songs for Women, that was released without the artist’s permission in the late 1990s. Having not heard that disc, I’m not able to compare this work to that earlier one, but regardless of that, it stands strongly on its own. The opening “Act 1” sets the stage for what will follow: a normally disparate combination of low end noise buzz and squelchy tones met with almost string-like sustained passages, contrasting both an overly dynamic bed of noise with almost ambient and dramatic swells as well.
While it never reaches the manic fury that Sutcliffe Jugend’s two albums on Cold Meat Industries did, "Act 2" and the longer, closing "Act 11" border on that territory. The former is based on stammering and stuttering digital noises and sharp, razor like transitions between textures, while the latter is a slow building pile of traditional "harsh noise," layering on top of itself until it reaches the inevitable climax of feedback and roar. Also, both of these pieces feature vocals: the former is more of a spoken word piece between Taylor and Gaya Donadio, where both deliver their parts in an extremely detached, mechanical cadence, while the latter is Taylor alone, screaming through murky layers of effects.
Between these more traditional tracks is where the more notable shifts occur. "Act 4" opens with disturbingly conventional electronic rhythms and synth works that could be any electronic or techno project, except the slow overtaking by punishing feedback and screeching elements that take it far away from normalcy. "Act 9" features similar electronic rhythms, but far less conventional and much more harsh, placing it more in a modernized early industrial vibe.
Other pieces are far more low key and subtle: the chimes, guitar, and delayed xylophone like notes over time stretched tones on "Act 7" feel more Asmus Tietchens than Anenzephalia, and the opening of Act 10 allows some of Taylor’s untreated gentle guitar work to be the focus, even though that later transitions to full on brutality by the middle point of the piece. Both "Act 3" and "Act 5" maintain the traditional power electronic menace, but in a slow and calm manner that is much more menacing than overtly aggressive.
Paul Taylor’s first proper solo release shows that he has continued the Sutcliffe Jugend tradition of brutalizing electronic noise, but allows a fair enough amount of experimentalism and variation in sound to show through. This disc shows that, just like his bandmate from SJ and Bodychoke Kevin Tomkins, Taylor is more than happy to push the boundaries of experimentation rather than just stay in a quagmire of harsh noise and shrieked vocals.
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The album consists of a variety of pieces that have been attempted or performed over the past seven years, appearing here in their most finished states (as finished as the artists can ever be satisfied with, that is). Opening with "Elation," the stage is set with low end tones and higher frequency ringing, crawling along at a slow pace and enshrouded in a tangible amount of reverb. The following "Useque Sumus Lux" keeps the sub-30hz frequencies pegged out, but throwing in rhythmic loops and a wider palette of noises. The piece is a running contrast of loud synths and raw rhythms, yet gentle and delicate ambient pastiches.
Both "Eolet" and "Ecstatic Forlornness" keep the rhythms in place, though the former is more buried and primitive in nature, while the latter is much more commanding and clattering. "Ecstatic Forlornness" is based on heavy elements and a lot of flanging and filtering, but the transitions between effects are almost too direct and jarring, never allowing the piece to hit its stride. The cover of Savage Republic’s "Procession" is similar, but more old school organic in nature. The echoing production is still present, but the allowance of more traditional rhythms and noticeable, although highly obscured, vocals give it more of an early 1980s feeling rather than oblique compositions.
"Dhanu-H" and the closing "Crescere" eschew the rhythms for symphonic, sweeping elements of dramatic flair. Both could be the score to a psychological drama, though the latter’s slow build from near silence into rawer textures and musical loops might be a bit too jarring to work in that capacity. Half of the first pressing of this disc includes a bonus second CD, consisting of the 33 minute track "Abhuna," which continues the dramatic ambience. Using all of the time allotted to it, the piece builds from nothing into a slow, sparse piece of glacial drift and reversed tones, reaching a warm and inviting conclusion instead of the expected raw and dark ending moments. While the second disc isn’t as impressive as the main album tracks, it does not detract from the experience either.
This set comes packaged in the traditionally beautiful Beta Lactam way, a heavy mini-gatefold jacket adorned with designs by Stephen O’Malley that compliment the subtle, yet complex sounds contained within very well. Considering it is more of a compilation of tracks rather than an album in the traditional sense, the pieces work extremely well together to form a coherent whole.
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As with its predecessor, Panama!2 compiles a stylistically varied assemblage of tracks from Panama's golden age that have never been released outside the country. This was no simple task (it took compiler Roberto Ernesto Gyemant two years of research and travel), as this period was characterized by rapid evolution and eclectic assimilation of disparate influences. Due to its unique location and diverse population (owing to the enormous influx of canal workers in earlier generations), traditional Panamanian music was buffeted by influences from American soul and funk, Cuban rumba, Columbian vallenato, calypso, and a host of African, Caribbean, and Latin American styles. Unsurprisingly, this convoluted cross-pollination often yielded impressive and infectiously dance-able results.
Gyemant has assembled a very solid collection and there are a number of attention-grabbing tracks here. The opening "La Murga De Panama" (by Papi Brandao) combines smoldering latin percussion with clean, elegant guitar work and a melancholy accordian, while Sir Jabonsky's bouncy, lurching calypso piece "Juck Juck Pt. 1" betrays a strong ska/reggae influence. I especially enjoyed the sultry, latinized funk of The Duncan Brothers, who appear here twice (on "Dreams" and as the backing band for Lord Cobra's amusingly over-the-top vocals on the Motown-tinged "Love Letters"). Those cats sure know how to kick a sensous jam (and the lengthy accompanying photo-filled booklet makes it clear that they know how to rock matching powder blue suits as well.).
Of course, there are a handful of tracks here that I didn't particularly like (as I have a strong personal aversion to anything that sounds like Santana or seems especially frenetic and busy), but Panama!2 is generally an extremely enjoyable and eclectic compilation of ideal summer music. Gyemant has undeniably created a vibrant and informative document (his track descriptions are especially colorful and charming) of a time when Panama was most definitely the place to be. (There has been an unsettling recent flurry of world music compilations that seem quite intent on pointedly illustrating that I was born into a particularly dull time and place. I do not like this trend.)
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- Papi Brandao y Su Conjunto Aires Tablenos – "La Murga De Panama"
- Sir Jablonsky – "Juck Juck Pt. 1"
- Lord Cobra y Los Hnos. Duncan – "Love Letters"
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Honest Jon’s Records
The World is Shaking documents a particularly fertile, unique, and influential period in The Congo's musical evolution that ultimately birthed Congolese rumba and Soukous (which completely dominated African music for nearly two decades). The music here was shaped by three massive factors: the growing excitement of the independence/anti-colonialism movement, the new nightlife that resulted from people flocking to the cities for well-paying factory jobs, and the recent influx of imported records of latin music, American jazz, and European torch singers. The Congolese were particularly enamored with Louis Armstrong and Italian heartthrob Tino Rossi.
Needless to say, many previously traditional Congolese musicians began appropriating these new cosmopolitan sounds by whatever means they had at their disposal. This resulted in some unexpected instrumentation: the brilliantly absurd "Tika Koseka" is centered around several buzzing kazoos, while "Bino Boton, Bosele" is built upon a thumb piano motif. Naturally, the distinctly non-African guitar is rampant throughout the album (and violins and banjos are not uncommon either), but the twenty-one tracks here are invariably anchored by infectious and sexy Latin/African percussion (regardless of instrumentation).
The highlights are many, but I was most struck by the mournful opening track (Laurent Lomande's "Maboka Marie"). Notably, many of the tracks included here feature rather downcast and lovelorn vocals, but the sadness is poignant rather than tiresome due to the relentless sultry heat of the underlying rhythm. Also, even the tracks that aren't conventionally great (such as perhaps Adikwa Depala's "Yoka Ngal") radiate such awkward wide-eyed enthusiasm that it is nearly impossible to avoid being charmed.
The World Is Shaking is definitely one of the best world music compilations that will come out this year. This is raw, inspired, and vital music (dangerous too: many of the lyrics deal with sex, death, drugs, pimps, and heartbreak). Also of note, this lovingly assembled collection is augmented by notes and rare photographs from Rumba on the River author Gary Stewart. Highly recommended.
samples:
- Laurent Lomande – "Maboka Marie"
- Vincent Kuli – "Yaka Ko Tala"
- Adikwa Depala – "Yoka Ngal"
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