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Graveyards are the most organic and traditionally structured of all of John Olson’s (Wolf Eyes) side projects. With improvisational jazz relying more these days on chemistry than the highs and distances of what’s left to explore, this trio are consistently drawing me ever closer, and deeper, to the heart of their sound.
This delicate looking one-sided vinyl sees the trio of horns / reeds, percussion and cello blend themselves into one nearly fourteen minute distillation of minds. Very surprisingly for a Graveyards release this seems to take a little while to warm up, and it’s about two and a half minutes in before everyone seems to be on the same page. Most of Ben Hall’s percussion work sounds more like charnel house floor scraping than anything to do with keeping tempo. But when he does pick up the traditional sticks it’s a slow loose skinned walk, a rhythmless funereal paced New Orleans summons.
This single piece is split by several silent lulls creating gaps of ever lengthening shadows. These aren’t tension creators or breathing spaces but take the shape of another player in Graveyards’ unsettling mix. The overall aura is an unfriendly but not aloof one. It doesn’t take long to become accustomed to the language and interplay between the sax and cello. Hans Buetow abuses the cello in a typically un-cello fashion, the staccato slides stabbing into and pushing against the other instruments. Alongside Stephen Thrower (Cyclobe / Coil), John Olson remains one of the most ignored and underrated free horn players around today. His lines weep and roar, taking the lead several times but never centre stage. At times it even sounds positively lonesome.
Vulture’s Banquet is all about textures and spaces in the sound, and unlike some free playing groups I don’t need hours of close listening study to hear the magic. This is instant, first listen deep stuff and this proves the chemistry is still going strong.
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Dwayne Sodahberk's latest for Tigerbeat6 pushes some of the glitchy electronics with which the artist is often associated to the background, allowing the simple pop melodies to rise to the fore. Though perhaps less experimental than some of his other work, Cut Open wins by being direct.
Honest pop music is tough to come by, especially in an age where every stylistic tick is played for some meta-textual inside joke that will usually cease to amuse anyone after six months. When I find a record with an honest but still fresh approach to squeezing digital production into the form of a pop song, it's always exciting. Too often the people with the skills to pull something like this off are too busy hiding behind not-so-clever references and shorthand for the work of other artists that they only seem to understand on a very superficial level.
Sodahberk captures the detuned, bedroom-produced pop sound in three minute slices about as well as anyone. The off-kilter instrumentation and touches of digital manipulation keep songs (that might otherwise sound too straightforward) a little off balance. Sodahberk always seems to be teetering on the line between needing to tune his instruments a little better and playing them just well enough that the sour notes seem necessary. The vocals are just burried enough to be mysterious, but not so overwhelmed as to be lost in the mix. And all of this is the difference between using an an imperfect aesthetic to create an atmosphere and simply relying on that aesthetic because it's all that you can pull off. It's easy for people to crank out tunes without so much as caring if strings are tuned, if drums are recorded properly, or if songs are mixed with an ear for balance. The production on Cut Open reveals that Sodahberk's choices are not only intentional—they pay off.
I imagine that work like this will eventually inspire a wave of commercial pop producers to try and create damaged but still polished songs for airheaded singers and posterboys. It's reasonable to imagine producers for pop albums dropping a record like this in an engineer's lap saying "I'm looking for THAT sound, but radio-friendly," and when that day comes, I assume that people like Sodahberk will already be on to something else. Luckily this album has guts and depth and the kind of authenticity that a $20,000 lock out rate can't buy.
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Dating from between ’96 and ’98, these tracks recreate golden years for the artist: the maturing of his duo Mouse On Mars, the beginnings of Sonig, a time when experimentation seemed to come as a natural tapering of the sound MOM made their own the day they first propositioned Too Pure with “Frosch”: a space-age tropical dub ambient, loosened an de-kitsched. With Lithops, St. Werner funnels the minor moments of MOM psychedelia through the bit machine and comes out with a shrouded, hermetic version, something breakable but ineffable in a swirl of binary infinites: the holy intervals of concrète sound dubbed, stabbed and guessed-at via synthesizer, feedback and cheap effects.
‘Kraut’ in an inherent lushness or a tendency toward organic motifs and phrasing only, early (and especially late) Lithops is a digital engine, meant for an audience with an ear for the graininess and the incomplete moments of a record like Vulvaland. Queries comes closer to MOM’s pastoral oddity Glam, or the outer bits of Instrumentals, alternating slow, wormy dub with the planetary drones and cries of feedback towards a backward psychedelic, lonely and vulnerable. This should be essential listening for any casual fan of MOM; it is a bare, twitching product where grooves and moods are scraped at, traversed, never noodled, just powerfully suggested in a cosmic dub concrète root exploration.
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Opener, “A Great Divide,” is perhaps the most epic the group has ever gotten, with crunchy guitars and battered drums nearly drowning out bassist/vocalist B.J. Warshaw, who gives his all into fighting back the musical onslaught. Elsewhere, chintzy bits of synthesizer and ragged tunefulness which reminds me of Husker Du appears, adding an interesting counter-point to sonic onslaught. “New Buildings” opens sounding like a bit of discarded Lightning Bolt before opening up into a passionate rave up that sounds as much noise rock as it does SoCal punk. While the rockers on Stay Afraid are awesome, sternum shaking jolts of pure sweat and aggression, it would have been beneficial had the band decided to throw in a few longer tracks that show the true range of the group.
Despite this one caveat, the album as a whole is as solid as a Mack truck. “Death” begins with some distorted synthesizer swells before a high pitched squeal of feedback disrupts the calm and the song launches into a breakneck chorus. Warshaw’s voice is covered in a shroud of digital effects and distortion, recalling at times the distant warped vocals of former Jesus Lizard front man David Yow. Ultimately this works to the bands advantage as his voice becomes another facet of the overall sound. Stay Afraid is an endurance test of a record, not in terms of unpleasantness, but in terms of the pace of the record. One can see the band literally dropping at the conclusion of the closer “Changing of the Guard,” and while listeners might too, they shouldn’t be disappointed.
Like climbing stairs, grade school physical fitness tests, and triathlons, Stay Afraid is the kind of endurance test that will leave you happy about the ass kicking it hands you.
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Protocol is at once a dense, bleak, murderous kind of record that works on a purely visceral level. The songs appear mostly as loosely structured experiments centered around the dirty, scab-ridden, blood-clotted themes that the album takes on. There are almost no discernable beats this time around, and what rhythm exists seems almost like the breakbeats that Yaseen is known for stretched almost imperceptibly long like sinewy tissue that is tearing.
The tracks are almost exclusively composed of intensive waves of grumbling low end and harsh, manipulated synth figures. In fact, there's so much going on in the low frequencies that a lot of this album is simply lost without a good sub because the weight of most tracks is being carried in a frequency range that bookshelf speakers and earbuds just can't reproduce. That's both an asset and a drawback for the record; with the sub blasting and the volume cranked, the album recreates the bludgeoning force of its themes, but coming through a standard car stereo or from an mp3 player, the record may fail to connect.
A range of guest vocalists provides the personification of the album's unrelentingly dark themes. The voices usually take the already brutal sound design and drag the songs further through filthy gutters, but then Lydia Lunch, Alan Vega, and Dälek aren't known for an up-with-people vibe. It can all be a bit overwhelming in fact, and I find the record hard to listen to straight through because it's soaked with a very palpable dread, but allowing it to work its dark magic, there's no denying that it DOES work.
Like a lot of art that isn't actually pretty to look at or fun to watch, Protocol can be difficult, but there is a certain beauty in how capably it renders a world of violence and grime. I'm not always in the mood for a Park Chan-Wook film or for Michael Gira's writing, and I imagine that I'll need the right headspace to really appreciate Protocol on repeated listens, but there's no doubt that Uniform have captured ugliness here in a way that is affecting.
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Important Records
Most of the songs are led by Yuki’s piano and Utaka’s viola, both instruments sketch some repeated lines which the whole band build up into a fully fleshed out flourish. They never resort to forming a wall of sound to accommodate all the instruments. Instead, they act more like an orchestra—even when all players are going at it hammer and tongs—each member adding their own element to the melody. Anoice hit all the blissful and joyous emotions and only rarely dip into melancholy like most bands of the same ilk.
The album’s nine pieces are split into two categories: four with titles, which are the straightforward songs of the album, and five untitled ones, interspersed between the others, taking a little more experimental experimental direction. The first two untitled pieces are droney glitch bits which bookend the song “Aspirin Music” (probably the most rock bit of the album, also the best) quite well. The untitled pieces all act as prologues and epilogues to the named songs; it is a unique way of doing the album. It disrupts the flow slightly but when each named track starts, it starts from a blank slate. This allows the band to start afresh and build up new moods and textures. I like this approach a lot.
Anoice might at first seem liike Important Records' attempt at finding another Larsen but they are more than that. Remmings is a damn fine album. It took a few listens to fully appreciate it but now that I have gotten into it I’m listening to it quite a lot. The range of music on the album goes from the simple and minimal to complex and dense pieces. A lot of craftmanship has gone into Remmings, it doesn't sound like the songs were just jammed out. They sound like they were carefully sculpted and coloured. As good as the album is, I never felt though as if Anoice ever got to full power. Hopefully Remmings is what will become a rich back catalogue.
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Matador
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The theme of the album is audio portraiture, each track named in honor of a favored personage. Where another more traditional group might pay homage in song by penning lyrics that reference the subject directly, Matmos utilize their signature strategy of object sampling, approaching the challenge obliquely and ingeniously. For each subject, a series of appropriate objects (and sometimes texts) are chosen, then sampled, mutated and molded into a song whose genre roughly corresponds to the chosen subject's aesthetic. In the case of "Steam and Sequins for Larry Levan," for instance, the club music pioneer is evoked with samples of hissing steam vents and sequins being affixed to fabric, which are magically transformed into exactly the kind of infectious mutant disco white-label side that might have been produced by Levan, Walter Gibbons or Arthur Russell back in the Paradise Garage heyday.
Though this working method undoubtedly results in a series of audio portraits that are wholly overdetermined by their subject (who couldn't have guessed that Joe Meek would be memorialized with a heavily phased, reverb-drenched rock instrumental?), I was nevertheless surprised by the many left turns and counterintuitive choices made by Matmos. Also, because nearly all of the subjects chosen by Matmos were confirmed or rumored to be homosexual (or sexually ambivalent), the album seems also to function as a kind of alternative "queer positive" historical thread running through the past 150 years of Western culture. By placing such maligned, misunderstood figures as "Mad King Ludwig" II of Bavaria and Valerie "I Shot Andy Warhol" Solanas in the same company as esteemed writers and philosophers (Wittgenstein, William S. Burroughs, Patricia Highsmith), Matmos create a broad category of uniquely eccentric queer cultural pioneers, suggesting that perhaps the originality that these figures displayed was part in parcel of their unorthodox sexuality.
All conceptual trappings aside, the music on The Rose Has Teeth is frequently brilliant, and would seem so even to a listener entirely ignorant of each track's subject or source material. The album's title is taken from its opening track, a particularly whimsical bit of text drawn from Wittgenstein's influential and inscrutable "Philosophical Investigations," the peculiar linguistic twists of logic being read aloud by Bjork and Marcus Schmickler of Pluramon, among others, while samples of roses and teeth are processed into the kind of crunchy, bottom-heavy psychedelic techno that has become the group's signature sound.
"Public Sex for Boyd McDonald" samples surreptitiously recorded anonymous sex acts, forming a haunting and sleazy funk track redolent of bus station bathrooms, video booths and pay-by-the-hour sex motels. The perversity continues, in a less seamy and more fantasmatical form with "Semen Song for James Bidgood," a tribute to the famous photographer and director of Pink Narcissus, which samples the dripping semen of Drew Daniel, the stereo-phased vocals of Antony and the lovely harp playing of Zeena Parkins. The track is the most hypnotic and ravishing on the album, a gauzey and hallucinatory boudoir fantasy raised to the solemn dignity of a funereal ode. The music of Coil is an obvious touchstone here, and it would not be hard to read this as a dual tribute to Jhonn Balance as well as Bidgood.
The longest track on the album is, not surprisingly, also the most conceptually daunting. How best to memorialize transgressive writer William S. Burroughs, whose life and work does not immediately bring to mind a specific musical genre? In his film adaptation of Naked Lunch, David Cronenberg opted for Middle Eastern-inflected cool jazz soundtrack featuring the playing of Ornette Coleman. Eschewing such easy formalism, Matmos instead create an epic 13-minute track that travels seamlessly through several different possibilities: from ragtime piano noodling, to percussive solos on adding machines and printing presses, through to full-blown Moroccan joujouka, and all the steps in-between. It's a masterful track that more than justifies its extended length.
In many ways, this is the most consistently musical album Matmos have yet created. There are very few extended passages of willfully arrhythmic electronica or noise, and in their place are fully fleshed-out songs with rigidly determined themes, that nonetheless miraculously transcend their digital precision, frequently laying bare the passion and interest that the duo undoubtedly feel towards their subjects. This enthusiasm and adventurousness is quite infectious, and endless pleasure can be derived through the examination and deconstruction of the concept behind each track, making this unreservedly my favorite Matmos album to date.
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Fern Jones' style of rockabilly gospel is the type of music I fondly recall hear when digging through the dingy used record stores on the weekend. It's a bit of Sunday salvation with a spice enough to make it lovable and not repulsive. Fern began playing guitar and piano at 12, by 14 years old was singing on Saturday nights, and by 16 was married to a man who soon thereafter heard the calling to become a preacher. With her hand in her husband's, his hand in god's, she embraced the gospel and devoted her life to the music of the lord, playing to thousands in tents and small churches for years around the south for years until her retirement in 1960. Like JS Bach, Fern was a voice of God, claiming that she only wrote down the music that came to her from divine power.
Fern's music was about belief and hope, of the salvation she has seen, and it's inspiring. Her voice is shining and full of conviction. Jeff Lipton's nearly made me a believer, as his remastering job makes these nearly 18 year old recordings sound as good as the recording equipment captured them back in the day. I find myself in agreement with her lyrics that the people who go to church every weekend but are as evil as the devil during the week "Ain't Got Nuthin';" I'm convinced she truly believes in the word of the bible verbatum, as Pentecostals do, when she assures her belief in the stories on "I Do Believe;" while her renditions of "Didn't It Rain" (see Songs: Ohia) and "The World Is Not My Home" (see: His Name Is Alive) are like divine artifacts. Her original "I Was There When It Happened" even became a popular tune, with recordings made by both Johnny Cash and Jimmy Swaggart.
Like Numero 003, the Bandit label release, the accompanying booklet provides a great little story on her life and recordings, as it's something unique, original, and unfortunately something we'll probably never be able to see a documentary or feature length on.
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Touch & Go
I knew this was about love from the moment I saw the cover; a tattooed palm carrying the universal symbol of passion is front and center, emanating an energy made tense by the presence of a crow also featured in the drawing. The booklet reveals a clone army of nude women, a hypnotic spell pulsing from their bodies. The first song, "Tangled," gravitates between romantic sentiment and a sense of ominous control: "Trapped in your web I'll always be / Wrapped around my heart like thorns you sting / Tangled in my heart you will stay." Paul Jenkin's sense of poetic creativity isn't on par with Leonard Cohen's, but its bare honesty and Jenkin's delivery suits the music almost perfectly. Everything from the artwork to the distinctly American, distinctly gothic music the band belts out revolves around a theme of helplessness and confused intentions. The band backs these themes up in spirit, morphing from impressionistic dirges into dark country western ballads featuring beautiful lap steel and string performances. This album is for love, against love, and inextricably bound up in all its conceits; it is a perfectly sequenced and conceived album with absolutely zero loose strings.
Just another love album would be dull, though, if it weren't for the layers of ideas and music that The Black Heart Procession has woven into this record. Jenkins draws straight lines from desperate love to worldly loss and dizziness. Love mired in a foggy world is far more desperate and impossible than love examined on its own and the band draws exclamation points around this fact. "The Fix" snakes a lusty course around the impossibility of change. Jenkins sings, "We can't change the course / We can't get the fix / We can't win the world," feeling the disparate lives everyone pursues growing further apart and less compassionate. Tobias Nathaniel plays organ and guitar over a gypsy-like violin part, emphasizing the busy world that grinds forward around everyone else, around the quiet prayers and hopes that people slowly abandon forever. It is remarkable to hear a band this in tune with the subject matter on a record. It's as if every member has a secret chart by which to translate every feeling into the appropriate chords and rhythms. The violin on a song like "The Letter" is astonishing, matching the intensity of the lyrics with an effortless cry. The instrument sounds alive all over this record and it's a fucking miracle to hear it played that way. Songs peak and sky rocket just when they should, escalating into mountains of sound at times and diving into deep, abysmal sadness seamlessly, without the first sign of sweat. The musicianship of each member is only matched by the mood they evoke through their talents. The sadness on "To Bring You Back" is almost choking, placing the world of lovers distinctly in the realm of the night, where tender emotions have to be hidden if they want to survive the universe at daylight.
I'm more of a fan of abstract music than anything, always taken by surprise when such unusual sounds can effect me personally. There are a few bands around, however, that take pop, rock, and other variations thereof and wind them up into something special and heart felt. The Black Heart Procession has taken forms of music everyone will be familiar with and turned them into an exciting, new, and powerful sound.
This is one of the best records I've heard this year and it'll be damn hard to top. Whoever does it will have to figure out how this band merged all their ideas together so well and addressed a topic so tired without sounding silly. In fact, The Black Heart Procession comes away sounding just the opposite, they've reinvented the topic of love and utilized with cutting precision. Oh, and on a side note, "Not Just Words" gets my vote for being the catchiest, most subtly depressing song in recent memory. I can't stop singing its chorus and at the same time it puts a pit in my stomach that makes me wish I could.
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