17 July 2005

Jonathan Dean

Albums and Singles

I thought I'd right a wrong here by reviewing Marissa Nadler's debutalbum, which I completely overlooked upon its release last year. Ballads of Living and Dying is unmistakably the same voice and sensibility as that on Mayflower May, but without the conceptual trappings, there are a greater variety of approaches to be found on the record.
Eclipse

The songs on Marissa's debut makegreater use of studio effects, with liberal vocal processing and amyriad of electric guitar effects, including an e-bow which is used tohaunting effect on several of the album's best tracks. On the whole,this album is darker and more psychedelic than Mayflower May,which I suspect might have greater appeal to listeners approaching thismaterial from the standpoint of classic 1960s psych folk like TheTrees, Fairport Convention and Mellow Candle. Nadler's vocals on thisalbum seem even a bit more dramatic and affected than on her sophomorerelease, especially when she tackles a pair of tracks adapted fromother writers' works, using her voice cannily to reshape the words inorder to fit her familiar melodic, cyclical fingerstyle. "Hay TantosMuertos" utilizes words by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and the album'sfinal track adapts Edgar Allan Poe's famously lyrical death ballad"Annabelle Lee" into a chilling slice of haunted psychedelia with anatmosphere inexplicably resembling Dark Side of the Moon-eraFloyd. Nadler's spooky evocation of Civil War-era balladry is inevidence on the track "Box of Cedar," where a soon-to-be war widowbemoans and celebrates her husband's certain fate: "I'm gonna telleverybody I know that I'm glad to see you/You know you're coming homein a box of cedar." Populating the album are a similar cast ofcharacters from the second album, including Mayflower May herself, thelonely ghost of a spoilt and slain maiden who wanders the woods"Without a lover/Without a friend/Without a savior," Nadler sadlyimploring: "And if you see her/Call out her name/And if you hearher/Out in the rain/Mayflower May Belle was her name." The addition onseveral tracks of auxiliary instrumentation including banjo, accordionand organ contributes to a slightly more eclectic sound that stands incontrast to Mayflower May's limited palette. As with the secondalbum, after repeat listens, the strongest aspects are once again thedeceptive simplicity of the songs and the strength of Marissa'sseductively haunting vocals. I could well imagine eventually growingtired of the rather trite stylistic conceit of Marissa Nadler's morbidpsych-folk, but I don't think I'd ever tire of hearing her voice. Infact, I would probably be happy listening to her recite the phone book.

samples:

• Hay Tantos Muertos
• Box of Cedar

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17 July 2005

Jonathan Dean

Albums and Singles

You can keep all your Joanna Newsoms, your Josephine Fosters, yourDiane Clucks, your Mira Billottes and your CocoRosies. I have beenforced to part company with all the other new folk songstresses, asthere is no room in my world now for anyone but Marissa Nadler, whosevoice is so lovely and bewitching that it spins me senseless until Ifind myself wandering aimlessly in a dark wood with no clue how to gethome.
Eclipse

Her voice is mysterious and enchanting, whispery and fragile, butalso enunciative and matronly, seductive but elegiac. I can detectshades of Hope Sandoval or Elizabeth Fraser, perhaps, but also darkerstrains of Linda Perhacs or The Trees' Celia Humphries. But just whenyou think that Marissa Nadler's voice is just a gentle, lilting,massaging instrument, there comes a coarse little edge of Anne Briggsand Shirley Colllins, but when you try to grab hold, she has recededfurther into the forest, and her voice echoes off of the canopy oftrees and disappears into the wilderness. The Saga of Mayflower Mayis Ms. Nadler's second album, and it's vaguely conceptual, with eachsong a different chapter in a cloth-bound book of murder ballads, thekind decorated with pressed flowers and handwritten love letters. Thelyrics are a glorious collection of unashamed balladeer cliches, fullof turquoise-colored eyes of lovers, fields of green and skies ofazure, and spoilt maidens silently bleeding to death beneath wildweeping willows, or drowned in rivers by scorned suitors. The fact thather songs play on such familiar lyrical themes works to Ms. Nadler'sadvantage, as it seems she is pulling from some vast collectiveunconscious archive of British and Appalachain folk ballads, whichmakes the emotional impact of the music quite stealthy. I was almostlulled into complacency when "Damsels in the Dark" began, and I wasrudely awakened by its spooky refrain: "Photographs of your face,against the wind/Against the rain, I'm gonna burn them all/And buryyour name." Marissa plays all of the guitars, including 12-string andukelele, and is joined on a few tracks by Brain McTear and Nick Castro,both of Espers and various other related projects. For the most part,Marissa's guitar playing is pretty but unremarkable, little rollingfingerpicked melodies that cycle around and create a foundation for herlovely vocals, which are the real star. There are moments of purehypnotic beauty on this record, when just at the appropriate time,Marissa's vocals are multitracked and overlaid, creating richlyevocative harmonies, a chorus of forest witches answering each lyricwith spine-tingling echoes. What I really respond to in MarissaNadler's music is not its originality, as it is clearly derivative of60s psych-folk, but its lack of pretension and self-consciouskookiness, something that the Joanna Newsoms and Devendra Banharts ofthe world could learn from. I have spun The Saga of Mayflower May more than any other album I've gotten lately, and I'm far from ready to take it out of my player.

samples:

• Under An Old Umbrella
• Damsels in the Dark
• My Little Lark

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10 July 2005

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Touch Tone

A live recording from late last year, this disc is an appetizer for theupcoming collaborative full length between two of the biggest names inelectronic music. Sala Santa Ceciliais one 19-minute laptop duet that will not appear on the future fulllength; however the track is described on the sleeve as an "overture,"so there's the chance that the eventual record could contain elementsherein, though it could just mean an overture for the show itself. Itdoesn't come as much of a surprise that these two would start workingtogether as they both, even as major personalities in the electronicworld, remain attached to acoustic instrumentation, as well as bothstraddling the vague terrain between high ('chin-scratch') experimentaland adult ('couch + cocktail') contemporary musics. I loved Sakamoto'stwo collaborations with Alva Noto (Vrioon I & II) and both of Fennesz's laptop improv trios with Fenn O'Berg,plus Touch is marketing this as if it were "the next level" ofmusic-making as we know it, so expectations were a little high, and thedisc lives up to some of them. The most impressive thing about it isthe amount of different sound elements packed into such a short timewhile achieving a fairly level flow (the fairly level flow is the mostunimpressive thing about it). If the set was improvised, it shows offthe sympathetic nature of each musician to the sound palette of theother as everything locks together so well that even if Touch said itwas improvised I would not believe them. The movement of the trackbenefits from Fennesz's recent retreat from the saturatingly obviousguitar riff and his new love of Vangelis-sized retro synth drones.Sakamoto is on point with some washed-out orchestral snips of his own,and Fennesz counters with some of the same dreamy lateral static cutsthat appear on everything of his except Hotel Parallel. Theopening of the piece is not so impressive, a call-and-response ofmonochrome tones, high-pitched and a little too church-y for my taste,oscillating in a commonplace glitch pattern. At about four minutes, arhythmic pulse ushers in the first meat of the track: bunches of thoseold-style drones, orchestral loops, some digital rain, and obliteratedpiano plunks. Someone goes crazy with the backward orchestra loops alittle too early and muddies the water, but at around nine minuteseverything bottoms out, leaving a beautifully suggestive rhythm ofdigital slices, the likes of which I've not heard from either artist,and around which earth-toned pools of Fennesz heroin start collecting,nice and slow, across the last six minutes. Where on a Fennesz recordthis kind of oceanic nostalgia would be enough, this time someonepeppers it, eggs it on with a mess of sharp and shimmering glitchliquid that really gets out there. The key to enjoying this is gettingtuned to the small changes; after repeated listens, I actually wishcertain sections would be allowed more repetition, more room forsmaller variation. That this is billed as an "overture" helps me topredict that the album will be rightfully more expansive.

samples:

• (excerpt 1)
• (excerpt 2)
• (excerpt 3)

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09 July 2005

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Temporary Residence
What was once a side-project of Tarentel bandmates has now fortunately matured into a fully-realized band. The Drift play a moody, contemplative, and sometimes ecstatic mixture of jazz and post-rock which is not too difficult to connect back to the current Tarentel sound, even though there is only one shared member at this point. The ensemble features of an accord of stand-up bass, guitar, drums, and trumpet, all sharing space to make some well-choreographed sounds. The two songs on this exquisitely-packaged 12" are teasers from The Drift's recording sessions for their full-length and the promise exhibited in them is exhilarating. "Streets" is a ten-minute explorative piece which has a few movements to it. It begins with what is literally a drifty oceanic sound shattered eventually by the prodding but not unwelcome entrance of the stand-up bass, poking its plucked strings through the haze. A light percussion gives it some feet until the instruments collaboratively all rush in with a swing-happy trumpet signaling the charge. The pleasantries of the song lie in the ability of all the instruments to be playing singularly and separately, doing their own thing, yet somehow melding into some organic mass of melody and rhythm which keeps the song running, jogging, or sprinting (the song phases through all of these paces amazingly well during its movements). Throughout the song, the instruments seem entirely able to step on one another's toes elegantly, if such a thing were possible. There is no disturbance in the dance, even when one instrument decides to muscle its way in and seemingly ask, "May I cut in?" The bass is the true conveyor for "Streets," while the other instruments step up for flings and flirtations, sometimes brief and other times extended. In the end, the circularity of the song brings it back to its beginnings (in true East Coker fashion) and the drifty sound transports it away on some deliberate ebb tide. "Nozomi" enters with relaxing guitar steps underwritten with a light wails from the trumpet. It's like walking up and down the same three graceful steps over and over. The tempo of "Nozomi" is uniformly slow and meditative, unlike "Streets" where there was acceleration paired with deceleration throughout. In fact, "Nozomi" feels entirely more holistic and showcases the more restrained capabilities of The Drift. They can improvise on a hushed level or an explosive level or on both combined. Likewise, this record can be enjoyed in either a hushed or explosive state, but it's better to embrace both.

samples:

• Streets (part one)
• Streets (part two)
• Nozomi

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09 July 2005

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Albums and Singles

5RC
The 15-year-old version of me loves The Mae Shi. The songs on their second release for Kill Rock Stars imprint 5RC carry all the hallmarks of what my inner child holds near and dear: fucked up guitars, anarchic rhythms, singers barely in control of their vocal chords. So I have to trust my more awkward and chubby counterpart when I say that Heartbeeps is a great record. While 2004's Terrorbird was impressive in its ambitious scope (33 songs in 43 minutes) Heartbeeps is just as impressive in its consistency. Songs like "The Meat of the Inquiry" and "Born for a Short Time" charge out of the blocks spitting strangled notes and caustic noise to all in their path at a breakneck pace. It's no surprise then that "Crimes of Infancy" ends in the sound of the band collectively hyperventilating, seemingly exhausted by their efforts. With all the breathlessness, it makes sense that this nearly sixteen minute endeavor is broken up with small slices of keyboard driven synth-pop such as "Spoils of Victory" and "Spoils of Injury." The Mae Shi are best when they stick to the noisy mash-ups. "The Universal Polymath" and "Heartbeeps" end the album with a great one-two punch, stretching out the time constraints and allowing the tempos to slacken without losing any of their thrust. "The Universal Polymath" could be misinterpreted as dance-punk, but its fractured drums, high frequency guitar, and its succinct conclusion challenge all the precepts of that genre while still managing to capitalize on a ferocious groove. Meanwhile, "Heartbeeps" (in its third incarnation on this release) achieves a nervy, anxious mood where hi-hat fills, analog keyboards, and the desperate vocals of the four singers heighten the unease. While Terrorbird was plagued by the fact that it didn't know whether it wanted to move or pummel the listener, Heartbeeps achieves an excellent balance of The Mae Shi's more caustic approach and their desire for a dance party. My 15-year-old self couldn't be happier.

samples:

• Crimes of Infancy
• Eat the Prize
• Polymath

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09 July 2005

Administrator

Albums and Singles

City Centre Offices
It's been raining here every day at a time that I want to go outside and do something fun. As a result, I've been couped up with my computers and a copy of Let Your Heart Draw A Line for a couple of weeks, and it's the perfect formula for creating a blog-obsessed, blanket curling, mopey shut-in. The newest from The Remote Viewer continues with the set up they laid out on their previous record for City Centre Offices, but turns the lights down even lower and captures that stuck-in-your-bedroom melancholy even more effectively. While the instrumentation sounds mostly natural like real pianos and guitars, everything is processed in a way to make it sound smaller, closer, more discreet, and in many cases less perfect. This is the promise of digital recording technology paying off: the use of high tech tools to manipulate recorded sound to be less perfect, more scratchy and more detuned rather than the reverse. These are simple tunes rooted in sad melodies and softly sung or spoken vocals and all the hissing and cracking that can rightfully be added to or brought out of a recording without making it seem like a joke. People are finally putting the click and glitch culture to work for something other than deconstructed techno and dub, and The Remote Viewer are doing it as expertly as anyone. This is the best of the new wave of laptop folk that I've heard because it keeps the songs together and it allows them to speak and mean something rather than letting them noodle off into the ether. There's a difficult balance being struck here between novelty production techniques and straight acoustic playing, between self-consciously pretentious song titles and heart-on-sleeve honesty, but it manages all to work in the end with a little bit of humor and a lot of damp, rainy repetition. Often, the kind of earnest, sappy break-up records recorded by folkies and emo kids and sensitive rockers leave me high and dry because the rock or folk language of guitars and drums and bass guitars feels too played out to resonante. Here is a moody break up record for the rest of us then, sweetly mapping out those lonely longing days where a computer is your only window to the world.

samples:

• They're Closing Down the Shop
• To Completion
• Kindtransport

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09 July 2005

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Originally available only as 10", now in special-sleeved compact disc, No Sign comes from artists with a bit more exposure than Sedimental is used to; the music, also, occupies austere and familiar realms, making it less the shock-to-the-head I've come to expect from the label, however deep listening turns over a complex and powerful piece.
Sedimental

The pin-prick-on-paper sleeve design is a nice foreshadow of the sound inside, reassuring too, as I've certainly used prickly adjectives to describe microtonal music with a significantly more maximalist approach than this. No Sign's punctures are spaced to produce a decorative, even conservative aesthetic that comes through sonically as well. Kyle Bruckmann and Ernst Karel play wind instruments arranged through forcefields of analog electronic noise. Though fully engrained, their horns are nonetheless distinct and often plaintive, pooling as they do around the open spaces and between scratches of mechanical interference. The word may be "restraint," but that implies an interest in suggesting an instrument's extremes, or at least a dialogic structure in the music, neither of which are present. With EKG, texture and transition feel extra tight, precise as a cube of pin-prickings, a quality that gets reinforced by the track titles, each a time interval, traveling from "Years" down to "Seconds." As with Murray's Places, the focus here seems to be overlappings of sound decay rather than an emphasis on particular lushness or complexity of concrète sound environments, something closer to the work of Axel Dörner whose prolific appearances preceded EKG's in both the Sedimental and Locust catalogs. The supreme breathlessness of Karel and Bruckmann's horns gathers everything into a groaning wheeze of descent rather than the crackling of surface play that defines most else in the closest-checkable genre. No Sign's uniqueness is a product of these visions of closely-structured time lapse coming together with the improvisational intentions and microscopic attentions of a thousand small sounds.

samples:

• Years
• Days
• Minutes

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09 July 2005

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Sedimental
A northeastern American sax player bent on packing his unique and extreme vision into an unassuming, highly personal statement, David Gross might as well be poster boy for the Sedimental label. His first for solo alto saxophone, Things I Have Found To Be True follows fellow Bostonian James Coleman's tremendous solo theremin recording Zuihitsu and Performing Tonight, a collection of baffling sax/voice duets from Gross and Liz Tonne. Gross' 15-year history of instrument discovery stops here in an indecipherable tome to childhood and personal history. Gross has made statements about dismantling completely his concept of looking for new niches within a history of jazz etc, and these ideas are completely supported from minute #1 of this disc. The artist's style is probably derivative of someone else; more appropriately it is entirely derivative of the saxophone as an inert vessel of forces, ideas at the core of any history of free music, but Things I Have Found makes clear that these matter not. By covering the disc with personal referents, including Gross' grandmother's beautiful cover painting of the artist and his brother as children, he creates a mythology that is more than simple juxtaposition of abstract sound and subjective information. The first track, "Partially Buried Woodshed," becomes obscure childhood memory, plea for the abstract expressionist credo of emotion-through-basic-gesture, and a brut simulation technique all flooding at once with Gross struggling to keep his breath within the spaces. Others have described the artist's style as "sculptural," a perfect term that hones in on the physicality of the playing and sounds played, while leaving room for projected spaces within the saxophone itself and divergent, imaginary realms created. A woodshed of breath, brass, earth, flesh, and…wood creates itself, outside of history, outside of temporal concerns, a bound diary of suspended moments, whittled down to a purity of expression without a purity of intent. The surprises come when things even remotely close to traditional (read: human) sax sounds creep through, as if by accident. "Dystonia" is a numbing human-voice-through-saxophone-bell piece whose guttural meanderings have surely been done-over countless times but enter the mythology of the record in a refreshing way here: comfort and assurance in, yes indeed, a human presence and abject terror at how the presence asserts itself. Gross' playing is more sparse on this release than any of the other documents I've heard, though these are his most complex compositions; the intimacy with which he approaches the saxophone, each screw in each latch, every fiber in the reed, every pad or valve, and all the negative space in between, is simply astounding.

samples:

• Partially Buried Woodshed
• Dystonia
• What Music Sounds Like

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09 July 2005

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Unschooled Records
It seems that Caleb Mueller just can't decide what kind of musician he wants to be. As Decomposure, he pinballs between singing pop songs in his basement and using household items to create experimental electronica (not just in his basement but his living room and kitchen, too). Despite the ingenuity, Decomposure has had difficulty finding a base audience mostly because of Mueller's refusal to adhere to one musical style: when he sits behind a piano and tries (not entirely unsuccessfully) to croon he alienates the electronic demographic; and when he bangs on pots and pans and records his cordless phone's beeping to make insane and frenetic beat sequences he loses the verse-chorus-verse set. But where At Home and Unaffected falls short in clarity, it shines in sheer sonic novelty, aided by Mueller's obvious and unbridled passion for making music his way. For the open-eared listener Mueller has crafted an ambitious and impressively creative mixture of both styles, with some further forays into spoken word and slam poetry and even some singer-songwriter guitar work. Don't let the stylistic wanderings fool you, as Mueller does have a purpose: strictly adhering to a rigid guideline (included in the liner notes), Mueller made At Home and Unaffected using (with a few minor exceptions) only sounds found in his home, sequenced with computer but not otherwise electronically altered in any way. He uses real instruments as the situation desires—guitar, piano, drums and even melodeon; he also is able to make sound out of household stuff, ranging from strums on rubber bands to whatever percussion he could glean from bathroom items. The liner notes, while detailed, are insufficient in explaining Mueller's method and are thankfully supplemented on Decomposure's website: one can read the explanations behind the more baffling songs in detail, including what Mueller used to make the sounds as well as the inspiration for the songwriting. The latter isn't merely agreeable-sounding fluff, either—Mueller tackles post-modern alienation (Center of the World) and modern-day religious hypocrisy (Disconnect) with equal verve. But as an album, At Home and Unaffected is flighty and disjointed—the rapid fire beats and glitches don't mesh well with the more melodious fare, and the listener is hard pressed to not be driven away (or crazy). Worst, some will dismiss Mueller's work as a gimmicky rather than ingenious. In a way, it is: ultimately, the idea wins out over the end result, as it proves to be more interesting to hear about a song crafted using the sonic residue from a Trivial Pursuit game than it is to hear the finished product. Still, Mueller has more going for him than novelty. He wins significant style points for creativity and method, and At Home and Unaffected isn't at all doomed to be background noise—the album's pop nuggets can surprise and delight, and the more manic electronic moments will challenge and amuse, especially rewarding those few who will bother to spin it more than once.

samples:

• Distraction
• Guitar/Trivial Pursuit
• The Center of the Universe

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09 July 2005

Administrator

Albums and Singles

discos mariscos
There's only one way to view Applied Communications second release Uhhh Sort Of, and that is as a very crude slice of self-help therapy for a kid who never got over his mother's death. The specter of dead parents, fickle friends, and cheating girlfriends abounds here. Applied Communications' Max Woods repeats child-like mantras like "It was just a dream, just a dream, just a dream..." in his whiny, prepubescent snarl over tinny drum samples and toy instruments. On "It Bothers Me It Bothers You I Snore," Woods ascends to a anxiety-ridden peak, using distorted drums, wah-wah guitar samples, cow bell clicks, and his particular brand of, um, lyrical stylings ("I didn't mean to take off your clothes and throw you on my mattress!" he squeals at one point). The problem with Uhhh Sort Of comes from its unremitting angst. This is the record that results when the eighth grade geek makes a record, and it isn't a pretty picture. We're talking years of pent-up aggression here, touching on everything from sexual insecurity, boredom, pop culture detritus, and death. That Max Woods builds these awkward, and sometimes touching rants on top of fairly innocuous, though serviceable laptop bells and whistles makes this an even more perplexing record, one not easy to dismiss yet not easy to embrace either. The biggest albatross on Uhhh Sort Of though is the death of Max Woods' mother. He references her passing constantly in a way that is both ironically self effacing and emotionally naked, yelping on "DFK" over a simple drum loop "Please forgive me/ I love you mom/ don't die again!" In many ways, Max Woods' messy self-help sample pop most closely linked to the work of Daniel Johnston, an artist whose (often) inarticulate, scatter-shot musings could reveal much more than was expected of him. While Uhhh Sort Of is liable to scare off most listeners within the first thirty seconds, those who stick it out will find a record that, though often frustrating, is mesmerizing in its emotional honesty and willingness to be stripped bare for all to see.

samples:

• Do You Know What I'm Saying
• It Bothers Me It Bothers You I Snore
• DFK

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