22 May 2016

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Albums and Singles

Newly reissued by his own Saltern imprint, 1985's Off the Wall takes its droll title from the rich acoustic properties of the Berlin studio that Wada was using as a practice space at the time.  While not quite crazy enough to warrant the more expected meaning of its title, this is definitely a very strange and ambitious album, as Wada’s small ensemble employed an arsenal of homemade bagpipes and organs to exploit the sonic properties of their surrounding architecture: the room guided the composition.  Unusual instrumentation and process aside, Off the Wall is also a curious anomaly stylistically, transforming the Eastern drone aesthetic of La Monte Young and Pandit Pran Nath into something resembling medieval Scottish free-jazz.  For better or worse, that is definitely a niche that does not get filled very often.

Saltern/Important

At first glance, Off the Wall is admittedly quite a tough sell (even by experimental music standards).  For one, I suspect that the audience for prolonged bagpipe freak-outs was quite small back in 1985 and it has likely not grown much since.  Though they certainly lend themselves nicely to drone-based music, bagpipes are fundamentally doomed to always be regarded as a definitively uncool instrument.  Secondly, this album’s very raison d'être is quixotically rooted in the acoustic properties of the room that it was recorded in.  The room that it is being played in (mine) is presumably very different, so much of the spatially dynamic and reverberant character of the performance has been lost or (at best) only partially conveyed by the recording.  Thankfully, I have a healthy appreciation for both futility and the perverse (a Japanese man in Germany building traditional Scottish instruments) and Off the Wall is bizarre enough to (mostly) work solely due to its brash, dissonant, and anachronistic compositional properties.  I still have absolutely no idea why Wada hand-built an organ especially for these recordings though, unless it was something as simple as "I want a pipe organ and I cannot possibly fit one through the door of my studio."  The bagpipes, however, were pre-existing, as instrument-building has long been one of Wada's many talents.

The album is split into two 20-minute halves that feel more like variations on the same piece rather than a single 40-minute piece that has been divided due to the constraints of the vinyl format.  The first side starts off innocently enough, as Wada's ensemble uses shifting bagpipe drones to create a complex, yet subtle cloud of overtones and oscillations.  Aside from the intentional overtones and the underlying organ, it is not a far cry from traditional Scottish music at all.  To my ears, Off the Wall is probably best (or at least most easily) appreciated as a kind of free-form fantasia on traditional Scottish music, as the timbre and melody of the bagpipes is nearly impossible to ignore, making the piece’s more subtle attributes very hard to focus on.  Gradually, however, Off the Wall delves into much stranger territory, as a hollow timpani groove kicks in and the ensemble's playing gets considerably more dissonant, erratic, and busy.  At times, it resembles a swarm of very annoying bees, but it occasionally opens up into calmer vistas, sometimes even resembling some sort of majestic and ceremonial court music.  The album’s second side essentially offers more of the same, as bagpipes are not well-known for their versatility.  Off the Wall basically has two modes: cacophonous squall and Scottish highlands drone.  For the most part, the latter aesthetic is the one that works best.

There are a number of frustrating elements to this album, but it is worth noting that almost none of them are what I would have anticipated.  For example, I would definitely expect 40 solid minutes of unrelenting avant-garde bagpipe music to grate on me. To some degree, I suppose it did, as this is not easy listening by any means.  However, my larger problem is that Off the Wall tries to cover too much stylistic territory within each single piece.  This would have been a much better album if Wada had, say, written some individual drone pieces and some individual free-form blow-outs.  There are some great moments of each throughout Off the Wall, but they do not coexist easily within the same composition.  Also, I could definitely do without the percussion, as the rolling timpani rhythms and cymbal flourishes give everything a very rigid and dated "classical music" feel.  They definitely do not add anything to the piece, whereas a good free-jazz drummer could have transformed the more frenzied bits into something considerably more volcanic.  I am not sure how available shit-hot jazz drummers were in 1980s Berlin, but even no drummer at all would have been better than the current situation.  My only guess is that percussion sounded much more thunderous in the acoustic environment of the studio than it does on record.  Nevertheless, Off the Wall does succeed in at least one major way: for better or worse, it is unlike anything else that I have heard.  I can definitely admire Wada’s boldly anachronistic and idiosyncratic vision, even if it was a flawed one.

• Off the Wall (excerpt one)
• Off the Wall (excerpt two)
• Off the Wall (excerpt three)

 

 

14 May 2016

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Albums and Singles

In the spring of 1968 a cargo ship was preparing to leave the port of Baltimore with an important shipment of musical instruments. Its final destination was Rio De Janeiro, where the EMSE Exhibition (Exposição Mundial Do Son Eletrônico) was going to be held.

It was the first expo of its kind to take place in the Southern Hemisphere and many of the leading companies in the field of electronic music were involved. Rhodes, Moog, Farfisa, Hammond and Korg, just to name a few, were all eager to present their newest synthesisers and other gadgets to a growing and promising South American market, spearheaded by Brazil and Colombia.

The ship with the goods set sail on the 20th of March on a calm morning and mysteriously disappeared from the radar on the very same day.

One can only imagine the surprise of the villagers of Cachaço, on the Sao Nicolau island of Cabo Verde, when a few months later they woke up and found a ship stranded in their fields, in the middle of nowhere, 8 km from any coastline. After consulting with the village elders, the locals had decided to open the containers to see what was inside – however gossip as scintillating as this travels fast and colonial police had already arrived and secured the area.

Portuguese scientists and physicians were ordered to the scene and after weeks of thorough studies and research, it was concluded that the ship had fallen from the sky.  Finally, a team of welders arrived to open the containers and the whole village waited impatiently. The atmosphere, which had been filled with joy and excitement, quickly gave way to astonishment. Hundreds of boxes conjured, all containing keyboards and other instruments which they had never seen before: and all useless in an area devoid of electricity. Disappointment was palpable.

It is said that charismatic anti-colonial leader Amílcar Cabral had ordered for the instruments to be distributed equally in places that had access to electricity, which placed them mainly in schools. This distribution was best thing that could have happened - keyboards found fertile grounds in the hands of curious children, born with an innate sense of rhythm who picked up the ready-to-use instruments. This in turn facilitated the modernisation of local rhythms such as Mornas, Coladeras and the highly danceable music style called Funaná, which had been banned by the Portuguese colonial rulers until 1975 due to its sensuality!

The observation was made that the children who came into contact with the instruments found on the ship inherited prodigious capabilities to understand music and learn instruments. One of them was the musical genius Paulino Vieira, who by the end of the 70s would become the country ́s most important music arranger.

8 out of the 15 songs presented in this compilation had been recorded with the backing of the band Voz de Cabo Verde, lead by Paulino Vieira, the mastermind behind the creation and promulgation of what is known today as “The Cosmic Sound of Cabo Verde.”

More information can be found here.

09 May 2016

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Albums and Singles

Thanasis Kaproulias’ latest release as Novi_sad expands on the compositional strategies found on his last work (2013’s Neuroplanets) but goes a step further both in concept and presentation. The single piece that makes up the audio portion of this multimedia work is first made up of sound provided by other well known sound artists, such as Richard Chartier and Carl Michael von Hausswolff. Not satisfied with that, however, Kaproulias then merges these with decidedly non-musical recordings (bridge vibrations, earthquakes, stethoscopes, etc.), and then further processes them with quantitative data from major financial crises. Decidedly high concept (and accompanied by a hardcover book featuring visualizations of the sound by Ryoichi Kurokawa), Sirens excels on both a conceptual and purely sonic level.

Sub Rosa

Even with all of the extrapolation of sound performed by Kaproulias, the artists who supplied the raw material have their own distinct representation as well.The first segment, featuring Richard Chartier, seems to draw on his depressant electronic synth haze of his Pinkcourtesyphone project.His contribution of what sounds like rumbling, deconstructed synth chords may differ greatly from the buzzing electrical surges and low frequency drones provided by Carl Michael von Hausswolff, but the two are effortlessly blended together.

Kaproulias then reforms the sound from Jacob Kirkegaard with recordings of earthquake vibrations into the third movement of Sirens.The low frequency surges capture the quaking land very well, as Kirkegaard’s work is pulled apart into digital interference, churning bass, buzzing insects, and just a general array of bizarre sounds scattered about, sputtering out into a satisfying conclusion. The reworking of Helge Sten’s material takes on a metallic, noisy sheen of frequency modulated synthesizers.Below this surface, Kaproulias builds a sinister sounding, bleak underlayer of sound that eventually subsumes what musicality may have been present into an abyss of darkness and dissonance.

The final portion is perhaps the most surprising.Consisting of solo cello performance by Beckie Foon, the inorganic sounds (recordings from electronic stethoscopes and data from the October 1987 "Black Monday" stock market crash, the treatments are extremely minimal.It sounds as if the additional information was used only to create and modify reverbs or dynamics, resulting in a subtle, yet ghostly tinge that envelopes the entire piece.The result is a surprisingly pure and traditionalist conclusion to an otherwise complex and concept heavy composition.

Besides the excellent sound, visual artist Ryoichi Kurokawa’s work that accompanies the music of Sirens makes for a brilliant co-presentation.He uses the audio data (with timestamps provided in the images) to generate abstract visions, blended with conventional images.The result are striking images of sonic, granular clouds, shaped into images of animals, landscapes, and people that mesh the familiar with the abstract.

Novi_sad’s work has been showing drastic steps in evolution and complexity since his debut just shy of a decade ago.That evolution is a striking one, moving from the more traditional processing and reassembling of prerecorded sounds and samples into a compositional method that applies non-musical and statistical data as an additional element.Even as a piece of music, without any knowledge of its underlying structure, concept, or visual accompaniment, Sirens would be an extremely impressive work.With all of those additional trappings, it becomes all the more magnificent and fascinating when taken as its intended, fully multimedia approach.

samples:

• Sirens (Excerpt 1)
• Sirens (Excerpt 2)
• Sirens (Excerpt 3)

 

09 May 2016

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Albums and Singles

The rural areas from which William Fowler Collins and James Jackson Toth hail have an inescapable influence on this new collaborative record. Across the three pieces that make up Under Stars and Smoke it is impossible to not hear the ambient desolation of Collins’ New Mexico home, while Kentucky’s own Toth provides unsettling Appalachian folk-tinged guitar and vocals. The two styles meld together perfectly, and with an appropriately challenging approach to production and aesthetic, it is a powerful entry in both artists’ already impressive catalogs.

Blackest Rainbow Records

The barren, sunbleached sands of New Mexico appear in sonic form immediately on the expansive introduction to "The Border".Elongated passages of bleak guitar tone are layered subtly, with occasional shifts in tone mimicking the errant desert mirage.Toth's guitar and vocals eventually come into focus, a sound that is simultaneously reminiscent of monastic chanting and country tinged revival bluegrass.His strained, intentionally thin voice adds to the creepiness factor that is already strongly in play before the icy sound is pulled apart by the duo into grinding guitar noise dissonance.

Connecting the two lengthy pieces that open and close this record is the brief "The Memorial".The song stands alone with a very different sense of composition, with a focus on quiet rumbling percussion that is far in the distance, enough to be disconcerting in its ambiguity.Collins and Toth keep the dynamic sparse and hushed, even as they push the composition into a more commanding wall of glistening processed sound for its conclusion.

The final piece, the 17 minute "The Man Who Could Not Stay" abandons the subtleties and instead opens abruptly with buzzing, noisy electronics and more overt electronic guitar squall.Just as quickly it fades back into more acoustic passages, with the duo returning to the more obvious electric guitar vibrations.There is a significant amount of effects here, but the sound is quite clearly that of a guitar, blending the more commanding notes with the space in which they are allowed to resonate.

Toth's vocals reappear amidst the guitar and what resembles the sparsest of field recordings.Buried low and hard panned, his voice sounds disconnected and isolated, made all the more pronounced via heavy echoes applied to it.The piece evolves and changes throughout the long duration, melding electrics, guitar, and vocals in different configurations that hint at both ambient noise and country-tinged folk, but never settle comfortably into either framework.

While the two different landscapes that James Jackson Toth and William Fowler Collins conjure via their work on Under Stars and Smoke, they complement each other wonderfully.Both may also have roots in the folk and drone metal scenes as well (respectively), and they bring those sensibilities to this record, the final product stands on its own as a singularly unique, bleak, but also gripping record that excels in its ambiguity and mystery.

samples:

• The Border
• The Memorial
• The Man Who Could Not Stay

 

08 May 2016

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Albums and Singles

Dominions is the second full-length release from Canadian electroacoustic composer Sarah Davachi, following 2015’s Barons Court. A slightly more demure approach is at work here, shifting from the brooding textures of her previous work to softer tones and more delicate movements in structure, as in side openers "Feeler" and "Ordinal." Recorded primarily at her home base in Vancouver, Davachi returns with her typical assembly of electronic equipment, mostly consisting of vintage synthesizers as well as the Orchestron, a rare optical sampler known for its low fidelity charms. The five compositions on this release breathe new life into these obsolete machines, pausing only for the stringed cacophony of the album’s closer. Melodics emerge almost as an after thought, suggesting something farther and more distant, echoed in the disjointed imagery of local artist, Daniel Presnell.

More information can be found here.

08 May 2016

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Albums and Singles

Australia’s excellent Preservation label has quietly resurfaced with a pair of cassette/digital releases, my favorite of which is the latest from this Finnish composer.  Muova draws its inspiration from both old New Age tapes and William Basinski, which certainly provides a rough summary of Aarni’s aesthetic, but does not convey how wonderfully and thoroughly he manages to transcend those influences.  While I do love both Basinski and distressed tapes, I am not at all predisposed to either vintage synthesizers or New Age revivalism, yet Aarni has managed to use those unpromising threads to weave something quite beautiful and unique.

Preservation

This is the first Olli Aarni album that I have heard, but he has quite a prolific back catalog of cassette releases behind him, so I may be a little late to the party.  In fact, he even has two other releases on Preservation under different guises (Nuojuva and Ous Mal), though neither sound much like Muova ("Plastic").  Having a shifting moniker has proven to be a historically excellent way to elude my attention.  In any case, Muova seems like a bit of a one-off stylistic divergence, though Aarni seems to be an especially game fellow when it comes to trying new things (2013's Koittaa aika is composed entirely of found sounds, for example).  This particular cassette consists of two 15-minute pieces built from a handful of simple synthesizer motifs.  While the aforementioned Basinski influence is amply apparent in approach, Aarni does not encroach upon his stylistic territory.  Rather, he just seems to have been awakened to the possibilities inherent in simplicity and endless repetition.  He also seems quite enamored with exploring the hissing and crackling textural wonders of old tapes, though he avoids using escalating degradation as a compositional tool.  Basinski and Aarni both use similar tools and start from very similar places, but they ultimately lead to very different aesthetics: Basinski's obsessively looping symphonies of melancholy and Aarni's hallucinatory and warmly beautiful floating stasis.

On the opening "Kirkas vesi" ("Clear Water"), Aarni creates a wobbly and shimmering reverie of looping synth swells, squiggles, and whimpers.  While very loop-centric, the loops are either long enough or spaced far enough apart to dissipate any sense of obsessiveness or forward motion.  Instead, all of the various components drift along in a gorgeously languorous pointillist shimmer.  I am particularly enamored with Olli's attention to texture, as the piece is so beautiful largely because it feels so quaveringly fragile and blurred.  Also, I loved how the more radiant and pastoral New Age motifs were balanced with a very effective and understated touch of bittersweet sadness.  There is a dark undercurrent at work that differentiates Aarni's work from its somewhat toothless inspirations. "Kirkas vesi" also works quite well dynamically, as its dreamy bubbling is made considerably more vibrant by its unusually swaying and see-sawing feel.  The second piece, "Tyhjä tie" ("Empty Road"), wisely avoids messing with that hugely successful template.  Much like its predecessor, "Tyhjä tie" endlessly repeats a handful of shaky, soft-focus motifs for the entirely of its duration with no obvious arc or evolution, settling instead upon a gently hissing, undulating, and dreamlike haze.  It is much less conspicuously synth-based, however, as its central theme resembles a slowed-down and pitch-shifted harp arpeggio.  Also, tape noise makes a bold step to the foreground as well: Aarni’s arsenal of hisses and crackles are every bit as important as the melodic components, giving the piece a strong inhalation/exhalation pulse and artfully masking/transforming the backdrop of field recordings.

While it is clear that Muova was intended as a somewhat modest release, it is something of a minor masterpiece of simple, understated beauty.  Superficially, these two pieces are composed of very little and just basically appear and disappear without much in the way of change or evolution, but making something this static and minimal work this effectively is a deceptively Herculean task.  Such a feat requires both delicate balance and an incredible lightness of touch, as the various loops need to be vibrant and compelling enough to hold my attention, yet unobtrusive enough to not get annoying when they endlessly recur (strong melodies do not work, but fragments do).  In that compositional regard, Aarni succeeded admirably with both pieces.  His real success, however, goes much deeper, as he was able to imbue his wobbly loops with both tender fragility and genuine emotion.  That is a very special thing indeed and Muova is a very rare achievement: the kind of album that I could happily listen to in an infinite loop for hours.

• Kirkas vesi
• Tyhj√§ tie

 

08 May 2016

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Albums and Singles

This is the debut album from the restlessly evolving Mark Van Hoen’s latest project, a duo with the Touch label's Mike Harding.  Recorded in LA during a particularly sweltering day, this single longform piece is quite divergent from any of Van Hoen’s previous work that I have heard, beautifully blending organ-like synthesizers with menacing throbs, crackling shortwave radio ambience, and mysterious field recordings.  Drøne are definitely onto something wonderful here, finding a niche that is simultaneously sublimely melodic, gently hallucinatory, and ominously unsettling.

Pomperipossa

I normally spend very little time wondering where and when an album was recorded, but in the case of Reversing into the Future, the oppressively hot Los Angeles environment goes a long way towards explaining the resultant atmosphere of simmering dread and buzzing ominousness.  Divided into two halves of a single longform piece ("This Strange Life"), Future is a slow-burning fantasia that feels like half existential horror, half Blade Runner-style dystopia.  For much of the first half, Van Hoen’s modular synthesizers are little more than a murky, seismic force, as layers of out-of-sync throbs weave an impressive air of smoldering menace.  Eventually, however, they are fleshed out by some stuttering drones before unexpectedly blossoming into hauntingly elegiac chord progression.  Once everything is finally in place, the piece achieves a creepily beautiful Davis Lynch-esque grandeur, like I am drifting over LA at night in a helicopter fitted with especially loud and sinister-sounding blades.  Eventually, the chords fade away and the first half of the piece closes with a multilayered miasma of densely throbbing, buzzing, stammering, and twinkling synth patches.

The second half of "This Strange Life" slowly creeps back to life with a flurry of pinging, arrhythmic sonar-like tones and something that sounds like a blurry, relentlessly skipping fragment of a classical music record.  The piece soon takes a strange detour, however, dissolving its momentum into a thickly buzzing interlude populated with grinding washes and a hollow-sounding, "locked-groove" riff. That lull is the only time the album ever completely betrays its somewhat improvisatory origins, as the piece quickly regains its footing by downshifting to a threatening, quivering simmer.  "This Strange Life" then slowly begins to build back up to its second peak, as echoing, unintelligible voices gradually bleed in and everything plunges into gently burbling and surreal submerged ambiance.  The music does a lot of shapeshifting over the course of a few minutes, but the chattering, cryptic shortwave voices remain a constant, imbuing the piece with a disorienting air of mystery.  At times, the second half of "This Strange Life" even verges on noise, as Van Hoen unleashes distorted rumbles of sound and something that sounds like a distant fire alarm.  As it nears the end, however, the piece blossoms into unexpected beauty once more, as slow, heavy, and overloaded washes of bass are joined by a wandering, disjointed church organ motif and buried shouting.  It is glorious.

My sole quibble with Reversing into the Future is that it definitely feels rooted in improvisation and correspondingly has a few more lulls than would be ideal.  The flip side of that, however, is that there is also a more unpredictable and organically evolving arc than a meticulously edited composition might have yielded.  That said, the album’s greatest qualities lie in both its execution and its vision.  Reversing is remarkably richly textured and visceral, as Van Hoen proves to be a wizard at layering thickly pulsing drones for maximum gravitas and tension.  This is a surprisingly heavy and eerie album.  Also, even though the only "real" instrument is Van Hoen’s battery of synthesizers, Reversing into the Future does not sound at all like a "synthesizer album," which I hugely appreciate.  Admittedly, those synths do a lot of the heavy lifting, but many of the more memorable parts are either due to Harding’s shortwave radio transmissions or a more general collision of textures or juxtaposition of motifs.  The beauty of Reversing into the Future is that everything bleeds together so effectively and egolessly to evoke a sustained atmosphere of buzzing, throbbing disquietude.  I sincerely hope that Drøne is much more than a one-off collaboration, as Harding seems to be quite an excellent foil: this is easily my favorite Mark Van Hoen album since 2012's The Revenant Diary.

• This Strange Life I
• This Strange Life II (excerpt one)
• This Strange Life II (excerpt two)

 

 

01 May 2016

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Albums and Singles

Raime’s second album, Tooth, arrives June 10, 2016 on 2xLP, CD and digital formats. The widescreen melancholia of their 2012 debut, Quarter Turns Over A Living Line, gives way to an urgent and focussed futurism, in the shape of eight fiercely uptempo, minimal, meticulously crafted electro-acoustic rhythm tracks. The DNA of dub-techno, garage/grime and post-hardcore rock music spliced into sleek and predatory new forms.

No let-up, no hesitation. Needlepoint guitar, deftly junglist drum programming, brooding synths and lethal sub-bass drive the engine. The production is immaculate, high definition. No hiss, no obscuring drones or extraneous noise: the music of Tooth is wide-open and exposed. The seeds of its supple dancehall biomechanics can be found in the self-titled 2013 EP by Raime side-project Moin, an ahead-of-its-time synthesis of art-rock and soundsystem sensibilities, but Tooth pushes the template further, binding the disparate elements together so tightly that they become indistinguishable from one another.

If Quarter Turns was an album that confronted total loss and self-destruction, even longed for it, then Tooth is the sound of resistance and counter-attack: cunning, quick, resolute; calling upon stealth as much as brute-force. At a time when so many pay lip service to experimentation without ever fully committing themselves or their work to it, Raime return from three years of deep, dedicated studio research with a bold and original new music: staunch, rude, and way out in front.

More information can be found here.

01 May 2016

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Albums and Singles

Having completed a preliminary round of work on their eponymous 2015 album at Rockfield Studios, Wire found themselves with 19 tracks. Among them, there was a critical mass of 11 aesthetically unified songs. In typical Wire fashion, however, the remaining material was something other: it had the sound of a band already moving in a different direction, beyond the album project in which they were engaged at that time. These tracks were the basis for Nocturnal Koreans.

The difference between the two clusters of work birthed at Rockfield has its roots in discrete approaches to the studio process itself. “The WIRE album was quite respectful of the band,” explains Colin Newman, “and Nocturnal Koreans is less respectful of the band—or, more accurately, it's the band being less respectful to itself—in that it's more created in the studio, rather than recorded basically as the band played it, which was mostly the case with WIRE. A general rule for this record was: any trickery is fair game, if it makes it sound better.” Nocturnal Koreans emphasises studio construction over authentic performance, using the recording environment as an instrument, not just as a simple means of capturing Wire playing.

More information can be found here.

01 May 2016

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Albums and Singles

The long-awaited album is now available for pre-order.

Dark Fat is a celebration and documentation of 10 years of NWW shows, but to call it a live album is far too simplistic. It is an entirely new recording constructed by combining the most interesting moments of the past decade into unique tracks. We have M.S. Waldron to thank, as he is archival commandant of the NWW oeuvre and since 2006 has recorded everything and we mean EVERYTHING. He has recorded all the live shows, sound-checks, rehearsals, off-stage events and even covertly recorded the private conversations of the band. These recordings have been studiously and lovingly crafted into a unique sonic tapestry by Waldron and Stapleton with delicate embroidery and filigree added by Liles and Potter. Listen in the Dark and soak up the Fat. 

More information can be found here.