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The Helen Scarsdale Agency
Beginning this remarkably cohesive 56 minute set, "En Dare Kan FragaMer An Tre Visa Kan Svara" approaches like distant footsteps trying towalk straight on a windy path. Small rustling sounds eventuallycoalesce into thicker swarms over 12 minutes. This music is successfulbecause it recalls a barren landscape, but still provides small,recognizable nuances to cling to. The quiet crackling sounds, belltones and low moans which hover just below the long sustained tones ofeach piece add depth. At first Vikinga Brennivinseems minimalist in that there are no melodic or rhythmic elements.However, its appeal lies in uncovering the many layers of sound thatmake up this minimal facade. During "Heilir, thorn eirs hlyddu" thereis a wall of static that is barely noticeable until it is suddenlyremoved from the mix at the six minute mark. The six minutes thatfollow this shift are then more interesting because they feel likeundergrowth being pulled to the surface for inspection. On "En Dare..."and "Det Ar..." the trio pursue a decidedly more organic sound, whileon "Heilir..." and "Vidunder" a digital patina is added to the low-endrumbling that provides contrast but doesn't sound too jarring. On"Vidunder" in particular, sharp high-end digital stabs echo fromspeaker to speaker and are the closest the trio get to achievingrhythmic tension. During "Det Ar..." a single low tone is given severalminutes to meander before being joined by what sounds like smoke or gasbeing emitted from a pipe. The effect is akin to watching clouds passslowly overhead through a skylight. The sounds that are used throughoutthe album sound as if they were carefully chosen. The group meets itsobjective of combining elements in ways that produce subtly changing,atmospheric works in which more is discovered upon each listen. Theyseem well-attuned to a common mission and the result sounds moreseamless than simply being the sum of familiar parts. The gorgeous,unique silkscreened copper plate by Jim Haynes that serves as thesleeve for the first edition of 300 enhances the perception that thisis a work which has been carefully and lovingly crafted out of acombination of passion and skill.
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Touch
The choice ofboth title and design for Nilsen's debut full-length (under his ownname) might not be coincidence; white, as a symbol of blankness orabsence, seems the color most appropriate for the artist's recent workfollowing years of recording as Hazard. Past Hazard releases, withnames like Wind and Land,used a process in which environmental field recordings were transformedand obscured via computer and the addition of manufactured acoustictextures to create droning monoliths of hazy, indistinct but naturalsound. Nilsen's relationship with nature has always been one of vagueintent, his Hazard music forever avoiding the accessibility suggestedby a "field-recorded" music. Fade to White, though, sounds likea conscious attempt to carry these sounds, however humble in origin,past the elemental abstractions suggested in previous titles and into atemporal realm of commonality and decay. Never have Nilsen's sourcesbeen more heavily obscured, though never have his compositions soundedso simply or weightlessly constructed. Perhaps taking inspiration fromNilsen's new-found love of the pipe organ, as documented on Spireand his prior live CDR, these six lengthy tracks are complex withoutbeing complicated, massive droning structures without weight ordensity, captured on the brink of a final dissolution. It's as if theinsect frenzy, blizzard winds and hollow industrial spaces of previousreleases are replaced now with echoes of an earthly movement, vestalremnants of the natural sublime reduced to its most basic melodic ortextural parts. This music has an inertia separate from anythingsuggested by the naturalism of sounds or even rhythmic loops placed ontop. Obscured textures move things in a perpetual fade-out doubling asperpetual saturation; I'm reminded of Bergman movies told in segmentsthat overflow with light in perfect and anxious timing. I get theimpression, based also on his recent collaboration with theunclassifiable Stilluppsteypa, that Nilsen has entered a new phase inhis art, combining an exhausted reverence for natural phenomena with aninterest in values that transcend or speak-through the natural world.Titles like "Grappa Polar," or the title of the new collaboration Vikinga Brennivin(ahallucinogenic Nordic liquor) indicate that altered states or thejourney inside may now have eclipsed previous interest in theinvestigation of the surrounding world. Nilsen's Fade to Whiteis a blindfold, a scraping clean of the canvas to discover which imagesare lost, which remain, and which are transformed.
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Hydra Head
Warren's vocals sound like they areerupting from the mouth of a biker-boy from hell and his bass soundsalmost too thick and grotesque to be called just a bass instrument.Backing up the chugging riffs and igneous yelps is Willis' constantlyshifting percussive movements. Willis never exactly moves me into astate of awe, but his chops are heavy and perfect for this record,staying simple and moving with the rumble and sway of the guitarplaying. For every repetitive chord there is a new fill or a differentset of rhythms hacked out of the snare, bass, and toms that keepsthings from getting too predictable. At least the music doesn't get toopredictable most of the time. "O.G." is a convincing start, the whistleof some stranger echoing out before the beginning of the song as thougha western movie of the most violent proportions is about to begin. Sureenough a gargantuan sounds pours out of the speakers as the whistleends and neither Warren nor Willis bothers to attenuate their rotundand shaking playing until the track ends. "Focus Pocus" continues themetallic spasms that opened the album, but focuses somewhat more on thespaces and dynamics that exist between the loud and the extremely loud."White Pizazz," on the other hand, doesn't stand the two-man test thatBig Business puts it up to; the expanded melodies are nice, but it letsgo of the pressure that the album has developed a little too quickly,plus Warren's performance is, at times, a bit on the over-done side. Head for the Shallowis over 40 minutes long, but contains only eight tracks. As a result,some of these songs go on just a little too long. Nonetheless, there'sa wealth of heavy goodness literally oozing out of every note and, witha few exceptions, Head for the Shallow sounds like a jackhammeror an electric shock out of the past. The music definitely has itsroots in the music of a certain Brainwashed poll favorite, butultimately the grind of the music is primal and crushing and seated ina muck all its own.
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Limited to 1000 copies and coupled with a video forthe song "Rails," Rumblings jumps back and forth between tapemanipulation, screwy free-verse adventures, recognizable musicalarrangements, and playful sound collages constructed from metallicscrapes, diseased brass instruments, and typical commercials. Theresult is a little bit like flipping through various televisionstations, but with the ability to find a red thread through the chaosof comedies, cartoons, and documentaries. The first few tracks promiseall of this before some of the collages start to become dull and themiddle portion of the album begins to drag through some directionlessbits of space noise. "Rails (uncoupled)" and "Moonleggs" pick up where"Johnny No!" left of and luckily things only get better from thatpoint. Smegma are best when they attach their own particular brand ofsurrealism and nonsense to the traditional rock stylings of the 50s and60s. "Moonleggs" crosses tropical guitar chords with a spool of brokenspeech samples and distorted horn moans before giving into theprimitive and galactic energy of "Smoke," which mingles absurd lyricswith a propulsive bass line and drum performance. The end of the albumfeels far more cohesive than the beginning and almost feels as if itwere meant to stand alone from everything else on the disc. "Rumblings"and "Supersimple" continue the guitar and noise ethos with bothconsideration and aimless abandon. The continuous metamorphoses thateach track exhibits is intoxicating and by the end of the album I feellike I've had some strange psychedelic experience. Despite something ofa slow start, Rumblings is a lot of fun and it does nothing butget better with each listen. "Rails" is the kind of song that I wishcould be extended into a 20 minute freak out of curving noise and vocaldestruction, even if that meant less tape splicing were to appear.Those tracks just seem distracting after hearing the thump and growl oftheir jam sessions. samples:
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The Field Mice were thecanonical Sarah band, expanding the label's sound beyond the hermetictag of twee pop, which it wore and still wears as a badge. While theField Mice certainly hovered in the regions of twee, they also forgedand hybridized other sounds: dance, electronic, indie pop, Brit pop,folk, and shoegazer. Despite a histrionic dissolution of the band, someof the former Field Mice have continued recording like-minded musicunder monikers such as Northern Picture Library and Trembling BlueStars. In 1998, Shinkansen Records, Matt Haynes' follow-up label toSarah Records, released Where'd You Learn to Kiss That Way,a double CD collection of Field Mice songs which was more of a greatesthits compilation than an exhaustive discography. Since that collectionitself has been out of print for a while now, LTM has kindly stepped inand released a full retrospective arranged chronologically on threeseparate releases.
Snowball + Singles
Named after the 10" mini-LP which The Field Mice released on SarahRecords in 1989, this includes the first two Sarah 7" singles, a 7" onThe Caff Corporation, and a compilation track. What struck me first wasthat the cover art on this CD (and the others) was largely out of touchwith what I knew of the band's original artwork for their records.Field Mice albums tended to have very colorful and geometric coversdesigns which caught the eye immediately. On the LTM reissues there aresome wispy, Photoshopped landscapes which look like the covers on musiconce found at The Nature Store. The font for the band name and thetitle have a horribly tasteless drop shadow which looks like somethinga fifth-grader created on MacPaint in 1987 for a Mother's Day card. Ialmost expected to hear the sound of rustling leaves for 70 minuteswith a bonus track of lapping ocean waves. Reassuringly, the music hereis unsullied and as I remember the band. The two Sarah seven-inchessupply the best moments on this disc. Songs like "Emma's House" and"When Morning Comes to Town" are such delicate indie pop moments thattheir fragility becomes not so much a liability as it is a strength.The latter song opens with such a softly-strummed guitar that as aresult your ears are piqued by the challenge to hear the music. Adoting bass line soon picks up the louder decibels and colors thesoftness elsewhere. Other instruments fall in eventually and even theguitar tempo picks up and the song becomes inexplicably dancy, albeitin the most soft-spoken way possible. "Emma's House" is anthemic in away that indie pop rarely can be. A drum machine provides a roboticbeat wherein shimmery guitars climb up and down, settling down only formere seconds at a time. The song is the eponymous cut from The FieldMice's first single when the band was but two people: Bobby Wratten andMichael Hiscock. In fact, most of the songs on Snowball were produced at a time when the band was still a two-piece. I never much cared for the Snowball10" and still don't, but "This Love is Not Wrong" is nothing if notpure twee beauty. "Letting Go" interestingly conjures sounds of TheCure with its minor-chord ramblings, veiled whispers, and glisteningkeyboards. It sounds eerily similar to "All Eternal Things," a songfrom the most recent Trembling Blue Stars album. Some things don'tchange, I suppose. "That's All This Is," is from the Airspace!compilation and by its own virtues is the best validation for LTM'sreissue. Resonating like a percussed lullaby, it's the type of song forwhich a Field Mice lover desperately pines.
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Skywriting + Singles
This two-CD set is an overview of the band's middle years. At thispoint, I am starting to get a little suspicious of LTM's graphicdesigners and what their aesthetic vision was for these CD covers. Gonenow is the nature imagery and in its place there is the distressedstature of a skyscraper looking spookily like one half of NYC's TwinTowers. The image is irrepressibly hideous, not for what it evokes butsimply for its banal appearance. The music on disc 1 is my leastfavorite Field Mice material, partly because they endeavor to sound alittle too much like the Human League (hardly an imprudent move in andof itself, but executed not very well here) and partly because the bandloses some of its virtuous fragility through the over-used electronicsin the songs. The songs are taken from the Skywriting 12" and the So Said Kay10". Most people will tell you that "So Said Kay" is a song whichtypifies everything good about The Field Mice, but I submit that thesong "Holland Street" is a much better mark of the band's glory. Thehand-drummed beginning sounds nearly tribal but any primitivism is soondissipated when the guitar lusciously falls in and from there the songsimply percolates for three minutes in the best sort of instrumentalanxiety. "Holland Street" sounds like a perfected introductory song foran album. Too bad LTM didn't feel poetically licensed enough to playwith the sequencing on these reissues because it would have made onedecisive opening track. One of the more curious songs here is"Humblebee." It is a sound collage which is more perplexing thanartfully incisive. The Field Mice seem out of their element here, lostin the continental forests and far from any meadows in Surrey. Disc 2offers some salvation from the electronic experimentation of disc 1."If You Need Someone" is playful and soaring with its keyboard andguitar exchanges. Wratten's vocals are so earnest it can hurt, but theynever make you feel embarrassed the way that some earnestness does.With only its title, "Anyone Else Isn't You" explicitly announces TheField Mice's thematic vision of singularity and of purpose. Many oftheir songs focus on a significant other, whether adored or estrangedor both, firmly believing that this is the one person who can make lifemeaningful. If the band does not zealously believe in destiny, theycertainly are blinded by it occasionally. Though this theme issomething you can probably discern from just perusing the song titles,actually listening to the lyrics confirms it. The songs from disc 2come from the Autumn Store seven-inches (of which there are two) as well as some outtakes and compilation tracks. Skywriting + Singlesends on something of a sour note with the tedious ten-minute ruminationentitled "Other Galaxies" which jams and drones for about seven minutestoo long. Of the three reissues, this installment is the leastbrilliant and yet the most voluminous.
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For Keeps + Singles
At this point, I am convinced that LTM hired a consultant from theThomas Kinkade galleries (no, they don't look like Kinkade's work butthey exhibit the same lack of taste) to design the covers. This thirdcover has a fuzzed-out ocean scene (or are they clouds?) with the sameblue/purplish hue saturating the other covers. On a good note, the dropshadows have disappeared from the fonts. Whether this was donepurposely or as an oversight is unclear, but my money is on the latter.Fortunately, the music starts out more satisfactorily with "FiveMoments" from the For Keeps LP, which was The Field Mice's only official full-length album. For Keepsstill has those moments of Human League emulation but the band was ableto dilute that with some more standard indie pop creations. "FiveMoments" starts off with some suspect effects-processed and tribalvocals (not tribal like the drums from "Holland Street," which werealmost Native American influenced. This is more of an eastern Indiansound, from the heart of Bombay or New Delhi) but soon enough glidesinto a gentle and pleasant wah-pedal melody. Annemari Davies's vocalsare featured on this song, not Wratten's. Davies also gives voice tothe most heartbreaking Field Mice song to be found anywhere: "Willow."It is a simply but infectious guitar dirge drenched in pathos andsadness. The song is elegant and easy to listen to but in between thelyrics there is writhing and pain beyond what you might expect from theband. Perhaps less soul-crushing but equally dramatic is "A Wrong Turnand Raindrops." A swollen harmonica mixes with a lethargic guitar andthe song never gets going until the chorus where the guitar gainspurpose and clarity, the vocals gain intensity and melody, and the songcomes together, only to fall apart again during the next verse, comeback once again at the next chorus. The pattern repeats for four and ahalf minutes. It is offsetting yet compelling and heavy on the emotion.To balance things out, there are moments of levity such as "An EarlierAutumn" which has a country twang and a light step. The song (alongwith "September's Not So Far Away" and "Between Hello and Goodbye") isfrom the last Sarah Records Field Mice 7" and returns the group fullcircle to something that is much closer to their initial sound:spritely, playful, and dripping with lovelorn honesty.
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Durtro/Jnana
In Bill Fay's case, this speculation has oftentaken an unfortunately hyperbolic form, with many critics painting aportrait of a psychotic loner whose music was clearly the result ofdrug burnout and paranoia, a "mad bearded Rasputin" with a resemblanceto Charles Manson (a reference to the photograph of Fay on the coverhis second LP). This finally prompted Bill Fay to write an angry letterto The Wire last year, setting the record straight: that he was simplya songwriter who had long hair and a beard "as a lot of people didthen," and that he had never been heard from again only because he losthis contract with Decca after the poor sales of his two albums, andcouldn't get signed anywhere else. "I still continued to write andrecord but not with a label," Fay continued, and Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrowis the first evidence of that work. This album, recently released as adigipack CD by Durtro/Jnana (David Tibet has long been a champion ofFay's music), contains Bill Fay's third album, the follow-up to Persecution,recorded 1977-1981 but never released until now, 25 years later. BillFay Group is the name given to Fay's teaming on this record with TheAcme Quartet, a misleadingly named improvising trio of guitar, bass anddrums. These smaller arrangements create a more intimate backing forFay's intensely personal, soul-searching songs that provides aninteresting counterpoint to the huge, Scott Walker-style MOR strings(along with searing fuzz guitar and climactic passages of free jazz)that characterized the first two LPs. This is not to suggest that themusic on Tomorrow is simple, however. It is far from simple.The group utilizes a complex interplay of competently played jazz andpsych-rock elements with sudden left turns into areas of psychedelicabstraction, as well as vocal doubling, stereo panning and amultritracked backing chorus. At times the effect is very reminiscentof the mid-70s work of Pink Floyd, at others Soft Machine. Roger Watersand Robert Wyatt at their best, however, cannot equal the haunting,apocalyptic lyrics and intuitive chamber-pop songwriting that seems toflow so easily from Bill Fay. Over the course of 20 tracks, the artistnever misses a hook, creating haunting pop songs that recall theinstantly memorable melodies of a Paul McCartney with the chillingdoomsday prophesizing of a Current 93. If Time of the Last Persecution represented the songwriter's emotionally wrenching exegesis of Armageddon, then Tomorrowpoints to a doorway out of tribulation and purgatory. After climbing a"Strange Stairway" to "Spiritual Mansions," and confrontingunflinchingly the hypocrisies of life and man, Fay sings triumphantly:"We are raised/We sit beside Him now/We are raised." Bill Fay navigatesa symbolic world informed by Christian prophecy, but illuminated fromwithin by personal revelation. His weathered voice and unique musicalgenius are able to mediate these impossibly vast concepts straight intothe realm of the individual. It's outrageous to think that this albummight never have seen the light of day had it not been for the effortsof Durtro/Jnana and the Bill Fay Group, as it represents the inevitableand necessary third chapter to the trilogy and a sublime masterpiece ofmodern pop music.
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I can get downwith a substance-less booty jam with the best of them, but this is thekind of amateurish, formulaic piffle that makes me want to leave theclub scene well behind. The artists took no care to create or craft asingle sound in the title cut or its b-side remix that is the least bitinteresting. This is simply stock disco and electro rehash withpredictable lead lines and endlessly trite drum beats. Anyone wantingto replicate "Take U To The Car Crash" needs only to purchase a coupleelectro/techno loop CDs and leave all notions of experimentation andfun behind. Cheesy synth lines, mechanical beats and obnoxious trashvocals seal this record as the worst thing I've heard yet this year.The irony of one of the mixes being called "Original Mix" despite thefact that not a single thing about it is original is the only thingabout it that makes me smile.
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Released as an LP on the K.A.K. labelin 1995, Zero Beats Per Minute was conceived as the ultimateanti-rave statement, growing out of a series of after-club performancesalong the London-Swansea mainline in industrialized Newport. Anal wouldperform next to the train tracks, hoping to catch wandering acid andecstasy-fueled ravers as they wandered from closed clubs to after-hoursillegal warehouse parties. As anti-rave, I imagine Anal's brand ofnoise worked quite well, a series of rhythmless explosions ofaggravated analogue noise specially formulated to piss off all but themost anarchic ravers. Anal was far more interested in the bleak,industrial frigidity of Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse than themid-90s weekend rave scene typified by Praga Khan and the Lords ofAcid, and it shows. As a punk-as-fuck, industrial-strength belch in theface of vapid dance and drug culture, the album works. As another wayfor synthesizer fetishists to get a cheap thrill, it also works; anyonewho likes Mount Vernon Arts Lab or Queen Elizabeth would likely alsoappreciate Anal. The question of whether or not it contains good musicis a bit more difficult, however. The album's first six tracks are allrelatively brief little sketches of Anal's delicious blasts of analoguedrones, blankets of static, steam-venting copper tubing and gale-forceplumes of thought-canceling noise, but nothing stays long enough tofully develop. The album's main attraction is the sidelong behemoth of"Journey Through a Burning Anal," which uses all of the techniques onSide A to build a long, slowly transforming odyssey through thegraveyard shift of a steel mill, with clever little nods to morepopular forms of techno here and there just to remind you of how faryou have traveled. Though this track is nice enough, when it was over,I couldn't help feeling a little shortchanged by the album. At 31:42,it's incredibly brief, the LP apparently having been shortened for thisreissue. I can only speculate as to why it would have been edited downin its transition to the digital format, but it seems an odd choice.Fans of Coil and Co. who have been waiting years for Eskaton to makegood on its promise to release "I Am Newport" b/w "Kiss Me Ringland"will doubtless be disappointed that this material has not been includedas bonus. Also, Cope's Fuck Off & Di label apparently engineeredthis release without the consultation of Jody Evans or Thighpaulsanda,making this entire release of somewhat questionable pedigree. Let thebuyer beware.samples:
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I think this is supposed to sound grinding, heavy, and intimidating,but the latest from Chondritic Sound's founder sounds more like a blastof dense, hot air than anything else. This single, 42 minute trackfluctuates between a frustrating stasis and short, intense barrages ofmachine noise and static. The bass-like rumble that stays through theentire album undergoes a series of modulations that becomes thicker andthicker while waves of bees, never-ending crunches, and low-endfrequencies boil over one another in an almost indistinguishable haze.Eventually Death Tonebegins to sound as though it is going nowhere and by the end of thealbum I feel as if I've been run in tiny and completely uninterestingcircles for far too long. There's no doubt that the album is incrediblyloud, but it isn't punishing or particularly noteworthy in itsseverity. With a title like Death Tone that's a bitdisappointing, especially considering the label Hive Mind released thison and the lack of any discernable arrangement other than the shifts intexture that so gradually occur. The constant cycle of homogenouselements doesn't allow for any shocking moments or unpredictable blastsof sound and it especially doesn't allow for any interestingdevelopments. Roughly ten minutes of listening to this would have beenenough to let me know what was going to happen throughout the rest ofthe record; an entire 30 minutes or so is wasted repeating andrehashing what was accomplished very early on. To make matters worse,the jumble of fuzzy waves that make up this album eventually begin toblend into the background and disappear altogether. Instead of soundinglike a confrontation with something deadly or even scary, the musicslowly becomes benign and altogether easy to listen to. I expectedsomething confrontational and demented, but received a poorlyconstructed and disengaging soundscape. Louder, far more deadly havocexists out in the realm of noise; the name and vaguely anti-musicalsentiments of Death Tone aren't enough to make a bland and redundant recording exciting or horror-inducing. samples:
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Here, MachineBoy unfortunately adds nothing to the previous cast of characters whohave worked with these tools in the past. While the central point ofinterest is supposed to be Lorian Elbert's spoken word, that's exactlywhat derails this disc and leaves Machine Boy's production to try, (andfail) to take up the slack. Elbert's poetry might mean something ifread with conviction, but her delivery is soaked with the dissociated,uninterested droll of someone's who's heard of poetry as a verbal artform, but hasn't quite mastered it. Every line pulled from her verse isdelivered with virtually the same intonation so that I'm never sure ifall the words are from one long poem about tedium, or just sound thatway because she lacks the spirit or presence to bring the words fullyto life. The words are further maligned by Machine Boy's sampling,looping, and poor recording of them. Spoken word is a hard thing topull off without garnering laughs from all but the most turtle-neckedEnglish majors, but artists like Nicole Blackman, Maggie Estep, andElizabeth Alexander bring to mind the kind of collaboration thatMachine Boy no doubt wants this to be. Thankfully, none of the tracksare long enough to inspire contempt, but they aren't interesting enoughto merit the short time they do occupy either. Tied down todeconstructed poetry and musical backing that doesn't seem to noticethat the words are there, the Depression EP never has a chance to take off. samples:
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