SMEGMA:
Rumblings CD (HANSON) I'll
admit it, you can beat me up later: first listen was kinda
"eh." I thought, "Man, these guys should work
with Wolf Eyes all the time, they could use the help!"
Just more jam-noise, I was thinking, and the two things that
made it different -- occasional surf-rock Louie Louie riffs
and Richard Meltzer's out-of-nowhere spoken-word appearances
-- also made it more awkward. Then, next morning, listen #2:
whoah. Something happened. The presskit blurb called Smegma
"the most psychedelic band ever!" and it was starting
to seem possible, because while listening to the disc I felt
myself falling down a rabbit hole, a time slip, even though
I was completely sober except for two cups of coffee. I was
hearing endless no-mind no-zone no-man jam-splunge that was
in no hurry and had nothing to prove because it knew I would
get sucked in eventually. And that's exactly what was happening.
Now, when Meltzer suddenly starts yelping out one of his observations
after these long-ass no-zones, it's like I've set the controls
for the heart of the sun and awoken 90 years later (thawed
out from cryogenic deep-freeze of course) to find myself at
the corner bar next to some guy talking my ear off while drinking
beer and shelling peanuts . . . . . and the band plays on
. . . . (I already know of two different people who have gotten
lost driving while this record was playing on their car stereo).
SPECS
ONE: The Artist CD (ABDUCTION) Well,
this is interesting . . . . for one thing, it is perhaps the
most 'normal' CD that Abduction Records has ever released.
It's a hip hop CD, and not "outsider music" hip-hop
like Sensational, or even a dense paranoid post-Wu kind of
thing, just smooth chilled-out alternative/independent intelligent
hip-hop, produced, written, and arranged by a dude from Seattle
named Specs One. The beats are damn nice, plenty of head-nodders,
and the flow is always on, though after 3 or 4 listens I have
yet to come away recalling any specific lyrics. Not a lot
of curses, but a few, and there's weed rhymes, so it's kinda
rugged. In fact, as far as I know, it's the best Seattle hip-hop
album since Sir Mix-a-Lot's Swass, but the only thing
about it that consistently surprises me is how, well, 'normal'
it is. But that doesn't mean it isn't good -- in fact, track
#14 "Wide World," a lovely wistful trip-hop instrumental
(with Sublime
Frequencies vibes), is easily one of my favorite hip hop
tracks this year.
SUBLIME
FREQUENCIES UPDATE
(Just
heard that there'll be another batch of Sublime Frequencies
releases coming out in October, so I'd better hurry up and
write some reviews of the last batch of six that have been
out for awhile now, blowing my mind for months in ways that
are very hard to put into words......perhaps the best batch
yet......)
STREETS
OF LHASA CD (SF 016) And
now we're walking around in Tibet hearing low-key music and
ambience recorded outdoors in August 2003. Opens with the
bad-ass singing of a three-year-old boy and this boldly human
element extends throughout. Soft bells ring in hallways (reminds
me of The Dreamy Draw!) while kids scamper and shout
and is that a buzzing horsefly or a distant human humming
ecstaticly? Close listening reveals the latter......track
six is a killer erhu solo, which is a two-string bowed fiddle
type thing......other solo instrument/vocal performances sound
like something off of Sun City Girls' High Asia (Carnival
Folklore Resurrection #9) -- yet another Sublime glimpse
into the SCG fakebook. And the last track is really something,
one of the holiest 7 minutes I've heard on wax for at least
. . . . a month. Some sort of soft prayer chant on a tranquil
mountaintop, eavesdropped on by the microphones of Beijing,
China resident Zhang Jian, who recorded the whole album and
did a fine job.
HARMIKA
YAB-YUM: FOLK SOUNDS FROM NEPAL
(SF 017) Truly
there, truly sublime, such simple and deeply felt folk music,
sounding ancient and stripped-down and direct enough to make
Robert Johnson sound like Elvis Costello or something. As
usual per SF, there is so much here, like choirs singing call-and-response
devotional chants a capella, bad-ass percussion & horn
jams (a LOT like BYG/Actuel free jazz), straining naked tuff
mouth harp solos, plenty of inscrutable outdoors ambience
(street sermons, pony trains, wedding processions, prayer
wheels, Pokhara dogs) . . . . It isn't really spelled out
in the liner notes, but it seems to be a mix of radio recordings,
live musical performances, and ambient field recordings, collected
and put together seamlessly and cryptically by Robert Millis
of the Climax Golden Twins. Some beautiful heart-piercing
stuff all the way, actually my top recommendation of this
new six.
FOLK
AND POP SOUNDS OF SUMATRA VOL. 2 CD
(SF 018) Actually,
this might be my top recommendation -- I think it recently
surpassed Yab-Yum for most listens. People have been
describing music as "deep" lately, and, well, this
Sumatra shit is DEEP. This is beat-digger deep, this is dusty-crate
deep -- I mean the crates this shit came from must have been
REALLY dusty. Plus, the crates were in Sumatra, so top THAT,
DJ Shadow! Not that this CD is filled with "funky breaks,"
but it is filled with really good MUSIC -- remember that?
How about the prog-tastic lo-fi Santana/Crimson/show-tune
swirl of the Orkus Gambi style, represented here on four different
cuts? Or how about the lady-sung heaven-dream that is the
introduction of "Pariaman" by Fetty, however betrayed
by the cheesy gamelan pop it becomes? How about track 2 ("Unknown"
by Unknown!), lady-sung gamelan pop that is not cheesy in
the slightest -- in fact, it's a sexy brooding wildcat in
a trance, with some extremely funky breaks. Plus
several more examples of the unstoppable loping/driving Dangdut
style, a style I first encountered on Folk and Pop Sounds
of Sumatra Vol. 1 (SF 001) with the unbelievably lovely
"Indang Pariaman" by Sansimar. Pretty soon Sublime
Frequencies will have released enough Dangdut tracks that
I can make my own 2-CDR all-Dangdut comp! Can't wait . . .
.
MOLAM:
THAI COUNTRY GROOVE FROM ISAN CD
(SF 019) Ah
shit yeah, summadat G-ass thai funk fo' yuhz . . . . no, but
seriously, the title says it all: this is COUNTRY MUSIC. And
country music, when it's the "real thing", is always
funky, even when it's plugged-into rock'n'roll amplifiers,
like much of this stuff is. A lot of folks, from Birmingham,
Alabama native Sun Ra to Outkast ("some people call us
country/but really we just Southern...") to the No Neck
Blues Band (with their various overt/covert Allman Bros. tributes)
have been hitting some sort of country/electric polyglot over
the last few years -- oh yeah, Sun City Girls too, hitting
all kinds of polyglots for a good 25 years now. Not that this
disc sounds anything like any of these artists, or anything
else American, but it is some ole electrified country funk
-- the country just happens to be "Laos and the predominately
rural Northeastern region of Thailand known as Isan."
Learn about such funky Molam ("master singer") styles
as Lam Phun, Lam Sing, and Look Thoong, and instruments such
as the khaen (mouth organ), the phin, the soong (both "lute-like
instruments"), the sor ("a bowed fiddle"),
"and a percussion ensemble featuring finger cymbals and
hand drums." And when the rock'n'roll virus makes it
all the way to Isan, "electric bass, effected guitars,
electric organs, kit drums and horns" start getting into
the mix and things get really wild! It's all right here on
Molam: Thai Country Groove From Isan!
RADIO
PHNOM PEHN CD (SF 020); RADIO SUMATRA: THE INDONESIAN FM EXPERIENCE
(SF 021) Two
more of Alan Bishop's dense and dizzying radio collages, with
the upshot that they are up-to-the-minute, both recorded in
2004 in Cambodia and Sumatra respectively. (Pre-tsunami.)
I can't lie, listening to Radio Sumatra makes me
nervous, but it's not because of cultural differences, it's
because of cultural similarities! Each Sub. Freq. release
packs at least one heavy cultural lesson-wallop, and the one
here seems to be that, even in an 'exotic' and 'faraway' place
like Sumatra, the nü-metal and thug rap styles of America
-- not to mention the loudmouth morning-zoo DJs -- have a
significant influence. But it's not that simple either, like
when in the middle of track #8 everything slows down for a
totally eerie Asian pop ballad that sounds like a little girl
singing to her lost
parents from beyond the grave 1000 years ago . . . . . . as
for Radio Phnom Penh, I don't know where to even
start, times ten, and Cambodia is always heavy. Actually,
the more I listen, the more I'm hearing it as one of the more
"song-oriented" of Mr. Bishop's radio collages,
a la Radio Morocco? But every listen reveals something
new, and then there's track #13, "Sign Off/The Venerable
Anthem." It starts out with the Sublime-standard on-the-fly
tuner-mixed collage chaos, then a brassy female DJ shouting
over loud post-hiphop beats (the "Sign Off"), and
then around the 2 minute mark the whole thing breaks down
into an operatic ballad fanfare sung by a chorus of women
as if they were sent by unseen forces to sing a lamentation
for Planet Earth that the entire world will hear. ("The
Venerable Anthem.")
SUN
CITY GIRLS: Dawn of the Devi LP (MAJORA) At
first this short (less than 30 minutes) 1991 all-improv 12-inch
was one of my least favorite Sun City Girls releases -- I
know, I know, they record and release whatever they want,
and I love 'em for it, but I do like to have at least a song
or two, and these particular five medium-length jams with
no vocals seemed very improvised. But here it is a couple
years down the road, and it's practically become one of my
favorites. There's tons of SCG improv to be had out there,
but the recording aesthetic on this is kinda unique -- trebly
and raw, but also somewhat professional, which yields a nice
crisp quality -- and once you get used to the idea of extra-crispy
totally uncompromised improv jams, and learn to follow their
inner logic, the music becomes endlessly suggestive. For example,
on the first track "The Kissy Sting" the bass and
drums mime a churning river of mud that occasionally gets
stuck on a boulder or a big tree branch before taking that
along with it too. Meanwhile, the guitar becomes everything
else on top: the sky, the birds, the outside world, the synthetic
world, humans moving around, and human culture in general,
such as language, conversation, arguments, and/or half-remembered
totally-felt universal human songs and melodies. Or, maybe
the guitar is just playing its ass off trying to keep up with
with the bassist and drummer who are freaking out, playing
a freaking river of mud -- and succeeding.
SUN
CITY GIRLS: The Fresh Kill of a Cape Hunting Dog / Def In
Italy 2LP (ECLIPSE
RECORDS) This
is the third of ten projected double LP releases that will
comprise the Sun City Girls' and Eclipse Records' Cloaven
Cassettes reissue project. Tackled this time is one of the
very best of the Cloaven Cassettes, a little number from 1987
called The Fresh Kill of a Cape Hunting Dog, which
means two essential early SCG pieces are now vinylized: the
vicious rant-jam called "I Told You So," which sounds
like Alvarius B sitting in while a more-fried-than-usual Pink
Fairies makes stuff up, and "Nile Hilton Burning,"
a very heavy and spaced-out piece that, besides some odd chanting
and percussion, is basically a solo electric guitar jam. However,
neither Rick Bishop's Django Reinhardt side nor his Ted Nugent
side is in evidence -- this is nothing but evil drone-chord
no-chord echo-slam. (Maybe one of the other two guys played
it?) The other tracks are great too.
As for Def
In Italy, after one listen, it kind of strikes
me as another SCG covers album, in the tradition of To
Cover Up Your Right To Live and Midnight Cowboys
From Ipanema. The original
C60 sounds like such a great thing, documenting the notorious
JFA/SCG USA tour of 1984, with one side being an entire live
set from Albuquerque, and the other side a collection of cuts
from various shows on the same tour. This latter approach
is what we have for the vinyl reissue, with only two of the
Albuquerque cuts showing up. Some of the legendary confusion
and resentment the JFA/SCG tour spawned is well-documented,
particularly a crowd of St. Louis, MO thrashers chanting "YOU
SUCK! YOU SUCK! YOU SUCK!" and possibly morphing it into
"YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!" and then having it all
fall apart when Brother Rick suddenly shouts "Alright
now THIS half of the room!" So yeah, it's pretty
essential, even if it's really just another messy covers album,
kicking off with none other than "Black Magic Woman"
(Knoxville, TN). Only three of eleven tracks are SCG originals,
although one of 'em is "Kal El Lazi Kad Ham" (Albuquerque,
NM), an SCG signature song that might as well be an original,
here given a great intense reading. And then there's Charlie
Gocher performing a 'sensitive' (i.e. narcoleptically whispered)
solo acoustic guitar version of the Grateful Dead hit "Dark
Star" (Phoenix, AZ). Not to mention another cover on
here that Gocher also plays guitar on, a duo version of Ayler's
"Ghosts" (Nashville, TN) . . . with Brother Rick
on drums! The ole switcheroo. Yep. Oh yeah, the gatefold is
again very nice looking and the liner notes by BonBon are
totally intense.
SUN
CITY GIRLS: 98.6 IS DEATH CD (ABDUCTION) Jeez,
37 tracks in 58 minutes spanning 12 years of recording activity
. . . this is like the secret fourth disc of Box of Chameleons
. . . . . why don't YOU write a review of it! That's okay,
I can do it, starting right now. Another "made for radio"
joint by the SCG, this one prepared specifically for a 9 April
2004 broadcast on Louisville, KY's 91.9 FM, it's a highly
fragmented series of quick soundbites, whether it's a person
talking, or the band playing, or someone scanning the radio
dial, or a completely weird collage of any combination of
those three elements and (many?) others, and hardly anything
ever lasts for more than two minutes, usually much less than
that. It's certainly off-putting at it's core, but once you
put on some goggles and a windbreaker and sit down with it,
getting some clues from the titles and paying close attention
to what's going on, it gets pretty fruitful. Something needs
to be said about Alan Bishop and his continuing brilliance
at channeling vicious Baudelarian poetry through the soul
of an open mic night emcee at a Tempe and/or Seattle coffeehouse.
The guy can really write and perform -- I'd say he's nudged
past Gocher as the band's resident scribe -- and there's more
buried one liners here than any one listen is gonna notice.
("98.6 is death! You are not alive!" . . . . "You
wanna see if you have dandruff? Go shake your head over Johnny
Cash" . . . . "It was all over before the phony
millennium bell rang, much the same as a child being one year
old after 21 months of breathing" . . . . "Hello,
and welcome to questions and answers. I ask the questions,
and you answer them incorrectly. If you get one right, I'll
send you some wicker furniture for your birthday.") As
for the musical bits scattered throughout, as is so often
the SCG case, on first listen 98% of it can sound like throwaway
improv, but on subsequent listens each tossed-off note starts
to take on importance, sometimes stunningly so. And the occasional
songs are great, like a jaunty little stormy rasqueadaso instrumental
called "Dark Eyes," "Weird Al" Bishop
doing a memorable Bacharach song parody ("Anvils keep
fallin' on my head..."), a glowing Sir Richard Bishop
banjo serenade from a hotel in Bangalore, and a closing cover
of Morricone's "Man With A Harmonica" that is dark,
epic, and huge. So there's a lot to chew on here -- and you
can keep that toothpick!
SUNN
O))): White2 CD (SOUTHERN
LORD) Been
reading about these guys as much as you have, but until this
disc I made it a point not to pay attention to their music.
I just figured we've already got about 19 Melvins records
and three or four Earth records and a couple Thrones records
and about 39 low-end drone records from New Zealand or whatever.
(Surface of the Earth,
anyone??) But this one was lying out at the radio station
and the graphics were excellent, so I started looking at it.
And I noticed that the last of the three tracks was 25 minutes
long, and I needed to play a long song to end my show so I
could take off early and get to work on time. So, I threw
it on, a number called "Nihil's Maw" and boy, did
it sound good in the car going up Lake Shore Drive. Then a
couple weeks later the stars aligned and a friend in the right
place flat-out gave me a free copy, so here it sits in my
player, and it's a knockout. First track is the simplest of
circular Joe Preston-era Melvins riffs but it's just so HEAVY.
Second track is almost too mellow but, if it even does err
at all, it errs fully on the side of evil. And the third track,
"Nihil's Maw" again, wow -- it's the evil-est of
the three, especially when guest vocalist Attila Csihar comes
in with some crazy black Tuvan shit and it all goes down several
notches more.
TAR
PET: The Artist Revealed Is Taralie Dawn LP (GALACTIC ZOO
DISK/ECLIPSE) Wow,
meandering moaning discursive weird acoustic acid solo music
from a member of Chicago group Spires That In The Sunset Rise.
The thing that really makes this album is the busy guitar/mandolin/zither/etc.
playing, and the way she seems to overdub these instruments
several times on top of themselves, creating a big thicket
of stringed rumination that rolls and tumbles along. The vocal
murmurs and mumbles are kind of secondary, barely heard above
the music, except when a deep cracked voice moan bulldozes
up, or a strafing high yelp careens above, and occasionally
a full-on song emerges. For example, take "The Dripping
Hand," which emerges near the end of side one with seemingly
no overdubs at all, just Ms. Taralie Dawn singing and playing
guitar, and it sounds as full and spooked as anything else
on here. Powerful stuff!
TAURPIS
TULA: Sparrows LP (ECLIPSE
RECORDS ) And
speaking of the Charalambides-Scorces-Taurpis Tula axis (see
500MG review), here's the debut full-length by the third group,
the duo of Heather Leigh X and David Leigh X. You might know
David Keenan solely as a music journalist for The Wire,
but he's been a musician on the UK scene for longer than that.
Years ago a friend turned me on to the Telstar Ponies, a 90s
band he was in, and their double LP Voices From The New
Music. It seemed to come and go to little fanfare, but
it was really an impressive piece of avant rock folk melancholia
-- I still get a little misty when I think about the opening
track(s) "Bells For Albert Ayler" and "Voices
From The New Music." Now it's much later and Keenan's
playing in a new duo with Heather Leigh Murray of the now
geographically farflung Charalambides. They're called Taurpis
Tula, and they're for sure picking up right where the Charalambides
have (only temporarily) left off, both in sound and in quality,
with an only apparently simple combination of sparse guitar
arpeggios, sparse guitar leads, subtle if not outright imaginary
drones, and absolutely haunted voices creating long masses
of devotional/mournful psychedelic sound. As with the Charalambides,
there's a deep sadness in it. With music like this I always
wonder if the performers have been through that kind of sadness
in order to express it like this -- but so what, the point
is that they've found a way to express it, for those who have
been through it. Which is a hell of a lot of people.
TEXT
OF LIGHT CD (STARLIGHT FURNITURE CO.) When
I first heard this CD it was from the next room, on shuffle
with four other discs in the changer. I listened to it for
a good 30 minutes without knowing who it was, and it
sounded good, sturm-und-klang electric-guitar-based free music
running full steam with no sign of ending anytime soon. Occupied
some of the same scorched space as Pelt's Burning Filament
Rockets album, but with an enticingly lower notch of
meditative intensity. (Sorry to those for whom that's an obscure
reference, but that's the album I kept thinking of.) Anyway,
it was such a nice listen, because I didn't even know who
the personnel were, so I wasn't concerned with how I was going
to write about them in this review. Like Alan Licht, who for
some reason I always end up dissing, or Lee Ranaldo, for whom
I would have to write a lengthy aside about how Sonic Youth
has never lost it or even so much as slipped in their entire
career, or DJ Olive, which would tempt me to make fun of Illbient™
and the Knitting Factory®, or the Starlight Furniture
Co. label and how, even though they always put out excellent
records, and they're connected with far and away the best
post-noise magazine of all time (Bananafish), I don't think
their records ever look very good from a graphic design standpoint.
Sort of like how Thinking Fellers LPs always had awkward font
choices -- come to think of it, it's probably the same designer.
Anyway, that's just it, I didn't have to worry about all that
atrocious fanboy detail, I could just sit back and enjoy some
brooding high free drone klang music with other elements flickering
in the mix, such as the saxophone and "sax-tronics"
by Ulrich Krieger, and the turntables by DJ Olive (on two
tracks) and Christian Marclay (on the other one), which I
can't even specifically recall hearing. Even the drums by
William Hooker are much less of a powerhouse presence than
Hooker usually is, probably because he's not the leader here.
No one's the leader here -- it's a real non-hierarchical sound,
and I suspect the real leader of the band is the films of
Stan Brakhage, which this band always screens live, which
come to think of it is another bit of rather loaded baggage
I was able to ignore on my first listen: the whole 'bands
showing films while they play' thing. Which is a whole 'nother
line of critique that I won't go into with this review. Suffice
to say that there is an interesting disclaimer about the Brakhage
thing in the liner notes, and I've been enjoying the hell
out of this release at home without breaking out my By
Brakhage DVD once.
TO
LIVE AND SHAVE IN L.A.: God And Country
Rally! CD (THE SMACK SHIRE) The
basic tracks for this 47-minute album were mostly recorded
in 1996, the year after the basic tracks for the massive 2-CD
Wigmaker were mostly recorded, and it does feel like
the coda, the afterword, the wind-down, the glowing and smoky
embers remaining after the house-on-fire that was its predecessor.
It's still wild and thunderous in classic Shave fashion, but
there's something quieter about it, something more introspective.
Maybe this is because of the amazing guitar performance turned
in by Bill Orcutt of Harry Pussy, who pecks and whittles throughout
with such strange and calm power that he seems to pull the
entire mix down to his level. Meanwhile, Nandor Nevai works
away at a drum-kit, another jaw-dropping performance that,
like Orcutt's, seems informed by the free improv/fire music
legacy of the late 1960s, but also by the industrial punk
of the 1980s, while standing well outside of both. He sounds
like he's in another room, or another house entirely, dislocated
and lonely. Tom Smith's vocals sound that way too, still a
constant presence, but more cracked, more human, weary and
even humble after the world-class struggle of The Wigmaker's
epic plunge. It works on many levels; Orcutt and Nevai add
so much extra sonic intrigue and counterpoint to the dependably
powerful and wildly fractured core trio (Smith on shortwave
radio and prepared cassette deck; Rat Bastard on bass guitar;
Ben Wolcott on oscillators) that I keep coming back to the
album just to tease out the frequencies. During these investigations,
I stumble across sensitive emotional vocal/lyric centers that
I can't help but poke at as well. They bite back, and I leave
the room scratching my head, feeling somewhat hurt myself.
Maybe it can be explained by this quote from "Richard
Wright's Blues" by Ralph Ellison: "The blues is
an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal
experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger
its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation
of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic
lyricism." Maybe that's a bit much, but the point is
that the album is suggestive and layered enough that it even
made me think of Ralph Ellison in the first place. Though
the bulk was recorded 8 or 9 years ago, as usual for an Om
Myth production, it has been tweaked and remanipulated and
overdubbed (in this case all the way up to 2003), and now
presented in a very nice color digipak (dig the painting),
as if the release date wasn't a single day late.
TUMBLE
CAT POOF POOFY POOF: Werewolf Story (Plus Five More) CS (YEAY!
CASSETTES) Man, people are putting out nice-looking cassettes
these days....this one comes from our beloved Yeay! label
in a double-size case and features not just a cassette, but
an entire deck of handsome cards, each with their own unique
delicate understated surrealistic animals-and-objects pen-and-ink
drawings. It's like the noise/tape scene was suddenly invaded
by a Paul Klee/Chris Ware collaboration. At first this construction
overwhelms the music, which starts as a guy randomly hitting
things while some kind of noise randomly goes on. But then
it gets deeper and more interesting, partly by pulling a midway
'free folk' move not unlike the one on the Can't picture disc.
You know, the tenor flute thing by Can't? Tumble Cat's similar
folk move consists of lonely voice and accordion. And then
the tape closes out with a long blown out psychedelic improvisation-jam
in front of a live audience that is really nice and rippling.
And then side two is blank -- perfect!
VALLEY
OF ASHES CDR (SPIRIT
OF ORR) This
rather large group of extremely down Louisville, KY folkies
have been playing music for at least a couple years now, but,
whether intentionally or not, the evidence of their fine sound
production has been kept very much on the down-low. A vinyl
LP will be coming out in a very small and extremely down-low
run at some vague moment in the near-to-middling future, and
it's going to be fantastic. Until then, 100 copies will get
around of another release, this very nice spray-painted CDR
from the Spirit of Orr label. It's a raw 'documentary' recording
of the group in a small city house at night with the windows
open, you know the feel. Extremely slow and dragged-out wasted
tunes that, whether running for 3 minutes or 22, really invite
the universe. Weaving in and out of the dragged-out folk-fabric
are the mysterioso appearances of "songs by Rob Maggard,
Dead Moon, Crazy Horse, Lou Reed (sorta)." I'm too green
to know who "I Don't Wanna Talk About It" was written
by -- maybe it was Rob Maggard, who is a member of the band
-- but it's a real catchy slab of serious blues -- whatta
vocal performance by who, Pete Nolan? Rob Maggard? Kris Abplanalp?
Wes Abplanalp? Who knows with Valley of Ashes?
VARIOUS
ARTISTS CS (A
VERITABLE WHIRLWIND OF...) "It's
not a compilation, it's a mix tape!" says the Veritable
Whirlwind Of... website, and the presentation bears it out,
a mysterious and confounding group of songs and spoken passages
and pieces of sound that beg for an easily discernable track
listing (which would make it more of a compilation) but refute
it handily, the only concession being a ratty little handmade
art booklet where each artist/song/event on the tape gets
a page, some with credits and titles, most without, and not
even close to being in the order they appear on the tape.
So, without knowing at any point who in the hell I was specifically
listening to, my first thought was that I felt like I was
hearing the first Sublime Frequencies release focusing on
America. Then I began to realize that a lot of this stuff
isn't even American. (There's stuff from Germany, Japan, Finland.)
Lots of disorienting and fascinating stuff on here, even if
the thrift-scored self-released Christian fundamentalist family
singalong stuff is becoming sort of cliche. (I mean, Mark
McKinney did his "every comedian has a preacher character"
bit
on Kids in the Hall way back in 1989.) As usual, the answering
machine messages (these all jacked from Chicago thrift stores)
seem to take the cake for sheer everyday human pathos. I know
it's lame but I wish it was a CDR so I could easily sample
all these nutso tracks, but one-sided cassette it is, and
believe me, it's still worth it. Do check out this new label,
originated in Chicago, now based in Olympia -- I can't wait
to see what they do next.
VARIOUS
ARTISTS: Million Tongues Festival CD (BASTET) I'm
a little disappointed in the packaging -- awesome cover art
by Chicago psychedelic superhero Plastic Crimewave, but I
just don't like the flat cardboard slip-case things. I think
the digi-pack is the only way to go for artwork like this.
But hey, it ain't my label, and other than that quibble, this
is a great comp! A nice beneath-the-hype treatment of the
contemporary acid folk scene. Because it reminds you that
a lot of today's rock music is still just (plugged-in) folk
music. This is the companion CD to an incredible festival
that Sir Crimewave put on at Chicago's Empty Bottle in August
2004, and the only reason I wasn't there is because I happened
to be out of the country that month. Highlights, in order,
are Nissennenmondai (metal rhythm and drone duo rock from
Japan), Inner Throne (super heavy lumber metal), Plastic Crimewave
Sound (a version of what I consider their most central number,
"Caged Fire Theme," that is better than the one
on the LP, except the LP vocals are amazing), Josephine Foster
& The Supposed (very inscrutable rock track), Matt Valentine
& Erika Elder Medicine Show (a lot like Sea Ensemble We
Move Together, and, I think, just as good!) . . . . the
Simon Finn song (new? I think?) is really good, but the next
song, by Frankie Delmane (who's she?), is even better. The
song after that, by Espers, has really grown on me. Slow brooding
chamber folk played tight and doomy. As a Tower Recordings
fan since 1997, I've always been surprised to not really get
into PG Six solo material, but I really dig his track on here
-- maybe because it's an instrumental -- great folky improvising
on some sort of zither or autoharp -- tell Richard Fariña
the news! The track by Für Saxa is terrific -- I've got
to get a real album by her, all I've heard are comp tracks
(and, most notably, one great live show). The album ends with
two tracks from the harsh noise end of Chicago psych, by M.V.
Carbon and Panicsville respectively -- a nice Crimewave touch
from a city where it ALL ends in (harsh) noise.
VARIOUS
ARTISTS: The Naked Prey Original Soundtrack
CD (LATITUDE) I
had not heard of the 1966 movie, but I guess I have heard
of its director, producer, and star actor Cornel Wilde. I
mean, you've heard of him, right? He was a "Hollywood
star and former Olympic fencer," okay. The movie is about
an adventurous explorer dude (Wilde, natch), deep in 19th
century Africa, forced into playing a little Most Dangerous
Game against some authentic tribal warriors. Sounds pretty
suspenseful, but the soundtrack isn't ominous in the slightest
-- it's very low-key pleasant everyday village music, working
and eating songs, and plenty of other songs with very explanatory
titles, "Courtship Song," "Dancing Song,"
"Boasting Song of Men," "Drinking Song,"
"Cattle Herding Song," etc. Both men and women sing,
though often it's a combination of two or three male voices
-- the roots of doo wop?! Later in the album (track 12, "Village
Celebration: Music Examples") things get bigger and a
massive trance-beat opens up with what sounds like large crowds
of people. A total blast. Whatever the suspenseful racial-wargame
plot of the Wilde movie, it thankfully has nothing to do with
the value of its fine soundtrack album, except to remind us
that music is a far finer cultural vessel than action movie
plots. Latitude is the "international traditional music
and field recordings" division of the Locust Music record
label.
VARIOUS
ARTISTS: Tapeworms Eat Bookworms 2CS (NOT
NOT FUN) You
gotta love this -- a double cassette compilation that comes
inside an actual hardback book, hollowed out just like a prop
in a whodunit. Mine is a copy of The Giants: Russia and
America by Richard Barnet, but it's been given the lovely
NNF silkscreen treatment to read "Tapeworms Eat Bookworms,
edited by Not Not Fun", the original meaning of The
Giants by Richard Barnet hijacked and obliterated by
the poetry music of today's renegade artists (this particular
cell is mostly from California though they have followers
in every continent). The book is still given some respect,
as all the tracks are said to have a literary theme, and whether
that's apparent or not from one contributor to the next, the
music is very consistently excellent, uniformly riding the
charge of the packaging. First track is by Haunted Castle,
who I've never heard of and may never hear of again, but it's
a killer free noise jam, squalling electronics and hard-driving
congas! Our old friends No Doctors contribute "A Gold
Patch for Walt Whitman" which shows new direction for
these transplanted Californians -- an epic and haunted dirge,
Eastern-inflected, noise-raga guitar, moaning vocals -- powerful.
Then someone named Adam Lipman contributes a really serious
and DOWN bedroom ballad with piano and pseudo-timpani hits.
Then someone named Aum Rifle do a really DOWN bedroom country
ballad called "Spring," and then D Yellow Swans
bring the noise with a track called "The Murder of Two
Men by a Young Kid Wearing Lemon Colored Gloves." (I
get that literary reference, I've read the piece it's named
after, but I can't remember the writer's name -- does that
count? Oh wait, Kenneth Patchen?) Then Wives/Cherry Point
REALLY bring the noise with "Wives Hate Police."
Corcoran Quartet bring "Doong Sa (A Prayer For Owen Meany)"
which is a nice rippling oceanic prayer by saxophone quartet,
and I'm guessing they're part of the Sacramento/Weird Forest
hardcore jazz scene because the name Corcoran is probably
Kevin Corcoran, formerly of Antennas Erupt, and currently
(?) of the Kevin & Chad 7-inch also reviewed in this issue.
Barr offers "That That Good" -- this dude has won
me over with his motivational speaking, not to mention his
stuttering go-go beats. A true emo original! Mika Miko close
out side one with some punk-girl-yelp-sass-panic that is really
the kind of thing I expected the Not Not Fun label to be all
about. They're a very good band, but what I'm really stoked
by is how many more facets there are to the NNF aesthetic
-- it's like the goddamn geodesic dome of dance-punk-everything.
I haven't even gotten to tracks by Watery Graves, Weirdo/Begeirdo,
Parker Posey's Parkinsons, Grey Skull, Carrier Pigeonz, Raking
Bombs, Quem Quaeritis, My Sexual Dad, Offal....and there's
about that many again, and the whole thing is a fine listen.
VERTONEN:
Return of the Interrobang CD (C.I.P.) Have
seen a lot of Vertonen shows here in Chicago, bumped across
a comp track or two, heard him on the radio twice, but this
is surprisingly the first time I've sat down at home with
a Vertonen release. So far the live stuff has come across
as great loud deep-flow crash-sizzle, often with a nasty beat
orientation wrecking through it, but on wax it's been unpredictable,
softer but somehow heavier -- and Return of the Interrobang
surprises me further with deep glacial industrial dare-I-say-mellow
textures. First track is a rather gorgeous and fairly soft
(but thick) drone, not completely unlike something you'd hear
from Birchville Cat Motel (who Vertonen is playing on a bill
with here in Chicago in just a couple days, and there's a
nice interview between the two on the C.I.P.
site). Great tones, glowing embers with doom undercurrents,
packed with a sci-fi title: "Toroidal Circulation 1 &
2." (Never mind, I just looked it up and it's a science
fact title.) Second track comes in with a hard beat, your
basic urban alarm siren drill kind of thing, with mysterious
sounds floating in the background, and it's pretty heavy,
but ends up the most 'typical' track on the CD, because the
remaining three, a trilogy called "The Medical Turntable
Variations," are just lovely little subtle stumbling
loop miniatures. I mean, sure, you can infer a creepy entropic
'broken machine' connotation with all three tracks, and the
title of the third part, "Deplete To Ruination, The Wide
Shift," is of course something scary to contemplate,
and topical too: the ostensibly
approaching era where dystopian science fiction becomes dystopian
science fact. (There's that "it's not science fiction,
it's science fact" thing again, he's good with that.)
Possibly the loveliest of the three, but it does have a haunted
piano thing going on . . . . like, say, the haunted piano
bar of a big-city luxury hotel in ruins, long abandoned by
human life, now a bizarre gargantuan relic of the oil age
. . . . oh, and hey, what's an interrobang?! Is that science
fiction or science fact?!
VERTONEN:
Orchid Collider CD (C.I.P.) On
the heels of Vertonen's very strong Return of the Interrobang
CD comes another disc, Orchid Collider, that he also
made with grant money from the Chicago Arts Council, and once
again the money has been well spent. This time the deep-drone
approaches that were extensively explored on Interrobang's
first track have gotten even deeper and more perfect. Six
tracks, almost all in the sweet-spot 7-to-9-minute range,
that display a nice variety of sounds that all fit within
a broader deep-drone approach. You've got the gorgeous slow-motion
laser-beam sounds, as on the first track "extend to decipher,"
which is practically reminding me of some early Popol Vuh!
(And it's not the only track on the disc that does.) You've
got the very distant ghost-tones of "stone oceans"
that eventually get overtaken by furious jackhammer drones
that are somehow still strangely serene. You've got the low
subdued grind of "forgiveness precipice," which,
before it almost faded away completely, my wife thought was
an appliance in our home. You've got more than that, too,
but as usual I don't want to describe everything, but I'll
just say that the patient, austere, and often surprisingly
gorgeous sounds on this album constitute one of the finest
drone-based albums I've heard all year (and I've heard quite
a few!). Real nice-looking artwork too, by Jason Talbot (who
himself just put out a recommended release on C.I.P.).
VIRGIN
EYE BLOOD BROTHERS: Monkey Glands in the Skull Orchard CS
(BLACK VELVET FUCKERE) Fuckin'
summer. I've got this tape turned up pretty loud, but I can't
hear a damn thing because I've got the oscillating fan going,
the window air conditioner blaring away in the other room,
and my mom is visiting and the baby is sleeping and this might
be "weird and noisy" music that will totally freak
all of them out so I don't want to turn it up louder . . .
. okay, it's been going for about 30 seconds and I can sort
of hear something ominous happening somewhere in the room
. . . . okay, it's been 60 seconds, and I turned it up louder
and can now hear some subtle drone-shift going on, quiet (non-fan)
oscillations and misterio-drift -- shit, it's pretty damn
good. Very subtle and eerie and stoned-sounding. Now, 10-15
minutes in and it's inevitably getting louder and spookier
but the fine degree of control has not been relinquished.
Hmm, this is hard to describe and it doesn't exactly give
a clear picture of what this band does -- in fact, it doesn't
give a clear picture of anything at all. Which could
be, of course, the BIG picture. Highly recommended.
WARMER
MILKS: Family Corpse of God CDR (BORNMUGGED) Nevermind
Chinaboise, THIS is my pick of the issue. From Lexington,
Kentucky, consider Warmer Milks a real 'band to watch'. I
really thought this was going to be a jam-noise album, with
its John Olson/American Tapes style artwork, right down to
the cubist lettering. With two of the Hair Police playing
on here, I figured it would be the October Faction to Hair
Police's Black Flag . . . . . . But oh my GOD. This is not
a jam-noise album. Not at all. This is an album of songs,
and they are golden electric-guitar folk-rock dreams. I was
definitely digging the first three songs right away, but it
was during the fourth and fifth, both recorded live, that
the jaw went ahead and dropped. The fourth track "Dogs
All Slain," without really sounding like My Bloody Valentine,
features some of the best glide guitar playing I've heard
since that band gave us Loveless. After the first
2 or 3 minutes (the part with the words and vocals), it settles
on a lovely circular guitar-chord cycle and just goes and
goes, until it ends over ten minutes later to small-crowd
whoops of applause and a "hell yeah!" But that's
nothing compared to the goes-and-goes you get with "Penetration
Initials," the last track on here, a 30-minute epic that
winds its way through soft uninterrupted moods and golden-slow-chord
folk forms, beautifully progged out with occasional soft-yelp
vocals. On first listen, about 10 minutes in, I realized something
special was happening, so I stopped the work I was doing and
just laid on the floor like I was on a blanket in the grass
at an outdoor concert. Everybody who is alive or has ever
lived was there. Neil Young finally stopped staring out at
the ocean, looked back over his shoulder and raised an eyebrow.
Keiji Haino and Jandek strolled by, Jandek eating an ice cream
cone, dressed up just like he was onstage in Scotland. They
stopped and listened, closing their eyes and nodding their
heads. After the song/set ended, they went over to the merch
table and Jandek bought Keiji a Warmer Milks CDR. The 24-year-old
Tim Buckley was there listening, deciding that he should stick
it out with the whole Starsailor vibe after all,
even though it wasn't selling too well. Even the controversial
but ticket-selling headliners Simon & Garfunkel, who had
been confidently having a pre-party in the backstage tent
with an entourage that included Jack Nicholson and Shelley
Duvall, got a little quiet and pensive during the last half
of this epic song, quietly realizing that the folk-world winds
were changing direction.
WARMER
MILKS: Penetration Initials CDR (MOUNTAAIN) This
is it, the monster jam. I already reviewed this 30-minute
epic when it was part of the not really released Family
Corpse of God CDR, but now it's been made official as
a one-track CDR on Lexington label Mountaain. Sounds remastered
too! At least I'm hearing more details than before in the
glorious sun-haze fabric of this endless quilt of a psych
ballad. Seriously, every time I hear this song with all of
its cyclical movements and melodies, I can't believe it was
actually written and performed at all, and on top
of it, that it was recorded. Which means that we
get to listen to it in our homes. The world is filled
with wonders.
WATERSPORTS
CS (WHITE TAPES) Another
mysterious collective from the White Tapes universe. This
tape came with stickers over the, uh, whatchacallem, the tape
holes, on both sides, so in order to play the tape I had to
punch through the sticker over each hole, and then dig in
there and get the sticker paper out so it wouldn't interfere
(I used an exacto knife). It's working, but I can still hear
a big paper "CLICK" come from the tape deck every
5 seconds or so. The "CLICK" is louder than the
music, which is very quiet and low-key. What I think I'm hearing
is some sort of vaguely looped sample of what might be crowd/audience
noise, eventually joined and/or replaced by very low-key feedback
and fuzz. Gorgeous, but ends after about 10 minutes or maybe
even less -- kinda short -- so I flipped it over, cut holes
out of the sticker on that side, rewound it, and played it
. . . . but I don't think there was anything on there. Those
White Tapes usually are short 'uns, and I love me a one-sided
tape. Stylin'.
WEIRD
WEEDS: Hold Me CD (EDITION
MANIFOLD) Weird
Weeds live in Austin, Texas, and one member used to live in
Nashville, Tennessee, where he was a member of the Cherry
Blossoms. Four of the songs on here were co-written with Steve
Gigante, great musician who played in Deerhoof, and the Weird
Weeds in fact sound quite a bit like Deerhoof-related band
The Curtains. Despite these pedigrees, on my first listen
while busy at work all I could think was Jon Anderson of Yes
fronting Slint. But after a while, the shuffler took me to
track eight which has a very nice sudden guitar-drone soundscape
in the middle of it, like the last half of Sonic Youth "Mote"
re-recorded at home on cassette 4-track instead of a big studio
and then pasted into something new all over again. This really
woke me up, and now intrigued, I kept re-listening to give
the album another chance, a process that soon became re-listening
simply because I liked it. The singing and songwriting are
surely a bit precious, but I'm nonetheless rather hooked on
these little avant-indie miniatures, how each Slintily clad
mystery-verse seems to be offset by a screeching chamber-pop
noise or a weird plink-plonk that suddenly shifts into a loud
chorus with noise guitar or some other more unidentifiable
arrangement oddity and then back to a quirkily quiet man/woman-sung
verse that has a folk-pop feel to it. And, it's a real good
guitar album -- the line-up is a drummer and three guitarists,
and it's often the "lead guitar" (credited as such)
by Kurt Newman that saves the day, sharp little spiky melodies
bouncing off the chordal chiming prog-pop interlock the rhythm
players lay down.
KEITH
FULLERTON WHITMAN: Schöner Flußengel LP (KRANKY)
Title
is pronounced "shooner floos-engel." It's a heavy
drone album with fusion-jazz ornamentation and an acoustic
guitar undercurrent. Right now I'm on an unexpected sixth
or seventh listen in just a week's time and it's still getting
deeper. One-person drone LPs are the shit, a Pure Form. You
know they run the gamut from "dark ambient" internet
crap to the loner synth classics to the contemporary deeply
considered album releases by form-masters like Kevin Drumm,
Hive Mind, Vertonen, Ian Nagoski, Maryanne Amacher, and many
more. Call it the 'killer drone' LP, and include Schöner
Flußengelin this camp. Even if
it is (with all the musicianly ornamentation) like the Steely
Dan (or Stevie Wonder!) of killer drone LPs, the end result
is more than 'bad-ass' enough to live up to its doomy cover
imagery.
JACK
WRIGHT: Up For Grabs CDR (SPRING
GARDEN MUSIC) I've
been listening to post-jazz free-music saxophonist Jack Wright
for years, because back when I lived in Lincoln, NE he actually
came and played there several times. He really didn't have
much choice -- at the time he was living in Boulder, CO, which
meant he had to pass through Nebraska to get to the East Coast
-- but whether he was playing for just two audience members,
or for a more successful show (i.e. four audience members),
he always went absolutely balls-out. He's one of the most
fully committed musicians I've ever seen in any genre on any
instrument. In the liner notes for this record he writes,
"For me the question is, what am I doing now, how deep
can I go." Well, the answer is pretty goddamn deep --
this disc is completely intense. It's been duking it out with
the high tea-whistle of my radiator and the soft stops-and-gos
of the dishwasher, and when any two or more are going at once
it's almost too beautiful. Most of the time I don't even notice
the saxophone playing at all, and when I do, for the first
minute or two I always think it's just my cats jumping around
in the other room. Wright has gotten that far inside of our
every day existence with this music, sort of how ol' Cagey
went into the anechoic chamber and still heard "om"
(i.e. a low tone and a high tone, the sound of his nervous
system and his circulatory system, respectively) -- THOSE
are the kind of tones Mr. Wright is getting to with his saxophone.
According to the liners, the inspiration for this bold reduction
in form and movement turns out to have been the intensely
small/quiet 1998-present music of saxophonist Bhob Rainey
(Nmperign).
Also of note is the way this disc is being, ahem, marketed:
"These recordings will be available free to musicians
and music-lovers at concerts or for the cost of mailing. You
may direct your readers to me at jackwri444@aol.com or 1032
Spring Garden St./Easton PA 18042 . . . . This music needs
to be known and freely shared, especially among musicians,
to foster the growth of the music and the community. This
is more important than for the recordings to acquire the status
of products on the market, or for the musicians to divert
their energies as merchants, for which many of us are ill-suited."
XEX:
group:xex CD (THE SMACK
SHIRE) As
legend has it (I just read the story on the Smack Shire website),
when Tom Smith of To Live and Shave in L.A. was doing DJ shifts
at WFMU circa 1999, he spent
some time camping out in the record library pulling albums
one by one, looking for lost gems. Good thing he started from
Z and went backwards, because otherwise he might not have
made it to Xex. They were a band from Nowheresville, New Jersey,
also known as South River, just south of Sayreville, the home
of Jon Bon Jovi. In fact, according to the mapquest (dot com),
South River and Sayreville are only 1.85 miles apart. Can
you imagine young Jon Bongiovi in 1980? Well then, try and
imagine xex in 1980, a young woman and three or four fairly
dainty young men from Jersey, playing nutso synth-pop entirely
on "electronic instruments -- synthesizers, arps, computers"
without any record industry veneer whatsoever. Not much in
the way of info on this reissue -- just a great mysterious
live shot from April 1980 and an enthusiastic community newspaper
article from probably that same year -- but there is plenty
of music, and xex is a true discovery. It can sound like some
sort of state-sponsored co-ed barber shop quartet from the
totalitarian future singing propaganda songs disguised as
entertainments in order to seduce and brainwash intellectuals,
but most of the time it's clearly just a kick-ass and uncommonly
intelligent new wave synth band. There are songs and hooks
on here that you will love immediately ("Rome On $5 A
Day"!!!), and the instrumental tone throughout is true
atmospheric sensual regional-fi dystopia-beat -- but it's
the words that'll really rewire your synapses. They sing about
politics and sociology -- fashion victims, urban commutes,
Catholic school casualties, and Soviet nerve gas attacks --
and today, nigh on 25 years later, the content still cuts
to the bone. The nerve gas song, titled with the acronym "SNGA,"
has an intentionally kitschy but also genuinely creepy sci-fi-horror-film
atmosphere and some of the most mordantly hilarious lyrics
I've ever heard, such as "Soviet nerve gas is strong
/ Snort it up and you won't be snorting long," "Soviet
nerve gas is subtle / When it hits there's no time for rebuttal,"
"Soviet nerve gas is fun / If your pleasure is killing
everyone," "Get a drop on your skin / And the bullshit
will set in . . ."
YUMA
NORA: Red Train Graphing the Sunset of All CD (DEATHBOMB
ARC) I'll
admit, I thought Yuma Nora was going to be another one of
these neo-no-wave noise-punk power duos, because they are
a duo, and there are costumes involved, and noisiness, and
electronics instead of guitars, etc., but there's something
far deeper going on here, and you will like it. Track one
starts kinda slow-brew, and I really like the steam it picks
up as it develops into harsh trance-lumber free-form circuit-buzz
improv-rock. The duo is Amy Vecchione on some amplified homemade
circuit electronics (hence the harsh trance-lumber buzz),
and drummer Aaron Reyna (really a kid to watch the way he
bitches-brews the moods up and down). And the wild card is
Vecchione's vocals, which come and go intermittently and really
hit a rarefied low-key dead-blues vibe. Thirty minutes, two
seconds, and out -- killer EP.
YUMA NORA: Not a quartet.
Zs:
Karate Bump CD EP (PLANARIA) I'm
assuming it's pronounced "Zs", as in "zees,"
rhymes with "cheese." Not that they're a cheesy
band, but some cartoon mouse Zorn-isms are audible. [Rough
draft of review is suddenly abandoned here. Time marches on]
Now it's a week later, and I have to admit to you that I stole
that "cartoon mouse" image from the Aquarius
Records website, verbatim, which might be plagiarism,
but tonight, just now, and I am totally not bullshitting you,
track #3 from Karate Bump came on the stereo and
my 22-month-old kid stopped in his tracks and listened and
after about 10 seconds turned to me and exclaimed "Mowsh!"
"Mouse?," I answered back, and he nodded yes, vigorously,
and then began dancing to the music as mouse-like as he could.
So are you gonna accuse him of plagiarism too??
But on the
Zorn topic, yeah, I'm sure the people in Zs grew up with the
music of John Zorn to one extent or another, but the good
news is that the Zs are also growing out of the music of J.Z.
and into something pretty close to being all their own. They
are doing it with a disciplined songwriting scheme, focused
here on quietude and sustained swing/groove. Neither of which
are especially common in the "brutal prog" scene
with which this band has been aligned. The result is some
swank driving music that practically sounds like Duke Ellington
next to any rough grouping of their peers. Not to mention
Evan Parker -- the "scratchy breathing" and "keypad-clicking"
techniques that free improv music has over-explored are given
new life by Zs as a tool for composition rather than simply
improvisation.
ZELIENOPLE:
Sleeper Coach CD (LOOSE
THREAD) I
had lived in Chicago three years but hadn't heard of this
Chicago band until they, or somebody, sent Blastitude their
CD. That's cool, I always admire a band that doesn't care
if they get out that much. The press kit led me to expect
an icy drone-texture mellow-eerie space-art band, and that's
kind of what they are, but what I didn't expect was that almost
every song would have vocals. Actually, I didn't expect songs
at all, just "pieces," but these are almost all
songs, which is very refreshing. Definite Spacemen 3 vibe,
done very well -- late-period Spacemen, that is, with the
fiery Stooges-derived guitar distortion almost entirely freeze-dried
out, leaving great monolithic walls of frozen space-ice whisper-song
atmospherics. Seriously, I keep coming back to this one, and
it's still getting better -- one of the better chilled-out
dream-punk albums of the last ten years.
I'll
admit it, you can beat me up later: first listen was kinda
"eh." I thought, "Man, these guys should work
with Wolf Eyes all the time, they could use the help!"
Just more jam-noise, I was thinking, and the two things that
made it different -- occasional surf-rock Louie Louie riffs
and Richard Meltzer's out-of-nowhere spoken-word appearances
-- also made it more awkward. Then, next morning, listen #2:
whoah. Something happened. The presskit blurb called Smegma
"the most psychedelic band ever!" and it was starting
to seem possible, because while listening to the disc I felt
myself falling down a rabbit hole, a time slip, even though
I was completely sober except for two cups of coffee. I was
hearing endless no-mind no-zone no-man jam-splunge that was
in no hurry and had nothing to prove because it knew I would
get sucked in eventually. And that's exactly what was happening.
Now, when Meltzer suddenly starts yelping out one of his observations
after these long-ass no-zones, it's like I've set the controls
for the heart of the sun and awoken 90 years later (thawed
out from cryogenic deep-freeze of course) to find myself at
the corner bar next to some guy talking my ear off while drinking
beer and shelling peanuts . . . . . and the band plays on
. . . . (I already know of two different people who have gotten
lost driving while this record was playing on their car stereo).
Well,
this is interesting . . . . for one thing, it is perhaps the
most 'normal' CD that Abduction Records has ever released.
It's a hip hop CD, and not "outsider music" hip-hop
like Sensational, or even a dense paranoid post-Wu kind of
thing, just smooth chilled-out alternative/independent intelligent
hip-hop, produced, written, and arranged by a dude from Seattle
named Specs One. The beats are damn nice, plenty of head-nodders,
and the flow is always on, though after 3 or 4 listens I have
yet to come away recalling any specific lyrics. Not a lot
of curses, but a few, and there's weed rhymes, so it's kinda
rugged. In fact, as far as I know, it's the best Seattle hip-hop
album since Sir Mix-a-Lot's Swass, but the only thing
about it that consistently surprises me is how, well, 'normal'
it is. But that doesn't mean it isn't good -- in fact, track
#14 "Wide World," a lovely wistful trip-hop instrumental
(with 
And
now we're walking around in Tibet hearing low-key music and
ambience recorded outdoors in August 2003. Opens with the
bad-ass singing of a three-year-old boy and this boldly human
element extends throughout. Soft bells ring in hallways (reminds
me of The Dreamy Draw!) while kids scamper and shout
and is that a buzzing horsefly or a distant human humming
ecstaticly? Close listening reveals the latter......track
six is a killer erhu solo, which is a two-string bowed fiddle
type thing......other solo instrument/vocal performances sound
like something off of Sun City Girls' High Asia (Carnival
Folklore Resurrection #9) -- yet another Sublime glimpse
into the SCG fakebook. And the last track is really something,
one of the holiest 7 minutes I've heard on wax for at least
. . . . a month. Some sort of soft prayer chant on a tranquil
mountaintop, eavesdropped on by the microphones of Beijing,
China resident Zhang Jian, who recorded the whole album and
did a fine job. 
Truly
there, truly sublime, such simple and deeply felt folk music,
sounding ancient and stripped-down and direct enough to make
Robert Johnson sound like Elvis Costello or something. As
usual per SF, there is so much here, like choirs singing call-and-response
devotional chants a capella, bad-ass percussion & horn
jams (a LOT like BYG/Actuel free jazz), straining naked tuff
mouth harp solos, plenty of inscrutable outdoors ambience
(street sermons, pony trains, wedding processions, prayer
wheels, Pokhara dogs) . . . . It isn't really spelled out
in the liner notes, but it seems to be a mix of radio recordings,
live musical performances, and ambient field recordings, collected
and put together seamlessly and cryptically by Robert Millis
of the Climax Golden Twins. Some beautiful heart-piercing
stuff all the way, actually my top recommendation of this
new six. 
Actually,
this might be my top recommendation -- I think it recently
surpassed Yab-Yum for most listens. People have been
describing music as "deep" lately, and, well, this
Sumatra shit is DEEP. This is beat-digger deep, this is dusty-crate
deep -- I mean the crates this shit came from must have been
REALLY dusty. Plus, the crates were in Sumatra, so top THAT,
DJ Shadow! Not that this CD is filled with "funky breaks,"
but it is filled with really good MUSIC -- remember that?
How about the prog-tastic lo-fi Santana/Crimson/show-tune
swirl of the Orkus Gambi style, represented here on four different
cuts? Or how about the lady-sung heaven-dream that is the
introduction of "Pariaman" by Fetty, however betrayed
by the cheesy gamelan pop it becomes? How about track 2 ("Unknown"
by Unknown!), lady-sung gamelan pop that is not cheesy in
the slightest -- in fact, it's a sexy brooding wildcat in
a trance, with some extremely funky breaks. Plus
several more examples of the unstoppable loping/driving Dangdut
style, a style I first encountered on Folk and Pop Sounds
of Sumatra Vol. 1 (SF 001) with the unbelievably lovely
"Indang Pariaman" by Sansimar. Pretty soon Sublime
Frequencies will have released enough Dangdut tracks that
I can make my own 2-CDR all-Dangdut comp! Can't wait . . .
. 
Ah
shit yeah, summadat G-ass thai funk fo' yuhz . . . . no, but
seriously, the title says it all: this is COUNTRY MUSIC. And
country music, when it's the "real thing", is always
funky, even when it's plugged-into rock'n'roll amplifiers,
like much of this stuff is. A lot of folks, from Birmingham,
Alabama native Sun Ra to Outkast ("some people call us
country/but really we just Southern...") to the No Neck
Blues Band (with their various overt/covert Allman Bros. tributes)
have been hitting some sort of country/electric polyglot over
the last few years -- oh yeah, Sun City Girls too, hitting
all kinds of polyglots for a good 25 years now. Not that this
disc sounds anything like any of these artists, or anything
else American, but it is some ole electrified country funk
-- the country just happens to be "Laos and the predominately
rural Northeastern region of Thailand known as Isan."
Learn about such funky Molam ("master singer") styles
as Lam Phun, Lam Sing, and Look Thoong, and instruments such
as the khaen (mouth organ), the phin, the soong (both "lute-like
instruments"), the sor ("a bowed fiddle"),
"and a percussion ensemble featuring finger cymbals and
hand drums." And when the rock'n'roll virus makes it
all the way to Isan, "electric bass, effected guitars,
electric organs, kit drums and horns" start getting into
the mix and things get really wild! It's all right here on
Molam: Thai Country Groove From Isan!
Two
more of Alan Bishop's dense and dizzying radio collages, with
the upshot that they are up-to-the-minute, both recorded in
2004 in Cambodia and Sumatra respectively. (Pre-tsunami.)
lost
parents from beyond the grave 1000 years ago . . . . . . as
for Radio Phnom Penh, I don't know where to even
start, times ten, and Cambodia is always heavy. Actually,
the more I listen, the more I'm hearing it as one of the more
"song-oriented" of Mr. Bishop's radio collages,
a la Radio Morocco? But every listen reveals something
new, and then there's track #13, "Sign Off/The Venerable
Anthem." It starts out with the Sublime-standard on-the-fly
tuner-mixed collage chaos, then a brassy female DJ shouting
over loud post-hiphop beats (the "Sign Off"), and
then around the 2 minute mark the whole thing breaks down
into an operatic ballad fanfare sung by a chorus of women
as if they were sent by unseen forces to sing a lamentation
for Planet Earth that the entire world will hear. ("The
Venerable Anthem.")
At
first this short (less than 30 minutes) 1991 all-improv 12-inch
was one of my least favorite Sun City Girls releases -- I
know, I know, they record and release whatever they want,
and I love 'em for it, but I do like to have at least a song
or two, and these particular five medium-length jams with
no vocals seemed very improvised. But here it is a couple
years down the road, and it's practically become one of my
favorites. There's tons of SCG improv to be had out there,
but the recording aesthetic on this is kinda unique -- trebly
and raw, but also somewhat professional, which yields a nice
crisp quality -- and once you get used to the idea of extra-crispy
totally uncompromised improv jams, and learn to follow their
inner logic, the music becomes endlessly suggestive. For example,
on the first track "The Kissy Sting" the bass and
drums mime a churning river of mud that occasionally gets
stuck on a boulder or a big tree branch before taking that
along with it too. Meanwhile, the guitar becomes everything
else on top: the sky, the birds, the outside world, the synthetic
world, humans moving around, and human culture in general,
such as language, conversation, arguments, and/or half-remembered
totally-felt universal human songs and melodies. Or, maybe
the guitar is just playing its ass off trying to keep up with
with the bassist and drummer who are freaking out, playing
a freaking river of mud -- and succeeding.
This
is the third of ten projected double LP releases that will
comprise the Sun City Girls' and Eclipse Records' Cloaven
Cassettes reissue project. Tackled this time is one of the
very best of the Cloaven Cassettes, a little number from 1987
called The Fresh Kill of a Cape Hunting Dog, which
means two essential early SCG pieces are now vinylized: the
vicious rant-jam called "I Told You So," which sounds
like Alvarius B sitting in while a more-fried-than-usual Pink
Fairies makes stuff up, and "Nile Hilton Burning,"
a very heavy and spaced-out piece that, besides some odd chanting
and percussion, is basically a solo electric guitar jam. However,
neither Rick Bishop's Django Reinhardt side nor his Ted Nugent
side is in evidence -- this is nothing but evil drone-chord
no-chord echo-slam. (Maybe one of the other two guys played
it?) The other tracks are great too. 
Jeez,
37 tracks in 58 minutes spanning 12 years of recording activity
. . . this is like the secret fourth disc of Box of Chameleons
. . . . . why don't YOU write a review of it! That's okay,
I can do it, starting right now. Another "made for radio"
joint by the SCG, this one prepared specifically for a 9 April
2004 broadcast on Louisville, KY's 91.9 FM, it's a highly
fragmented series of quick soundbites, whether it's a person
talking, or the band playing, or someone scanning the radio
dial, or a completely weird collage of any combination of
those three elements and (many?) others, and hardly anything
ever lasts for more than two minutes, usually much less than
that. It's certainly off-putting at it's core, but once you
put on some goggles and a windbreaker and sit down with it,
getting some clues from the titles and paying close attention
to what's going on, it gets pretty fruitful. Something needs
to be said about Alan Bishop and his continuing brilliance
at channeling vicious Baudelarian poetry through the soul
of an open mic night emcee at a Tempe and/or Seattle coffeehouse.
The guy can really write and perform -- I'd say he's nudged
past Gocher as the band's resident scribe -- and there's more
buried one liners here than any one listen is gonna notice.
("98.6 is death! You are not alive!" . . . . "You
wanna see if you have dandruff? Go shake your head over Johnny
Cash" . . . . "It was all over before the phony
millennium bell rang, much the same as a child being one year
old after 21 months of breathing" . . . . "Hello,
and welcome to questions and answers. I ask the questions,
and you answer them incorrectly. If you get one right, I'll
send you some wicker furniture for your birthday.") As
for the musical bits scattered throughout, as is so often
the SCG case, on first listen 98% of it can sound like throwaway
improv, but on subsequent listens each tossed-off note starts
to take on importance, sometimes stunningly so. And the occasional
songs are great, like a jaunty little stormy rasqueadaso instrumental
called "Dark Eyes," "Weird Al" Bishop
doing a memorable Bacharach song parody ("Anvils keep
fallin' on my head..."), a glowing Sir Richard Bishop
banjo serenade from a hotel in Bangalore, and a closing cover
of Morricone's "Man With A Harmonica" that is dark,
epic, and huge. So there's a lot to chew on here -- and you
can keep that toothpick! 
Been
reading about these guys as much as you have, but until this
disc I made it a point not to pay attention to their music.
I just figured we've already got about 19 Melvins records
and three or four Earth records and a couple Thrones records
and about 39 low-end drone records from New Zealand or whatever.
(
Wow,
meandering moaning discursive weird acoustic acid solo music
from a member of Chicago group Spires That In The Sunset Rise.
The thing that really makes this album is the busy guitar/mandolin/zither/etc.
playing, and the way she seems to overdub these instruments
several times on top of themselves, creating a big thicket
of stringed rumination that rolls and tumbles along. The vocal
murmurs and mumbles are kind of secondary, barely heard above
the music, except when a deep cracked voice moan bulldozes
up, or a strafing high yelp careens above, and occasionally
a full-on song emerges. For example, take "The Dripping
Hand," which emerges near the end of side one with seemingly
no overdubs at all, just Ms. Taralie Dawn singing and playing
guitar, and it sounds as full and spooked as anything else
on here. Powerful stuff!
And
speaking of the Charalambides-Scorces-Taurpis Tula axis (see
500MG review), here's the debut full-length by the third group,
the duo of Heather Leigh X and David Leigh X. You might know
David Keenan solely as a music journalist for The Wire,
but he's been a musician on the UK scene for longer than that.
Years ago a friend turned me on to the Telstar Ponies, a 90s
band he was in, and their double LP Voices From The New
Music. It seemed to come and go to little fanfare, but
it was really an impressive piece of avant rock folk melancholia
-- I still get a little misty when I think about the opening
track(s) "Bells For Albert Ayler" and "Voices
From The New Music." Now it's much later and Keenan's
playing in a new duo with Heather Leigh Murray of the now
geographically farflung Charalambides. They're called Taurpis
Tula, and they're for sure picking up right where the Charalambides
have (only temporarily) left off, both in sound and in quality,
with an only apparently simple combination of sparse guitar
arpeggios, sparse guitar leads, subtle if not outright imaginary
drones, and absolutely haunted voices creating long masses
of devotional/mournful psychedelic sound. As with the Charalambides,
there's a deep sadness in it. With music like this I always
wonder if the performers have been through that kind of sadness
in order to express it like this -- but so what, the point
is that they've found a way to express it, for those who have
been through it. Which is a hell of a lot of people. 
When
I first heard this CD it was from the next room, on shuffle
with four other discs in the changer. I listened to it for
a good 30 minutes without knowing who it was, and it
sounded good, sturm-und-klang electric-guitar-based free music
running full steam with no sign of ending anytime soon. Occupied
some of the same scorched space as Pelt's Burning Filament
Rockets album, but with an enticingly lower notch of
meditative intensity. (Sorry to those for whom that's an obscure
reference, but that's the album I kept thinking of.) Anyway,
it was such a nice listen, because I didn't even know who
the personnel were, so I wasn't concerned with how I was going
to write about them in this review. Like Alan Licht, who for
some reason I always end up dissing, or Lee Ranaldo, for whom
I would have to write a lengthy aside about how Sonic Youth
has never lost it or even so much as slipped in their entire
career, or DJ Olive, which would tempt me to make fun of Illbient™
and the Knitting Factory®, or the Starlight Furniture
Co. label and how, even though they always put out excellent
records, and they're connected with far and away the best
post-noise magazine of all time (Bananafish), I don't think
their records ever look very good from a graphic design standpoint.
Sort of like how Thinking Fellers LPs always had awkward font
choices -- come to think of it, it's probably the same designer.
Anyway, that's just it, I didn't have to worry about all that
atrocious fanboy detail, I could just sit back and enjoy some
brooding high free drone klang music with other elements flickering
in the mix, such as the saxophone and "sax-tronics"
by Ulrich Krieger, and the turntables by DJ Olive (on two
tracks) and Christian Marclay (on the other one), which I
can't even specifically recall hearing. Even the drums by
William Hooker are much less of a powerhouse presence than
Hooker usually is, probably because he's not the leader here.
No one's the leader here -- it's a real non-hierarchical sound,
and I suspect the real leader of the band is the films of
Stan Brakhage, which this band always screens live, which
come to think of it is another bit of rather loaded baggage
I was able to ignore on my first listen: the whole 'bands
showing films while they play' thing. Which is a whole 'nother
line of critique that I won't go into with this review. Suffice
to say that there is an interesting disclaimer about the Brakhage
thing in the liner notes, and I've been enjoying the hell
out of this release at home without breaking out my By
Brakhage DVD once. 
The
basic tracks for this 47-minute album were mostly recorded
in 1996, the year after the basic tracks for the massive 2-CD
Wigmaker were mostly recorded, and it does feel like
the coda, the afterword, the wind-down, the glowing and smoky
embers remaining after the house-on-fire that was its predecessor.
It's still wild and thunderous in classic Shave fashion, but
there's something quieter about it, something more introspective.
Maybe this is because of the amazing guitar performance turned
in by Bill Orcutt of Harry Pussy, who pecks and whittles throughout
with such strange and calm power that he seems to pull the
entire mix down to his level. Meanwhile, Nandor Nevai works
away at a drum-kit, another jaw-dropping performance that,
like Orcutt's, seems informed by the free improv/fire music
legacy of the late 1960s, but also by the industrial punk
of the 1980s, while standing well outside of both. He sounds
like he's in another room, or another house entirely, dislocated
and lonely. Tom Smith's vocals sound that way too, still a
constant presence, but more cracked, more human, weary and
even humble after the world-class struggle of The Wigmaker's
epic plunge. It works on many levels; Orcutt and Nevai add
so much extra sonic intrigue and counterpoint to the dependably
powerful and wildly fractured core trio (Smith on shortwave
radio and prepared cassette deck; Rat Bastard on bass guitar;
Ben Wolcott on oscillators) that I keep coming back to the
album just to tease out the frequencies. During these investigations,
I stumble across sensitive emotional vocal/lyric centers that
I can't help but poke at as well. They bite back, and I leave
the room scratching my head, feeling somewhat hurt myself.
Maybe it can be explained by this quote from "Richard
Wright's Blues" by Ralph Ellison: "The blues is
an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal
experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger
its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation
of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic
lyricism." Maybe that's a bit much, but the point is
that the album is suggestive and layered enough that it even
made me think of Ralph Ellison in the first place. Though
the bulk was recorded 8 or 9 years ago, as usual for an Om
Myth production, it has been tweaked and remanipulated and
overdubbed (in this case all the way up to 2003), and now
presented in a very nice color digipak (dig the painting),
as if the release date wasn't a single day late. 
Man, people are putting out nice-looking cassettes
these days....this one comes from our beloved Yeay! label
in a double-size case and features not just a cassette, but
an entire deck of handsome cards, each with their own unique
delicate understated surrealistic animals-and-objects pen-and-ink
drawings. It's like the noise/tape scene was suddenly invaded
by a Paul Klee/Chris Ware collaboration. At first this construction
overwhelms the music, which starts as a guy randomly hitting
things while some kind of noise randomly goes on. But then
it gets deeper and more interesting, partly by pulling a midway
'free folk' move not unlike the one on the Can't picture disc.
You know, the tenor flute thing by Can't? Tumble Cat's similar
folk move consists of lonely voice and accordion. And then
the tape closes out with a long blown out psychedelic improvisation-jam
in front of a live audience that is really nice and rippling.
And then side two is blank -- perfect! 
This
rather large group of extremely down Louisville, KY folkies
have been playing music for at least a couple years now, but,
whether intentionally or not, the evidence of their fine sound
production has been kept very much on the down-low. A vinyl
LP will be coming out in a very small and extremely down-low
run at some vague moment in the near-to-middling future, and
it's going to be fantastic. Until then, 100 copies will get
around of another release, this very nice spray-painted CDR
from the Spirit of Orr label. It's a raw 'documentary' recording
of the group in a small city house at night with the windows
open, you know the feel. Extremely slow and dragged-out wasted
tunes that, whether running for 3 minutes or 22, really invite
the universe. Weaving in and out of the dragged-out folk-fabric
are the mysterioso appearances of "songs by Rob Maggard,
Dead Moon, Crazy Horse, Lou Reed (sorta)." I'm too green
to know who "I Don't Wanna Talk About It" was written
by -- maybe it was Rob Maggard, who is a member of the band
-- but it's a real catchy slab of serious blues -- whatta
vocal performance by who, Pete Nolan? Rob Maggard? Kris Abplanalp?
Wes Abplanalp? Who knows with Valley of Ashes? 
"It's
not a compilation, it's a mix tape!" says the Veritable
Whirlwind Of... website, and the presentation bears it out,
a mysterious and confounding group of songs and spoken passages
and pieces of sound that beg for an easily discernable track
listing (which would make it more of a compilation) but refute
it handily, the only concession being a ratty little handmade
art booklet where each artist/song/event on the tape gets
a page, some with credits and titles, most without, and not
even close to being in the order they appear on the tape.
So, without knowing at any point who in the hell I was specifically
listening to, my first thought was that I felt like I was
hearing the first Sublime Frequencies release focusing on
America. Then I began to realize that a lot of this stuff
isn't even American. (There's stuff from Germany, Japan, Finland.)
Lots of disorienting and fascinating stuff on here, even if
the thrift-scored self-released Christian fundamentalist family
singalong stuff is becoming sort of cliche. (I mean, Mark
McKinney did his "every comedian has a preacher character"
I'm
a little disappointed in the packaging -- awesome cover art
by Chicago psychedelic superhero Plastic Crimewave, but I
just don't like the flat cardboard slip-case things. I think
the digi-pack is the only way to go for artwork like this.
But hey, it ain't my label, and other than that quibble, this
is a great comp! A nice beneath-the-hype treatment of the
contemporary acid folk scene. Because it reminds you that
a lot of today's rock music is still just (plugged-in) folk
music. This is the companion CD to an incredible festival
that Sir Crimewave put on at Chicago's Empty Bottle in August
2004, and the only reason I wasn't there is because I happened
to be out of the country that month. Highlights, in order,
are Nissennenmondai (metal rhythm and drone duo rock from
Japan), Inner Throne (super heavy lumber metal), Plastic Crimewave
Sound (a version of what I consider their most central number,
"Caged Fire Theme," that is better than the one
on the LP, except the LP vocals are amazing), Josephine Foster
& The Supposed (very inscrutable rock track), Matt Valentine
& Erika Elder Medicine Show (a lot like Sea Ensemble We
Move Together, and, I think, just as good!) . . . . the
Simon Finn song (new? I think?) is really good, but the next
song, by Frankie Delmane (who's she?), is even better. The
song after that, by Espers, has really grown on me. Slow brooding
chamber folk played tight and doomy. As a Tower Recordings
fan since 1997, I've always been surprised to not really get
into PG Six solo material, but I really dig his track on here
-- maybe because it's an instrumental -- great folky improvising
on some sort of zither or autoharp -- tell Richard Fariña
the news! The track by Für Saxa is terrific -- I've got
to get a real album by her, all I've heard are comp tracks
(and, most notably, one great live show). The album ends with
two tracks from the harsh noise end of Chicago psych, by M.V.
Carbon and Panicsville respectively -- a nice Crimewave touch
from a city where it ALL ends in (harsh) noise. 
I
had not heard of the 1966 movie, but I guess I have heard
of its director, producer, and star actor Cornel Wilde. I
mean, you've heard of him, right? He was a "Hollywood
star and former Olympic fencer," okay. The movie is about
an adventurous explorer dude (Wilde, natch), deep in 19th
century Africa, forced into playing a little Most Dangerous
Game against some authentic tribal warriors. Sounds pretty
suspenseful, but the soundtrack isn't ominous in the slightest
-- it's very low-key pleasant everyday village music, working
and eating songs, and plenty of other songs with very explanatory
titles, "Courtship Song," "Dancing Song,"
"Boasting Song of Men," "Drinking Song,"
"Cattle Herding Song," etc. Both men and women sing,
though often it's a combination of two or three male voices
-- the roots of doo wop?! Later in the album (track 12, "Village
Celebration: Music Examples") things get bigger and a
massive trance-beat opens up with what sounds like large crowds
of people. A total blast. Whatever the suspenseful racial-wargame
plot of the Wilde movie, it thankfully has nothing to do with
the value of its fine soundtrack album, except to remind us
that music is a far finer cultural vessel than action movie
plots. Latitude is the "international traditional music
and field recordings" division of the Locust Music record
label. 
You
gotta love this -- a double cassette compilation that comes
inside an actual hardback book, hollowed out just like a prop
in a whodunit. Mine is a copy of The Giants: Russia and
America by Richard Barnet, but it's been given the lovely
NNF silkscreen treatment to read "Tapeworms Eat Bookworms,
edited by Not Not Fun", the original meaning of The
Giants by Richard Barnet hijacked and obliterated by
the poetry music of today's renegade artists (this particular
cell is mostly from California though they have followers
in every continent). The book is still given some respect,
as all the tracks are said to have a literary theme, and whether
that's apparent or not from one contributor to the next, the
music is very consistently excellent, uniformly riding the
charge of the packaging. First track is by Haunted Castle,
who I've never heard of and may never hear of again, but it's
a killer free noise jam, squalling electronics and hard-driving
congas! Our old friends No Doctors contribute "A Gold
Patch for Walt Whitman" which shows new direction for
these transplanted Californians -- an epic and haunted dirge,
Eastern-inflected, noise-raga guitar, moaning vocals -- powerful.
Then someone named Adam Lipman contributes a really serious
and DOWN bedroom ballad with piano and pseudo-timpani hits.
Then someone named Aum Rifle do a really DOWN bedroom country
ballad called "Spring," and then D Yellow Swans
bring the noise with a track called "The Murder of Two
Men by a Young Kid Wearing Lemon Colored Gloves." (I
get that literary reference, I've read the piece it's named
after, but I can't remember the writer's name -- does that
count? Oh wait, Kenneth Patchen?) Then Wives/Cherry Point
REALLY bring the noise with "Wives Hate Police."
Corcoran Quartet bring "Doong Sa (A Prayer For Owen Meany)"
which is a nice rippling oceanic prayer by saxophone quartet,
and I'm guessing they're part of the Sacramento/Weird Forest
hardcore jazz scene because the name Corcoran is probably
Kevin Corcoran, formerly of Antennas Erupt, and currently
(?) of the Kevin & Chad 7-inch also reviewed in this issue.
Barr offers "That That Good" -- this dude has won
me over with his motivational speaking, not to mention his
stuttering go-go beats. A true emo original! Mika Miko close
out side one with some punk-girl-yelp-sass-panic that is really
the kind of thing I expected the Not Not Fun label to be all
about. They're a very good band, but what I'm really stoked
by is how many more facets there are to the NNF aesthetic
-- it's like the goddamn geodesic dome of dance-punk-everything.
I haven't even gotten to tracks by Watery Graves, Weirdo/Begeirdo,
Parker Posey's Parkinsons, Grey Skull, Carrier Pigeonz, Raking
Bombs, Quem Quaeritis, My Sexual Dad, Offal....and there's
about that many again, and the whole thing is a fine listen.
Have
seen a lot of Vertonen shows here in Chicago, bumped across
a comp track or two, heard him on the radio twice, but this
is surprisingly the first time I've sat down at home with
a Vertonen release. So far the live stuff has come across
as great loud deep-flow crash-sizzle, often with a nasty beat
orientation wrecking through it, but on wax it's been unpredictable,
softer but somehow heavier -- and Return of the Interrobang
surprises me further with deep glacial industrial dare-I-say-mellow
textures. First track is a rather gorgeous and fairly soft
(but thick) drone, not completely unlike something you'd hear
from Birchville Cat Motel (who Vertonen is playing on a bill
with here in Chicago in just a couple days, and there's a
nice interview between the two on the 
On
the heels of Vertonen's very strong Return of the Interrobang
CD comes another disc, Orchid Collider, that he also
made with grant money from the Chicago Arts Council, and once
again the money has been well spent. This time the deep-drone
approaches that were extensively explored on Interrobang's
first track have gotten even deeper and more perfect. Six
tracks, almost all in the sweet-spot 7-to-9-minute range,
that display a nice variety of sounds that all fit within
a broader deep-drone approach. You've got the gorgeous slow-motion
laser-beam sounds, as on the first track "extend to decipher,"
which is practically reminding me of some early Popol Vuh!
(And it's not the only track on the disc that does.) You've
got the very distant ghost-tones of "stone oceans"
that eventually get overtaken by furious jackhammer drones
that are somehow still strangely serene. You've got the low
subdued grind of "forgiveness precipice," which,
before it almost faded away completely, my wife thought was
an appliance in our home. You've got more than that, too,
but as usual I don't want to describe everything, but I'll
just say that the patient, austere, and often surprisingly
gorgeous sounds on this album constitute one of the finest
drone-based albums I've heard all year (and I've heard quite
a few!). Real nice-looking artwork too, by Jason Talbot (who
himself just put out a recommended release on C.I.P.). 
Fuckin'
summer. I've got this tape turned up pretty loud, but I can't
hear a damn thing because I've got the oscillating fan going,
the window air conditioner blaring away in the other room,
and my mom is visiting and the baby is sleeping and this might
be "weird and noisy" music that will totally freak
all of them out so I don't want to turn it up louder . . .
. okay, it's been going for about 30 seconds and I can sort
of hear something ominous happening somewhere in the room
. . . . okay, it's been 60 seconds, and I turned it up louder
and can now hear some subtle drone-shift going on, quiet (non-fan)
oscillations and misterio-drift -- shit, it's pretty damn
good. Very subtle and eerie and stoned-sounding. Now, 10-15
minutes in and it's inevitably getting louder and spookier
but the fine degree of control has not been relinquished.
Hmm, this is hard to describe and it doesn't exactly give
a clear picture of what this band does -- in fact, it doesn't
give a clear picture of anything at all. Which could
be, of course, the BIG picture. Highly recommended. 
Nevermind
Chinaboise, THIS is my pick of the issue. From Lexington,
Kentucky, consider Warmer Milks a real 'band to watch'. I
really thought this was going to be a jam-noise album, with
its John Olson/American Tapes style artwork, right down to
the cubist lettering. With two of the Hair Police playing
on here, I figured it would be the October Faction to Hair
Police's Black Flag . . . . . . But oh my GOD. This is not
a jam-noise album. Not at all. This is an album of songs,
and they are golden electric-guitar folk-rock dreams. I was
definitely digging the first three songs right away, but it
was during the fourth and fifth, both recorded live, that
the jaw went ahead and dropped. The fourth track "Dogs
All Slain," without really sounding like My Bloody Valentine,
features some of the best glide guitar playing I've heard
since that band gave us Loveless. After the first
2 or 3 minutes (the part with the words and vocals), it settles
on a lovely circular guitar-chord cycle and just goes and
goes, until it ends over ten minutes later to small-crowd
whoops of applause and a "hell yeah!" But that's
nothing compared to the goes-and-goes you get with "Penetration
Initials," the last track on here, a 30-minute epic that
winds its way through soft uninterrupted moods and golden-slow-chord
folk forms, beautifully progged out with occasional soft-yelp
vocals. On first listen, about 10 minutes in, I realized something
special was happening, so I stopped the work I was doing and
just laid on the floor like I was on a blanket in the grass
at an outdoor concert. Everybody who is alive or has ever
lived was there. Neil Young finally stopped staring out at
the ocean, looked back over his shoulder and raised an eyebrow.
Keiji Haino and Jandek strolled by, Jandek eating an ice cream
cone, dressed up just like he was onstage in Scotland. They
stopped and listened, closing their eyes and nodding their
heads. After the song/set ended, they went over to the merch
table and Jandek bought Keiji a Warmer Milks CDR. The 24-year-old
Tim Buckley was there listening, deciding that he should stick
it out with the whole Starsailor vibe after all,
even though it wasn't selling too well. Even the controversial
but ticket-selling headliners Simon & Garfunkel, who had
been confidently having a pre-party in the backstage tent
with an entourage that included Jack Nicholson and Shelley
Duvall, got a little quiet and pensive during the last half
of this epic song, quietly realizing that the folk-world winds
were changing direction. 
This
is it, the monster jam. I already reviewed this 30-minute
epic when it was part of the not really released Family
Corpse of God CDR, but now it's been made official as
a one-track CDR on Lexington label Mountaain. Sounds remastered
too! At least I'm hearing more details than before in the
glorious sun-haze fabric of this endless quilt of a psych
ballad. Seriously, every time I hear this song with all of
its cyclical movements and melodies, I can't believe it was
actually written and performed at all, and on top
of it, that it was recorded. Which means that we
get to listen to it in our homes. The world is filled
with wonders. 
Another
mysterious collective from the White Tapes universe. This
tape came with stickers over the, uh, whatchacallem, the tape
holes, on both sides, so in order to play the tape I had to
punch through the sticker over each hole, and then dig in
there and get the sticker paper out so it wouldn't interfere
(I used an exacto knife). It's working, but I can still hear
a big paper "CLICK" come from the tape deck every
5 seconds or so. The "CLICK" is louder than the
music, which is very quiet and low-key. What I think I'm hearing
is some sort of vaguely looped sample of what might be crowd/audience
noise, eventually joined and/or replaced by very low-key feedback
and fuzz. Gorgeous, but ends after about 10 minutes or maybe
even less -- kinda short -- so I flipped it over, cut holes
out of the sticker on that side, rewound it, and played it
. . . . but I don't think there was anything on there. Those
White Tapes usually are short 'uns, and I love me a one-sided
tape. Stylin'. 
Weird
Weeds live in Austin, Texas, and one member used to live in
Nashville, Tennessee, where he was a member of the Cherry
Blossoms. Four of the songs on here were co-written with Steve
Gigante, great musician who played in Deerhoof, and the Weird
Weeds in fact sound quite a bit like Deerhoof-related band
The Curtains. Despite these pedigrees, on my first listen
while busy at work all I could think was Jon Anderson of Yes
fronting Slint. But after a while, the shuffler took me to
track eight which has a very nice sudden guitar-drone soundscape
in the middle of it, like the last half of Sonic Youth "Mote"
re-recorded at home on cassette 4-track instead of a big studio
and then pasted into something new all over again. This really
woke me up, and now intrigued, I kept re-listening to give
the album another chance, a process that soon became re-listening
simply because I liked it. The singing and songwriting are
surely a bit precious, but I'm nonetheless rather hooked on
these little avant-indie miniatures, how each Slintily clad
mystery-verse seems to be offset by a screeching chamber-pop
noise or a weird plink-plonk that suddenly shifts into a loud
chorus with noise guitar or some other more unidentifiable
arrangement oddity and then back to a quirkily quiet man/woman-sung
verse that has a folk-pop feel to it. And, it's a real good
guitar album -- the line-up is a drummer and three guitarists,
and it's often the "lead guitar" (credited as such)
by Kurt Newman that saves the day, sharp little spiky melodies
bouncing off the chordal chiming prog-pop interlock the rhythm
players lay down. 
Title
is pronounced "shooner floos-engel." It's a heavy
drone album with fusion-jazz ornamentation and an acoustic
guitar undercurrent. Right now I'm on an unexpected sixth
or seventh listen in just a week's time and it's still getting
deeper. One-person drone LPs are the shit, a Pure Form. You
know they run the gamut from "dark ambient" internet
crap to the loner synth classics to the contemporary deeply
considered album releases by form-masters like Kevin Drumm,
Hive Mind, Vertonen, Ian Nagoski, Maryanne Amacher, and many
more. Call it the 'killer drone' LP, and include Schöner
Flußengel in this camp. Even if
it is (with all the musicianly ornamentation) like the Steely
Dan (or Stevie Wonder!) of killer drone LPs, the end result
is more than 'bad-ass' enough to live up to its doomy cover
imagery. 
I've
been listening to post-jazz free-music saxophonist Jack Wright
for years, because back when I lived in Lincoln, NE he actually
came and played there several times. He really didn't have
much choice -- at the time he was living in Boulder, CO, which
meant he had to pass through Nebraska to get to the East Coast
-- but whether he was playing for just two audience members,
or for a more successful show (i.e. four audience members),
he always went absolutely balls-out. He's one of the most
fully committed musicians I've ever seen in any genre on any
instrument. In the liner notes for this record he writes,
"For me the question is, what am I doing now, how deep
can I go." Well, the answer is pretty goddamn deep --
this disc is completely intense. It's been duking it out with
the high tea-whistle of my radiator and the soft stops-and-gos
of the dishwasher, and when any two or more are going at once
it's almost too beautiful. Most of the time I don't even notice
the saxophone playing at all, and when I do, for the first
minute or two I always think it's just my cats jumping around
in the other room. Wright has gotten that far inside of our
every day existence with this music, sort of how ol' Cagey
went into the anechoic chamber and still heard "om"
(i.e. a low tone and a high tone, the sound of his nervous
system and his circulatory system, respectively) -- THOSE
are the kind of tones Mr. Wright is getting to with his saxophone.
According to the liners, the inspiration for this bold reduction
in form and movement turns out to have been the intensely
small/quiet 1998-present music of saxophonist Bhob Rainey
(
As
legend has it (I just read the story on the Smack Shire website),
when Tom Smith of To Live and Shave in L.A. was doing DJ shifts
at 
I'll
admit, I thought Yuma Nora was going to be another one of
these neo-no-wave noise-punk power duos, because they are
a duo, and there are costumes involved, and noisiness, and
electronics instead of guitars, etc., but there's something
far deeper going on here, and you will like it. Track one
starts kinda slow-brew, and I really like the steam it picks
up as it develops into harsh trance-lumber free-form circuit-buzz
improv-rock. The duo is Amy Vecchione on some amplified homemade
circuit electronics (hence the harsh trance-lumber buzz),
and drummer Aaron Reyna (really a kid to watch the way he
bitches-brews the moods up and down). And the wild card is
Vecchione's vocals, which come and go intermittently and really
hit a rarefied low-key dead-blues vibe. Thirty minutes, two
seconds, and out -- killer EP. 
I'm
assuming it's pronounced "Zs", as in "zees,"
rhymes with "cheese." Not that they're a cheesy
band, but some cartoon mouse Zorn-isms are audible. [Rough
draft of review is suddenly abandoned here. Time marches on]
Now it's a week later, and I have to admit to you that I stole
that "cartoon mouse" image from the 
I
had lived in Chicago three years but hadn't heard of this
Chicago band until they, or somebody, sent Blastitude their
CD. That's cool, I always admire a band that doesn't care
if they get out that much. The press kit led me to expect
an icy drone-texture mellow-eerie space-art band, and that's
kind of what they are, but what I didn't expect was that almost
every song would have vocals. Actually, I didn't expect songs
at all, just "pieces," but these are almost all
songs, which is very refreshing. Definite Spacemen 3 vibe,
done very well -- late-period Spacemen, that is, with the
fiery Stooges-derived guitar distortion almost entirely freeze-dried
out, leaving great monolithic walls of frozen space-ice whisper-song
atmospherics. Seriously, I keep coming back to this one, and
it's still getting better -- one of the better chilled-out
dream-punk albums of the last ten years. 
