The Answer Is In The Beat

Étant Donnés: La Vue (Bain Total, 1981/reissued by Klanggalerie, 2018)

April 14, 2019 at 9:05 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Extremely sickly tape manipulations recorded back in 1979. I’m not sure how many people heard this tape but I feel like a lot of the more absurdist noise and industrial artists would’ve taken a lot of cues from this. Very heavy rhythmic loops with some occasional nonsensical gibberish chatter voices, and most notably, some very thick, intrusive stop-start rewinding and fast forwarding similar to what the Boredoms would do on Super Ae in the late ’90s. The slower bits have a sort of proto-vaporwave quality to them, but they don’t last long — nothing here does. It’s basically a sort of punk version of musique concrete, made by people who delight in hearing funny voices and hard, slamming sounds. And again, this was recorded before the advent of turntablist culture — you can imagne this duo doing horrific things with vinyl, although it might have been crazy in a different way. Unless they actually are using turntables on this? It sounds like tape loops but who can tell. Anyway, this is way, way ahead of its time and the entire time I’m listening I can’t believe what I’m hearing. How on earth was this made 40 years ago!?!?!

Asnakech Worku: Asnakech (1975/reissued by Awesome Tapes From Africa, 2018)

April 14, 2019 at 1:45 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

The first time I started listening to this, I immediately had to lay down and focus all of my attention on it. I didn’t want anything else to distract me. This just completely took me into another world and I wanted to inhabit it for as long as possible. Afterwards, I finally read the liner notes and found out that Asnakech was a cultural icon in Ethiopia, beloved as an actress, musician and dancer. She played an ancient harp known as a krar, and on this album she’s joined by Hailu Mergia, who is still alive and producing brilliant music today. Everything about this recording sounds strange and magical. The organ whines away in the background and gives it a bizarre horror movie atmosphere, barely audible drums drift away in the background, and the echo makes Asnakech’s krar playing seem detached and ghostly. And of course her vocals are just unbelievable, incredibly haunting. Just listen, I don’t have any further words for this.

Dina Maccabee: The Sharpening Machine (Geomancy, 2019)

April 13, 2019 at 7:41 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Dina Maccabee attended the University of Michigan a long time ago, and since then she’s collaborated with Feist, Tune-Yards, Vienna Teng, and many others. She currently records and tours with Julia Holter, and she wrote the score for a musical which will be premiering in St. Paul, Minnesota at the end of this month. This is forward-thinking experimental pop combining primitive drum machines, electro-acoustic fragments, and an intricate web of acoustic instrumentation, along with Dina’s multi-tracked slightly reverby vocals. It seems a little hazy but at the same time it’s very focused and deliberate. It gets rootsy (“Sad Sad Sad Sad Sad Song” has banjos and a fiddle solo, “Little Bite” is a toe-tapping country-ish tune that happens to have trombones) but at the same time it’s also a bit psychedelic. Songs like “Tall Trees” and “It Doesn’t Have to Be OK” are really relaxing but also slyly catchy. It might be worth mentioning that Holter appears on two songs, but the album has its own strange and wonderful vibe.

Tatira: Ghosts of Fall River (Inam Records, 2019)

April 13, 2019 at 7:05 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Tatira’s newest album goes beyond the new wave-inspired melodies of last year’s Blood Return, reaching a new level of accessibility for the artist. Improbably, this basically sounds like his version of an EDM album. “Ghosts of Fall River” is a pretty standard chugger, but then “Birdsong” is an atmospheric trap banger. “Clearest Night” is a pretty standard, loopy tech-house track, while “Candle and Stone” is a haunted downtempo cave journey. Then “Hell in a Cell” is a surprise peak-time festival bomb which could pass for a Deadmau5 track (except this is way better). “Witch Hunt” continues in a similar mode, while “Spectre” is a lengthy, minimal midtempo trek. Appearances at next year’s WMC and Tomorrowland are unconfirmed as of yet.

Jonathan Richman: SA (Blue Arrow Records, 2018)

April 8, 2019 at 11:48 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

One of the patron saints of college radio returns with another set of poetry, folk rock, and wide eyed optimism. The nearly 68-year-old troubadour is joined here by former Modern Lover and Talking Head Jerry Harrison, and Jonathan’s wife Nicole Mantalbano plays tambura on most songs, giving it a droning, Eastern feel, but otherwise it’s the type of sound you’d expect from old Jojo. “My Love She Is From Somewhere Else” is pretty fun and offbeat, and my favorite song here. “The Fading Of An Old World” is basically a riff on the Modern Lovers’ “Old World”, except instead of saying he still loves the old world, he’s saying he doesn’t want to go back. Here he’s talking about not wanting to go back to the days of corsets, but you know he’s alluding to not wanting to play his old material. “O Mind! Let Us Go Home” has a hypnotic sort of Krautrock vibe, like an unplugged Can, but with Jonathan singing. Really, a lot of this album has a sort of improvised jammy feel unlike usual Richman albums. If you’ve ever wanted to hear an 8-minute Jojo zone-out, check out “O Mind! Just Dance!” “This Lovers’ Lane Is Very Narrow”, however, is a sort of weird existential ego trip mantra. “Alegre Soy!” is the perhaps-obligatory Spanish tune, and it’s quite charming, really. A bit more cloying is “Yes, Take Me Home”, which is sung from the point of view of a dog in a kennel wanting badly to be adopted. Like a lot of Richman’s solo albums, this one’s no masterpiece, but it’ll do if you’re already a fan and you need a quick pick-me-up.