January 23, 2015 at 10:49 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Aaron Dilloway: The Beauty Bath LP
Aaron Dilloway’s most recent solo LP was actually released in 2013 by a Japanese label called Rockatansky Records, but this 2014 picture disc version on Hanson contains about 50% different/reworked material, ostensibly making it the definitive version of the album. It goes along with the noise loop compositions he’s been known for, but it also spends plenty of time exploring silence and blank space, often building up loops/washes of noise only to drop them out and only have a few spare tones make sound for a few moments. The album’s second track is a long wash of white noise with a few bass tones uncomfortably poking out. It seems like some sort of bath, but I’m not sure how good it’ll do at beautifying. The 3rd track has an abstract, clunking rhythm that will sound familiar to fans of his
Modern Jester album, but also some melancholy whistling and a light, mellow synth drone. Side B starts with a series of thick, discordant tones which get faster and angrier, until it’s just a shuddering, vibrating mess of sound. It eventually reaches a whistling pitch which makes it sound like a boiling tea kettle screaming at you. Then the final part of the album is another minimal, nearly quiet passage with a surprisingly melancholy melody (if it can be called that). This is eventually joined by a rhythmic loop which sounds like a small object sweeping and falling off some sort of surface. It all ends with some cricket-like chirping as the lonely calls out into the night.
January 23, 2015 at 9:54 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Adrian Rew: Slow Machine Music
Similar to Andy Hofle’s “Arcade Ambience” project (which consists of field recordings of early ’80s video game arcades), and the Golding Institute 7″s from the mid ’90s (field recordings of fast food restaurants, adult book stores and airport restrooms), this is another unusual, crazy, weird recording of American culture in action. This is what Midwestern casinos sound like. At any given point on this record, you’re hearing the sounds of dozens of slot machines, along with conversation, whistling, and whatever music is playing over the loudspeaker (there is most definitely some Def Leppard during side A of this record). It’s quite a hypnotic din, and listening to it could give you the urge to gamble your life savings away. You hear plenty of dinging and bleeping video poker and slot machines, lots of coins clinking, and even a few excited cheers of winners, but a lot of the time, conversations aren’t easily audible. It seems like everyone’s entranced by all the lights and sounds and just keeps compulsively gambling. On the first part of side B there’s a long stretch where a machine keeps dinging the same note rapidly, which makes you think that either it’s broken or someone’s winning a ton of money, but you don’t seem to hear anyone cheering about it. The final track doesn’t sound like a casino at all, but an outdoor recording of a train passing by very closely, with crickets chirping in the background. Only at the end do you hear some slot machine melodies, along with someone asking Rew what he’s doing, and him explaining that he’s recording the sounds. The liner notes explain that these casinos have strict security, and that these recordings are clandestine (usually the tape recorder is hidden in his pocket), so maybe it’s a guard questioning his act of recording. This was originally a limited CD-r release, but Hanson Records has released an amazing-looking picture disc LP of it. You can order it and listen to side A
here.
January 17, 2015 at 4:21 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Jan St. Werner: Miscontinuum Album
Newest release from one of the founders of Mouse On Mars. This album features spoken word poetry/narration (on the intro, outro and “scene” tracks) by Dylan Carlson (of Earth) and has more of a minimalist opera feel to it. I’m thinking Robert Ashley. Markus Popp (of Oval) wrote the text Carlson is reading, and in some places the album feels like a Microstoria (his project with St. Werner) reunion, but it goes far beyond that too. Taigen Kawabe from Bo Ningen is all over this providing strange vocalizations and screams. “Cervo” has all sorts of Autotune-like vocal manipulations, which MoM have been doing for years, but this takes them into a more experimental context. No dance beats or pop deconstructions here. “Repedron” has lots of harsh metal shrieking over minimalist electronics. Surrounding the minute-long outro are two very long pieces, the 16-minute “Schwazade” and 25-minute “Amazonas”, which easily take up more than half the album’s length, and consist of more waves of minimalist electronics and wordless (or at least non-English) vocals. “Amazonas” might actually be the brightest and most melodic track on here, with the technological sheen of its synthesized sounds coming close to imitating orchestral instruments at some points, but also going far beyond anything acoustic instruments are able to produce.
January 17, 2015 at 3:48 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Thurston Moore/John Moloney: Caught On Tape: Full Bleed
Thurston’s saving his songwriter-y albums for Matador, but he’s still doing noise albums for other labels. This is a bunch of jam sessions with drummer John Moloney. He plays some particularly fuzzy metal-like distorted guitar, which also lapses into ear-piercing high-pitched feedback. Likewise, Moloney’s rhythms switch from doomy sludge to cacophonous free-jazz splatter with nary a moment’s notice. The album was recorded in one session in one day, and it definitely has a spontaneous jam-session feel. As such, there are no highlights, it all sort of ebbs and flows, but any track will be a good jolt of energy into your show. The only real exception is :Arguing With A Balloon”, which is a little bit more atmospheric and meandering. Also “Dispute” starts out with exaggerated metal riffs, but then gets more SY-ish in the middle, then back to more blown-out metal.
January 17, 2015 at 3:45 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Obnox: The Juke That Sat By The Door 12″ EP
A typically blistering effort from Lamont Thomas’ incredible garage-noise-soul duo Obnox. Opener “Loud Speaker” starts with a short spoken intro talking about frequencies found on records, then “Dark Arts” batters your skull in for a few seconds with a super loud fast song that ends before you even start counting. “All Hail The Deejay” is a blurry midtempo song which repeats its title a lot, and “Sit Yo Ass Down” is more of a slower funk groove and also repeats its title extensively, and feels like the centerpiece/mission statement of the record. “Thanks For Yesterday” is a more straightforward soul cover (not sure who the original is by), and “(Do) The Clap” is a Gories-like stomp with a fuckton of distortion and a fast caveman beat. “Buzz Clique” is a brief backwards outro.
January 16, 2015 at 6:08 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Nausea Valley: Blood On The Spaceship
Ypsilanti folksinger/puppeteer Patrick Elkins’ latest project finds him in outer space, with help from Craig Johnson (Laserbeams of Boredom), Chelsea Jordan, and MC Trashpedal. Johnson’s drums and synths aren’t as manic as his usual solo work, but they add a spacey aura that isn’t always present with Elkins’ work. There is a lot of spacey echo on these tracks, which is nice. Chelsea Jordan generally sings the same lyrics/melodies as Elkins, as they do on the album they did together a couple years ago, but “Temple Without A Dome” (which features human beatboxing from Johnson) has them duetting both seperately and together. Easily my favorite song on the album is also the shortest by far, “Your Glow”, a spacey surf-pop number which comically ends after 37 seconds. “Lately I’ve Been Thinking About Leaving And Never Coming Back” is a solid E6-ish psych-pop song, whose lyrics (as the title suggests) seem like a mouthful, but they make sense and they sound cute and funny and wondrous and it’s a really good song. The last few songs are where the album gets really spacey, doing away with drums and drifting into some weird electro-acoustic zones, with the vocals and guitars of “Signal From The Shore” seeming to mutate and disintegrate, and the double tracked vocals on “Of Nebulous Origins” echoing into the void. So far there isn’t much info online about this project or album, but there is a
Bandcamp with one song from the album, so that’s a start.
January 15, 2015 at 6:54 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Jaga Jazzist: ’94-’14
Jaga Jazzist celebrate 20 years of existence with a commemorative vinyl box set, but the title makes you think it’s going to be a grand career-spanning retrospective, when all you get is a straight reissue of
A Livingroom Hush and 2 12″s of new remixes. I wish they would’ve just billed it as a deluxe reissue of
A Livingroom Hush. Which is still a great album, but this just seems misleading. Anyway, if you haven’t heard
A Livingroom Hush, it’s basically the go-to album for this band, it originally came out in 2001 and it perfectly demonstrates their unique jazz+drum’n’bass+glitch sound at its best. “Animal Chin” has and always will be a ridiculously fun track, with its speed-limit-exceeding breakbeat-propelled rhythm and paper-shredder glitches. The other tracks aren’t quite as crazy, but they always show excellent musicianship and cutting-edge technology. Tracks like “Airborne” seem like they could be from any number of Cuneiform bands, but then there’s the subtle glitches and electronic production. “Real Racecars Have Doors” tips into noisy post-rock territory, and “Low Battery” has a slow neo-soul-esque beat. “Midget” is another fast, choppy glitch overload track, which nowadays seems like a throwback to the era when Ninja Tune used to release stuff like Animals On Wheels and other “drill-n-bass”. “Lithuania” is an 8-minute suite that starts off calmly but then gets into some glitchy mutant disco. “Cinematic” is a slow-burning finale with spare piano notes and hissing waves of noise. The remixes are all of tracks from the group’s later material, which I’m not as familiar with. Clark and Illum Sphere both create jazzy, choppy house tracks, with Illum Sphere distorting everything into the red, to great effect. Big Black Delta go the woozy chillwave route, while Machinedrum creates jazzy atmospheric juke. Teebs stamps out the group’s lush strings with crackling static and thick, skipping beats. Miguel Atwood-Ferguson covers “Rose Heiress” in a beatless, airy string arrangement. Moire does a chilled-out downtempo remix of “Oslo Skyline”, and Invader Ace does a more punchy, overtly danceable remix of “Toccata”.
December 19, 2014 at 6:12 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
SALES: EP
We’re in the no-mans-land time period of the music industry, in between the last week of CMJ charting this year and the first of next, and there’s almost no new music coming into the radio station now. Fortunately, this indie-pop duo waited until now to send us their EP, because this one’s jumping out at me while I’m scrambling to catch up on all the music I missed this year in order to find music for my Best of 2014 shows. This male/female duo hails from Florida and initial press I can find about them seems to emphasize how minimal they are (just guitar, drum machine and vocals), and while their songs are short and compact, they’re catchy and leave enough of an impression that they don’t feel underdone or demo-ish. “Vow” in particular has the type of swoon-worthy chorus melody that causes me to play it several times in a row, and the doe-eyed naive voice of the singer certainly helps. Even though they’re American, these songs wouldn’t sound out of place in a set with any number of sweet-sounding Scandinavian indie-pop groups, although the more uptempo “Chinese New Year” sounds a little closer to a stripped-down Camera Obscura. Closing song “Toto”, the song’s most atmospheric and beat-driven track, appears in two versions: the two-minute original and a remix by xxyyxx, which slows things down and spaces it out to 3 minutes, but somehow it actually ends up feeling shorter and more sketchlike than the original. There may actually be more elements to the song, but they’re spaced out more, and the vocals are treated as samples rather than lyrics. The whole EP is an unexpected end-of-year treat.
December 13, 2014 at 7:22 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Jonathan Badger: Verse
Intriguing album of textural guitar pieces from an artist I’ve not heard of before. He loops, layers and transforms several electric and acoustic guitars, using computers to twist the sounds and create atmospheres, and generally create an orchestra out of relatively few instruments. There are contributions from musicians playing strings and horns, as well as vocalists, but Badger’s guitar playing and manipulations are center stage. There’s definitely some minimalist moments, and some parallels to Dustin Wong’s solo work, but Badger throws in a lot of curveballs and goes in unexpected directions. “The Bear” is a 2-minute raga drone-out with banjo and hand percussion, and it leads into the ambient-
Pet Sounds reverie of “Nimbus”, with wordless vocals and gentle guitars, which get chopped up ecstatically in the middle of the song, in a way that reminds me a little of Dan Deacon. The song ends with some of the few lyrics on the album, about pestilence and drinking blood, but ending with the words “we are lucky.” “The Valley Of The Shadow” starts with shifting electronic sounds, and then eventually settles into a human beatbox rhythm, which gets electronically processed and delayed, along with guitars which also have layers of delay and gated effects on them. “Limbec” has a more relaxed post-rock-ish guitar melody, along with somewhat dramatic horns and strings, and some curious electronic beats and effects. “Bouge” uses tranquil yet urgent pianos over pitter-pattering electronic beats, and eventually chorus vocals come in. “Erbarmen” also alternates between pianos, guitar melodies and soft glitchy beats, for another slowly building (and slowly ending) piece. “Sickle’s Compass Come” ends the album on the slow, piano-driven note it’s been going on, this time with more dramatic horns, which get diced up a bit electronically. A really hard to define album which goes off in a few different directions and shows off several sides to this composer in its relatively short runtime (under 40 minutes). Curious to hear more from him.
December 12, 2014 at 11:23 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Led Bib: The People In Your Neighbourhood
Super-fun spacey funk-jazz. Heavy grooves, horns, smashing drums, and tons of cool keyboard sounds. Almost kind of Acid Mothers Temple-ish in how they use spacey keyboard sounds, but in more of a jazz idiom. Not quite out there enough to be Sun Ra, but nobody is. “Giant Bean” starts out sounding like it’s quoting “Black Sabbath”, but then it goes into a different direction. But it still has that heavy plodding feel to it, just with a bunch of wailing saxes, before the tempo picks up. It cuts off very sharply at the end, as if to say “screw it, it’s over, just cut it, no need for a proper ending.” “Angry Waters (Lost To Sea)” starts out quiet and deceptively solemn, and surely isn’t as playful as some of the other tracks, but it gets a bit worked up by the end. “This Roofus” has a bit more of a festive feel, and gets frantic and a bit spacey as it goes. “Imperial Green” plays with a “Little Drummer Boy”-esque melody. 10 brings back some of the spacey synths, but on many of the other tracks they keyboards use piano or more Rhodes-sounding tones. Closer “Orphan Elephants” crawls along for 9 minutes, and gets really quiet for a while in the middle, before inching towards its finale. A pretty long, drawn-out album, but it’s pretty enjoyable.
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The Answer Is In The Beat 