July 21, 2013 at 10:46 pm | Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment
His Name Is Alive: Cliff Bells Vanilla DVD
A few weeks ago, Warren Defever posted a few new ultra-limited His Name Is Alive releases for sale (and probably sold out immediately). I think they were leftover copies from a recent show in Arizona. If there were any recent shows in Michigan I didn’t hear about them. But I got these new releases so that’s all that matters. First up is a DVD called
Cliff Bells Vanilla. It’s a live show in Detroit from November 2008, the same month I saw HNIA at the Brainwaves Festival in Cambridge, MA. This concert was also included as one of the discs in the
Eclipse 10-CDr box set from 2010. I have to admit I was disappointed by that release, especially since it cost $200 and there’s no liner notes or tracklist or any information included with the discs, and only recently did I notice a tracklist posted on Discogs. I thought the music was OK, but a lot of it just sounded like rehearsals or something, not particularly exciting. I probably should revisit it though. This DVD is pretty typical of a HNIA show, it kind of shows off a range of their live performance styles: intimate chamber-folk ensemble (a cello player is onstage, although it’s hard to hear him most of the time), acid rock shredding (Warren plays the crap out of his Flying V until the strings break), garage rock (One Wolf from Wolfman Band joins the band for a cover of Destroy All Monsters’ “You’re Gonna Die”, howling and crawling around the stage and audience and breathing in peoples’ faces, and passing out tambourines and shakers, which always happens during HNIA shows), acoustic piano jazz, and more. They cover Patsy Cline’s “Walking After Midnight”, which they did in concert a lot around that era, as well as Big Star’s “Blue Moon” (always one of my favorite songs HNIA does), and of course old classics “Cornfield”, “This World Is Not My Home”, and “Are We Still Married”. The video constantly switches between color and grainy black-and-white, and always has a shaky handheld camera feel. The DVD also includes scans of the show’s program (which includes song lyrics with incorrect/altered song titles, and also the lyrics to “I’ll Send My Face To Your Funeral”, which they didn’t actually play), and show posters. Looked like an awesome show, and it seemed to be in a pretty intimate setting, everyone was seated at restaurant tables and there doesn’t seem to be too many people in the audience. Hopefully they’ll do another show like this soon because I need to see them again.
His Name Is Alive: Home Is
Also released in this batch was a CDr called
Home Is, which is string interpretations of HNIA’s second album,
Home is In Your Head. In 2004, HNIA released a limited 10-CDr box called
Cloud Box, which included a disc called
Mystery Spot, which was actually string quartet arrangements of 4 songs from the first HNIA album,
Livonia. This disc was also released separately as
Livonia Strings. The versions on that disc take the songs “If July”, “Caroline’s Supposed Demon”, “Fossil”, and “How Ghosts Affect Relationships”, and stretch them out to over 12 minutes of breathtaking beauty each (except “Ghosts” which is under 4 minutes). The arrangements draw out the melodies of the songs so that they slowly evolve and breathe, and just elevate them to something powerful and transcendent.
Home Is does something different than
Livonia Strings; it’s only performed by one musician (Jean Cook, who’s played strings with HNIA since
Detrola, and is also a member of Ida and many other bands), and this disc contains 8 tracks, ranging from a minute and a half to six and a half minutes. The tracks seem to fluctuate between more straightforward versions of the
HIIYH material, and more liberal interpretations, or pieces that sound more like they’re inspired by the original material than direct covers. The first 2 tracks, “Blood” and “Married”, both seem to be based on “Are We Still Married”, with “Blood” being a slower intro, conveying dread with plucked strings panned across the speakers. “Married” speeds things up to the original tempo of the song, and even features a hummed version of the vocal melody. It also adds a sly new melody that adds to the song’s feelings of uncertainty and vulnerability. The track “Home” on this CDr is presumably based on the album’s title track, which is a two minute bass guitar instrumental, which sounds shot down and hopeless. This track seems to follow a similar cadence, but it’s playing something different, it’s 2 minutes longer, and it seems to go into a more hopeful direction by the end, like it’s taking the feeling of the original and uplifting it, looking upwards. Trying to resolve the feelings of doubt. “Beautiful” seems to be a straightforward cover of “Beautiful And Pointless”; in fact, it’s even clearer than the original, perfectly transcribing Karin Oliver’s vocal melodies to strings. “Pointless”, in contrast, takes the mood of the song and meditates on it for a glacial 6 minutes. “Then Winter Ends” follows, seems to be even more of a continuation of that mood, making things cold and still. “Hope” seems to be more based on the vocal melody of “Save The Birds” than “Hope Called In Sick”, which is a minute-and-a-half instrumental which starts with slow clanging bells and is violently interrupted by scorching guitar and drums. This version of “Hope” features slow, ominous plucked strings and some more hummed vocals, and a few sudden bursts, but not as sharp in contrast as “Hope Called In Sick”. “Eyes” is a multi-tracked, hazy instrumental that only barely at the end resembles the vocal melody of either “Eyes” tracks that bookend side 1 of
HIIYH (well, not including the brief intro version of “Are You Coming Down This Weekend?”). “Well” further clouds and obscures
HIIYH‘s “The Well” (easily one of the album’s standout tracks), not even attempting to replicate Karin Oliver’s majestic vocal performance, but keeping to a more ambient mode. Of course, I could be totally wrong about which tracks Jean Cook is trying to interpret, and what she’s trying to do with them. Her version is definitely not as schizophrenic, but it manages to bring out different elements, both light and dark.
His Name Is Alive: Dragons Look Out Your Window
The other new HNIA CDr is an album called
Dragons Look Out Your Window, an instrumental disc recorded last year in Detroit, with Warren Defever playing guitar, analog synth and harmonium, and Cassandra Verras (who I’m pretty sure was with the band last time I saw them perform in Detroit 2 years ago) on synth and violin. This disc sees Warren diving into analog kosmische synth-drone territory, and it is AWESOME. Couldn’t be happier to hear him go in this direction with his music. No track titles, but the first one’s 12 minutes, the last one’s 10, and the rest are mostly pretty short, but it’s all calm and pretty and cosmic and meditative. It has kind of a wobbly homemade circuitry feel; sometimes it sort of vibrates the way a vinyl record does if it’s on a weak surface and you put something down on it, except I’m playing this as an MP3 right now and it’s still vibrating like that. The second track has a snowy ambient guitar Windy & Carl sound, and definitely goes well with recent White Poppy. The next two tracks have kind of robotic motorik rhythms but without beats, and then track 5 suddenly features a Beach Boys type rhythm. There’s also a flute and string-synths, giving it somewhat of an early Kraftwerk feel. Track 9 has more lush, looping guitar ambient textures. The last track is probably the darkest and bleakest, sounding like it might have even been recorded backwards, with glacial movements suddenly flaring up every so often. Awesome stuff, seriously hoping there’s more HNIA like this coming in the future.
July 14, 2013 at 9:33 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Floorplan: Paradise
Floorplan is an alias of Detroit techno veteran Robert Hood, who started the alias in 1996. This is the project’s first full length LP. It’s definitely stripped down and dancefloor-friendly (as the name suggests). Even though Hood is credited with inventing “minimal techno”, some of his work (particularly last year’s phenomenal
Motor: Nighttime World 3) builds and progresses and is too melodic to just be categorized as minimal. This album is a little closer to what you might call “minimal” for his sound, as most tracks tend to feature a 4/4 beat, a few repeating samples or drum breaks, and a tiny snatch of melody, and they all hover around the 6 or 7 minute mark. And as the name Floorplan also suggests, this music is about getting straight down to the groove and making people dance, and it does that with flying colors. A lot of the tracks feature brief samples from soul and gospel records, used in a really lo-fi way as if they were sampled off cheap keyboards, like old Dance Mania records. “Let’s Ride” sounds like it samples a little girl saying “why do you tell?”, with a bit of choppy drums and minimal organ drone. “Baby Baby” has the titular phrase chopped and looped, along with a soul horn sample that appears throughout the track. “Change” is very typical of Hood’s minimal style, with a dubby chord and 4/4 beats looped and EQ’d without much change (even though the track is called “Change”). “Altered Ego” is another gradually building dubby minimal track, with chopped up Amen snares and a snakelike rattle sound. One of those tracks that just plain works. “Never Grow Old” has an old gospel sample taken off very crackly old vinyl, featuring a singer who basically shouts her lungs out while the crowd cheers and claps along. “Eclipse” stays minimal with only a few light synth washes over the beat. “Higher!” is also pretty minimal, with some echoing claps and gradual appearances from cymbal and drum sounds. “Confess” features a joyful piano sample and tough, pumping beats. “Chord Principle” has a spare sample of a girl laughing, and some classic Hood minimal organ chords. “Above The Clouds” ends the album with another dubby minimal groove.
July 14, 2013 at 12:09 am | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Bran(…)Pos: Den Of Ordure And Iridescence
Easily the most “no seriously, what is this?” record of the week. “Tin Tract Mine” starts off side A with some grotesque, choking, slurping vocal work, and after a minute and a half, some wavey stun-ray synths come in, followed by some more layers of shredding, flesh-melting synths, and more chopped up creepy voices. Around 5 minutes is when it all comes together to a wall of headfuck noise, but it’s not quite as dense and impenetrable as it might seem. Lots of layers and sounds messing with your head, but you still feel like you can trace everything. Around 7 minutes some pulse-beats come in, along with some high-pitched, rapid synth sounds dancing hard-panned between the speakers. The vocals start to get more tortured and zombie-like, and gets really crazy for the last minute and a half. “Sawed Off At Plasticized Forest” begins with some random stop-start electro-acoustics, as well as some uncomfortable bursts of deep strings, and some drill-like electronics. A rhythm seems to emerge and it sounds like the strings are sawing away in tune to it. Then it all goes quiet, and the strings slowly emerge from the black again. Another build with strings and squirmy electronics, and then the last minute is quiet again except for bare, lone strings. Side B is taken up by the epic “Lioness”, a truly impressive work featuring ghostly voices, bird caws, tympanis, horror soundtrack synth atmospheres, and so much more. It almost sounds like electric thumb pianos playing the melody, but maybe those are guitars or synths? It’s hard to tell. Can’t understate how epic those tympanis make this thing sound. Not to mention the whistly, bubbly synths, the cymbals in the background, the part when the synths sound like popcorn popping, the rhythm that comes in around the 10 minute mark… Wow, just wow.
July 7, 2013 at 11:55 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Lidless Eye: Escape The Split Screen
Lidless Eye is one of the many projects of Knox Mitchell, who runs Green Records & Tapes. Most of his releases are ultra-limited tapes and CDR’s that you can pretty much only get from the artist himself. I was really impressed with his live performances, so I’m glad Fred Thomas recorded and released a Lidless Eye vinyl, it sounds amazing. Sort of like Cotton Museum, this isn’t pierce-your-eardrums noise, it’s throbbing, lurching, queasy noise. Lots of whale-like high-pitched sounds and an electrified pulse. Very hypnotic. Still available from
Life Like.
July 7, 2013 at 10:48 pm | Posted in Reviews | Comments Off on D33J: Tide Songs tape (Anticon, 2013)
D33J: Tide Songs
I saw this guy open for labelmate Baths, and he definitely stole the show. Really nice grimy hazy lo-fi techno that could fit in with 100% Silk type stuff. I think this tape is actually the official release of a digital EP from a couple years ago, so some of it sounds a little bit different than the type of stuff he played live. Opening track “Park” is like what I heard at the show, calm but gradually evolving house beats and mutating synths. “Young Wavy” is just a short interlude, but it’s closer to what you might expect from Anticon; blunted abstract hip-hop beats. True to the tape’s title, there’s plenty of wave sounds throughout the tape. “Reever’s Edge” has a more uptempo beat, seriously warped synths and a vocal sample of an argument ending with “believe it or not, you’re important to me.” There’s also a bit of a guitar melody and some chopped up vocal samples, including the one from the beginning. On side B, “Drowning Pools” has more guitar melody and glitched up synths along with a nice building beat. “Sleeping Out” ends the tape with another wistful, slightly glitchy hip-hop instrumental. A nice surprise, both the tape and the live set.
July 6, 2013 at 11:29 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Nate Young: Blinding Confusion
Nate Young of Wolf Eyes continues his
Regression series, moving further away from the noise and industrial that Wolf Eyes fans might know him best for, and even going beyond the more spacious minimal noise of Stare Case and recent Wolf Eyes. There’s a peculiar stillness here; at times it almost feels like the soundtrack to a not-particularly-exciting RPG or fantasy-type movie. That’s not meant as a knock, though, as there’s some interesting textures here. “Beneath The Mist” is a little closer to what you might expect from his recent group work; it’s instrumental, and only 2 minutes long, but there’s some quietly knocking electronic percussion and some briefly fizzling-out noises. “When Nothing Works” begins with tension-heavy feedback, then switches to thundering echo and arpeggiating synth. “Only Fallen Heads” has a warm melody with warped, decaying textures underneath. “Escape With Nothing” and “Between” are both shorter musique concrete-like pieces. “Escape With Nothing” ends with some clanging sounds and explosions, and “Between” has a warm, pastoral sound which sounds like it’s going to turn into a melody, but it gets cut out by buzzing sounds. “The Bastards Gums” is the most recognizably melodic and rhythmic piece here, bobbing melancholy synths on top of a steady click and being attacked by thin, swooping sound waves.
July 5, 2013 at 6:27 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
CFCF: Music For Objects
Newest release from Mike Silver, creating audio miniatures inspired by normal everyday items. Like
Exercises, his last release, this continues in a heavily Ryuichi Sakamoto/David Sylvian inspired direction, with “Turnstile” having a bit of an Eastern sounding melody to it. “Glass” reminds me of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, and I swear it’s not just because it’s called “Glass”. There’s plenty of chilled out xylophone-like percussion patterns on a lot of the tracks that remind me of Steve Reich’s percussion-based works. “Camera” has some atmospheric saxophone, and “Keys” has sounds approximating chirping insects, plus house beats and more saxophones which snake their way around the beat pattern and bassline. The last few tracks are quieter and more piano-centric, with closer “Ring” being all twinkly and starlike. Super impressive release as always from CFCF, it’s always been fascinating to see this guy grow as an artist, and this music is just as awe-inspiring as ever.
July 5, 2013 at 5:52 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
exclusiveOr: Archaea
Glitch-heavy noise which combines laptop processing with self-built analog modular synthesizer. Strikes a nice balance between Mego-style abrasive digital noise and old-school synthesizer artists like Morton Subotnick, and shows that there’s not much essentially difference between the two. Most importantly, these guys sound like they’re having fun, creating weird squishy buzzy noises and letting them play off each other. Hard to really pick favorite tracks, they’re all fun and crazy, but opener “Landing” seems to sum up the mission statement of the album in 4 minutes, and “World On A Wire” starts out kind of dark and doomy and goes completely haywire, scrambling and combusting and leaving harmful radioactive substances everywhere. Closer “Archaea” is almost minimal compared to the rest of the album, only lasting 3 minutes and focusing more on quieter tones in the beginning and soupier, liquid sounds before shorting out at the end.
July 5, 2013 at 5:13 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Matt Davignon: The 3am Music
Haven’t heard much from this guy in a while, but he released a few albums on Edgetone during the mid ’00s. Supposedly he works with modified drum machines and processing devices, but it definitely doesn’t sound like any type of music you’d normally associate with a drum machine. There’s rhythms, sometimes even beats and bass, but not used in a conventional sense at all. Very exploratory and minimal. Feels sort of crushed and fractured, and with lots of murky underwater sounds. A title like “Still Life Of Dust Motes” fits perfectly; it sounds like field reordings of miniature, household things, but it’s all electronic. “Stitches And Mends” has a bit of a melody threading its way over a drone bed, and “Your Pulsating Little World” has an even more broken melody shuddering its way on top of more ominous droning, and it’s quite beautiful. As the album’s title suggests, it’s all about sleep, falling in and out of consciousness, dreams, and isolation from the rest of the world, and as such I’ve been listening to this a lot while trying to get to sleep, or while waking up in the middle of the night, and it complements that perfectly. Available at
Bandcamp.
July 4, 2013 at 12:15 am | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Congo Natty: Jungle Revolution
Congo Natty is one of the original junglists, starting his career in the late ’80s making ragga hip-hop and hip-house as Rebel MC, then playing a big part in creating the jungle genre, releasing hundreds of 12″s under several pseudonyms including Conquering Lion, Lion Of Judah, Tribe Of Issachar, and X Project. He’s truly an artist that sticks to his vision, not just in his unwavering devotion to Rastafarianism, but also by being fiercely independent and releasing most of his music on his own Congo Natty label, and associated labels. Which makes this album a bit of a surprise, not just because there haven’t been any Congo Natty releases in about 7 years (unless Discogs is incorrect or I’m reading it wrong), but because he’s releasing a collaboration-heavy, highly produced album on a big label (Ninja Tune sublabel Big Dada). His older 12″s were more lo-fi, seemingly bashed out, pressed to dubplate and released. This album contains 10 tracks featuring several well-known ragga MCs (“UK Allstars” alone features General Levy, Tippa Irie, Top Cat, Tenor Fly and Daddy Freddy), plus live guitar, horns, bass, etc. Plus Adrian Sherwood mixed it! As far as the songs, lyrically there’s not too much that will surprise anyone familiar with reggae or dancehall, and especially ragga-jungle. Lots of burning babylon, lots of bumbaclaat, lots of talk about revolution. The tracks are mostly uptempo jungle/drum’n’bass, with plenty of chopped up breaks but generally a cleaner, more produced sound common to modern drum’n’bass, as opposed to the grimy lo-fi sound of the genre’s early days. A few songs (“Revolution”, “Nu Beginningz”, “London Dungeons” which obviously has nothing to do with the Misfits, “Micro Chip (Say No)”) dip into lower dubstep-ish tempos. Not that I’m accusing a pioneer of latching onto a current trend, but it definitely sounds closer to what’s happening now than what he was doing 20 years ago. It’s definitely closer to dubstep than classic dub. But even saying that, it manages to sound more genuine than trendy. The vocals do get a little annoying and the lyrics to get a bit cliche-heavy for this genre, but there’s some cool moments. “Jah Warriors” starts by predictably sampling
The Warriors, a film I’ve heard sampled, referenced and parodied so many times that I don’t ever need to actually watch the film, but it goes into some breakbeats that are closer to early ’90s breakbeat hardcore than what most drum’n’bass producers are doing now, and goes into some really hard smashing breaks later on, and I’m always in favor of that. As with most current reggae, there’s a lot of autotune on a couple tracks (“Jungle Is I And I”, “Micro Chip (Say No)” which also has children’s voices chanting “Jah, Rastafari”). A decent album, but definitely has the air of a crossover LP. The stuff this guy was doing in the early to mid ’90s still packs much more of a punch than this album.
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The Answer Is In The Beat 