April 13, 2013 at 9:05 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Barn Owl: V
I saw Barn Owl a few years ago at a Not Not Fun showcase at SXSW, and they were okay but didn’t really hold my attention. But since signing to Thrill Jockey (both as a group and for solo projects), their work has been getting unbelievable as of late, and this is easily their best album yet. Previous Barn Owl works were a little more rustic and acoustic, sometimes maybe a bit post-rock, sometimes a bit doom-metal. This one feels a bit more electronic and synthesizer-based, creating a really dark cosmic sound. “Void Redux” opens the album with a slow, deep pulse, sparingly used guitar notes and keyboard trills, and a whole lot of dark atmosphere. “The Long Shadow” is similar, with a clear, melancholy guitar part guiding ghostly atmospherics, distortion, organ, and more slow frozen-heartbeat pulsations. “Against The Night” is a really dark, desolate moment, with more ringing guitar, and bass and synth sweeps that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Burial track. “Blood Echo” has a slightly involved drum pattern, definitely a bit more than just a pulse, guiding the dark, haunted droning. “Pacific Isolation” is a short, slightly doomy instrumental beginning the second side of the album, and then we get the 17 minute epic “The Opulent Decline”. This one starts with a few minutes of layers of dark synth, with some heavy distorted bass tones. Then a slow, minimal drum machine takes over, sounding like drops of water dripping into a well. As the synths and guitars layer, after the 10 minute mark things start to get really heavy, with lots of tremolo effects, lots of thick, sludgy distortion, and a constant slow, thudding heartbeat. Dark and almost overwhelming, and truly stunning.
April 11, 2013 at 9:40 pm | Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment
Sujo: Ondan
Every couple months, we at WCBN get a mysterious package from Inam Records containing a super-limited CDR, usually from one of the label’s core projects (Olekranon, Sujo, Vopat, and sometimes Korperschwache). They’re all super high quality, and sometimes my radio show is thanked in the liner notes. Following Sujo’s LP debut on the Fedora Corpse label, a collab CDR with Sun Hammer and the previous Sujo CDR (
Repent), here’s
Ondan, which is actually an expanded edition of a digital EP. The title track starts us off with two and a half minutes of meandering fuzz before a sudden eruption of triumphant black metal drumming and riffs, which are clear and driving, but still shower everyone in sight with sparks of distortion. “Lost Numbers” is two minutes of screeching feedback and slow, reversed eerie tones. “Gaol” layers patterns of bashed drums and cymbals, rumbling noise and feedback, and gradually builds it and adds new layers and dimensions until it’s stunning on multiple levels. “Mrk 421” is a blur of distorted drone and far-away junky percussion. “Peste” brings back the black metal drums and riffs, and it’s dizzying and confusing at first, you’re not quite sure how to follow it, if it’s going fast or slow. But the slow, majestic chords lead the way through the choking feedback and fiery guitar noise. “Oxide” ends the disc with 8 minutes of bright electric drone with whirring and crackling buried underneath, with a really gorgeous oceanic feel during the second half. Again, more really incredible stuff from Sujo and Inam. Check it out
here, as of now 4 copies are still available.
April 6, 2013 at 8:32 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Jim Haynes: The Wires Cracked
Rusty, crackly noise-drone, created from sounds of wires, metal screens, wind, air compression, and ways and means that escape even the album’s composer. Wheezing, crushing, slurping, vaporizing sounds, with lots of neatly compressed edits. It’s “drone”, but it’s not averse to snapping you out of it with a sudden addition of some ticking, clacking sound or a shift out of distortion and into something else. Lots of detailed stereo separation, also. I feel like there’s more variation on the first side than the second, but that’s arguable. “Oscar” starts the album out with 5 minutes of neatly arranged static and crackle with a tight glitch-off ending. “X-Ray” starts with controlled hissing noise, features frequent sputtering sounds, and ends with some distant, decaying machine beeps, and finally cold, frozen stillness. “November” (the second side) starts chattery and a bit noisy, gets calmer, subtly twists around, and ends eerie and hissy.
April 6, 2013 at 7:35 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
EVOL: Proper Headshrinker
Newest album from rave-noise deconstructionists EVOL. All tracks are exactly 3 minutes long and consist of one sound looped for the track’s duration, and they’re all squirmy, buzzy synth patterns. Sort of feels like an audio Magic Eye puzzle, the type of thing where if you sit and concentrate long enough, you’ll start to see something emerge. Or, more likely, you just won’t get it at all and think it’s a waste of time. Of course, if you actually do listen close enough, particularly on headphones, you do notice minor variations, and it produces some strange effects swerving and worming its way through your head. All the tracks stop cold at 3 minutes, so they jolt you out of whatever state you’re in for a few seconds before the next track starts. Oh, and of course, once you’re done listening, taking your headphones off and standing in silence will make your ears feel like they’ve been swabbed out with laced Q-tips. The tracks with slightly more variation and more complex patterns end up being the highlights (particularly the better moments on the second side), and it seems like something that could be easily used as a neat DJ or sound collage tool, but sitting and listening to the entire thing loudly in one shot is an experience that is bound to affect your brain in some way or another.
April 6, 2013 at 6:55 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
FWY!: Any Exit
Newest tape from Edmund Xavier of Teenage Panzerkorps and Horrid Red. Continues the sort of “lonesome desert highway drive” feel of last year’s
San Clemente tape (also on Moon Glyph), but branches out a little. Still lots of minimal, tinny drum machine beats and New Order-ish guitar, with a bit more emphasis on ambience, and a tiny bit more dance-ness. “Any Exit (Anywhere)” starts the tape with leisurely drum machine, guitar and organ drone. “Irvine” is an 11 minute odyssey which pauses halfway through, dispenses with guitar and switches to a more intimate beat pattern, then ends with some soft 4/4 beats. “Evil Downtown” has a big driving bass guitar, and sounds like it’s a little furious at all the stupid people crowing the city streets, but then we get back on “710 Again” and everything’s pleasant, with more Peter Hook-like bass and some bongo-sounding percussion. “Orange Circle” sounds like a variation on the previous track, but without the bongos, and adding some creepy synth ambience. “Sepulveda” keeps it minimal with an upfront beatbox rhythm, clean guitar, soft synth, and a burst of loud, ringing guitar towards the end. “Garden Grove” has a 4/4 beat and gets somewhat dancey, especially with the bongo sounds added later in the track, which are used quite sparingly. The tape ends with “Pink Dust”, a quiet, melancholy piano-lead ambient track.
April 4, 2013 at 8:41 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Sonogram: How We Saw Tomorrow
Todd Gautreau seems to have been operating under the radar in all of his long-running projects, from industrial/ambient Tear Ceremony, to shoegaze/indie Crushed Stars, to his downtempo/IDM alias Sonogram. Last year a 2cd Sonogram anthology called
Apparent Microdots was released, which was my introduction to this project, and now here’s a new full-length. The 9 tracks here are usually around the 4 or 5 minute mark, feature chilled-out production and analog keyboard sounds, and crunchy beats. “Bloom” is a fragile ambient piano track, “Futurist” has slippery synths and drum machines that remind me of Stereolab circa
Dots & Loops, and also Mouse On Mars (who produced some of that album) from that era. “Single Dwelling Structures” starts out still and ambient, but develops a bassline and some muted skittery beats, along with some other somewhat detached sounds. “Glasstop Hotels” is a frosty ambient track, and “Cosmonaut” returns to squishy beats and curious synth melodies and piano. “The Closer You Come, The Further You Are” has some calm, bright tones, and eventually a rumbling Autechre-ish beat, before a more pronounced beat steps in. “Outlands” ends the album with additional piano and ticking beats which aren’t too hard or intrusive but are always changing. The Sonogram sound certainly fits in with the sort of melodic downtempo IDM that n5MD releases, with a definite attention to sonic detail which prevents it from being merely background music.
April 4, 2013 at 8:03 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Bonobo: The North Borders
Bonobo’s last album, 2010’s
Black Sands, was a breath of fresh air for the downtempo/nu-jazz producer, as well as the sometimes samey Ninja Tune label, injecting some 21st century UK bass elements into a sound that definitely needed some updating. Of particular note was the addition of British soul singer Andreya Triana, who sang on 3 of the album’s songs, particularly standout “Eyesdown”. Bonobo produced Triana’s solo album
Lost Where I Belong the same year, and while she doesn’t appear on Bonobo’s new album, instead we get none other than Erykah Badu, as well as promising newcomer Szjerdene, plus Grey Reverend (of Cinematic Orchestra) and Cornelia (who has a few solo releases and a lot of guest appearances). Musically, the album generally continues in the dancey direction of
Black Sands, and while it seems at first that there’s less jazzy elements and a more electronic sound, the liner notes list plenty of live instrumentation credits (lots of strings, horns, and mallet percussion), which are seamlessly integrated into the sound. While 5 of the tracks feature guest vocalists, many others feature manipulated vocal samples, in line with what other recent Ninja Tune-released artists such as FaltyDL are doing. Highlights include the galloping two-step “Emkay”, choppy harp-driven dubstep track “Sapphire”, and both Szjerdene tracks. Nothing as blindingly gorgeous as “Eyesdown” here, but still at least as solid a full-length as its predecessor.
March 31, 2013 at 11:01 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz: The Keystone Cut Ups
People Like Us is the type of artist that I could just go on forever about, I seriously think Vicki Bennett’s audio and visual collage work has been a major influence on how I perceive reality. Her works typically combine stock footage, common-knowledge melodies and glitch noises, subverting sounds and images you might have seen and heard many times before and take for granted, and turning them into something surreal and special. A lot of her work is available for
free download online, but the releases that have particularly rewired my brain the most are
Abridged Too Far and
Wide Open Spaces, so start with those first.
This DVD is the latest of PLU’s ongoing collaborations with Ergo Phizmiz, a like-minded sound collage artist, who also has tons of music available for free download online, and who specializes in warped covers of pop music (such as this collection of R&B/hip-hop covers, plus the entire VU White Light/White Heat album). He also sometimes releases his own quirky offbeat solo material, such as the recent Eleven Songs album. He has a really dry, deadpan style, sort of like Ivor Cutler, but combined with songwriting closer to Syd Barrett or Robyn Hitchcock. Previous PLU/Ergo collaborations have resulted in truly warped meldings of sampled material (just try and not lose your mind during “Social Dance Song”, along with songs utilizing the duo’s own vocals (sometimes silly, such as “Gary’s Anatomy”, other times surrealist and touching, such as “Withers In The Whist”, both on Rhapsody In Glue). On this DVD, the duo creates split-screen film collages (leaning heavily on Dali and The Marx Brothers, among others) and creates a soundtrack, less sample-driven than their previous works, but freely borrowing from and lapsing into familiar melodies, and occasionally featuring their own vocals. It sounds a little closer to Ergo’s works than Vicki’s. Musically, the most touching moment is “Magic”, which repeats the lyric “I’ll never forget the moment we kissed” until it just drills itself into you, as well as quoting the standard “That Old Black Magic”. Along with the DVD’s final track, “Moon” (which cribs from gospel hymn “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”), it’s also been released on a blue vinyl 7″ which is also well worth owning. The audio for this DVD is available as a free download on the Illegal Art website, but the DVD versions of the songs have added sound effects as well as visuals, so the download works as a soundtrack without the incidental sounds. Still worth grabbing and listening to on its own merit, especially since it’s free. Lovely, amazing stuff as always from PLU, and if all the free downloads of her music that I’ve linked aren’t enough for you, she also does radio on WFMU sometimes with a show called Do Or DIY, and she also curated Radio Boredcast last year, 744 hours of audio focusing on slowness and our ambiguous relation with time.
March 31, 2013 at 4:46 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Mitchell Turner: Cascade
Still making my way through all the Constellation Tatsu promos I’ve had on my laptop for months. I’m pretty sure at least one of them was supposed to be some sort of soundtrack, and listening to this one, I thought this was it, but I don’t think it actually is. The presence of several variations on the main theme throughout the tape make it feels like one. But basically it’s a half hour of languid guitar instrumentals, with occasional synth washes. Everything’s under the 4 minute mark, and mostly pretty melodic, so it establishes an idea quickly and moves on, but sometimes returns to a certain idea, such as the title themes or the tracks called “Dirt Swell”, which have an appropriately swirly distorted guitar sound. Kind of spacey, but in a contained sort of way, if that makes sense.
March 31, 2013 at 3:40 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Saturday Looks Good To Me: self-titled
So the fact that SLGTM has reformed with a new lineup, is playing shows again, and will be releasing a new album this May, is certainly welcome, exciting news for sure. But something at least as exciting is the fact that Polyvinyl has reissued some of the band’s earliest material on vinyl. The band’s self-titled album was originally released on vinyl on a mysterious label called Hereforeveralways (which would end up being the name of one of my favorite His Name Is Alive songs a few years later), but then was given an expanded CD reissue on Fred Thomas’s previous, now-defunct label, Ypsilanti Records. I bought that in college when I first got into this band, and it’s always been a favorite of mine, being a weirder, not-quite-developed version of the band that released
All Your Summer Songs and
Every Night. So now having this album on blue marbled vinyl is flooding back a lot of memories. Similar to
Stars On ESP-era HNIA, this band has sort of a warped time-machine take on ’60s pop, sort of taking Phil Spector’s wall of sound to a not-necessarily-logical conclusion, and allowing bits of dub, noise, Afrobeat and whatever else seep in. The whole album is incredible, but the majority of the first side is just truly mindblowing to me, still to this day. It starts with a different, Ted Leo-less version of “Ambulance”, with no drums and lots of noisy dub delay. This goes into “I Wish I Could Cry”, which Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway sings, and is just a really crazy over-distorted bopping early rock-and-roll style song. “Ladder” is another gloriously echo-drenched song, with lots of midnight sax and a bit in the middle where the two vocalists do a brief spoken dialogue part. After this is a short song called “Obstacle” which carries on the melody from “Ladder”, and this segues perfectly into “Everyday” a truly incredible song which just goes off the deep end with distortion and delay and dub effects during the second part of the song. I just love this sort of weird dub-noise-pop that SLGTM did so well back in the day that nobody else really seemed to do anything like. I don’t want to go through every track on this album, but they’re all great, there’s some slow jams, some more confused/disturbed type moments, some crazy distortion effects, and some bird calls. It’s essential. If you didn’t buy the CD release, you can get it on vinyl now, so do it.
Saturday Looks Good To Me: Love Will Find You
Also now out on vinyl is
Love Will Find You, which I think was supposed to be released on Polyvinyl around the time of
All Your Summer Songs, but ended up only being given a really limited CDR release at one show, or something like that. If you’ve been following the band all this time, you’ll probably recognize most of the songs in some form or another, as a bunch of them have been on singles, compilations, other albums, and the
Sound On Sound rarities CD comp that Redder Records released in 2006. But this vinyl issue has 19 tracks worth of rare early SLGTM, including a vastly superior version of “Diary” to the one that Polyvinyl released on a CD EP in 2003. There’s also lots of Erika vocals, all the “Store” songs (“Liquor Store”, “Record Store”, “Pet Store”), and a whole bunch of songs on side B of this record that weren’t on the original CDR (not that I had a copy of that anyway). And different version of “We Can’t Work It Out” (this one has a drum machine) and “Lift Me Up” and “Just Keep Walking” than the ones on
Every night. I feel like there’s a couple songs I hadn’t heard before, or at least they didn’t stand out to me before, like “Parking Lot Blues” and “I Get So Excited”. Anyway, another incredible reissue, so glad to own both of these on vinyl now.
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The Answer Is In The Beat 