Snow / Nostalgia for fellow children of the 1990s

The best way for a child of the 1990s to celebrate the modestly berserk levels of snow, which made the lake near my town look significantly more like a Grouper album cover...

Foundcloud #4

Another month, another Foundcloud. Accompanied this time by a link to my new Mute Branches EP -- Conditions in Limbo. I take a lot of inspiration from the music I cover on this blog so, if you enjoy that, please don't hesitate to stream or download free on the Bandcamp page.


El Fog - 'Time, Memory'

I only recently heard about El Fog, the vibraphone / electro-acoustic music project of Berlin-based artist Masayoshi Fujita. It’s fair to say that the concept of music containing vibraphones, elements of glitch and of general electro-acoustic tinkering (not to mention a release with Flau Records) was enough to send me rushing to his Soundcloud page like a cheetah on cocaine.

The track is a minimalist yet emotive vibraphone solo played over a similarly sparse field recording. Gradually, Fujita introduces gradually elements of electronic distortion that eventually come to take over the track. Like many of the tracks I speak highly of on this blog, it’s an excellent fusion of human instrumentalism and machine music that seems to say that, if – as so many annoying purists are wont to proclaim – electronics and computers are destroying music, then at least it’s a destruction that sounds good.

Honey Son - 'Soundprov #2'

This next track is a great live improvisation by Honey Son, the recording project of Texas-based Mars Wright.

Despite being a simple "one-man and a looper" set-up, Wright nevertheless keeps the track sounding fresh and interesting throughout. Beginning with interlocking guitar loops and the subsequent introduction of an additional phrase of e-bow guitar, the track continues to develop nicely - at one point resembling somewhat the jazz-inflected post-rock of a band like Tortoise, before increased improvisation with sampling and effects - as well as the introduction of soulful, somewhat Jeff Buckley-esque vocals - gives Wright the chance to take the track down a multitude of increasingly interesting musical avenues.

In a way, this solo, loop-based composition can be seen to - like the El Fog track - showcase just how much electronics have to offer to the realms of live instrumentation and performance.


---

Additional notice deserves to be given to the unexpected Four Tet release - 0181 - consisting of unreleased music from between 1997 and 2001.



Click here to read the review I wrote of it for BeardRock.com.

YouTube Recommendation: Beach House - New Year

What better way to usher in the new year than with a song with the title 'New Year' that just so happens to be one of my personal favourite songs from one of my personal favourite albums of the year?

Its accompanying video, I guess -- released today by the band as a "happy new year" message to their fans.

As for the video itself, it's a mish-mash of footage, amongst which is included: footage from the recording of the album, some stunning outdoor shots and time-lapse footage (of the sort one can easily associate with Beach House's increasingly beautiful and dreamy music), and - probably the Internet's favourite visual subject* - cats.

Happy new year to you all! Hopefully I'll update this more frequently through 2013, and realise some of the (perhaps slightly overambitious) plans I have both for this blog and for other things.

__
* That's suitable for the whole family, anyway.

Christmas Digest!

'Tis the season to post a much-delayed post talking about some great stuff found on Bandcamp recently. In a similar way to my occasional 'Foundcloud' feature, I considered naming this post 'Faaandcamp'. I rejected this, due to not genuinely having a Cockney accent, and worrying therefore about deceiving the Internet. And on CHRISTMAS, as well.

Uh... anyway...


Sparky Deathcap
Tear Jerky EP

Ever since Sparky Deathcap first appeared in my Last.fm Recommended Radio, I’ve been looking for some place where his Tear Jerky EP was available for download. It was a pleasant surprise, then, to find that he’d made it available for download on the infinitely amazing D.I.Y. music store Bandcamp (for £4 or more).

To introduce Sparky Deathcap, it’s the lo-fi, indie folk project of Robert Taylor – now also a member of Los Campesinos!, which is quite relevant given there are some similarities that can be found between the work of that band and the songs on this EP. For the most obvious example of that, I’d probably point you in the direction of ‘Send it to Oslo’, as a track that’s strings, glockenspiels, and energetic shout-a-long lyrics would easily fit on We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, and for other, more general examples, I’d point out the somewhat similar lyrical styles between Taylor and Gareth Campesinos! – both speaking from an overtly singular first-person perspective, and often ruminating on the topic of sex and relationships, as can be seen in lines like “since then you just make cameos in my sleep, you’re the William Shatner of the elite genre of women I have loved and lost. But with Facebook hope and Myspace I could find you in a keystroke, but for air fores and the likelihood you’d have found another bloke” (from ‘Berlin Syndrome’) and “when we scraped our bones together, and we got fire” (from ‘September’).

Despite these similarities though, there’s no doubt that – with Sparky Deathcap – Taylor has put a lot of effort into crafting his own unique sound: he takes influence from the likes of (Smog) and The Microphones not only in the form of his lo-fi, DIY aesthetic, but also in his inventiveness and in his striving to make something big and ambitious from modest, homemade recordings. As pleased as I am with this re-release of Tear Jerky EP, I don’t think I’m alone in saying I look forward to whatever Taylor plans to do in the future with this project.

Download the EP for £4 (or more) here

Various Artists

...and Darkness Came (curated by Headphone Commute)

The online ambient / experimental zine +Headphone Commute have really done something great here.

As if it wasn't enough to organise and release an 87 track compilation of great ambient / experimental / neo-classical / electronic music (think the likes of Peter Broderick, Nils Frahm, Loscil and Max Richter, all of whom feature), they're also donating the proceeds to the charitable organisations Doctors Without Borders and the Humane Society, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy earlier this year.

It helps that this compilation of 87 tracks (many of which are previously unreleased) is also very consistent in quality and in tone, many tracks evoking that late-night, moody feel that much contemporary ambient, drone and 'neo-classical' music does so well.

Download the compilation for $10 (or more) here.

Also... I've embedded a couple of my personal highlights, below...

--

All that said and done, I also wish you all a happy new year (given the promise of new My Bloody Valentine material and tour dates, I think it's fair to assume it'll be fairly happy).

Foundcloud #3

Here's my breaking of the long absence (day off from work, to the max), with two more tracks pulled from my Soundcloud 'favourites' folder (or 'likes', as they're now called in the infinitely cool 'New Soundcloud')...

And on we go!

Falling Stacks - Husky

First thing that struck me about this track was the highly Steve Albini-esque production: aggressive drums, noisy guitars, a good grasp of dynamics (as can be heard particularly towards the end of the track, as the loud noise gives way to some wicked funkiness from the rhythm section), and a general rawness akin to that that can be heard in Albini productions like P. J. Harvey’s Rid Of Me and Pixies’ Surfer Rosa.

This, of course, is definitely a good thing, as I generally see Albini’s as pretty much the apex of good production as far as this sort of noisy punk-influenced rock goes: suitably raw and lo-fi, without neglecting the vital (yet frequently somewhat ignored) components of bass and drums.

Fittingly, the other aspects of Falling Stacks’ music bring to mind the sort of band who’d work with Albini – the semi-spoken vocals competing with the angry instrumentation shouting lines like “...and that dog doesn’t look like a husky; it’s way too skinny...” and (I think) “... I see 1000 images, I just walk around all day...” brings to mind Andy ‘Falco’ Falkous, of Future of the Left, and formerly of Mclusky.

I Am Halo - Little Planet

With a title like ‘Little Planet’, and a genre that is listed by the artist as ‘Moon Addict’, one wouldn’t be blamed for expecting something spacey and otherworldly. Furthermore, one shouldn’t, because ‘Little Planet’ is definitely very spacey.

I should elaborate that this “spaceyness” isn’t so much in the vein of classically ‘spaced-out’ bands like Spacemen 3 or Bardo Pond, but more reflective of a sort of human wistfulness towards the stars that can be heard in Radiohead’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ or in the work of ‘90s post-rock band Laika – more a feeling of looking up in wonderment and curiosity at the vast expanse of space.

In track, I Am Halo’s wistful, spacey atmosphere is fuelled by the dreamy electronics, flutes, and echoing guitars; dreamlike lyrics like “in the forest, I’m wandering lost” and “little planet watching me from above” that are earthbound yet unquestionably looking upwards; and the general production of the track, which is characterised by dense layering of these elements and by a liberal use of reverb.

As interesting and adventurous as it is accessible, this track is highly recommended, and also available on I Am Halo’s Bandcamp page, on his self-titled album: http://iamhalo.bandcamp.com/album/i-am-halo

Minor Update (Mute Branches)

Hey,

I haven't updated this as much in recent weeks as I had planned to, but rest assured there'll be some more stuff on its way (including some 'Hallo Halloween' stuff that'll probably end up coming after the 31st, unfortunately).

But here's a quick update in the meantime to promote that my two Mute Branches releases - So Remote + So Alien - previously only on Bandcamp, are now also on Last.fm -- again for totally free... so please have a gander at them if you're interested and haven't already!


Mute Branches - So Remote


Mute Branches - So Alien

Hallo Halloween - Album Recommendation 3

Sonic Youth - Bad Moon Rising (1985, Homestead)

The most typically "Halloween" cover in the history of time?

Sonic Youth are a band renowned for their experimentation with the guitar – making use of unorthodox tunings and the technique, borrowed from avant-garde composition, of ‘prepared guitar’ to produce unique tones and strange timbres.

Of their ‘main albums’ (i.e. excluding rarer and more esoteric material like the SYR EPs and curios like Silver Session for Jason Knuth), it’s probably safe to say that 1985’s Bad Moon Rising is the album where such textural experimentation is most pushed to the forefront: unlike the noisy avant-punk that came before it on Confusion is Sex, and the increasing flirtations with more traditional structure that would come after it – much of Bad Moon Rising can almost be described as ‘ambient’ music, designed for establishing a mood and atmosphere through subtle instrumentation.

 In fact, when looking for which Sonic Youth album would be most appropriate for Halloween-listening, it’s hard to come up with an argument for why that album wouldn’t be Bad Moon Rising: for one, the cover of the album is a scarecrow with a flaming carved pumpkin for a head and as images go, you can’t really get much Halloweenier than that. And additionally, of course, that mood and atmosphere mentioned earlier can also be described as “pretty Halloweeny” – the band pull out all the stops on this album to make it sound as unsettling, violent, and tense as possible: we hear the whole host of Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore’s guitar trickery – discordant chiming, noisy squalls, feedback quietly humming in a way that always sort of reminds me of the atmospheres of a John Carpenter soundtrack; Kim Gordon’s bass creeps in and out through the album’s duration, providing an effective rhythmic backdrop alongside Steve Shelley’s drums, which – when they come in – pulse mechanically in a way that, if Gordon’s bass is creeping towards you, then Shelley’s drums are chasing you relentlessly and showing no sign of exhaustion.

The lyrical content is appropriate to what Bad Moon Rising’s visual and aural aesthetics bring to mind: the legendary Death Valley ’69, for example, is a terrifically aggressive track whose title and vague lyrics (“She started to holler, so I had to hit it”) allude to the Charles Manson murders; and the lyrics to I’m Insane show a fascination with trashy pulp fiction novels as Thurston Moore sings fragments of the titles and back-cover descriptions of such novels in lines like “twisted passions, flesh parade...” and “one step more, he’ll stir your senses, scratch your surface and nail your head...” against the backdrop of hypnotically droning noise and industrial-sounding rhythms.

So, this year, why not play this album loud and terrify yr neighbours to the point that they won’t be able to file a noise complaint? Or make their day if they’re big Sonic Youth fans... whatever, I don’t know your neighbours. Just listen to it anyway.

(a wicked live video of I'm Insane, courtesy of Staffan Sladik)

A couple of other recommendations...

Public Image, Ltd. - Swan Lake

(courtesy of BonzoGoesToMexico)

On the subject of unsettling post-punk / noise-rock, it'd be foolish not to mention Metal Box and, in particular, this track from it; on which dub-influenced basslines and vaguely disco-esque drumming serves as the backdrop to chaotically noisy guitar work and the aggressive hyperactivity of John Lydon's vocals.


Akira Yamaoka - Pyramid Head (from the Silent Hill 2 soundtrack)

(courtesy of PeyserConley)

Playing Silent Hill 2 for the first time (with the lights on, of course, even though it was still daytime), I remember thinking that some of the noisier, more industrial tracks from Akira Yamaoka's soundtrack to the game (which, by the way, is great - especially if you're into trip-hop and moody ambient music) sounded very similar to a lot of what Sonic Youth are doing here, on Bad Moon Rising.

Listening to this now, I can definitely see where my young, terrified-of-weird-mannequin-legs-and-pyramid-headed-cleaver-wielding-manifestations-of-guilt self was coming from. The mechanical clattering of this track is especially reminiscent of the noisy chaos on show on a number of Bad Moon Rising's tracks, in particular something like Ghost Bitch.