The Blogglebum Cage

2009-08-20T16:06:00.000-07:00

I Have a New Blog

You can read it here:

http://bubblegumcage3.com/

2008-12-01T22:59:00.000-08:00

Top Ten of the Year 2008
First of all, here's the good news: This end-of-the-year post is huge! Epic! Plenty of "online content" for you to chew on, lots of record-buying recommendations and even a few free MP3 downloads, for those of you who make it to the end. My twin commitments to (a) typing this blog as hastily as possible and (b) proofreading it not one bit know no bounds.

Now, here's the bad news: This will be the last ever post on The Blogglebum Cage. I'm sure this will be heartbreaking news for the (statistically-proven) two dozen people who visit the blog every day but I need time to work on other - dare I say more important - projects. I was laid off from work a couple of weeks ago so, in the short term, in need time and energy to devote towards job hunting. In the long term, I also want to spend more of my computer time making music and less writing about music.

Talking of music, here's the more bad news: It's been another generally sucky year for new music. You may notice that I spend a considerable amount of this post telling you what I don't like about my favourite Albums of the Year. That can't be a good sign.

The real problem for me this year has been the lack of surprises. Most of my top records of the year came from favourite artists, doing what they do very well, resolutely refusing to raise the stakes. Maybe it's a bit unreasonable to expect the shock of the new in 2008 but I still want to be challenged, confounded and amazed.

So, for what it's worth, here is the final Blogglebum Cage end-of-year list, plus a few of the usual bonus features. Take a good look at these Michael because it's the last time. (Actually, I may return to blogging in 2010 but who knows if there'll even be such a thing as blogs that far in the future!)

Before I get started, a few things about the format of this year's list should be made clear:

The Top Ten Albums of the Year list and the Bubbling Under lists are in rough order of preference
The Other Notable Releases list is in alphabetical order
The format that I've noted for each release is the format I happen to have it in - some of the CDs I list are or will be available on vinyl
I've tried to stick strictly to 2008 releases but if you notice some stuff from last year creeping in there... well, fuck you, I don't care!
I haven't done a Songs of the Year list but I have flagged up a few particular favourites along the way
I haven't includes my own brilliant 2008 album (connect_icut, They Showed Me the Secret Beaches) in the list as I naturally assume it will be at the top of all the other end-of-year lists I read

Now, without further ado...

Top Ten Albums of the Year

Fennesz - Black Sea LP and CD (Touch)
(also, Transition 7")
Did I just say "favourite artists, doing what they do very well, resolutely refusing to raise the stakes"? Well, this is exactly what I'm talking about. After almost five years of waiting, what do we get from Christian Fennesz's new solo album? We get a really, really great Fennesz album. We get the Album of the Year. And we get nothing!

You might imagine the fact that Black Sea is simultaneously my Album of the Year and A Slight Disappointment is a function of unreasonable expectations. Fennesz is a certifiable genius and he hasn't released a solo album since Venice in early 2004, so - as a long-time fan - I was expecting something pretty mind-blowing.

In fact, on these terms, Black Sea isn't disappointing at all. It's a large-scale triumph: monumentally beautiful, massively brilliant. It's the work of an incredibly talented and original musician at the absolute top of his game. It's the best damn album that anyone has put out this year. So, what's the problem?

Well, for an artist who speaks a pretty abstract musical language, Fennesz has a remarkably high public profile. Since "Transit", his collaboration with David Sylvian on Venice, not to mention the distinct pop leanings of his masterwork Endless Summer, Fennesz has seemed poised to tighten up his act and make a crossover album that would introduce a whole swathe of the music-listening public to an entirely new world of sonic wonders.

It probably seems perverse for me to wish this kind of crossover success on Fennesz. But I'm still stuck on an idea the British music press drummed into me as a teenager: that to be relevant, "alternative" music has to raid the over-ground and change the world, at least a little. In the post-grunge Internet age, this kind of thinking is pretty much redundant. That's a fact but I can't help feeling it's by no means an inevitable fact or that it describes an entirely desirable state of affairs.

In any case, Fennesz has not spent the last half-decade crafting a world-changing avant pop masterpiece. Instead, he's simply been trying to make the best damn Fennesz album he can. And while Black Sea is unlikely to add anything substantially new to Fennesz's body of work or indeed his fan-base, it is going to give his existing fans an enormous amount of pleasure.

It's a remarkably focused encapsulation of all that he has achieved since his 1995 debut EP Instrument. It's a series of long-form pieces that marry the most reflective elements of the last two Fennesz albums to the more abrasive abstraction of his earlier releases. If I had to flag a single track up as a representative standout, I'd point you in the direction of the gorgeous "Perfume for Winter".

So anyway, while Fennesz isn't trying to take on the mainstream, it would be ridiculous to say that Black Sea isn't ambitious and it would be an outrage to argue that Fennesz's ambitions are modest. This is a Big Album, in absolutely the best sense.

The Transition 7" is more of the same and an essential companion to this most essential of albums. I haven't heard the new one-sided LP on Table of the Elements yet but I'm willing to go out on a limb and say it's probably pretty good.

The Fall - Imperial Wax Solvent LP (Universal)
Last year's Reformation Post TLC is widely considered to be the Worst Fall Album Evar and while it's no Are You Are Missing Winner it's certainly a hard record to defend. Seems like Mark E Smith has now strayed so far off the rails (witness his unreadable autobiography) that any album attempting to catch him in the raw is doomed to be a more-or-less un-listenable shambles.

Thank goodness, then, that Imperial Wax Solvent is a distinctly digital studio construction. Smith needs someone to tie up his loose ends more than ever these days and - even then - things can still go horribly awry (witness his unreadable, ghost-written autobiography called Renegade for fuck's sake - must have taken them seconds to come up with that title).

Luckily, the various producers and engineers (including Grant Showbiz and Andi Toma from Mouse on Mars) assisting Smith on Imperial Wax Solvent have done a wonderful job, crafting a tight set of quintessentially Fall avant rockers. This is probably the best Fall album since The Unutterable and it's probably no coincidence that it's also the most electronic-sounding Fall album since that particular late-period classic. Apparently, I wasn't the only one who though that Smith's underrated collaboration with Toma in Von Sudenfed represented the only valid way forward for the great man.

Gang Gang Dance - Saint Dymphna LP (The Social Registry)
Like Fennesz, Gang Gang Dance have roots in experimental abstraction and a potentially bright future introducing mainstream listeners to the roller-coaster thrills of the avant garde. Saint Dymphna comes much closer than Black Sea to being the perfect storm of pop and pandemonium that I've been craving but it still sounds rather hesitant or - at least - a little too content to simply do its thing.

Much of Saint Dymphna is taken up with twinkly digital synth jams that add nicely to the overall flow of the album but just don't kick ass like they should. When Gang Gang get punchy, though, they pretty much lay waste to the competition. "Princes" - featuring grime MC Tinchy Stryder - and the Kate Bush-esque "House Jam" both deserve a mention in any reasonable Songs of the Year list.

Portishead - Third 2LP (Universal)
This was a good year for long-awaited returns. My Blood Valentine's return to the live arena was undoubtedly the most significant musical event of the 21st century (so far). It would have been pretty hard to top that but the arrival of a new Portishead album also represented a pretty significant event for those of us who came of age in the '90s.

Third - it has been said - is Portishead's Kid A. That may be a rather trite thing to say about a 1990s alt-fave releasing their most experimental album to date but it's really not too wide of the mark. Like Kid A, this album sees a popular act taking on a range of left-field influences whilst simultaneously boiling their own unique musical language down to its bare essentials. For sheer audacity alone, the Spartan "Machine Gun" would have to be high up in my Singles of the Year list.

alva noto - Unitxt 2X12" (Raster Noton)
Not long ago, post-Oval computer music seemed like the most embarrassingly uncool musical thing imaginable. But the efforts of a few diehards kept the flame alive during those lean times and 2008 became the year that glitch returned to okay-to-like status. The fact that this all happened remarkably quickly is extremely validating for those of us who kept the faith. On the other hand, it might just be a reflection of the fact that today's listeners want to dabble in a little of everything, without committing themselves to anything for too long.

Whatever... The fact that people are paying attention to Carsten Nicolai again is cause for celebration. The really exciting thing, though, is the fact that Nicolai - aka alva noto - is producing some of his most compelling work to date. On Unitxt, noto funnels the sound of raw digital data into viciously clinical grooves. Heard on the beautifully cut vinyl edition, this is a pretty-much perfect mix of the digital uncanny and good old-fashioned physicality.

Astral Social Club - Model Town in Field of Mud LP (Textile)
Have I mentioned that I put an album out this year? Oh yeah, it was the fourth connect_icut album, it was called They Showed Me the Secret Beaches, it had a really cool cover, it was critically acclaimed and - of course - nobody bought it. I couldn't be more proud of Secret Beaches but I'm not sure I'll ever be able to top it and - in any case - the fiscal effects of putting out deluxe LPs that don't sell are becoming a bit too brutal for me to stomach.

Luckily, there's always Astral Social Club. Model Town in Field of Mud is the sound of the post-Sun City Girls free-rock underground rising to the challenge of digital technology. It's a joyful riot of noise and melody, chaos and structure. It sounds kind of like my stuff and I like it a lot.

Beequeen - Sandancing CD (Important)
(also Sandancing Demos 10")
The ongoing transformation of Beequeen from sub-:zoviet*france: dark ambient industrialists to shadowy craftsmen of finely-wrought nocturnal song-scapes is one of the most marvellously confounding stories in recent musical history. Like Ownliness and The Body Shop before it, this album mixes post-rock, glitch, jazz, pop and folk to genuinely sexy effect.

The Sandancing Demos 10" makes a worthwhile appendix, presenting the finely crafted tunes of the album as a set of beguilingly off-the-cuff lo-fi sketches.

Restiform Bodies - TV Loves You Back CD (Anticon)
If hip-hop is redundant in 2008, doesn’t that make post-rap beyond redundant? Honestly, there are dozens of reasons to hate TV Loves You Back: the over-convoluted rhyming; the “ironic” '80s pop sounds; the token splashes of smarty-pants electronica; the lapses into dumb-as-fuck puerility; the unforgivable misogyny; the constant harping on about the evils of mass-media consumerism; the "zany" photo shoots...

And yet I keep coming back to it. How could something so hard to like be so hard not to love? More than likely, it's just a beautiful mystery but if I had to hypothesize a couple of scientific explanations, I'd go with: (a) complicity and (b) realization.

Complicity, then. The fact that TV Loves You Back constitutes an unrelenting 45-minute attack on the corrosive influence of TV and consumer culture could - and to some extent does - make it bit of a wearing listen. The thing that makes it bearable is that it's a story told from the outside moving in. Structured as a true concept album, it starts with third-person hectoring and moves inexorably towards first-person despair. The impression one is left with is that Restiform Bodies genuinely love TV - it's themselves they can't stand. I couldn't disagree more with the PopMatters review of this album - there's no distance here; no judgement. There's complicity.

Then, realization. Restiform Bodies have been waaayyy off the radar for years, so they've had plenty of time to craft a tight set of songs. And holy crap have they ever succeeded! The lyrics are incredibly dense with horrifically vivid imagery, the tunes are insanely catchy and the songs are all ingenious multi-part constructions. Nothing is meaningless here and nothing is left to chance. "Opulent Soul" is the Song of the Year and "Interactive Halloween Bear" isn't far behind.

In fact, this might have been in the running for Album of the Year if it wasn't for all that stuff that I just can't forgive - not least the icky (ironic?) misogyny of "A Pimp-Like God". If these guys could stop thinking with their dicks, they'd probably take over the world.

Rafael Toral - Space Elements Vol. 1 LP (TAIGA)
The Space Programme is surely the most conceptually ambitious thing going in experimental music right now. As a man who made his name in the '90s purveying ear-pleasing guitar abstraction, Rafael Toral would be forgiven for wanting a piece of the post-Fennesz pie. Instead, he's simultaneously burrowing into the roots of electronic music and launching his considerable imagination into the cosmos.

Toral's Space albums meditate upon the sonic absences that link John Cage, modern jazz and outer space itself, mixing hot-wired electronics with free improvisation in the context of a very specific High Modernist aesthetic. Toral is fiercely serious about this stuff and while the results may initially sound like your dad's idea of experimental music, attentive listening reveals a fundamentally new music characterized by an ornate, otherworldly beauty.

Space Elements Vol. 1 is the Space Programme's most ambitious mission so far, almost orchestral in its large-scale realisation, totally admirable in every way and a great listen to boot.

Russell Haswell - Second Live Salvage 2LP (Editions Mego)
Like the alva noto album, this is a beautifully cut two-record set that adds a distinct physicality to that most virtual of genres - computer music. Russell Haswell is a bona fide sound artist - his work mostly consists of site-specific installations and performances and is not really designed for home listening. Haswell's Live Salvage albums compound this fact by presenting documentary-style live recordings as his most high-profile commercially available releases.

From a purely sonic standpoint, it's an approach that works wonders. Like his sometime collaborator Florian Hecker, Haswell is a hardcore proponent of academic-grade music software. Again like Hecker, he uses this definitively cerebral sound source to unleash an astonishingly visceral sound, the elemental power of which is truly transcendent. It makes sense that, to facilitate the transformation from bits-and-bytes to true, air-shaking sonic chaos, Haswell has to situate his music in a room. Heard on headphones, straight from the hard-drive of Haswell's laptop, this stuff wouldn't have half the force it does.

Second Live Salvage is sourced entirely from audience recordings of Haswell performances. The sound quality is variable but none of the recordings take the edge off Haswell's raw power - quite the opposite, one suspects. This is the sound of computer music getting out of the ether and bringing the house down.

Bubbling Under

Can't - Private Time Two LP (Weird Forest)
Jessica Rylan - aka Can't - has more than a little in common with Russell Haswell: both artists seem to command a great deal of respect in the legitimate art world; both deal in an unusually nuanced version of harsh noise/power electronics; and both released albums with really awesome cover art this year.

There are differences too. If anything, Rylan's noise is even more visceral than Haswell's, particularly on this album. And whereas his work is presented as an imposingly cerebral/Apollonian version of extreme music, hers is more openly personal and cathartic. This is mirrored in the fact that whereas Haswell's music is produced by high-level software applications, Rylan primarily uses her own voice, run through an array of homemade synthesizers.

Rylan's 2005 album New Secret (which mistakenly found its way into my 2006 top ten) cloaked confessional lyrics in a suffocating blanket of modulated distortion. Private Time Two, by contrast, is sharp and shocking. Kris, who has remarkable tolerance for harsh noise, openly proclaimed it to be "a bit much".

In any case, it's hard to deny the uniqueness of Rylan's artistic voice, the clarity of her execution or her remarkable range. Private Time Two encompasses ornate noise sculptures, Jandek-style bummer folk, twisted cabaret numbers and no-holds-barred primal scream therapy. It's one of those albums you won't listen to every day but when you're in the mood for it, nothing else will hit the mark.

The Bug - London Zoo CD (Ninja Tune)
(also King Midas Sound - "Cool Out" 12")
Not quite the mind-bomb I was hoping Kevin Martin would drop this year and insanely expensive on vinyl, this nevertheless featured some of the fiercest beats of 2008. "Fuckaz" featuring the spaceape is among my Songs of the Year.

If London Zoo represents a partially successful attempt to add some light and space to Martin's signature aesthetic, including "Cool Out" - released on Hyperdub under his King Midas Sound moniker - would definitely have upped the hit-rate. Roger Robinson's ambiguously heavenly vocal provides the perfect foil for Martin's heavyweight beats - just as Paul St. Hilaire's has done on past projects – making “Cool Out” one of the essential Singles of the Year.

High Places - 03.07 - 09.07 and High Places CDs (Thrill Jockey)
Okay, so this Brooklyn duo may be the poor person's Gang Gang Dance but that's not such a bad thing to be in 2008. It's hard to choose between the two album's they released this year: The singles collection 03.07 - 09.07 has better tunes but the self-titled album proper has quite a bit more oomph in the sonics.

Various Artists - Spire Live: Fundamentalis LP (Touch)
(also Fennesz/Jeck/Matthews - Amoroso 7")
This collection of live recordings documenting the Touch label's Spire series of church organ concerts presents a remarkably coherent aesthetic statement, which is as beautiful as it is imposingly monolithic. The 7" provides a nice addition, although it doesn't catch Fennesz on top form.

Lawrence English - Kiri no Oto CD (Touch)
Another Touch release from what turned out to be a fantastic year for the veteran UK label. This one presents heavyweight digital drone from the Australian fellow behind Room40 recordings. "Allay", in particular is an absolutely stunning piece of minimalist impressionism, worthy of the great Ekkehard Ehlers.

Other Notable Releases

Aerosol Constellations/Born Without Bones - split one-sided LP
Aerosol Constellations are the duo of Vancouver weird punks behind the already-legendary Fake Jazz events. They trade in :zoviet*france:-style drift and they may just be the best band out of Vancouver right now. Most of their output comes in the form of hand-packaged CDRs but - for those of you who just have to have some wax - they've also put out this splendid and highly desirable item.

Oren Ambarchi - Destinationless Desire 7" and A Final Kiss on Poisoned Lips one-sided LP
Ambarchi continued to go from strength to strength this year, with these two releases featuring some of his best work to date. The 7" is more-than-usually electronic-sounding and samples Fairport Convention. The one-sided LP includes part of his stunning 2007 show at the Vancouver New Music Festival.

Basic Channel - BCD2 CD
Of course, I have all the 12"s but this CD represents a considerably more affordable way to learn about how Basic Channel came to define the sound of minimal techno. The 17 minutes and 45 seconds of "Inversion" are worth the asking price alone.

James Devane - James Devane free download
This probably became a bit redundant the moment an actual Fennesz album got released but if you can't get enough guitar'n'granular drift then this is well worth the no asking price. Get it from Bremsstrahlung Recordings.

Empty Love and Les Beyond - Wedding cassette
Slightly biased here, as Empty Love is the fellow who put out the first connect_icut CD. Still, it's hard to deny that there's something special in this marriage of EL's deliberately stark and cold analogue drones to Les Beyond's US post-rock-style guitar chimes. I put it down to the fact that the two elements come just close enough to gelling, without ever become too cosy. An uneasy wedded bliss.

Kellarissa - Flamingo CD
One of two great 2008 albums featuring ex-members of P:ano, my all-time second favourite Vancouver indie rock act (after The Beans). An undeniably unique mix of synth pop, Finnish folk, Juana Molina-style live-looping and dub FX.

kode 9 - "Konfusion" 12"
“Konfusion" is pretty much business as usual, which is no bad thing coming from kode 9. Shackleton may be ahead of him in the avant dubstep sweepstakes but this should give kode 9's fans nothing to complain about. In fact, "Konfusion" is probably the best single track he's given us since "Backwards".

Machinefabriek - Huiswerk 7"
It's more-or-less impossible to keep up with the prodigious output of post-Fennesz computer musician Rutger Zuyderveldt aka Machinefabriek. Still, everything I've heard by him this year has been... worth hearing, at the very least. For a bite-size sampler, you could do much worse than this 7" on Vancouver's very excellent Ketchup Cavern label.

Stephan Mathieu - Radioland CD
Radioland is collection of heavenly music from one of the true glitch gods; shortwave radio transmissions channelled through an array of Max/MSP delays in a manner that recalls Keith Fullerton Whitman's masterful Playthroughs. Mathieu saves the best for last here - the album's final track "Prolog i Himmel" starts with a landslide of granular detritus before settling into a gorgeous plainsong-like chant, leaving vapour trails of drone in its wake.

Daniel Menche - Body Melt LP
While most this Portland artist's work seems to fit easily with the West Coast “posinoise” sound defined by the likes of Yellow Swans and John Wiese, Body Melt is something of a departure, being based around analogue synth drones and Native American percussion. There's far less distortion here than you might expect but this is a primal and intense sound experience nonetheless. Imagine a post-punk version of early Popol Vuh.

No Kids - Come Into My House LP
The other great post-P:ano album of the year. This time, a smarty-pants pop confection, sure to delight fans of Arthur Russell and Scritti Politti.

Popol Vuh - "Nachts: Schnee (Mika Vainio Remix)"/"Aguirre 1 (Haswell and Hecker Remix)" 12"
What with the Daniel Mench album and all, this was clearly the year that purveyors of abrasive electronica discovered the charms of Florian Fricke's new age krautrock ensemble Popol Vuh. The fact that this 12" came out on Editions Mego (not to mention red vinyl) meant that it was probably the 2008 release that was most accurately niche-marketed to me personally. Is there any chance of getting a whole album of this stuff?

Arthur Russell - Love is Overtaking Me CD
While this is a collection of highly obscure rarities, it actually combines some of Arthur Russell's most conventional songs. As such, it's not all gold - there's some sub-Van Morrison blue-eyed soul that is decidedly disposable. Still, when the tracks concentrate on integrating ideas from folk, electro-pop and the avant garde, the results are often stunning. "Eli" is droning song about a dog and it's worthy of Russell's classic World of Echo. His orchestrated version of the traditional "Goodbye Old Paint" beats Van Dyke Parks at his own game.

Shackleton/Mordant Music - "El Din"/"Olde Wobbly" 10"
This is an absolutely stunning split single of haunted dancehall numbers. Showcasing Shackleton's world-beating avant dubstep and Mordant's hauntological techno at their very best, this certainly ranks as one of the Singles of the Year.

Sick Buildings - Mains Frequency Flicker 3" CDR
This Vancouver noise artist is moving ever closer to pure conceptual sound art. Mains Frequency Flicker provides a marvellously concise encapsulation of the Sick Buildings concept.

Chris T-T - Capital CD
T-T is finally starting to get the recognition he deserves. As expected, Capital is a mixed bag of shear brilliance and really bad artistic decisions but the best moments are very, very good indeed. Much better than anything Billy Bragg's done in about two decades, anyway.

Various Artists - Emergency Room Vol. 1 LP (Grotesque Modern/Nominal)
This is a great overview of Vancouver's world-renowned "weird punk" scene. While it focuses on the scene's more conventional no wave-influenced band's - including my personal favourite, Twin Crystals - this is a record that finds room for the abstract sounds of the aforementioned Sick Buildings.

Two New Mixes

Not Me: The Acid Folk Remix Project
Here's my extra-special Christmas gift to you. Okay, so the final tracklisting is not ready at the time of publishing but the Soundcloud players below will grow organically as new songs are added throughout December. This is the place to check for Acid Folk Remix Project updates. Email me if you want a CDR copy of the finished product.

Side A:
1. Chris Mastheim - "Winter is Blue" (Vashti Bunyan cover)
2. Anne Briggs - "Living by the Water (Not Me Extended Remix by connect_icut)"
3. Comus - "The Bite (Not Me Remix by Esperik Glare)"
4. connect_icut - "Cruel" (based on "Cruel Sister" by The Pentangle and "The Cruel Mother" by Shirley Collins)

Side B:
1. Skullfucker - "Evil Island Home" (Kevin Coyne cover) [Added December 19th]
2. The Luminaries - "I Would Not Let You Drown" (based on "Sweet Child" by The Pentangle)
3. Steeleye Span - "Rogues in a Nation (Not Me Extended Remix by connect_icut)"
4. The Watersons - "Christmas is Now Drawing Near Drawing Near at Hand (Not Me Remix by Gunshae)" [Added December 17th]

Sam's Mix for Winter 2008/9
Available only as a hard-copy CDR for friends and family. Email me if you want a copy (I haven't actually burned any yet but I will, prob'ly). Here's what you'll get:

1. The Fall - "Tommy Shooter"
2. Twin Crystals - "No Clinics"
3. Kellarissa - "Flamingo"
4. Mount Eerie with Julie Doiron and Fred Squire - "Flaming Home"
5. Machinefabriek with Soccer Committee - "Di-o-day"
6. High Places - "The Storm"
7. Gang Gang Dance with Tinchy Stryder - "Princes"
8. Restiform Bodies - "Opulent Soul"
9. The Bug with the spaceape - "Fuckaz"
10. Shackleton - "The Rope Tightens"
11. Ricardo Villalobos - "Minimoonstar"
12. alva noto - "U_08-1"
13. Fennesz - "Perfume for Winter"
14. Lawrence English - "Allay"
15. Stephan Mathieu - "Prolog i Himmel"

Alright then, that's yer lot - bringing another epic Top Ten post (and five years of The Blogglebum Cage) to a close.

Additions: 23rd December
In the last few days, I’ve added two new tracks to the Acid Folk Remix Project play-lists:

The Watersons – “Christmas is Now Drawing Near at Hand (Not Me Remix by Gunshae)” [Incredible re-imagining from Vancouver’s ambient masters Gunshae]
Skullfucker – “Evil Island Home” [Hair-raising lo-fi outsider folk reading of the Kevin Coyne classic, coutesy of the mysterious Skullfucker]

Looks to me like volume one of The Project is now finished. Look out for volume two in December 2009.

Also, over the last couple of weeks I have discovered the following (excellent) 2008 releases:
• Fennesz- June
• Fennesz/Dafeldecker/Brandlmyr – ‘Til the World’s Blown Up…
• Flight of the Conchords - s/t
• Lau Nau - Nukkuu
• Peter Rehberg – Songs for GV
• Shackleton - Soundboy's Suicide Note
• Tape - Luminarium
• Noriko Tujiko – Trust
• Noriko Tujiko/Lawrence English/John Chantler – U
• James Yorkston – When the Haar Rolls In

Some other lists worth viewing:
Blissblog
Expressway
SFJ
Tower of Sleep
The Decibel Tolls
Ljud
Raven Sings the Blues
Mapsadaisical
And You May Find Yourself
Jon Dale

One thing I've noticed: A lot of album's that received tepid reviews upon their releases have been showing up in tons of lists (Gang Gang Dance and The Bug spring to mind).

(Small, informal) party at my place, New Year's Day! Email for details.

RIP Davy Graham.

2008-11-26T16:45:00.000-08:00

The Acid Folk Remix Project: Aaargh!
Things are not going according to plan around here. BooMP3 has now been decidedly dysfunctional for about four days, so I'm trying out this thing called Soundcloud, which I discovered via Ljud.

At the moment, I can only upload five of the Acid Folk Remixes but if it goes well, I'll add more when I can and replace all those BooMP3 players with Soundcloud players. Hopefully, BooMP3 will have come back to life by the time you read this and you can discount the whole thing. But just in case...

2008-11-21T18:25:00.001-08:00

The Acid Folk Remix Project: Silence, Go Boom!
I've replaced the DivShare play-list with a series of BooMP3 players. Let us never speak of it again. Here are the tracks we have so far. More to come soon. Prob'ly.

Chris Mastheim - "Winter is Blue"

Anne Briggs - "Living by the... (Remix)"

Comus - "The Bite (Remix)"

connect_icut - "Cruel"

The Luminaries - "I Would Not Let..."

Steeleye Span - "Rogues... (Remix)"

[Additional note: If the BooMP3 players don't appear, please click here. Thanks.]

2008-11-20T11:13:00.000-08:00

The Acid Folk Remix Project: Spy Versus I
So, I was at the office this morning, downloading Chris Mastheim’s version of “Winter is Blue” when that ol’ devil DivShare dumped some major-ass spy-ware onto my work PC, practically crippling the poor thing.

DivShare has been getting constantly sketchier over the last year and this was the last straw. Therefore, as soon as I have time, the Acid Folk Remix Project DivShare play-list will be replaced with something more humane.

In the meantime, PLEASE DON’T CLICK ON ANY DIVSHARE LINKS!

2008-11-19T19:20:00.000-08:00

The Acid Folk Remix Project: Blue Christmas
Nick Krgovich of No Kids (formerly P:ano) has allowed me to add his lo-fi version of Vashti Bunyan's "Winter is Blue" to ~~the DivShare play-list~~. If he can find me the original multi-track cassette, I might even get a shot a doing a bona fide remix of this one.

Nick's "Winter is Blue" originally appeared a few years back, on a Christmas-special CDR called "I Come on All Ye" that he released under the name Chris Mastheim. I'm not making this up. The first song was called "Midnight Mass Ass". Well worth snagging a copy, if you can track one down.

More good things of this nature to come, hopefully.

Chris Mastheim - "Winter is Blue"

[Note: The DivShare play-list that was originally embedded in the Acid Folk Remix Project posts has been replaced by a series of BooMP3 players.]

[Additional note: If the BooMP3 players don't appear, please click here. Thanks.]

2008-11-17T09:00:00.000-08:00

The Acid Folk Remix Project: Rogues Return
I've done a new, extended mix of "Rouges in a Nation" and added it to ~~the DivShare play-list~~ . I've also removed my rather sub-par mixes of The Pentangle's "Lyke-Wake Dirge" and "Let No Man Steal Your Time". That leaves the play-list at five tracks in 35 minutes. The rest is up to you. Only five remixing weeks left 'til Christmas!

Steeleye Span - "Rogues... (Remix)"

[Note: The DivShare play-list that was originally embedded in the Acid Folk Remix Project posts has been replaced by a series of BooMP3 players.]

[Additional note: If the BooMP3 players don't appear, please click here. Thanks.]

2008-11-16T11:00:00.000-08:00

The Acid Folk Remix Project: The Living End?
Well, the good new is that my external hard-drive seems to have come back to life. But I never did find that song. To make up for the loss, I've come up with a new version of my Anne Briggs remix. I may do even more work on this one at some point (Kris says it needs to be "way more fucked up") but I'm pretty pleased with the current version, for the time being. Eight-and-a-half minutes of folky warbling and granular synthesis. Top that!

Anne Briggs - "Living by the... (Remix)"

[Note: The DivShare play-list that was originally embedded in the Acid Folk Remix Project posts has been replaced by a series of BooMP3 players.]

[Additional note: If the BooMP3 players don't appear, please click here. Thanks.]

2008-11-15T09:00:00.000-08:00

The Acid Folk Remix Project: More Pentangling? Shirley Some Mistake!
So, I found another one of those acid folk-sampling old connect_icut songs. This one’s called “Cruel” and it probably includes elements of The Pentangle’s “Cruel Sister” along with parts lifted from “The Cruel Mother”, as performed by Shirley Collins. I say “probably” because the definitive facts are lost in the mists of time.

"Cruel" has been added to ~~the DivShare play-list~~ . Turns out it’s a pretty good choon – kind of a cross between alva noto and The Third Eye Foundation, which makes sense. Goodness knows how it ended up getting left off Moss.

There was another, similar song that I was working on around the same time. It was called “Rake” and it sampled various versions of “Reynardine”. I was scouring my external hard-drive for it just the other night when a baffling technical failure led the ol' Mac to start denying said drive’s very existence. “Rake” may be lost for good, along with a host of other connect_icut rarities.

Luckily, nobody gives a rat’s ass.

connect_icut - "Cruel"

[Note: The DivShare play-list that was originally embedded in the Acid Folk Remix Project posts has been replaced by a series of BooMP3 players.]

[Additional note: If the BooMP3 players don't appear, please click here. Thanks.]

2008-11-14T09:00:00.000-08:00

The Acid Folk Remix Project: Pentangling
Here is the promised cavalcade of Pentangle remixes. I'd already come up with a rough mix of "Lyke-Wake Dirge" when Jesse Simon - aka The Luminaries - told me about a track he'd done some time ago, based on "Sweet Child".

That, in turn, reminded me of some acid folk-sampling connect_icut tracks created around the time I was working on Moss, one of which was largely based on a Pentangle recording. Amazingly, said tracks were no longer on the ol' hard drive. It was only after considerable digging that I was able to track the Pentangle one down on a CDR titled Last October? Others are still missing.

The upshot of all this is that the following tracks have been added to ~~the DivShare play-list~~:

The Pentangle - "Lyke-Wake Dirge (Not Me Remix by connect_icut)"
This is a rough mix. Hopefully, a more polished version will be added to the list at a later date. [Deleted]

The Luminaries - "I Would Not Let You Drown"
Yep, apparently it's entirely based on guitar samples lifted from "Sweet Child", although it retains none of that tune's jauntiness, preferring to opt for a vague, timestretching-enhanced dread. Exxxxxxcellent

connect_icut - "Rue"
Based on The Pentangle's version of "Let No Man Steal Your Thyme". May also include fragments of The Iditarod's version but was created years before I heard Shelagh McDonald's take. [Deleted]

The Luminaries - "I Would Not Let..."

[Note: The DivShare play-list that was originally embedded in the Acid Folk Remix Project posts has been replaced by a series of BooMP3 players.]

[Additional note: If the BooMP3 players don't appear, please click here. Thanks.]

2008-11-13T09:00:00.000-08:00

The Acid Folk Remix Project: You're Into It!
There's been a really good response to the announcement of my new Not Me project. More email has come in regarding said project than I've had time to deal with, so apologies to anyone who is yet to receive a reply. Two mixes have already been added to ~~the DivShare play-list~~ , namely:

Comus - "The Bite (Not Me Remix by Esperik Glare)"

and

Anne Briggs - "Living by the Water (Not Me Remix by connect_icut)" [Deleted]

Coming very soon, a veritable shit-load of Pentangle-related mixes, including a particularly radical reworking from The Luminaries and some real vintage connect_icut tracks (if I can find the files).

Also, it seems like a good time to mention that contributors can feel free to:

(a) Send rough mixes. The tracks I've posted so far are basically demos. Hopefully, they'll be replaced by finished versions before too very long.

(b) Contribute out-and-out, no-holds-barred cover versions of classic acid folk tracks or original readings of traditional British/Irish tunes.

The sky's the limit, basically. Go acid folk crazy!

Comus - "The Bite (Remix)"

[Note: The DivShare play-list that was originally embedded in the Acid Folk Remix Project posts has been replaced by a series of BooMP3 players.]

[Additional note: If the BooMP3 players don't appear, please click here. Thanks.]

2008-11-12T09:00:00.000-08:00

Not Me: The Acid Folk Remix Project
As you may know, for each of the last few Christmases, I've made a compilation CDR of classic psychedelic folk rock from the British Isles. Not sure I'm up to the task this year, as most of my recent listening/digging has been focused on other musical arenas. What I'm going to do instead is finally initialize a collaborative musical extravaganza I've been threatening to unleash for some time: The Acid Folk Remix Project.

Basically, the plan is to come up with a CDR featuring experimental remixes of classic psychedelic folk tunes from the late '60s/early '70s. At least some of these remixes will be created by yours truly but I'm also looking for input from third parties. Therefore, you - yes you - are invited to get involved by sending me a remix you've made, based on the work of some circa-1970 UK folky or other.

2008-11-11T09:00:00.000-08:00

Frittering
Been doing a bit of blog repair recently. Random weird things have been happening, like the picture of Paul Morley disappearing and the Autumnal Melancholy Mix starting in the wrong place. Both problems have been corrected.

Can't believe "Frittering" by Mercury Rev got left off that mix. I bought Yerself is Steam during my first week at university and spent a good part of that autumn sulking along to side two, track one. They've still never topped it.

2008-11-10T09:00:00.000-08:00

Flight of the Conchords - "If You're Into It"
Are my features too deep-set to be considered classically handsome?

2008-11-09T09:00:00.000-08:00

Outdoor Miner: Slight Return
You may remember that I wrote about cover versions of Wire's "Outdoor Miner" here and here. Well, according to The Decibel Tolls, there are even more versions of this song than I thought, including this one by neo-shoegazers Experimental Aircraft.

In fact, there's a whole album of the bloody things! I actually wish this kind of thing would happen more often. It's pretty interesting to see the different ways different bands will approach the same song. Probably more interesting than hearing most bands play their own stupid songs, anyway.

2008-11-08T09:00:00.000-08:00

Post-rocktoberfest in November: BBC WTF?
Simon Reynolds just told me about a documentary about post-rock that Paul Morley made for BBC Radio 2 this year. Sadly, it's not available online. Anyone know how I can hear this?

2008-11-07T12:44:00.001-08:00

Best 30 Rock Evar!
"I don't think it's fair for me to be on a jury because I can read thoughts." Enjoy this clip before NBC has it pulled from YouTube. I would embed something from the network's official site, only they just plain don't want people in Canada accessing their online content.

2008-11-06T20:20:00.000-08:00

Autumnal Melancholy Mix
As requested by C O, ten sad songs, hastily plucked from my iTunes folder. When things are finally starting to look up, you can rely on me to thoroughly bum everyone out (in a variety of genres!) "Enjoy".

Need cheering up now? Probably, right? Especially if you live in Vancouver, where the rain appears to be almost literally shitting down. Well then, here's some more good news for you - the fine folks from Fake Jazz are putting on another show at the Western Front. Here are the details:

Fake Jazz Fridays @ Western Front
Friday, November 7, 2008, at 8PM
An evening of experimental, underground fearlessness. Guest curated by Jeremy Van Wick and Bill Batt, creators of Fake Jazz Wednesdays, this event showcases artists from local labels Thankless Records and Isolated Now Waves, with:

Shearing Pinx
Nü Sensae
Aerosol Constellations
a/d
Japanese Graffiti
Aja & Gabe

2008-10-30T17:40:00.000-07:00

Post-rocktoberfest 2008: 30 Rocktoberfest (Spooky, Scary)
So, there you have it - a whole month's-worth of post-rock posts. Sure, most of the third-party contributions fell through and I never did get around to writing about Papa Sprain but what are y'gonna do?

As somebody recently pointed out to me, if you think about it, Post-rocktoberfest should actually be in November. So maybe I'll find time to do that Papa Sprain post after all. Or maybe I'll write something about post-rap.

I hadn't thought about - or listened to - post-rap for ages, until: (a) I got into a comments box debate about it; (b) I heard a few tracks off the new Restiform Bodies LP - which is shaping to be one of my albums of the year.

We'll see if it makes the cut when I do my end-of-year list in December. Boy, you really do have a lot to look forward to don't ya? All this plus the 30 Rock season premier tonight and Halloween just around the corner.

To get you all psyched-up for the ensuing goodness, I'm providing some relevant streaming media content in the player below. Please enjoy responsibly and try not to get too spooked.

2008-10-28T14:11:00.000-07:00

Post-Rocktoberfest 2008: Scorn
Here's what Mark E. Rich has to say about Scorn. This is cross-posted over at Expressway:

If I were to prescribe to Sam's definitions of the three stages of Post Rock (and I do) then I would have caught on to the genre midway through the second stage, with Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die being the launching pad. Post Rock to me, at the time, meant Tortoise and it's many offshoots (Isotope 217, Chicago Underground Duo 217 etc.), Cul De Sac, Gastr Del Sol and the then burgeoning Constellation Records scene (Do Make Say Think, Godspeed! You Black Emperor and A Silver Mount Zion). In all honesty, most likely due to the ignorance of the press I was reading at the time (Spin, Alternative Press and Rolling Stone...so sue me! I lived in a small town where the only outlet to new music were in these music rags), I had no idea there was a post rock scene that preceded this North American one, much less on the other side of the pond. It wasn't until a few years later when I got into UK groups like Seefeel that I found that post rock was originally a British-coined term denoting, as Simon Reynolds (the man behind all this confusion) put it, "using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes, using guitars as facilitators of timbres and textures rather than riffs and powerchords." Well that sure widens the scope of this already confusing genre tag.

This brings us to the album in question--Scorn's Evanescence, which I am still becoming acquainted with, and which was recommended by thee Post Rock Ombudsman himself, to be reviewed by me for Post Rocktoberfest. After several listens over the last few weeks, I still wonder how this fits into the post rock category. I hear more in common with dub, electronic and industrial musics than I do with the mainstays in the post rock genre, or with rock music in general. Most of this album sounds as if it were created on a computer or in a lab rather than by a band using their rock instruments in a forward-thinking manner. In fact, Evanescence sounds a hell of a lot like fellow UK act Meat Beat Manifesto and their two albums, Subliminal Sandwich and Actual Sounds and Voices, and who have always been associated with the industrial-rock scene of the early-mid 90s. Need proof? Check it...

MEAT BEAT MANIFESTO
Boomp3.com

Boomp3.com

SCORN
Boomp3.com

Boomp3.com

Both groups share a penchant for simplistic, dubby grooves, slowly spoken vocals, creeping guitars and synths, and dark, industrial-like noises and tics. So why is that MBM were never slotted into the post rock category? And why was Scorn ever put there in the first place? Both bands created similar works during the same era and in the same part of the world. Perhaps this is what always confused me and many others when having to define post rock and when to assign certain groups into the wide scope of the genre. Some groups made the post rock cut while others were left in the dust.

If you take a look at the current crop of noise rock mongers like Hair Police or Wolf Eyes and place Simon's definition of post rock over top, it becomes a perfect match. Here we have a great example of groups who use rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes. Yet no one dares call Hair Police post rock even though, by definition, they fit the mold perfectly. So are we now in the fourth stage of post rock? Should the "third stage" of post rock (ie. the boring, instrumental "dog shit" rock of Explosions in the Sky and latter day Mogwai) even be included under the post rock umbrella? If Scorn and Meat Beat Manifesto rely on the studio more than rock instruments are they still post rock? Unanswerable questions, really.

The point of writing this was to help contribute a meaningful review of a post rock album to Sam's blog. Instead I think I have just made the already muddy post rock waters just a little murkier.

Scorn Bonus Features
More goodness from ReynoldsRetro. Click the links below to take a closer look:

Review One

Review Two

And two rather amusing live videos from YouTube: one from the very early 90s, when Scorn were still a pre-post-rock metal group and one from the 00s, by which time Scorn had mutated into Mick Harris's solo post-post-rock electronica project.

2008-10-26T20:45:00.000-07:00

Post-rocktoberfest 2008: Simon Reynolds on Techno Animal
To celebrate Post-rocktoberfest, Simon has given me permission to re-post a few of the vintage article scans he's been uploading to his ReynoldsRetro blog. First up, we have an interview with and a review of Kevin Martin's Techno Animal. Click the links below to take a closer look:

Interview Part One

Interview Part Two

Review

2008-10-22T21:21:00.000-07:00

Post-rocktoberfest 2008: Perpetual Motion Machines
My current favourite UK post-rock album is Motion Pool by Main. This monumental three-12" set has to stand as one of the few truly innovative post-Loveless guitar albums. It makes perfect sense, then, that Main went on to release a split 12" with Christian Fennesz. More than any other popular musical artist today, Fennesz beautifully exemplifies the original definition of post-rock: "using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes, using guitars as facilitators of timbres and textures rather than riffs and powerchords."

Well then, this seems like as good a time as any to break the exciting news that Fennesz's long-awaited follow-up to Venice is finally about to arrive. Even more exciting - for me, at least - is the news that Black Sea should be available as a vinyl LP in early November, a full two weeks before the CD is set to arrive. It won't be issued in a triple-12" deluxe edition but you can't ask for everything now, can you?

2008-10-21T18:45:00.000-07:00

Post-rocktoberfest 2008: The Three (de-facto) Ages of Post-Rock
As regular readers will know, I'm something of a post-rock fundamentalist. When I use the term "post-rock", I'm referring to that so-called "lost-generation" of left-field UK indie bands from the early 90s - bands such as Moonshake, Main and Papa Sprain.

Post-rock was first identified as a distinct musical genre by Simon Reynolds in issue 123 of The Wire (May 1994). Simon used the term to describe a wave of acts "using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes, using guitars as facilitators of timbres and textures rather than riffs and powerchords." In more mundane terms, Simon was simply grouping together a fairly diverse collection of UK bands he happened to like at the time, including Disco Inferno, Bark Psychosis, Insides and Seefeel.

Now, even a post-rock fundamentalist like myself would have to admit that these are not the bands most music fans think of when they hear the term post-rock bandied about. The fact is that - in the eyes and ears of the public - any musical genre will be largely defined by its most popular acts. The vast majority of acts in the first wave of UK post-rock achieved little or no commercial success. Those that did get somewhere were either only loosely associated with the post-rock scene (e.g. Stereolab) or achieved their success by sheltering under another marketing umbrella (e.g. Seefeel associating themselves with Warp's "electronic listening music" scene).

Post-rock as a genre term did not receive any widespread recognition until two years later when Simon identified a group of American bands that he believed represented a Johnny-come-lately American equivalent of post-rock. This coincided with the release of Tortoise's classic second album, Millions Now Living Will Never Die. In his book Bring the Noise, Simon expresses confusion over the way the influence of Millions... came to define the sound of post-rock.

Doubtless, Simon would be even more confused to realise that Tortoise-style jazzy noodling no longer defines post-rock in the popular perception. The fact that post-rock has now entered a de-facto third age was recently brought home to me by a series of rather distressing online experiences.

You see, I made the mistake of joining some post-rock discussion forums, notably the AfterthePostRock forum and the Post Rock group on Last FM. I thought these groups might provide some information on and insight into the work of Disco Inferno, Bark Psychosis et al (or at least Tortoise). I was dismayed to find that the discussions never got much further than: "Post-rock is a bit of a meaningless term, isn't it but Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky are rather super, aren't they?"

This was a major WTF moment, for me. Who on earth would join a forum dedicated to the discussion of a musical genre they didn't even believe in the existence of? And how had "post-rock" come to be synonymous with "dogshit awful instrumental indie rock"?

Well, for better or for worse, the two aforementioned acts (it would pain me to type their stupid names again) alongside Godspeed You! Black Emperor (who I've always rather liked) and Sigur Ros are the most popular bands to be labeled post-rock in the last 10 years. Therefore, their brand of quiet-loud-quiet guitar jangle has come to define 21st century post-rock.

To my ears, A Sunny Day in Glasgow - just to pick an example - are way closer to the spirit and sound of first-wave UK post-rock. But my position as Post-Rock Ombudsman only gives me so much power.

And the mob has spoken.

2008-10-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

Post-rocktoberfest 2008: An Extremely Loud Noise Wrapped Inside an Enigma
I'm still not ready to discuss the impact that finally seeing My Bloody Valentine live had on me. Not really. But you can consider this little post a step in the right direction or - at least - an attempt to clarify some of the incoherent-with-near-religious-fervour posts that I've been leaving in other people's comments boxes.

You might be forgiven for asking how this is relevant to post-rock? Well, obviously, My Bloody Valentine had a massive influence on the original UK post-rock scene. Moonshake's First EP and Seefeel's debut album, in particular, sound like wholehearted attempts to do something more creative with MBV-fuleled inspiration than the generic constraints of shoegazing would allow.

Mike Barnes once told me that when MBV's Glider EP came out, he thought it would create a whole new genre of music. Well, in a sense, it did. Glider's classic lead track "Soon" (plus AR Kane's experiments with dub, noise and acid house) equals UK post-rock ground zero, in the same way that Slint's Spiderland prefigured the American scene.

Examining the influence that MBV had on post-rock will tell you a great deal about what UKPR was and how it came to be. But it's unlikely to give you much insight into the continuing enigma of Kevin Shields and his merry band of noiseniks.

First of all, here's something you always have to keep in mind when considering MBV: the band's most stridently avant garde song, "To Here Knows When" (lead track from Tremelo, the follow-up to Glider), was a top 40 hit in the UK! MBV's genuine popularity set the stage for post-rock's assumptions about what might be achieved with experimental rock in the early 90s. While American post-rock was happy to noodle around in its little corner of the world, the British bands often sounded like they were out to assault a much larger chunk of the world at large.

How does this help us understand My Bloody Valentine? It doesn't. Another important thing to understand about MBV is that they can't be fitted into any standard historical rock narrative. Attempts to force MBV's work into any such narrative are almost always indicative of an understandable-but-neurotic need to gain some sort of illusory mental dominance over the inexplicabe. Normally this expresses itself as a kind of defensive flippancy.

Just look at all the fucking idiots parading around the Internet right now, trying to make themselves look clever by glibly dissing My Bloody Valentine. I suspect that most of these people are basically narcissists, hoping to make themselves seem smart by debunking the "myth" of MBV.

The problem for these idiots is that they're basing their actions on the assumption that 15 years of silence has deepened the MBV enigma. In fact, the opposite is true: readers of Q magazine and other assorted rock bozos have had a decade-and-a-half to explain away the magic of Loveless with reference to drugs, insanity, studio "trickery" etc. But seeing the band live absolutely bulldozes these attempts at demystification. How the hell do they make that sound?

The MBV reunion is a massive fuck-you to the almost universally mediocre rock music of the last 15 years. As such, it is making all the right people feel confused and insecure. To my ears, My Bloody Valentine are still at least a decade ahead of the game. MBV live is a unique phenomenon, more intense and nourishing than anything a mere rock concert can provide.

2008-10-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

Post-rocktoberfest 2008: The Final Nail in the Coffin
While "Mr. Wells" was indisputably the song that ended post-rock's dominance of the UK top 40, it was the arrival of Colon that consigned post-rock - that once mighty cultural institution - to the dustbin of history.

Witnessing Colon's historic first appearance on legendary BBC2 rock show Indie Club, it was hard for even the most devout Moonshake fan to deny that a new era was being ushered in. How could mere post-rock compete with a band with so much to say and such an original, eloquent, forceful way of saying it?

2008-10-12T09:00:00.000-07:00

Post-rocktoberfest 2008: Ian Crause is Alive, Well and Living in Bolivia
Recently got a blomment from Crumbs in the Butter, a delightfully Web 1.0 online magazine which claims to have an upcoming interview with ex-Disco Inferno front-man Ian Crause. The site seems to mainly concentrate on third-wave UKPR bands like Epic 45. I have mixed feelings about such acts but have to admire the way these folks are attempting to keep the flame alive.

And, in any case, the cautious re-emergence of Crause has to be cause for celebration. If you obsessively follow happenings in the comments box of Sit Down Man You're a Bloody Tragedy, you'll know that the great man has made not one, not two but three major public pronouncements recently!

Okay, so my tone may be jokey but there really is reason for joy here. Among the mildly bizarre tidbits of information Crause gives us (he's moved to Bolivia, he's never heard of Fennesz) are hints of great things to come. Or some things to come, at the very least. Crause tells us he's recently started working on music again and that what he has planned is rather ambitious.

This news, along with the triumphant return of My Bloody Valentine, is tantamount to permission for the reinitialization of innovation in rock music. Sure, Ian Crause's previous solo work, while excellent in its own way, was hardly groundbreaking and it's highly unlikely that MBV will ever release any more new material but you have to figure that just having bastions of (relatively) recent rock innovation back on the scene will impact the way guitar-wielding youngsters perceive their collective duty to the future.

Mind you, when Radiohead dropped Kid A, I thought it was going to turn alternative rock into a playground for the avant garde. All it really did was inadvertantly turn Coldplay into megastars. If nothing else, tommorow's indie rock bands will have even fewer excuses for continuing to ignore the fact that they can - and should - do better.

Since the whole Kid A debacle, I hadn't really thought about rock having a "future", as such. But then I saw My Bloody Valentine live and everything changed. More on this soon.

2008-10-10T09:45:00.000-07:00

Post-Rocktoberfest 2008: Bark Psychosis - "Absent Friend"
A UK post-rock YouTube fan video! Could there possibly be more of this stuff out there? Answers on a postcard to the usual address.

2008-10-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

Post-rocktoberfest 2008: The One That Got Away
Bizarrely enough, minutes after publishing my post on The True Cost of UK Post-Rock, I noticed that someone had put a vinyl copy of The Hair and Skin Trading Company's Jo in Nine G Hell up on eBay, with a starting bid of one pound. And you know what happened? I got outbid on the fucker!

I have to stop letting this happen to me. Regret is a terrible thing. So, this seems like as good a time as any to post my personal UK post-rock wish-list. If anyone could hook me up with a cheap vinyl copy of one or more of these recordings, I would be eternally grateful:

Butterfly Child - Tooth Fairy 12" and Eucalyptus 12"
Early singles on AR Kane's H.ark! label. Not sure Eucalyptus actually exists on vinyl, though.

Deadstock - Deadstock LP and Oedipus Sucks 10"
I believe that one of the Mordant Music guys was in this band. They sounded like "Blue" era Bark Psychosis. Again, I'm not entirely sure the album actually came out on vinyl.

Earwig - Under My Skin I am Laughing LP
Insides before they were called Insides.

The Hair and Skin Trading Company - Jo in Nine G Hell LP, Over Valence LP and Psychedelische Musique LP
The "other two" from Loop. The ones who didn't go on to form Main.

Laika - Good Looking Blues LP
Mainly for the excellent novelty rock single "Bad Times". I'd also accept the spangle-covered 7" of that song.

Moonshake - First 12"
On Creation and sounding remarkably shoegazy! This one has escaped my grasp a couple of times recently, actually but I did manage to steal the MP3s from teh intertubes.

Papa Sprain - May 12"
Another H.ark! rarity from the most mysterious post-rock act of all, this is about as desirable as rare records get, as far as I'm concerned. Hope to write about this band at greater length in the not-too-distant-future.

Seefeel - Quique LP
Fat chance of finding a cheap copy of this. Goes for a mint. I currently only have it on a US promo cassette!

The Third Eye Foundation - Semtex LP, Semtex 12" and In Version LP
Likewise, these are not dollar bin items, by any stretch of the imagination.

2008-10-06T09:00:00.000-07:00

Post-rocktoberfest 2008: Ultimate UK Post-Rock Playlist
Here's an iTunes playlist from my computer at work, presented in DivShare format, for your online streaming pleasure. Most, if not all, of these songs have previously appeared on my UK post-rock compilation CDRs but that's no reason not to enjoy them again, in a webtastic embedded media context. Those of you who are courageous enough to brave DivShare's gauntlet of sketchy banner ads and counterintuitive user interface design can get the original files here.

2008-10-05T17:59:00.000-07:00

Post-rocktoberfest 2008: Why Post-Rock Failed
It happened during a long, hot summer in the mid '90s (the exact date is lost among the mists of time). England's two biggest post-rock acts - Disco Inferno and Bark Psychosis - went head-to-head, releasing new singles on the same date and directly competing for the coveted number one spot. Nobody really new whether it would be "Second Language" or "Blue" that would top the hit parade that week but we were all pretty sure it would be one or the other.

And then, something incredible happened. An unknown young band from Manchester unleashed a debut single of such raw, elemental power that it rocketed to numero uno, leaving devastation in its wake and effectively ending post-rock's stranglehold on the British pop charts. The band was called Oasis, the song was called "Mr. Wells" and the rest is history.

2008-10-03T09:00:00.000-07:00

Post-Rocktoberfest 2008: Moonshake - "Second Hand Clothes"
I've spoken before about how much impact this video had on me back in the day.

"Here's the song that got me into post-rock in the first place. One week back in my adolescence, a friend who had satellite TV taped MTV Europe's 'alternative' show for me because The Fall were on it. The show also featured the video for 'Second Hand Clothes', a song which still sounds raw, unearthly and startlingly original."

Yep. It's power remains undiminished, even now. Really worth picking up the 12", if you can find it. All the tracks are great and there's a wicked locked groove at the end of side two - a Jaki Leibezeit-style drum pattern that more than justifies Moonshake's decision to name themselves after a Can song.

At the time, what media coverage the first incarnation of Moonshake gained mostly concentrated on the twin songwriting talents of Dave Callahan and Margaret Fiedler. But what made this EP an instant classic was the devastatingly dry-and-heavy rhythm section of John Frennet and "Mig" (real name Michael Rother, apparently!) That and the sporadic storms of guitar and sampler noise.

I know it's easier not to watch the stupid YouTube videos people embed in their blog posts but I really hope you take a look at this one, out of respect for how totally it blew my tiny teenage mind.

2008-10-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

Post-rocktoberfest 2008: The True Cost of UK Post-Rock
Man, the ol' record-buying habit certainly started to get a bit out of control last year. There were numerous precipitating factors but a lot of it had to do with the existence of eBay. Nowadays, if you want a record, you can be pretty sure that it'll come up on eBay eventually, no matter how obscure the artist is.

So it was that I started buying classic UK post-rock vinyl. Like a lot of people, I spend a significant proportion of my record-buying cash on things I enjoyed as a youth (via the radio, dubbed cassettes etc.) but didn't have the funds to actually invest in, at the time.

It's weird that people can only afford to own much of the music they love once they get to an age at which music is no longer the be-all-and-end-all of their lives. It's important for us aging vinyl snobs to remember that we've had many of our most intense musical experiences via low-quality, high convenience media. Honestly, what's the difference between a song taped off a crackly radio show and a low-bit MP3 downloaded from some bozo's blog?

Anyway, last year's UK post-rock catch-up yielded some real gems, including the Spoonfed Hybrid LP and Papa Sprain's "Flying to Vegas" 12". But it turned out to be surprisingly expensive. Here's the thing: there is a market for UKPR but it's a very small one. Therefore, it's potentially worth a seller's while to put a choice post-rock item on eBay but there's no guarantee that said item is going to spark a major bidding war. Chances are there's only one person out there who's looking for it, so the seller is pretty much forced to fix a relatively high minimum bid or put the item up as an expensive "Buy it Now" item.

This year, the ol' record-buying habit has been kept under control by the setting of a strict monthly budget, most of which gets spent at Zulu, on electronica special orders. Buying stuff on eBay is pretty much out of the question. This is partly because of shipping, which can easily add 10 or 15 bucks to the price of a record. But it largely has to do with the inflated prices of the items I'm looking for. In any store, these records would go straight to the dollar bin but on eBay they can cost as much as $40 - before shipping!

And the fact is that - more often than not - nobody bids on this stuff. Who wants to pay $55 for a dollar record? If these prices are too high for me then who the hell is going to pay them? Behold! I am The World's Greatest UK Post-rock fan and I am not prepared to blow my entire monthly record-buying allowance on something that I should - by rights - be able to pick up for a buck or two.

Perhaps I'll have to start picking my way through the dollar bins, depressing as that thought may be. Who knows what may be hiding there?

2008-09-29T16:26:00.000-07:00

If the Watchmen Movie Looked Like This, I Might Actually See It
Josh Rose sent me this image and while it’s clearly awesome, whoever is responsible for it has made some pretty basic errors.

Specifically:

Charlie Brown should be Nite Owl II
Snoopy should be Doctor Manhattan
Linus should be Ozymandias
Lucy should be The Comedian
Sally Brown should be Silk Spectre II
Pig Pen should be Rorschach

2008-09-26T15:00:00.000-07:00

Wild Combination
The Vancouver International Film Festival just started. They're showing that Arthur Russell film. Sadly The Pants I Have Owned didn't make the cut.

But don't listen to me. The only real way to get any useful VIFF lowdown is from the planet's most beautiful, witty and intelligent blogger.

2008-09-24T16:34:00.001-07:00

Do Fake Do Front
Fake Jazz at the Western Front this Friday. Details here.

2008-09-17T15:00:00.000-07:00

Post-rocktoberfest: A Call for Contributions
Owen just published a fantastic little post about Disco Inferno and the credit crunch. But couldn't he have waited? After all, Post-rocktoberfest is just 'round the corner and I would've been delighted to have cross-posted his piece during the festivities.

Seriously, though, in the unlikely event that there are some other bloggers out there who would like to write a UK post-rock post for The Blogglebum Cage, I'd be fully, fully into it. Email me! We'll make arrangements.

Alternatively, if anyone has some secret post-rock knowledge or hyperlinks they'd like to share, my eternal gratitude will surely be forthcoming. I'm particularly looking for: (a) information on what ex-members of UK post-rock bands are up to now; (b) live video footage of UK post-rock bands.

Or you could just sit on your lazy arses as usual and do fuck all. The choice is yours.

2008-09-14T16:00:00.000-07:00

Bonus Novelty Rock Video Cavalcade
These should have Carl Impostume crying into his chips and gravy. Plenty more where they came from, too.

Worth doing this post for the P:ano video alone.

Blur - "Parklife"

Holy Modal Rounders - "If You Want to be a Bird"

Hot Chip - "Boy from School"

Daniel Johnston - "Casper"

Monty Python's Flying Circus - "The Lumberjack Song"

P:ano - "Christmas (What's it All About?)"

Jason Segel - "Lady L"

Brendon Small - "Freaky Outie"

The Streets - "Fit but You Know It"

Ween - "Push th' Little Daisies"

Wiley - "Pies"

Moon Unit Zappa - "Valley Girl"

2008-09-12T11:50:00.000-07:00

Image Unrelated
You may notice a slight lack of blogging for the rest of the month. Post-rocktoberfest is almost upon us and preparations must be made. In the meantime, if you live in Vancouver, you should go to Fake Sleep at VIVO tonight. Here are the details:

Fake Sleep
Fibrillation (Anomalous Records, from Bangkok)
Gabriel Mindel Saloman (ex-Yellow Swans)
Aerosol Constellations (Shearing Pinx, Stamina Mantis)
Empty Love + Les Beyond (dueling drone artists)

Fri Sep 12
VIVO Media Arts Centre
1695 Main Street, Vancouver
Doors at 8, first band at 9pm sharp!

2008-09-09T09:51:00.000-07:00

There is No "Music"
There is Basic Channel and there is silence.

2008-09-08T11:48:00.000-07:00

Evolution in Progress!
This is also funny. This provides some context.

2008-09-07T15:48:00.000-07:00

Get Your Sleep On
When there's a Fake Jazz-related event in a non-terrifying venue, you really have to go. The extremely rare opportunity to witness the super-talented Fibrillation is the icing on the cake.

2008-09-06T11:59:00.000-07:00

Dogmeme
According to IT: "The idea is to identify the common rhetorical and stylistic tropes of your favourite bloggers and ask them to write a post in which they get taken away, thus revealing the pure truth of their writing. Possibly. All posts must be at least 200 words."

I was tagged by Carl, who demanded "no electronica, no confessions, no cats, no reasonableness", so here are my at least 200 words:

I won't tell you the name of the fucking stupid exhibition that's thankfully about to end at the Vancouver Art Gallery. It's a name that obliquely references something Carl's dumb-ass "dogmeme" guidelines prohibit me from referencing - obliquely or otherwise. This may already be one oblique reference too far but so what? Get off my fucking back already, it was just an oblique reference!

Oblique! Fucking!! Reference!!!

Anyway, it seems that the dick-wads and ass monkeys at the VAG hit upon quite the money-spinning scheme for this summer: essentially an exhibition of geek culture, taking in comics, video games and animation. After all, your average nerd will have not only a decent amount of disposable income but also a foolhardy willingness to actually dispose of this income on anything that falls within the general remit of geek culture.

Additionally, regular folk have recently shown a strong willingness to vicariously indulge in geekiness of various kinds, just so long as they don't actually have to - you know - buy an actual comic book or anything. Cunts! The VAG's sickeningly cynical marketing bullshit played heavily upon this tendency, accentuating the freak factor involved to a skin-crawling degree.

As if this horrifying marketing campaign would not be enough to thoroughly crush our spirits, the VAG added insult to injury by throwing the actual exhibition together in an insultingly cavalier fashion. For example, absolutely no attempt was made to logicaly connect the different media involved or make them work together.

The English-language comics and "graphic novels" section (that term was used in quotes throughout the exhibition) concentrated exclusively on indie/underground cartooning. If any attention had been given to mainstream American comics, it might have made more sense to put comic book art in the same exhibition as stills from video games. But it's hard for all but the most ignorant of fuckheads to see any link between Chris Ware and "Grand Theft Auto".

The real drag was that, among all this ignorantly thrown-together clutter, lay some real gems. Perhaps the most moving pieces of all were original production drawings from Windsor McCay's massively seminal cartoon "Gertie the Dinosaur". Interesting that McCay was included for "Gertie..." while the equally influential "Little Nemo in Slumberland" was ignored entirely. Doubtless the curators felt the unfortunate period racism that blighted "Nemo" would make patrons uncomfortable. And we wouldn't want to make anyone uncomfortable while we were taking their money now, would we? Not in an art gallery, nooo...

You fucking bastards.

I'm only going to tag three people. I tag...

Expressway to My Skull: No music I've never heard of, no Byron Coley-isms, no uploads

Tower of Sleep: No indie rock, no Vancouver, no moustaches

Updateable Mixtape: No hyperlinks, no embedded media, no Internet whatsoever

I know that these limitations have more to do with subject matter and layout than writing style but so what? I'm feeling unreasonable!

2008-09-05T16:23:00.001-07:00

Never Tell You
Behold The Sneefler as she tries to decide which Rhythm and Sound 10" to put on next.

2008-09-04T17:05:00.000-07:00

Novelty Rock Video Clash Part Five: "I'm a Little Dinosaur" by Jonathan Richman
I win! I win! And this proves it! Oddly, I actually thought about posting "Star Trekkin" myself, at one point. You can consider "I'm a Little Dinosaur" the knockout punch, if you like. I'm sure Carl will agree when I say that Jonathan Richman is the Greek God of Novelty Rock.

2008-09-03T11:30:00.000-07:00

Novelty Rock Video Clash Part Four: "We Don't Play Guitars" by Chicks on Speed
This is pretty ripe. The only problem is that it's unmitigated crap whereas great novelty rock is - more often that not - mitigated crap (I can't think of a better description of The Moldy Peaches).

For some reason, Carl's pick got me thinking about "Track X" by Sheep on Drugs. "Track X" is a terrible art school goth/novelty techno take on The Normal's "Warm Leatherette" - I believe that both songs were covered by Grace Jones. Unfortunately, Sheep on Drugs' crap was in no way mitigated. But it did get me thinking about the similarly-named Chicks on Speed - art school electroclash/novelty techno pranksters who also covered "Warm Leatherette".

Novelty lyrics can elevate fairly ordinary music to the realm of the avant garde. Often the line between arty experimentalism and goofy comedy is perilously thin. Ladies and gentlemen: Chicks on Speed, the Fuzzbox it's (kinda) okay to like.

2008-09-02T14:27:00.000-07:00

Recently Played
Here's what iTunes Party Shuffle has been puking up on my work computer (click the image for a closer look). The spooky thing is that it 'randomly' chose to play Sonic Youth's "Do You Believe in Rapture?" back-to-back with "Rapture's Delight" by KRS-One. Is someone trying to tell me something?

2008-09-01T17:30:00.000-07:00

Novelty Rock Video Clash Part Three: "Lucky Number Nine" by The Moldy Peaches
I thought this was a bit of a cheap shot. There's a difference between unintentionally funny rock and novelty rock, mate. Besides, all the best rock is unintentionally funny. It takes a special kind of asshole to be sincerely comedic (as opposed to comedically sincere). And the Moldy Peaches were very "special" indeed. Besides, all the best novelty rock is intentionally annoying.

2008-08-31T21:15:00.000-07:00

Negative Community
Of course, you could easily argue that it's too early to start talking about Vancouver's weird-punk/harsh noise scene having problems. The scene is constantly growing stronger as an artistic community. Shows, releases and events of various kinds are happening more and more frequently. There's every reason to believe that artists like Twin Crystals and Sick Buildings will produce world class albums within the next couple of years. And - aside from anything else - everyone involved with the scene is really really nice.

Still, it seems very possible that if these folks aren't willing or able to avoid some (perhaps rather obvious) pitfalls that will confront them over the coming months and years, they're going to risk stagnation and/or self-caricature. If you're involved in a musical movement of any kind, you have to stay alert and critical about what's going on around you. Any scene's strengths can easily become liabilities, especially when dogma starts to set in.

The main strength/liability that a real music scene faces is that it is a community. This can be a great thing for musicians - community makes things psychologically and logistically possible. But communities can easily become gangs or cliques. Communities are founded on exclusion of the Other and they're maintained by suppression of the incompatible. If a scene wants to stay vibrant, it must do the unthinkable: recognize elements from the outside the community and let them in. This risks destroying the community but not taking this risk guarantees destroying what makes the community worthwhile.

So, while some people involved with this particular scene have made it clear that they want nothing to do with electronic dance music, there are plenty of weird-punks and harsh noiseniks who do, in fact, know their minimal techno from their dubstep. If these heretical influences are allowed to infect the scene, we're going to hear some pretty startling and original music. Imagine a Villalobos remix of Twin Crystals' "No Clinics".

The main reason someone like Villalobos is so alien to this scene is that his work is primarily focused on hedonism, whereas weird-punk/harsh noise is relentlessly, self-consciously negative. The scene's "harsh music for a harsh environment" approach is all well and good but it only tells half the story. The music really does express something important about the horrific economic inequality that blights Vancouver life. But its aesthetic doesn't propose any viable Utopian alternative and - at its worst - goes as far as glamourising poverty and squalor.

This goes back to the old problem of musical styles that try to evoke urban reality. They inevitably end up buying into the capitalist lie that this reality is some immovable state of nature, rather than the result of a very particular set of socio-economic circumstances. Vancouver could be a wonderful place to live. Unfortunately our collective spirit is being crushed by forces that want to use the city as an experiment in how far neoliberal economics can be allowed to run before total chaos sets in.

We're all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the mountains.

2008-08-30T21:01:00.000-07:00

Novelty Rock Video Clash Part Two: "Jesus Was Way Cool" by King Missile
I have to admit that this was a pretty great riposte but we're supposed to be doing a sound-clash here, not a call-and-response. For my next volley, I almost selected "Fish Heads" by Barnes and Barnes but I felt sorry for the fish. Then I discovered the phenomenon of "Jesus Was Way Cool" fan videos and the choice became clear. This is the best one, obviously. Linus was way cool.

2008-08-29T09:57:00.000-07:00

I Mean... Obviously, Right?
Thanks This Recording.

Are Joanna Newsom and Andy Samberg really a couple?

2008-08-27T09:00:00.000-07:00

Novelty Rock Video Clash Part One: "All I Want for Christmas is a Dukla Prague Away Kit" by Half Man Half Biscuit
It's on!! Beat that Mr. Impostume!

2008-08-26T14:00:00.000-07:00

Harsh Realm
Interesting article on the Exclaim! website about the Vancouver noise scene. Nice to see these kids getting some attention in the mainstream media (and - no - The Wire doesn't count). As usual, though, I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. The main element that's bothersome is the disdain for electronic dance music expressed by a few of the people interviewed. This seems like bullshit to me, given that the city's uncontrollably vibrant noise crowd is in exactly the same boat as its equally happening post-rave/dubstep massive. Both are having to create their own spaces to exist in; refusing to be squeezed out of existence by the city's crypto-Satanic neo-liberal overground.

2008-08-24T10:15:00.000-07:00

Obviously, I Want One
Seriously, I haven't felt so niche-marketed since that Vanity Fair cover. Get out of my head Ugobe!

2008-08-23T11:33:00.000-07:00

More Late Notice Local Noise
The Rita gets conceptual at Antisocial tonight. Should be interesting. I think Sick Buildings is playing too and maybe some others. 2425 Main. Starts at eight sharp.

Things are looking up - I'm finding out about cool shows the day before they happen instead of the day after.

2008-08-22T16:45:00.000-07:00

My Bloody Valentine
When will the right time come? When can we really get into this? When will we know that the language has evolved which will allow us to say what must be said?

Never.

So, fuck it - might as well start talking about My Bloody Valentine; fumbling our way towards some sort of enlightenment or insight. Perhaps all we really need to acknowledge, though, is the fact that this music can't be explained, accounted for or tidied away into a neat little box. That's specifically why it's so... is "interesting" too weak a word?

Words are too weak. That's the point.

Certainly, it's been said that lyric-writing was never the band's greatest strength. Where the words are audible at all, they generally amount to little more than simplistically needy pleading for sex or drugs or whatever. But context is everything in music and within the context of MBV's music, these words have an astonishingly precise, elemental power. That's why "Slow" can sound so momentous when it's really just a little ditty about... well... getting a blow job, frankly!

The point is that My Bloody Valentine are absolutely the most conceptually coherent act in rock history. It all makes sense in light of the master plan. And yet, shedding light on precisely what that plan comprises is hard work at best. Are there any precedents for this?

The only name that springs to mind is The Ramones. It's surely significant that The Ramones are a key Valentines influence. Like MBV, they built an incredibly intelligent gestalt from a few dumb elements. Like MBV, they created something shockingly piquant which fans, critics and imitators alike have consistently been unable to explain or recapture. It's easy to identify the parts, impossible to account for the sum. It's unlikely we'll ever know what the Ramones were actually getting at. But it makes so much sense on a visceral level; rings so true.

It could be said that the very problem with MBV is that their muse is so singular. They presented a future for rock music - perhaps, the only viable one that's been proposed in the last 20 years - but they did so in a way that was fundamentally inimitable. This has led many people to believe that, since the band's early-90s heyday, rock has been a style which has exhausted its potential for innovation.

That's why I sometimes have mixed feelings about UK post-rock. Much as I love acts like Scorn and Techno Animal, they did rather seem like ways for rock musicians to escape from the responsibility of carving out a future for rock per se; to disappear into electronica and experimental music. Only Disco Inferno seemed to have a valid vision of some future rock but their ambition far outstripped the technical and financial resources they had at hand.

Still, hearing MBV play songs from Loveless in Manchester this summer... well it still sounded like the future - more than 15 years down the line. It still sounded like there was a future. The lasting impression it gave me was that the last decade and a half of rock has not been a story of exhausted potential but one of mere laziness and cowardice.

2008-08-22T12:40:00.000-07:00

Allez!
The relentless onslaught of critical adulation continues apace. Secret Beaches reviewed on Mapsadaisical.

2008-08-20T17:39:00.000-07:00

Do Your Homework
Those of you who enjoyed the Ahmad track on my last '90s rap compilation owe it to yourselves to take a look at this.

2008-08-19T17:10:00.000-07:00

Short Notice
Only just heard about this and I probably can't make it but if you're in Vancouver and you're younger and less tired than me, then this show offers a great opportunity to hear two of the city's most intriguing experimental music acts, in a pretty cool venue:

Rundownsun Presents...
Rough Noble & Ian Gregory James
Cassette Release
Tuesday August 19th, 8pm, $3
Solder & Sons
247 Main Street, Vancouver BC, V6A 2S7

2008-08-17T21:30:00.000-07:00

Brilliant!
In these distracting times, it's particularly satisfying to find a truly addictive new album - one that takes a hold and doesn't let go; that you just have to hear over and over again. In recent months, the two albums that have really grabbed a hold of these here ears have been Pluramon's The Monstrous Surplus and I'll be the Same by Sun.

Mentioning the two albums in tandem is particularly relevant, as they're both essentially indie-pop records made by experimental artists. Pluramon is the rock-and-pop-focused project of multimedia journeyman Markus Schmickler. I'll be the Same, meanwhile, is album number two from the Australian duo of Chris Townsend and renowned experimental guitar-and-electronics manipulator Oren Ambarchi

Now, I don't know if I've mentioned Oren Ambarchi before but I'm rather fond of his work. Having said that, it must be confessed that Sun's self-titled debut album was not all that great. Townsend and Ambarchi apparently went out of their collective way to make the most straightforward record they could, suppressing their avant impulses, whenever they arose. The results essentially sounded like Galaxie 500 without Kramer's production. The LP's main saving grace was a bonus disc which set a host of guest remixers loose on the songs.

With I'll be the Same, Sun have clearly found the confidence to just go with the flow, allowing their gift for pop hooks coexist with their restless need for invention. Actually, "coexist" is too wishy-washy a term for what's happening on these six drifting, shifting songs. Sure, the tunes and arrangements sound sunny but there's a real undertow of unease and discontent here that keeps the interest level high throughout. And would it be too fanciful to suggest that this quality is quintessentially antipodean? The sampled poolside chatter on "Bruise Things" would certainly suggest so.

The opening track - "Mosquito" - is the most sublimely catchy tune I've heard in quite some time, piling hooks upon hooks - seemingly more with every listen. "Help Yourself" starts off as post-Jandek free-folk scrabble but develops into a pop song in a manner which is truly witty and ingenious. "Right Now" sounds like Surf's Up era Beach Boys re-imagined by Ween. Elsewhere, there are hints of Pavement, Fennesz, The Animal Collective and so on and so forth.

And so there you have it - a truly addictive new album. It's not really all that new though, to be honest. I'll be the Same was actually released on CD by Staubgold and on LP by Important last year. But it eluded my grasp for so long that I only just heard it. I could never find a record store that stocked the LP and the MP3s didn't ever show up on Solarseek. Eventually, I ordered the LP direct from Important. So here it is, on milky white vinyl, steadfastly refusing to leave my turntable.

Helps that the weather's been so good.

2008-08-15T15:51:00.000-07:00

Thurston Moore Likes Me!
They Showed Me the Secret Beaches reviewed in issue 30 of Arthur magazine by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley. Thanks to Numark for the tip-off.

2008-08-09T13:15:00.000-07:00

White Noise, Pink Noise and New Age Power Electronics
It's probably a sign of the times that much of the most interesting music being made right now is so extreme. It's getting dark and only noise seems to make sense. This is fine as far as it goes but it only goes so far. Here, then, are some proposed escape routes from the cul-de-sac of dark noise.

Russell Haswell is certainly a dude with spotlessly dark credentials; a fan of black metal and Whitehouse. And yet, there's something else happening on his latest double LP, Second Live Salvage. First of all, Haswell takes an restlessly cerebral approach to his noise. These visceral sound-art erruptions are powered entirely by high-end, academic computer music software.

The other interesting thing about Second Live Salvage is that it's a collection of live recordings sourced from audience members. The official-bootleg concept takes Haswell's music away from it's digital source and puts it in a room. This only adds to the elemental power of his mind-bending noise constructions. Second Live Salvage is viciously intelligent.

It also has a great cover, which is possibly a pastiche of Keith Jarrett's new age jazz classic The Koln Concert.

Talking of great album covers, John Wiese's Soft Punk has some of the best packaging in quite some time: a wall of pink Marshall amps on the cover and a slab of marbled pink vinyl on the inside. You've got to love Wiese, the cat who famously guested with Sunn0))), sitting upright in an open coffin, laptop in lap.

Like Haswell, Wiese's noise is distinctly digital but - by contrast - there's very little darkness on display here. Soft Punk is extremely harsh-sounding but it's also relentlessly good-humoured, recalling nothing so much as Kid 606's Down with the Scene (complete with sampled drumstick clicks). Approximately, ten tonnes of fun.

Less heavy but just as effective in its combination of digital noise and good vibes is Astral Social Club's Model Town in Field of Mud. It's been described as a mixture of free-folk with Villalobos-style minimal techno and - while that may be a little fanciful - it's certainly good to see someone from the new weird noise underground (ASC's Neil Campbell is an ex-member of Vibracathedral Orchestra) taking an interest in electronica.

Actually, to these ears, what Model Town's combination of digital noise and acoustic picking really recalls is connect_icut's LA (An Apology). Which is possibly why I like it so much.

2008-08-04T15:00:00.000-07:00

Rejoice!
Today is that most special of days. Roxie - aka The Sneefler - is seven. Good to see Canada has finally declared her birthday a national holiday.

To celebrate, here's another sneak preview of the next connect_icut album, Let's Hear it for the Vague Blur. The track in the player below is called "The Roxie Music". The title was suggested by perpetual wiseacre Jesse Simon. The image above should appear on the album artwork, which I'm hoping Jesse will design.

The song itself was made heavily under the influence of Haswell and Hecker's Blackest Ever Black. Basically, I used an application called HighC to turn cartoons of The Sneefler into sound loops, then ran the results through my Max patch. The results were suitably bonkers.

Let's Hear it for the Vague Blur should be available as a free MP3 download, some time in the next 12 months. Unless anyone wants to step up and do a proper release.

2008-08-02T20:45:00.000-07:00

Still Ill
Great hip-hop top 10 over at Expressway, complete with MP3s. The particularly interesting thing about this list is that, although it's presented as an all-time best-of, the albums are drawn exclusively from the early-to-mid '90s. A few years ago, if one were to suggest that this period happened to be rap music's real golden age, one would inevitably be greeted with looks of blank incomprehension. Take it from one who knows.

Seems that my personal favourite era of music (hip-hop or otherwise) is undergoing quite the critical rehabilitation. Even post-Oval electronica appears to be back in fashion, with glitch diehards like Pita and alva noto (not to mention their associated labels) receiving praise from the most unlikely of quarters. Go '90s!

2008-07-29T09:45:00.000-07:00

Defeat
Well, I told Carl I was going to write something about Chumbabwamba but - let's face it - I'm never going to top this. All I can offer him in return is the smattering of random Half Man Half Biscuit MP3s that I was able to find via The Hype Machine.

Fuckin' 'Ell It's Fred Titmus
Quintessential! Evidently, Fred Titmus was a cricketer.

I Hate Nerys Hughes (From the Heart)
Can't really agree with the sentiments expressed here. Who didn't love The District Nurse? Seems to be some kind of (attempted) metal pastiche. As featured on the NME's legendary C86 compilation.

Dickie Davis Eyes
Again, a (failed) genre pastiche (this time, prog) which expresses sentiments I can't agree with ("Mention The Lord of the Rings just once more/And I'll more than likely kill you" etc.) in a way that I find entirely amusing. Is that the theme from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy they go into at one point?

Apparently, Half Man Half Biscuit are still going in some form or another. They even have a website, where you can buy their music. The site also informs us that, a couple of years ago, HMHB put out an album called Achtung Bono - reason enough to love them forever, surely.

Wonder which sports celebrities Nigel Blackwell is singing about nowadays. Can I put in a vote in for a song about this year's anti-heroic Tour de France loser Cadel Evans? I mean, look at this:

And then there's this:

Apparently, "dog" means "foot" in Australia.

Surprising how sad I was to see this year's Tour end. Still, at least Cadel didn't win.

2008-07-26T14:22:00.000-07:00

Unmissable!!!
And this time I mean by me, too. Prob'ly.

2008-07-15T00:05:00.000-07:00

You Like Me!
Extremely heartening review of the new connect_icut LP, by Chris Sharp, in the latest issue of The Wire. Thanks to Scott Mapsadaisical for the scan.

My advice? Renew your subscription to The Wire. Then order They Showed Me the Secret Beaches at one of these fine outlets:

Scratch (Canada)

Scratch (US)

Rough Trade (UK)

2008-07-14T00:27:00.000-07:00

I Tolerate Novelty Rock
Not sure why. But it's a fact I had to face when admitting to Carl Impostume that I'd just spent ten quid on a vinyl copy of Half Man Half Biscuit's Back in the DHSS. I knew he'd understand. He's a Jonathan Richman fan.

The example of Richman is probably instructive. The real appeal of Jonathan is - I've always assumed - the man's utter sincerity. There seems to be some link between undeniably sincere songwriting and no-holds-barred novelty rock. Or at least, there seems to be a place where the former crosses into the latter. That would explain Current 93, then.

The Moldy Peaches are another good case in point. Sometimes it's the most stupid lines in their ludicrous "songs" that are the most touching. I honestly get quite choked up when I hear Kimya Dawson sing: "Without 40 ounces of social skills/I'm just an ass in the crack of humanity/I'm just a huge manatee." Its true!

But Half Man Half Biscuit? Surely there's no excuse for that! The explanation I gave Carl at the time was "pure nostalgia". Well, as a smartypants blogger, I should be able to excuse my nostalgia by resorting to the good ol' H word, right?

Actually, there is something (vaguely) defacto hauntological about hearing Nigel Blackwell trauling through the dregs of 80s popular culture. Of course, at the time, he was just flicking bogies at the contemporary world as it appeared to him. But his (literally) pathetic songs have taken on a new poignancy now that most of the celebs who irked him so much are no longer famous.

The wow-and-flutter of the production probably helps. I got into HMHB as a young teen, via a third-or-fourth generation cassette of their first two albums. It's surprising to hear some of those songs again on a near-mint vinyl pressing and realize that the tape was actually a fairly decent reproduction of a really really crappy sound.

2008-07-12T12:18:00.000-07:00

Unmissable!
Erm... except I'm probably going to miss it because we're moving on Tuesday and several days of chaos and exhaustion are anticipated. But you should go. If you're in town, like.

2008-07-09T15:29:00.000-07:00

Available
UK readers take note: those fine people at Rough Trade think the new connect_icut album is "very good" and they're inviting you to purchase it here for ten quid .

2008-07-08T17:25:00.000-07:00

Fell Walking!
High wind plus condenser mic equals nature's own harsh noise (as we have previously noted).

2008-07-07T14:40:00.000-07:00

Puppy!
Keith: an Italian Greyhound.

2008-07-06T22:40:00.000-07:00

Argh! (Part Twenty-Seven Billion)
Remind me again why I should give a shit about this year's Tour de France. While the string of scandals over the last couple of years may have helped to clean up the sport of cycling in the long run, it's almost certainly claimed some innocent victims along the way (I maintain that Landis and Rasmussen are both 100% innocent... prob'ly).

What's worse, the cull has basically removed all of the most talented and entertaining cyclists from the Tour. And some of my personal favourite characters have been kicked out under utterly ludicrous circumstances.

Animal lover Levi Leipheimer made the disastrous move of joining the [deleted: well-chosen and objectively justifiable pejorative term] Astana team, which was subsequently banned from the race. Worst of all, pretty-boy record collector Tom Boonen just tested positive for non-performance-enhancing cocaine. Come on! The guy has a yellow Lamborghini!! Obviously, he takes cocaine!!!

[Deleted: Witty and accurate appraisal of remaining race favourites.]

God alone knows what's really going on behind the scenes in the highly-political, big money world of professional cycling. All I know is that it's the loyal fans who lose out. Not sure I'll even bother following the race this year, to be honest.

2008-07-06T22:10:00.000-07:00

Forthcoming
There are some pretty exciting musical artists coming to Vancouver over the next couple of months - and I'm not just referring to the thrilling prospect of connect_icut taking the "stage" at Blim, 8pm sharp this Friday.

First of all, the mighty kode9 will be playing at Richards, Monday night. Sadly, I won't be making it along to this particular show. The ad says "curfew late" and jet-lag currently has me nodding off at about three in the afternoon. This may be the third time that avant-dubstep's undisputed kingpin has played Vancouver and I haven't managed to see him once. Shameful, really.

Second, Japanese post-metal monsters Boris are returning to our fair city. Last time they played here, it was at the monumentally stinky Brickyard. They made it well worth spending a couple of hours glued to that venue's immobilizingly sticky floor. This time they'll be playing at the 50% less stinky-and-sticky Richards on Richards, July 30th.

Finally, there's a Bedroom Community Records double bill of Nico Muhly and Sam Amidon at the Media Club on August 16th. What a prodigiously talented and highly successful contemporary composer like Muhly is doing appearing at a tiny Vancouver rock club with shitty sightlines is a bit of a mystery but let's not look a gift horse in the mouth, eh? This one, at least, should not be missed under any circumstances. Might actually be over the old jet-lag by then.

2008-07-06T20:02:00.000-07:00

Show Update
A small addendum to this post: the doors for the show will be at 7 and I will actually be playing at 8. Don't be late!

2008-07-05T23:20:00.000-07:00

Strobe Lighting Will be Used During Tonight's Performance
My Bloody Valentine live at the Manchester Apollo on June 29th, 2008:quite simply the most profound musical experience I've ever had. My feelings about this whole affair are still a bit too intense for me to express with mere words. For now, I'll have to fall back on low-fidelity documentary evidence.

The following videos were taken by Krissie, on her humble photo camera. Obviously, clips of this sort could never hope to capture the full grandeur of such a momentous event. Still, we both felt that the recordings turned out pretty well (you can hear the vocals and everything!)

Kris didn't shoot the famous "apocalypse" section of "You Made Me Realise" (which, on this occasion, lasted almost half an hour) for fear that the sheer volume of noise would utterly destroy her camera's little condenser mic. Heck, it utterly destroyed me!

"When You Sleep"

"(When You Wake) You're Still in a Dream"

"Slow"

"Soon"

2008-07-05T16:10:00.000-07:00

connect_icut: Some Reminders
The new connect_icut LP - They Showed Me the Secret Beaches - is out now on CSAF Records. You can listen to a song here. You can purchase the LP in person at (among other places) Zulu Records in Vancouver and Rough Trade East in London. You can purchase the LP mail order via Scratch here (if you live in Canada) or here (if you live anywhere else).

As you can probably see from the image above, I'll be playing at Blim in Vancouver this Friday. Blim is at 17th and Main, the show is at 8pm and I'm on first. This should be a particularly interesting show as I probably won't have time to do any practices for it. See you there. Cheers.

2008-06-16T10:45:00.000-07:00

Audi
Biz-E. This will be my last post for a while because we're about to go on our holidays and we're moving house pretty soon after we get back. Two of the highlights of the trip will be going to see My Bloody Valentine play in London and Manchester.

Apparently, this MBV reformation is actually happening: the remastered CDs seem to be out in the UK and the Valentines have already played two "secret" shows at the ICA. By all accounts they are as punishingly loud as they were in the 90s. Can't wait.

To top it all off, They Showed Me the Secret Beaches will be officially released on July 1st. In actual fact, you can already order it from Scratch so - to all intents and purposes - it's already out.

Oh yeah... AND I'll be launching the album by opening a show at Blim on July 11th. Some details of said show are at the bottom of this post. Times and prices nearer the date.

So, anyway there probably won't be any posts for the next few weeks. Check back in mid July for more. In the meantime, satisfy yourself with the available responses to my Seven Songs tagging spree:

Expressway to My Skull

Ljud

Mapsadaisical

Updateable Mixtape

Here are the details of that show:

Friday, July 11, 2008
@ Blim, Vancouver
"a little night music"
featuring:
Hataken (Tokyo)
Gunshae (Vancouver)
Connect_icut (Vancouver)

The Konspiracy Group presents "a little night music" for your summertime listening pleasure. In anticipation of this years Powell Street Festival (the longest running community arts festival in the Lower Mainland), we open a cross cultural dialogue between Vancouver and Tokyo. Join us for an evening of electro acoustic collaboration with Pacific Rim ambienteers, Hataken, Gunshae, and Connect_icut.

Making his debut in Canada, Hataken is an improvisational musician, composer, and DJ. As an electronic artist he has worked with musicians across a broad range of styles (ambient jazz, psychedelic, techno, trance, chill out) and has been a force in the Tokyo underground scene for over a decade. Hataken is straight off the heels of a show at South by Southwest, where he performed with Tokyo-based saxophonist Fujiwara Daisuke and their project Quartzhead.

Joining Hataken in conversation, is Vancouver's panambient duo Gunshae. "The sound of stuff and things" describes what happens when you bring together a classically trained oboist and a dub afficionado, for a trip through time via sonic vibrations.

Rounding out a full evening of ambient experimentation, is Connect_icut, (Sam Macklin) an English abstract electronic artist living in Vancouver, Canada. Sam is also involved with free-folk ensemble The Bastion Mews. Sponsored by Blim and Powell Street Festival 2008

http://powellstreetfestival.com
http://blim.ca
http://www.thekonspiracygroup.com

2008-06-09T21:30:00.000-07:00

Seven Songs
I managed to bully Carl Impostume into tagging me for this m*m*.

"List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to."

Obviously I don't have time for this kind of nonsense but I did rather bring it on myself, so - without further ado - here's my hastily-typed-and-poorly-proofread contribution:

Oren Ambarchi - "Bleeding Shadow"
From Destinationless Desire, Ambarchi's contribution to the admirable Touch Sevens series. "Bleeding Shadow" samples a fair chunk of Fairport Convention's "Quite Joys of Brotherhood" (I think) and weaves all manner of electro-acoustic abstraction around it. The folks at Touch have a policy of not putting any playing speeds on their 7"s, in the hope that listeners will experiment interactively with the RPM settings on their record decks. While I'm not all that into the whole concept (preferring to respect an artist's opinion on how a record is supposed to sound) it does work rather well in this case. The Fairport sample sounds distinctly "right" at 45 and "wrong" at 33 but there are these little snatches of dialogue dotted throughout the track, of which the exact opposite is true.

American Music Club - "If I Had a Hammer"
In my late teens I really felt that American Music Club front-man Mark Eitzel understood my pain, maaan. As an adult, I can't imagine how I thought Eitzel's tales of romantic failure, AIDS, bereavement, alcoholism, depression and AIDS related to my trifling adolescent "woes". I hadn't listened to AMC in years but recently pulled Mercury from the shelf on a whim. Turns out that Eitzel really was a phenomenal singer-songwriter, with a truly brilliant line in gallows humour. AMC's secret weapon, though - what Grown-up Me really likes about the band - is the astonishing three-guitar line-up: Eitzel's plaintive finger-picking, Bruce Kaphan's diaphanous pedal steel and Vudi's feedback pyrotechnics. The Mitchell Froom-produced Mercury was the band's most experimental record and therefore the most okay-to-like from my current perspective (although United Kingdom was probably their masterwork). "If I Had a Hammer" is not that "If I Had a Hammer". You can listen to it in the DivShare player at the bottom of this post.

Basic Channel - "Quandrant Dub I (Edit)"
A kick drum and two-note bass-line filtered to a dull thud, keyboard figures like a couple of narcotized mosquitos copulating, a soft pillow of hiss filling the frequencies in between and... not much else, to be honest. For seven minutes. And it's beautiful. I'm stating the obvious when I note that Basic Channel reduced the sound of techno to pure, intangible radiance. No one else has ever come close. Genius.

The Fall - "Is This New?"
At first I agreed with Carl's claim that side A of Imperial Wax Solvent is far more interesting than side B. Not so sure now. Side B does initially sound like a collection of garage rock ditties in the Country on the Click vein but it reveals many hidden depths upon repeated listens. "Tommy Shooter", for instance, could almost be something from the band's John Leckie-produced heyday. "Is This New?", meanwhile, is a classically Fall melange of the mundane and the magical. Like "A Past Gone Mad" it mixes sci-fi narrative with a bunch of sniping about minor TV celebrities.

Fennesz - "Live in St. Michel and St. Gudula Cathedral, Brussels"
This massive sidelong testament to the transcendental powers of digital time-stretching comes from Spire Live: Fundamentalis, a double various artists LP on Portland's Autofact label, which forms part of Touch's ongoing investigation into re-fixed church organ music. The whole album is great. It's basically a massive expansion of the recent Fennesz/Jeck split single that I wrote about here. With a little extra room to breathe (five inches, to be precise), Fennesz really comes into his own. Fantastic to see that the great man is on such fine form but where where where is his new solo full-length?

Angelika Koehlermann - "Where Are You?"
When Angelika Koehlermann's Care was released by the Tomlab label, back in 2002, its numerous charms alluded all but the most attentive segments of the record-buying public. To be fair, the album was deliberately shrouded in mystery (the nom-de-rock Angelika Koehlermann was taken from the name of a record label, for which the artist had recorded under a different pseudonym). Still, can't help feeling that Care's odd mix of Casio beats, granular synthesis, found sounds and miniaturized song forms should have found a wider audience. The whole thing sounds like it was patched together in someone's dreams, using bits of old cassette tapes that never really existed. "Where Are You?" is just one song of 25 on the album but it's a particularly lovely one. You can listen to it in the DivShare player at the bottom of this post.

Pluramon - "Turn In"
Another slice of sugar cake from Markus Schmickler and Julee Cruise. You may remember that I've already written about my love for Pluramon's 2007 release The Monstrous Surplus (from which this tune is taken). I still think Monstrous is a delicious confection and have been listening it so much that I'm beginning to fear the onset of tooth decay.

I tag:

Expressway to My Skull

Ljud

Mapadasical

Please Keep Dancing

Sell Your Landspeader

Tower of Sleep

Updateable Mixtape/The Year of Spaghetti

2008-06-07T14:03:00.000-07:00

Tragic
Busy busy. I do hope to get at least one substantial blog post done before the holiday but don't count on it. The nearest thing I've done to proper blogging recently has been posting comments on Sit Down Man You're a Bloody Tragedy.

The thread in question has to do with The Fall's "Leckie Trilogy", which I previously wrote about here. I'm intrigued by Owen's comment about Smith's disdain for Leckie. I assume this is based on comments in the ghost-written MES autobiography Renegade, which just came out in Canada.

I have a copy of Renegade and I've tried to read it but I just found the tone insufferably mundane and - frankly - a bit depressing. Imperial Wax Solvent is really great and all but the time has clearly come to admit that the Mark E Smith who changed my life so profoundly back in '87 is no longer among us.

2008-05-27T17:30:00.000-07:00

Two New Mix CDs
Again: busy. I've been planning these mixes for ages but I haven't had time to actually get them together. Until now. You can listen to the mixes via embedded players in this post or - if you want a hard copy - simply email me and I'll decide whether or not you're worthy.

Busy: time constraints mean that I haven't had time to write any programme notes for the mixes, so I've had to outsource the task. The first mix is a general compilation of tracks I've been feeling recently. The programme notes come courtesy of Krissie. The second mix is yet another compilation of 90s rap. The programme notes come courtesy of Numark E. Rich, who has recently started writing this blog.

Take it away, guys...

Sam's Mix CD for Spring 2008
1. Can Can Summer – The Fall.
2. Serious Brainskin – Von Sudenfed
"Seriously? The Fall? Again? I think this mix cd would have been better started with the fantastic Von Sudenfed song which is just like a better version of The Fall anyway."

3. Don't Give a Fuck – Lykez.
"Grime? Another genre Sammy only picked up on because Simon Reynolds told him it was cool. Now this is a cool song. There used to be some smooth grime after this on the mix but thankfully it has been removed."

4. Etched Headplate – Burial.
"You haven't heard of Burial? With a name like that it isn't surprising that this song creeps me out. It kind of reminds me of Bongwater and I figure these must be people who like Coil like Sam does because he thinks he's better than everyone else."

5. If the Kids are United – Pluramon.
"Totally awesome. There used to be another totally awesome Pluramon song on this mix so that must be a good album."

6. Town with No Cheer – Scarlett Johansson.
"Hmm, it sounds like a dude and frankly the whole SJ obsession is a little laboured."

7. The Honeythief – Beequeen.
"No memory of this song."

8. Magic Doors – Portishead.
"Obviously this album is cool but Sam is not cool enough to have seen Portishead play and they were awesome."

9. Interdependance Dance – Adrian Orange and Her Band.
"A suggestion from moi. I am fairly obsessed with Adrian Orange/Thanksgiving and am totally into this world music sort of direction which apparently all the wannabes are ripping off now. This is a great song."

10. Dinosaur Egg – Scout Niblett.
"Another suggestion from me, after the really cool Scout show we saw. I prefer the other recent album though and thought a song from that would be good. People don't seem to know how cool she is."

11. Low Bay of Sky – Richard Youngs.
"Yeah that Richard Youngs guy or Arthur Russell? Aren't they the same guy, maybe Tim Buckley? I don't know. Actually this is a good song."

12. Allure – Fovea Hex.
"Yeah, who IS this? This one is totally amazing although sometimes a little fey and ethereal like Clannad and if I was listening to it Sam would probably make fun of me except someone told him this was cool enough to like. Not like Clannad."

13. On a Desolate Shore a Shadow Passes By – Fennesz.
14. Trailing Moss in Mystic Glow – Oren Ambarchi .
"These last two more ambient tracks are both good and I was so into them that I accidentally drove over a bridge I didn't mean to."

15. Hip-hopopotamus vs. Rhymenocerous – Flight of the Conchords. "I don't count this one."

Bad Words, Pronouns and Adverbs: Rap in the 90s Volume 3
1.Mahogany – Eric B and Rakim
"Only Rakim could drop a sex rhyme in the middle of an intense record (Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em) and not make you want to skip the track."

2. Funky Technician – Lord Finesse and DJ Mike Smooth
"Pretty much the defining track on one of the most underrated/overlooked hip-hop records of the 1990s. The first known use of this instantly recognizable James Brown break taken from his Black Ceasar album."

3. Vamos a Rapiar – Main Source
"Large Professor, who mans the production and the mic in Main Source, paves the way for hip hop production by combining jazz, latin, soul and funk - and that's just this one track!"

4. They Reminisce Over You (TROY) – Pete Rock and CL Smooth
"One of the most recognizable tracks from the second golden age of hip-hop, Pete Rock mined the saxophone sample that would cause immense jealousy of rival producers for years to come. Meanwhile, CL Smooth gives the track emotional weight by writing a tribute to Trouble T. Roy, a dancer for Heavy D who was accidentally killed."

5. Blow Your Mind – Redman
"Who else, without turning the track into muddy funk, could pack in samples from Sly, Parliament and James Brown but Erick Sermon of EPMD? Of course, the real star of the show, long before becoming a parody of himself (see: all the episodes of the Method and Red show), is Redman, who, still to this day, has one of the most recognizable styles on the mic."

6. "*!*!" What U Heard – Diamond and the Psychotic Neurotics
"Another one-man-does-it-all track, Diamond D weaves myriad soul and jazz samples (James Brown, Donny Hathaway, Grover Washington Jr. among others) topped off by a Brand Nubian sample that sent the heads bobbing back in 1992, and still does!"

7. Represent – Showbiz and AG
"A defining track from the Runaway Slave album that launched Showbiz and AG to the top of their game. Represent is a DitC posse cut that features the best of the crew (Big L, Lord Finesse, DeShawn and Showbiz & AG, natch) boasting at their finest. The opening line by Big L cemented his status as the nastiest and most clever of the entire crew. Essential!"

8. Krazy wit da Books – Das EFX
"After their debut record, Das EFX were tagged as one-trick ponies for their hyper-tongue twisting flow. They came back with a much darker sound and more venom on the mic. Didn't really matter though - within weeks, another darker clan from their hometown of Staten Island overshadowed their triumphant return."

9. Here Comes the Lords – Lords of the Underground
"One of the last great tracks produced by Marley Marl, The Lords announced their arrival in the game with this defining track. Rough and tumble flows over breezy jazz samples were the order of the day for these young guns."

10. Punks Jump Up to Get Beat Down – Brand Nubian
"The inimitable Sadat X leads this edgier, more violent version of Brand Nubian (Grand Puba left the group to go solo) that was a far cry from their former Five Percent/Nation of Islam affiliated group."

11. C'Mon wit da Git Down – Artifacts
"Artifacts snuck in one last great record for the Golden Age of hip-hop before the whole scene ran out of steam. 'C'Mon wit da Git Down' is an underground classic that still stands tall in an era of countless underground classics."

12. Breakdown – Fu-Schnickens
"A trifecta of funk samples: James Brown, Zapp and Parliament are all fronted by their incredibly odd and cartoon-like flow that found them treading the same one-trick-pony water as Das EFX. Still one of their best tracks from another underrated group from the second golden age of hip-hop."

13. Back in the Day – Ahmad
"A minor hit of sunlit G-Funk (minus the G) that has slipped into obscurity, overshadowed by the behemoth of G-Funk that was The Chronic."

14. Lifestylez ov da Poor and Dangerous – Big L
"One of the grittier tracks from an already gritty record, 'Lifestylez...' is a perfect example of the late, great Big L's ruthless, yet witty lyrical flow that has never been matched. A leering and ominous bass line backs Big L's ultra-violent tales of New York street life."

15. Ice Water – Raekwon
"Short tales of inter-continental drug trading, chronicling the highs and lows of such risky business permeate the track and - well - the entirety of Cuban Linx. The RZA production is a bit more subtle and stripped down than the rest of the record, making this a stand out track on a near perfect record."

16. Nuttin’ but Flavor (Vocal) – Funkmaster Flex
"ODB is truly the star of this oddball track from a Funkmaster Flex 12" released in 1995. Ol' Dirty's drunken, breathless flow is truly strange next to Biz Markie's warbled sing-song vocal delivery. One of the best collaborations during this transitional era of rap."

17. Puerto Rico/Black People – Frankie Cutlass
"Not at all familiar with Cutlass or this track."

2008-05-21T22:53:00.000-07:00

That New Max Patch in Full
You'll have to wait a bit to find out what it sounds like but here's what it looks like...

...and here's what is really looks like!

2008-05-15T13:15:00.000-07:00

Out of the Loop/Into the groove~
Still out of the loop. The long-awaited release of Max/MSP 5 totally passed me by. When did that happen?

Anyway, I've finally caught on, downloaded the demo and made some time in my schedule to try it out (by staying up 'til 2AM every night). My first impressions suggest that it's going to be well worth the $200 upgrade fee.

Max 5 has a completely overhauled programming interface, making it waaay simpler to use (and nicer looking) than any previous version. There are also a number of key improvements to how Max handles musical time - making it much easier to build beat-centric patches.

I can't tell you the hell I went through with Max 4, just to build the chintzy step sequencer I use when making Not Me tracks. But after two nights trying out Max 5, I'd already built a completely new, far better sequencer.

The only downside is Max 5 seems to be bit more processor hungry than Max 4, making it hard for me to run my old connect_icut patches in the new version. Luckily the two versions are totally separate applications, so installing one doesn't mean wiping the other. Particularly good news because I want to keep using my old Max 4 patches and I can't afford a new goddamn Mac.

Anyway, y'all know how I love Max/MSP. It seems to me that the new improvements (nicer interface, increased ability to work with rhythm) could make Max accessible to a much wider user base. It could even create a minor revolution in contemporary electronica. Here's hoping.

2008-05-08T23:53:00.000-07:00

By Royal Appointment
And if you could also avoid saying "meme", that would be super too.

2008-05-05T19:30:00.000-07:00

I Has a Happy
Awesome new albums by The Fall and Portishead? On vinyl?? Looks like the year in music has finally begun!

2008-05-03T20:15:00.000-07:00

Not Me Virtual Remix 12" Number Three
I've been sitting on this one for a while because I literally haven't had time to label the MP3s and upload them to DivShare. Here, finally, is the third Not Me virtual remix 12", with input from Esperik Glare, Lim and - of course - yours truly. The track-listing is:

Side A: Heidi (Ho Neighbor Remix by Esperik Glare)
Side B: Another Scanner Darkly Remix (by connect_icut, based on a loop by Lim)

Sadly, these are not the crossover club bangers that we've all been hoping for but they are rather spiffy, if I do say so myself. You can listen to the mixes in the player below or download them from here.

2008-05-02T14:00:00.000-07:00

Tonight? Alright!
Sorry about relying on embedded multimedia content, in lieu of any actual posts. This is honestly one of the busiest and most stressful periods of my entire life. Please bear with me. Normal service will be resumed.

Just to show how out of the loop I am right now, I must confess to having only just noticed that the mighty Antipop Consortium have reformed! How did this pass me by? Antipop are one of my absolute favorite musical acts of all time!

I have a lot on my plate right now, Kenneth.

2008-04-26T14:00:00.000-07:00

Happy Mondays - "Tart Tart"
Waaay better than anything Joy Division ever did.

2008-04-20T14:00:00.000-07:00

Latest Vinyl Purchases including Two of a Kind: If the Kids are United
Amoroso is another addition to the Touch Sevens series. You may remember I bought Fennesz's Transition a little while back. This one features Fennesz too, alongside K-Punk-approved turntablist Philip Jeck.

Amoroso is also part of Touch's ongoing Spire project, which seems to involve experimental/electronic artists reinterpreting church organ music (there's a full-length Spire LP coming soon too). On Amoroso, Fennesz and Jeck tackle the work of one Charles Matthews.

The Fennesz side is an extremely pleasant wash of sound but - rather astoundingly - I actually prefer the Philip Jeck side. Jeck's Charles Matthews refix is at once angular and immersive; more challenging and ultimately more satisfying than the Fennesz effort.
In other record-buying news, I just picked up The Monstrous Surplus, the 2007 album from Pluramon - a "modular project" helmed by glitch veteran Markus Schmickler. This project has always mixed digital electronica with electric guitar melodies but the melodic, organic side of things has really started to come to the fore on recent Pluramon releases.

The Monstrous Surplus is surely the most conventional thing Schmickler has ever done, yet it's actually very peculiar in its own way. Side A of the album is packed with flagrantly synthetic dreampop confections, overloaded with soaring synth strings and excessively autotuned vocals (some of them provided by David Lynch muse Julee Cruise).

On side B, though, things take a real left turn into dark and thorny territory, starting with the Sunn0)))-meets-Hawkwind freakout of "Fresh Aufhebung". And then there's the cover of Sham 69's gutter-punk classic "If the Kids are United".

There's an obvious irony inherent in Pluramon covering this song, which Schmickler seems keen to amplify to the greatest degree imaginable. On The Monstrous Surplus, this unmistakable three-chord wonder is presented as a mellotron-laced prog rock power ballad.

One thing that's remarkable about this transmogrification is that Schmickler manages to make the song sound hugely epic (even finding time for a key change), while still bringing it in at almost a minute shorter than Sham 69's already concise original.

What's really amazing, though, is how beguilingly lovely the results are. The whole thing could come off as a cheap gag but - by playing it absolutely straight - Pluramon succeed in making "If the Kids are United" incredibly moving.

On the face of it, turning this song into something emotionally rich might seem fundamentally impossible. The original is little more than a testosterone-fueled soccer hooligan's terrace chant (it even concludes with an actual terrace chant). The title may be "If the Kids are United" but the implied meaning is clearly "If the Lads are United".

Perhaps more to the point, it hardly drips sincerity. The opening is a ludicrously staged piece of matey dialogue ("Alright mate?"/"Yeah, I'm alright") and the body of the song itself is hardly any less contrived. Oddly enough, it reminds me of a street punk equivalent to Simon and Garfunkle's stunningly inauthentic misunderstood bohemian youth chic.

Were Sham 69 even real real punks? My dad once claimed that he used to play cricket again the band's frontman Jimmy Pursey, who had bought a country manor in Herefordshire. Admittedly, this story is a little hard to swallow but witness the hammy artificiality of "If the Kids are United" and it starts to seem oddly believable.

On the other hand, there's another element to the song that I totally missed until Pluramon's cover version emerged. Listen closely to the words and you'll find that this macho crypto-oi! anthem is actually about sticky, messy, girly feelings! Seriously! The verses are full of lines like "Take a look around/And what do you see?/Kids with FEELINGS/Like you and me".

So, really, all Schmickler and co have done is bring out the hidden side of a familiar song. Conceptually, this is quite brilliant but it's the delivery that puts Pluramon's take on "If the Kids are United" over the top, into the realm of real genius. Take a listen to both versions and you'll see what I mean.

Anyway, this is only one track on what is a truly astonishing and unique album. I'd like to make a late addition to my 2007 albums of the year list, please.

2008-04-18T14:00:00.000-07:00

Obviously...
...nevertheless...

2008-04-14T14:00:00.000-07:00

Uptight Crickets
New comics day is becoming increasingly depressing. Precious little new talent seems to emerging either in mainstream comics or the indie scene. Meanwhile, old favourites like Frank Miller and Gilbert Hernandez are happily churning out work that is - more often than not - utter, unmitigated crap.

Just recently, though, two excellent new titles have emerged, each of which combines a true mastery of the comic book form with some very apposite and rather unsettling observations about the human condition.
Jordan Crane's Uptight is intense and unflinching in its portrayal of human relations. The short stories are told with the skill and pacing of a master. They have an uncomfortable sting of authenticity about them and yet are carried along effortlessly by Crane's remarkable lightness of narrative touch.

Speaking of which, I notice that his wonderful all-ages book The Clouds Above just got reprinted. It's got an awesome cat in it and I commend it to your whole family.

Sammy Harkham's Crickets is similar in style and tone to Uptight but it has a more surreal, dreamlike quality to it. The closest comparison I can come up with is Ander Nilsen's excellent sketchbook graphic novel Monologues for the Coming Plague. Like that book, Crickets has a darkly whimsical Kafkaesque quality.

It's a shame - but also an inevitability - that independent auteur-created comic books like these appear so irregularly. Getting a new issue of something as masterfully done as Uptight or Crickets is a great way to brighten up a dreary Wednesday afternoon.

2008-04-08T14:00:00.000-07:00

Oh Come On
It's a good thing that some people have a lot of time on their hands because I have a lot on my plate right now, Kenneth. New 30 Rock on Thursday, BTW.

2008-03-31T14:00:00.000-07:00

Secret Beaches Now Available for Pre-order
The connect-icut website has been updated. Eager shoppers can now pre-order a copy of They Showed Me the Secret Beaches for a bargain, never-to-be-repeated price. The LP's official release date is July 1st but I'll be shipping pre-orders as soon as the records are ready. If you're not ready to commit, you can simply listen to a song or download the press release.

2008-03-29T14:00:00.001-07:00

Extremely Early connect_icut Review Spotted
Rather amazingly, Frans de Waard of Beequeen has already reviewed They Showed Me the Secret Beaches in his Vital Weekly newsletter. The review, which you can read here is only faintly complimentary. Confusingly, Frans prefers LA, which he regards to be the poppier of the two albums. Seems arse backwards to me but each to his own.

The really startling thing is how quickly this review appeared. Frankly, it's surprising that he's even received the test pressing I sent him. The fact that he's had time not only to listen to it but also to write a review of it frankly beggars belief. Does he listen all the promos he gets sent as soon as they arrive? Makes me tired just thinking about that.

So, has anyone heard the latest Beequeen album (pictured above)? I liked the last one a lot but I'm not sure the new one will be poppy enough for my liking (insert emoticon of your choice). Seriously though, great band, lovely guy, nice to get a mention. Buy the Bequeen CD now, then buy Secret Beaches when it comes out on July 1st.

2008-03-27T14:00:00.001-07:00

Mmmm... "Aaarrrggghhh!"
My 2008 New Year's resolution was to stick with a strict system that would keep my record buying under control. Things had started to get a little pathological in the 07 - I was acquiring more vinyl than I could reasonably listen to or even store!

So - long story short - I'm buying a lot less music this year. One of the many positive upshots of this is that I'm genuinely excited every time a new record comes into my hands. Another is that I tend to listen to everything I buy mutliple times, right away.

My most recent purchase was the new LP from Can't - aka sound artist and instrument builder Jessica Rylan. Private Time (Part Two) is a vinyl edition of 500 copies on Weird Forest records. Considering its limited nature, the disc looks surprisingly mass market, with its "proper" jacket and printed inner sleeve (which is reproduced at the top of this post).

The cover isn't just pro, though - it's also exquisitely designed. It might even be a clever pastiche of some classic album but - if so - I'm unable to place the reference. In any case, the portrait of a mild-mannered tea-sipping Rylan does little to betray the cathartic ferocity of the music (?) contained within.

Apparently, this album was recorded at Rylan's parental home, while Mom and Pop were sleeping. In light of that, one might reasonably expect a reprise of the excellent New Secret, on which Rylan seemed to be whispering diary entries into a homemade ring modulator (which is probably exactly what she was doing, come to think of it).

Instead, side one offers up a series of wild-eyed and heavily-processed screechin' an' yellin'. It's truly hair-raising stuff and yet Rylan somehow manages to dodge the numbing cliches of much dark-side harsh noise. The sound here is chillingly sparse and razor sharp, without ever becoming thin or tinny.

Side two comes closer to the New Secret sound but with greater compositional focus and sonic clarity. Furthermore, "Hey Puritan" - which opens proceedings after the intermission - is a complete departure, being a detuned bummer folk song in the style of Jandek.

Not for the faint of heart but fucking essential for the hardcore, Private Time (Part Two) is available through Keith Fullerton Whitman's ever-reliable Mimaroglu Music Sales. Get it while you can!

2008-03-26T14:00:00.000-07:00

Single of the Year!
Take that Portishead! I'm kidding! I'm kidding! Again. Still, you have to wonder about the fact that so many of the year's best releases have been singles. Must be something to do with MP3 culture plus the continued mainstreaming of 12"-centric genres like dubstep and minimal techno.

And let's not forget that the rather improbable Popol Vuh remix 12" on Mego really is thoroughly excellent. I've been anxiously awaiting this one since... well since mid January. It doesn't disappoint.

Mika Vainio of Pansonic turns in a surprisingly Fenneszesque remix of "Nachts: Schnee" from the 1987 Werner Herzog soundtrack Cobra Verde. Blogglebum faves Haswell and Hecker, meanwhile, daub a track from the Aguirre soundtrack (another Herzog flick, of course, from '72) with their signature sonic scrawls.

Bracing stuff, all round and the most classically "Mego" sounding release in some time. Available from all well-stocked record stores (i.e. I got mine from Zulu) or from the Editions Mego website. Buy vinyl! Do it now!

2008-03-24T14:00:00.000-07:00

Album of the Year!
Take that Portishead! Okay, I'm mostly kidding because I've only just downloaded it but the forthcoming Fall album Imperial Wax Solvent really does sound great. And this time I mean it! Seriously, it's much better than the last one and very much in the avant garage vein of Fall Heads Roll. Totally bonkers and bit more electronic than any Fall album in some time, Imperial Wax Solvent truly is a (cliche alert!) RETURN TO FORM.

No free MP3 downloads for you! The last thing I need is Mark E Smith on my tail. Still, you've got to love that whole file-sharing deal. As far as I know, there's still no release date for the vinyl of Imperial Wax Solvent but these free peer-to-peer MP3s will tide me over 'til I'm able to pay cash for the proper version (the proper proper version that is - I think the CD comes out the same day as Portishead).

Ah, yes, God bless file-sharing networks. I even managed to find the fabled "long" version of "Glider" by My Bloody Valentine (well it's eight minutes long, which is longer than either of the commercially available versions, I'm pretty sure). But where are the rest of the "lost" Glider tracks? Well, I also found a demo called "Explosive". Not sure when it's from but it ain't bad (though, hardly the Holy Grail). Maybe I'll even post it for you but not until next Valentine's day. And only if you're nice.

2008-03-23T15:00:00.000-07:00

That Modern Vernal Rite (In Part)
This is ripe! Someone already posted YouTube clips of the rundownsun showcase at the Cobalt last Wednesday.

The Bastion Mews (that's me rockin' the vintage 12" Powerbook)

flatgrey

Mental!

2008-03-23T14:00:00.000-07:00

New connect_icut LP July 1st 2008
Here's the draft press release text for the forthcoming connect_icut LP. I've already sent out some test pressings with this draft attached. The actual records have arrived too and I'll start sending out full-art promos as soon as I get the artwork together (the image above is from the CDR promo I was giving out last year).

Mailing vinyl records is hideously expensive, so I'm going to have to limit the number of freebies I send out. I've already had quite a few requests for promos so anyone who wants to review the album should email me ASAP to ask for a copy. I'd also appreciate suggestions of how I can improve the press release text.

connect_icut They Showed Me the Secret Beaches
Released July 1st 2008
CSAF Records
CSAF102LP
33 1/3 RPM

Side A
1. Hot Logic
2. They Showed Me the Secret Beaches
3. Veronica Mars Season One
4. Fender Bells

Side B
1. Why We Cry
2. Drunk on Sophia
3. Two Greyhounds
4. Cantus in Memoriam Ian Forsyth

All songs written and performed by
Sam Macklin
© 2008 connect_icut. All rights reserved.

MANUFACTURED IN THE USA

Produced by connect_icut
Mastered by Joshua Stevenson

Nothing is wrong! All glitches are intentional!

PROMOTIONAL COPY:
NOT FOR RESALE

About the album
They Showed Me the Secret Beaches is the fourth album of experimental electronica from Anglo-Canadian artist Sam Macklin aka connect_icut.

It's by far the most melodic and structured connect_icut album to date – stand-out tracks “Hot Logic” and “Why We Cry” even approximate pop song structures.

But Secret Beaches is still overloaded with connect_icut's signature audio chaos – indeed the title track and “Drunk on Sophia” reach new heights of shear sonic delirium.

Don't let the Dionysian frenzy fool you. This is an extremely precise recording, crafted over a period of two years using Cycling 74's Max/MSP programming interface.

As ever, connect_icut music aims to remove the distinctions between instinct and intellect, chaos and order, organic and synthetic, analogue and digital.

Hence the fact that this album of contemporary computer music is offered exclusively as a vinyl LP. (Note, though, that it is not being released in a limited edition.)

Anything but obvious, Secret Beaches is destined to make you cast aside your prejudices about “laptop” music and submit to its irresistible tidal pull.

Recommended if you like
Oren Ambarchi, Ekkehard Ehlers, Fennesz, Tim Hecker, Oval, Rafael Toral.

Contact
interimlovers@yahoo.co.uk
www.connect-icut.com

Praise for connect_icut
“Macklin likes his computer and he likes pop music, taking pop sensibilities into the computer and vice versa... It would be too easy to say that connect_icut is a mere copy of those he admires as he surely knows how to add his own flavour to the mix.”
Frans de Waard, Bequeen

“Hesitant and tender glitchwork… pitched somewhere between Coil's Musick to play in the Dark and Fennesz's modernist abstractions.”
Matt Ingram, woebot.com

2008-03-22T14:00:00.000-07:00

The Pale Saints on Snub TV, 1990
I used to love Snub TV, me. Looking at this footage now, it all seems hilariously naive - truly like something from another age. The interview section and the voice-over are genuinely laughable but the live footage is every bit as exciting to me now as it was when I first saw it at the age of (gulp) 16.

In fact, The Pale Saints' debut LP The Comforts of Madness still sounds quite extraordinarily assured and accomplished. It's one of three albums that are on heavy rotation in my household right now - the other two being Neil Young's Tonight's the Night and the new Portishead. Pretty impressive company for a minor shoegazing/proto-post-rock band to be keeping but much deserved. Respect is overdue.

2008-03-20T14:00:00.000-07:00

Portishead - "Machine Gun"
Single of the year! Who's going to top this?