First published in Plan B #39.
Angel – Hedonism (Editions Mego)
Aidan Baker/Tim Hecker – Fantasma Parastasie (Alien8)
Aidan Baker – I Wish Too, To Be Absorbed (Important)
Xela – In Bocca Al Lupo (Type)
Nordvagr – Pyrrhula (Cold Spring)
There’s a reason why, when you picture a male noise-fan, they’re always in an overcoat. It has something to do with the onset of winter, lashing rain, lowering skies, skin-abrading wind, darkness at noon, the jouissance of misery. Blog-owning noise-hacks don’t talk about ‘blizzards of guitar scree’ and ‘avalanches of distortion’ for nothing, you know. For those to whom misanthropy comes naturally – setting up, so the cliché goes, exclusion zones for ‘ordinary’ music fans: “Here Be Limited-Edition Lathe-Cuts” – shut-in brooding, reflection on the world’s unrelenting hostility, comes naturally.
Digital noise, as pioneered by the artists associated with Peter Rehberg’s Mego label in the late 90s, with its searingly cold, alien textures, its propensity for fractured forms, would seem the perfect soundtrack to this longest season. And, indeed, the first half of Hedonism, recorded by the duo of Dirk Dresselhaus (a.k.a. Schneider TM, the one behind that Smiths cover) and Pan Sonic’s Ilpo Väisänen, doesn’t disappoint: sudden bursts of sandpaper-on-skin rasp are combined with suppurating weight and slow, dejected sound-currents, machines drained of any analogue warmth purring, growling and droning to themselves, occasionally clawing for the jugular. Then, ‘Dropping The Ego’s splintered construct of weather-system noise and shattered, chirping electronics cuts into enigmatic electroacoustic rattlings, as if a laptop were duetting with a percussionist playing a concrete dungeon floor. The last two tracks, recorded at Väisänen’s Finnish cottage come as a wonderful shock: layering field recordings of streams and birdsong with alternately celebratory and ominous synths and a wealth of small sound-details, their unfolding in time is a drama in itself.
Aidan Baker’s work with Leah Buckareff as Nadja has supplied some of the most powerful listening experiences I’ve had this year; fellow-countryman Tim Hecker’s decayed, sun-blind noise has proved just as addictive, so Fantasma Parastasie makes for a delectable prospect. Divided, bizarrely, into 66 tracks in 7 movements, it focuses on and magnifies the occasional pools of stasis and immaterial, atmospheric swirl in both projects: ‘Hymn To The Idea Of Night’ swells with synthetic winds, girded by Baker’s subtle bass, circling within the same celestial textural pattern; ‘Gallery of the Invisible Woman’s omnipresent shrouds of subdued harmonics radiate mere unease, so the bass frequencies’ viciousness bashes the listener in the head; in ‘Dream of the Nightmare’, shimmers of sun-bright melody are heard only through a gradually thickening blanket of noise. You keep waiting in fear for the skull-smashing beats or eviscerating showers (weather metaphor!) of feedback, but nothing comes; which, in a way, is even more unnerving. Although it matches neither man’s best work, it’s an exquisite torture nonetheless.
The same can’t quite be said for I Wish Too, To Be Absorbed, a 2CD anthology of Baker’s solo work from rare and out-of-print CD-Rs released between 2000 and 2007. The majority of the first disk consists of rather wispy, portentous cloud formations of processed guitars, certainly nothing especially gripping, and the unity of feel, uncharacteristically, makes it samey and long-winded. The second, more purely abstract disk, where processing has usually gone so far as to almost erase any sense of human presence, is better, and makes for marvellous background listening (with a slight tug of unease, in case you feel weird about listening to ‘ambient music’. Freaks.)
Type Records owner John Twells, a.k.a. Xela, is a man who knows a thing or two about ambience, having released work by Grouper, Sylvain Chauveau and Machinefabriek. He also knows his horror: previous releases include a 12” with renderings of John Carpenter’s Halloween theme and Goblin’s ‘Suspiria’, and a H.P. Lovecraft-inspired ambient album. One could imagine him as the estranged Catholic brother to Burial Hex’s occult novitiate: the entire album is wrapped in a quieter, sanctified version of Initiations’ murky dungeon ambience; one can almost feel the dust and incense drifting through the church’s cavernous space. Everything here feels decayed: sound piles up – skeins of vinyl crackle, the echo of long-gone footsteps, bells etched in sonic memory like trauma scars, the sound-cloud, like a miked-up hornet swarm, that dominates ‘In Misericordia’. The entry of ritualistic percussion on the 20-minute closer, amid a pulsing cloud of noise and inhuman shrieks, feels like the aftershock of a sacrificial rite.
If you need anything else with which to while away the long night, there’s always the new Nordvagr release. Subtitled Black Ambient Droneworks, and recorded over the pitch-black Swedish winter of 2007-8, it does exactly what it says on the tin. At low volume, it gives a subtle seeping trickle of darkness to the air; at high, its relentless solemnity is pretty damn forbidding (if a little unintentionally funny.) If dark-as-fuck amorphous textures, freaky ghost-moans, church organs, distended black-metal treble guitars and Satanic choirs are your thing, then this will hit the spot nicely. And whatever you do: don’t go outside.
Saturday 31 January 2009
Friday 30 January 2009
3. Thank You
First published in Plan B # 34
The members of Thank You – Jeffrey McGrath, Michael Bouyoucas and Elke Wardlaw – met whilst working at The Charles, an art house movie theatre in Baltimore. “I think we thought we were 3 reasonable people amongst hilarious jerks and bastard people…probably still do”, Michael says now.
Indeed: Thank You look eminently reasonable – urbane, mature (at least by the juvenile standards of ‘alternative’ culture), intelligent, and certainly not the types responsible for the agitated dynamics and scratchy, broken glass textures of Terrible Two, their new album (and first for veteran indie label Thrill Jockey). Reviews for their first album, last year’s World City, invoked the spirits of No Wave and post-punk, the patron saints of anxiety, death-wish nihilism and musical affront: The Fire Engines, The Contortions, Mars. A perfect example of how narrow the music press’ frames of reference are. City Paper reviewer Jess Harvell’s other suggestions, put in as afterthoughts, lead somewhere closer: the fiercely inclusive Art Ensemble of Chicago, the alien rhythms and colours of non-Western music, the angular, energy-saturated structures of The Ex.
Forming a couple of years after meeting, the band got to know “almost every band or musician in Baltimore”, eventually putting out World City on local label Wildfire Wildfire. They amassed a reputation for live shows that are, in Michael’s words, “completely overwhelming and psychotic in the best way possible”. And though their work might be outwardly anxious and challenging, on stage they have “the most immediate and penetrating rapport possible... not just within the band but with the people watching and listening as well”, something that comes over in the electric-shock urgency, telepathic interplay and deft structural tricks on Terrible Two.
Their polyamorous relationship with music has been the binding force in the band’s friendship since they first met: “We all love music so much...and it grows and changes all the time and there's no limit to what we like… We turn each other on to different things and make CDs and tapes for each other all the time... There's way too much throughout history to fall in love with.” Beginning from the position of music fans, rather than practitioners – “before playing together [we] bought instruments and just went at it” – gave the band the courage to try what they like. Often, not knowing any better is the best route to new sounds, something the splintered timbres and structures – think Minutemen’s turn-on-a-dime segues – of Terrible Two testifies to, but also its “unconventional” approach to lyrics – studiously minimal, delivered in off-mike shouts and chants – and instrumentation, with whistles, organ, sampler and percussion in addition to the standard bass/guitar/drums, and each member playing at least two instruments. “Our mindset is if you want to use an instrument in a song you just buy that instrument and get to work... I didn't have the faintest idea what to do with them before I bought them, but then I had them and just put them in songs...”
Much of the inheritance of the No Wave and noise-rock that soaks into Thank You is a practised sneer of obliquity that cloaks a lack of any real content or emotion; by contrast, the band’s work is welcoming and accessible, just on their own terms. The lyrics, Michael insists, are “not nonsense”, but just “cryptic enough to be interpreted any way the listener sees fit”. He continues, “every part of that album has an emotion behind it and resonates with us personally...Every lyric, guitar, organ and drum part has something of ourselves invested in it.” Listening to a test pressing, he was struck by “how panicked it sounded”, but feels that “there's also some great joy and hope in there too” – and, indeed, there are some moments of real wracked beauty on Terrible Two, from ‘Embryo Imbroglio’, where serrated treble guitars duck nimbly around vocal chants and a rhythm section out of Agharta-era Miles Davis, to the closing title track, which begins with organs that sound as if beamed in from space, and rises through thrashing percussion to a melancholic motorik swirl (“Every time we play it or I hear it I get this incredible sinking feeling”.) The song titles and lyrics are connected by a theme of pregnancy and children (which was “completely subconscious”, apparently); since finishing it, “unusual things have happened in our lives concerning birth”, from Jeff becoming a prospective uncle to label owner Bettina getting pregnant with twins. There’s no tiresome avant-punk misanthropy here, just a celebration of the possibilities of life and sound. Love and reasonableness, in other words.
The members of Thank You – Jeffrey McGrath, Michael Bouyoucas and Elke Wardlaw – met whilst working at The Charles, an art house movie theatre in Baltimore. “I think we thought we were 3 reasonable people amongst hilarious jerks and bastard people…probably still do”, Michael says now.
Indeed: Thank You look eminently reasonable – urbane, mature (at least by the juvenile standards of ‘alternative’ culture), intelligent, and certainly not the types responsible for the agitated dynamics and scratchy, broken glass textures of Terrible Two, their new album (and first for veteran indie label Thrill Jockey). Reviews for their first album, last year’s World City, invoked the spirits of No Wave and post-punk, the patron saints of anxiety, death-wish nihilism and musical affront: The Fire Engines, The Contortions, Mars. A perfect example of how narrow the music press’ frames of reference are. City Paper reviewer Jess Harvell’s other suggestions, put in as afterthoughts, lead somewhere closer: the fiercely inclusive Art Ensemble of Chicago, the alien rhythms and colours of non-Western music, the angular, energy-saturated structures of The Ex.
Forming a couple of years after meeting, the band got to know “almost every band or musician in Baltimore”, eventually putting out World City on local label Wildfire Wildfire. They amassed a reputation for live shows that are, in Michael’s words, “completely overwhelming and psychotic in the best way possible”. And though their work might be outwardly anxious and challenging, on stage they have “the most immediate and penetrating rapport possible... not just within the band but with the people watching and listening as well”, something that comes over in the electric-shock urgency, telepathic interplay and deft structural tricks on Terrible Two.
Their polyamorous relationship with music has been the binding force in the band’s friendship since they first met: “We all love music so much...and it grows and changes all the time and there's no limit to what we like… We turn each other on to different things and make CDs and tapes for each other all the time... There's way too much throughout history to fall in love with.” Beginning from the position of music fans, rather than practitioners – “before playing together [we] bought instruments and just went at it” – gave the band the courage to try what they like. Often, not knowing any better is the best route to new sounds, something the splintered timbres and structures – think Minutemen’s turn-on-a-dime segues – of Terrible Two testifies to, but also its “unconventional” approach to lyrics – studiously minimal, delivered in off-mike shouts and chants – and instrumentation, with whistles, organ, sampler and percussion in addition to the standard bass/guitar/drums, and each member playing at least two instruments. “Our mindset is if you want to use an instrument in a song you just buy that instrument and get to work... I didn't have the faintest idea what to do with them before I bought them, but then I had them and just put them in songs...”
Much of the inheritance of the No Wave and noise-rock that soaks into Thank You is a practised sneer of obliquity that cloaks a lack of any real content or emotion; by contrast, the band’s work is welcoming and accessible, just on their own terms. The lyrics, Michael insists, are “not nonsense”, but just “cryptic enough to be interpreted any way the listener sees fit”. He continues, “every part of that album has an emotion behind it and resonates with us personally...Every lyric, guitar, organ and drum part has something of ourselves invested in it.” Listening to a test pressing, he was struck by “how panicked it sounded”, but feels that “there's also some great joy and hope in there too” – and, indeed, there are some moments of real wracked beauty on Terrible Two, from ‘Embryo Imbroglio’, where serrated treble guitars duck nimbly around vocal chants and a rhythm section out of Agharta-era Miles Davis, to the closing title track, which begins with organs that sound as if beamed in from space, and rises through thrashing percussion to a melancholic motorik swirl (“Every time we play it or I hear it I get this incredible sinking feeling”.) The song titles and lyrics are connected by a theme of pregnancy and children (which was “completely subconscious”, apparently); since finishing it, “unusual things have happened in our lives concerning birth”, from Jeff becoming a prospective uncle to label owner Bettina getting pregnant with twins. There’s no tiresome avant-punk misanthropy here, just a celebration of the possibilities of life and sound. Love and reasonableness, in other words.
2. Queer Theories
First published in Plan B #38.
Various Artists – Dreams Come True: Classic First Wave Electro 1982-87 (Domino)
Jon Savage knows a thing or two about dreams: as the author of England’s Dreaming, he was the foremost chronicler of punk’s utopian moment. As Savage himself has pointed out, disco, punks’ most-hated genre, was, in its own way, a utopian movement: it created a cultural space in which gay and female liberation could be enacted as a norm, in which rock’s patriarchal assumptions held no power. Co-existing in New York with early hip-hop and the downtown avant-garde scene (both Grandmaster Flash and Sonic Youth played the Danceteria, namechecked here in C-Bank’s gloriously OTT ‘Get Wet’), disco’s commercialisation, and the new electropop flooding in from Europe, gave birth to the harder, nastier sound of electro, documented here – with obvious relish – by Savage.
Those European roots show through on the earliest track here, the 12” version of Yazoo’s ‘Situation’, matching Alison Moyet’s sexually ambiguous vocals against bubbling synths and stern drum-machine. The transatlantic transformation is enacted with Larry Levan’s extraordinary remix of Class Action’s ‘Weekend’ (originally released on Arthur Russell’s Sleeping Bag Records): 8 minutes of alternately skittering and squelching synths, handclaps, a relentless b-line, exploding syn-drums and disco strings backing up an hysterically sassy vocal: “I’LL FIND SOMEONE, SOMEBODY WHO WANTS MY BO-DY, BA-BY!!!” Such forthright carnality is profligate in these tracks, coupled to compulsive danceability and relentless innovation; free as they are of ironic quotation marks, to today’s ears they sound utterly compelling and downright bizarre. In track after track – ‘Love Ride’ by Nuance and Vikki Love, with sledgehammer beats played against hilariously cheesy vocals; Pamela Joy’s ‘Think Fast’, congas, shaker, syn-drum and nagging disco guitar driving home the message that “there’s always someone to take your place”; The Latin Rascals’ ‘Lisa’s Coming’, where, ahem, ‘suggestive’ moaning, relentlessly arpeggiated synths and vocal cut-ups point toward Chicago house – the intent is made patently, almost embarrassingly, clear: “a bit of the old in-out, in-out”, anonymously and without consequences.
This admixture of highly synthetic music and, um, organic concerns may strike the listener as incongruous, but the effect is more interesting than that: the all-pervasive electronics both amplify and mutate sexuality, onomatopoeically mirroring the body’s squelches and slithers, whilst simultaneously pointing toward a vision of a Deleuzo-Guattarian electronic ‘body without organs’ which would be refined by the likes of Mr. Fingers and the second wave of Detroit techno. This is most evident on Klein & MBO’s ‘Dirty Talk (European Connection)’, originally released in 1982, where only an occasional disco rhythm guitar disturbs what is otherwise a serene glide that looks back to the austerely lush eroticism of ‘I Feel Love’, and forward to the machine melancholy of ‘Blue Monday’; vocals, the very mark of organic presence, are subject throughout the album to vocoders, filters, machine cut-ups. As Mark Fisher wrote of Giorgio Moroder’s productions, “by suspending rock’s male-derived climax-based libidinal economy”, these songs, in all their pulp vulgarity, construct an “eternal Now”, an alternative model of sexuality that makes the rejection of reproduction – the primary so-called ‘sin’ of homosexuals – its very locus. The heretical question that resounded through England’s Dreaming – “If there’s no future, how can there be sin?” – is taken here for the norm, and the results are rapturous, energising, brilliant.
This collection spans the boom years of New York’s gay culture; by the time closer ‘Silent Morning’ by Noel was released, in 1987 the ravages of AIDS were already common knowledge. Savage, who is openly gay, surely feels the loss, judging by this last selection, which recounts a night of hedonism, and the morning after: “I wake up and you’re not by my side… How could our love have died?”
Various Artists – Dreams Come True: Classic First Wave Electro 1982-87 (Domino)
Jon Savage knows a thing or two about dreams: as the author of England’s Dreaming, he was the foremost chronicler of punk’s utopian moment. As Savage himself has pointed out, disco, punks’ most-hated genre, was, in its own way, a utopian movement: it created a cultural space in which gay and female liberation could be enacted as a norm, in which rock’s patriarchal assumptions held no power. Co-existing in New York with early hip-hop and the downtown avant-garde scene (both Grandmaster Flash and Sonic Youth played the Danceteria, namechecked here in C-Bank’s gloriously OTT ‘Get Wet’), disco’s commercialisation, and the new electropop flooding in from Europe, gave birth to the harder, nastier sound of electro, documented here – with obvious relish – by Savage.
Those European roots show through on the earliest track here, the 12” version of Yazoo’s ‘Situation’, matching Alison Moyet’s sexually ambiguous vocals against bubbling synths and stern drum-machine. The transatlantic transformation is enacted with Larry Levan’s extraordinary remix of Class Action’s ‘Weekend’ (originally released on Arthur Russell’s Sleeping Bag Records): 8 minutes of alternately skittering and squelching synths, handclaps, a relentless b-line, exploding syn-drums and disco strings backing up an hysterically sassy vocal: “I’LL FIND SOMEONE, SOMEBODY WHO WANTS MY BO-DY, BA-BY!!!” Such forthright carnality is profligate in these tracks, coupled to compulsive danceability and relentless innovation; free as they are of ironic quotation marks, to today’s ears they sound utterly compelling and downright bizarre. In track after track – ‘Love Ride’ by Nuance and Vikki Love, with sledgehammer beats played against hilariously cheesy vocals; Pamela Joy’s ‘Think Fast’, congas, shaker, syn-drum and nagging disco guitar driving home the message that “there’s always someone to take your place”; The Latin Rascals’ ‘Lisa’s Coming’, where, ahem, ‘suggestive’ moaning, relentlessly arpeggiated synths and vocal cut-ups point toward Chicago house – the intent is made patently, almost embarrassingly, clear: “a bit of the old in-out, in-out”, anonymously and without consequences.
This admixture of highly synthetic music and, um, organic concerns may strike the listener as incongruous, but the effect is more interesting than that: the all-pervasive electronics both amplify and mutate sexuality, onomatopoeically mirroring the body’s squelches and slithers, whilst simultaneously pointing toward a vision of a Deleuzo-Guattarian electronic ‘body without organs’ which would be refined by the likes of Mr. Fingers and the second wave of Detroit techno. This is most evident on Klein & MBO’s ‘Dirty Talk (European Connection)’, originally released in 1982, where only an occasional disco rhythm guitar disturbs what is otherwise a serene glide that looks back to the austerely lush eroticism of ‘I Feel Love’, and forward to the machine melancholy of ‘Blue Monday’; vocals, the very mark of organic presence, are subject throughout the album to vocoders, filters, machine cut-ups. As Mark Fisher wrote of Giorgio Moroder’s productions, “by suspending rock’s male-derived climax-based libidinal economy”, these songs, in all their pulp vulgarity, construct an “eternal Now”, an alternative model of sexuality that makes the rejection of reproduction – the primary so-called ‘sin’ of homosexuals – its very locus. The heretical question that resounded through England’s Dreaming – “If there’s no future, how can there be sin?” – is taken here for the norm, and the results are rapturous, energising, brilliant.
This collection spans the boom years of New York’s gay culture; by the time closer ‘Silent Morning’ by Noel was released, in 1987 the ravages of AIDS were already common knowledge. Savage, who is openly gay, surely feels the loss, judging by this last selection, which recounts a night of hedonism, and the morning after: “I wake up and you’re not by my side… How could our love have died?”
1. Testing, Testing
I've decided to set up a new blog for my writings - I felt uncomfortable posting them up at The End Times. Hopefully no-one will give enough of a fuck to want to read them here, and they can remain in delightful semi-obscurity. Work written for my university course, and director's cuts of old pieces from Plan B will appear here.
Watch, as they say, this space.
Watch, as they say, this space.
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