Category Archives: Archive

SOME OLD SHIT

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Gonna open up the files, here comes some (mostly) short reviews (most of which have been recently published in the new Bejeezus zine, mainly available in Louisville) that have been languishing in the archives. Enjoy.

Dungen, Ta Det Lungt (Subliminal Sounds) CD

Sweden’s been fertile ground for awesome psych reissues in the past coupla years. And wouldn’t you know it? They’ve got some good heavy slabs of new psych bands out now, too. Dungen‘s this band of Scandi whippersnappers who know how to bring the heavy jamz, with plenty of heaping helpings of melody. If anything, the sweetness might potentially put off some of the heavier psych heads out there. But fuck ’em, this album is great. “Panda” kicks off the show with a tune so catchy I’m tempted to learn some Swedish just so I can sing along. Dungen slows things down a bit by the fourth track, “Du hr for fin for mig” (yeah I have no idea what that means, either), which brings in some sappy strings and mellotron/synth soundz for maximum melodrama moments. Good times, and guaranteed to make the girls swoon.

Buy “Ta Det Lungt” from Subliminal Sounds.

Crain, Speed + 4 (Temporary Residence) CD

Whoa, this is a doozy. The debut album by Louisville’s super-heavy (and super-long-gone) Crain has just been reissued by Temporary Residence, and it’s about time. To say that this reissue was long overdue is an understatement. It’d be difficult for me to overstate the effect that Crain’s music had on my formative teenage years. It would also be impossible to recount the many times I saw them kick total ass live, though I do remember the Speed record release show quite clearly. That night I got my copy of the LP (limited glow-in-the-dark edition!) and, also, my mind blown by the sheer force that was Crain’s lineup at the time. Experience the glory for yourself, re-mastered to finesse.

Buy “Speed” from Temporary Residence.

The Weird Weeds, Hold Me (Edition Manifold) CD

To most people, weird as an adjective is a pejorative. Then again, most people are douchebags. C’mon, it’s not all that misanthropic to say that, oh, 80 percent of the earth’s population ain’t worth a damn. I’m sure most of the time you’ve felt that way too. Anyway, Austin, Texas’s Weird Weeds are weird in a non-pejorative way. That is, they are unique, not ooooh bad I don’t want to deal with this because I can’t/don’t/won’t understand it. Currently a three-piece (tho a four-piece on this CD), the Weird Weeds blend beautifully sung melodies with usually spare guitar lines and minimal drumming as accompaniment (though the first song “Paratrooper Seed” starts with what sounds like a nice synth part). Occasionally the players’ free-improv backgrounds come to the fore in the form of some radical-sounding guitar noodling and drum-thumpery (which adds a nicely-needed tension to the proceedings). All in all, this is emotional music, conveying a beautiful sense of desperation, without being emo blah bullshit.

Buy “Hold Me” from Edition Manifold.

 

Optimo, How to Kill the DJ Part Two (Kill the DJ/Tigersushi) 2CD

JG Wilkes and JD Twitch are the dj duo behind Optimo, the most popular dance club night in Glasgow, Scotland. How to Kill the DJ Part Two is their new mix compilation, and it melds dance floor classics with obscurities, and just plain weird stuff. Eclecticism is the name of the game here, and the listener ultimately is who “wins.” You’ve got your typical 00s party hits like Gang of Four‘s “Damaged Goods” (honestly, I get tired of hearing this one but these guys do mix it in inventively, so they get a pass), Arthur Russell‘s “Is It All Over My Face?” (under the Loose Joint moniker) and Carl Craig‘s “Demented Drums” but then there’s also tracks by the Sun City Girls, Langley Schools Music Project (covering “Good Vibrations” and signifying the change on the decks from Wilkes to Twitch), Suicide and Nurse With Wound to keep things interesting. The bonus disc compiles a good, non-mixed mix that listeners can play with. The now sound is the sound everything but the kitchen sink, people.

Keith Fullerton Whitman/Greg Davis, Yearlong (Carpark) CD

Keith Fullerton Whitman and Greg Davis toured together extensively in 2001 and 2002, and Yearlong is a fascinating document of their live electronic and electro-acoustic improvisations over that year. Though there’s very little music on Yearlong that could be described as “accessible,” there are some very pretty moments, along with some of the harsh sounds typical to a number of laptop improvising schtick. But don’t let the harsh sounds fool you: even at their most aggressive, there is a musicality to Whitman’s and Davis’s approaches, and Yearlong — while not for the average shmoe — definitely rewards patient listening.

Buy Yearlong from Carpark.

Excepter, Throne (Load, 068) CD; Excepter, Self Destruction (Fusetron, FUSE041) CD

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With these two super-high-quality releases toward the latter half of the year, and another in the can, 2005 might be the year of Excepter. And what a year it’s been, so far: if you spent most of it drunk and/or high, or just questing after a transcendental state, you could do far worse by spinning these musically fantastic messes. Throne is the more stoned trip of the two, and flows with a lazy grandeur not often heard in today’s music “scene.” Sleepy electronics reminiscent of the RZA’s Ghost Dog score start out the disc on “Jrone (Three),” with a first few whisperings and moans which later grow into heavily echoed lamentations from recently-departed (from the band, I mean) member Caitlin Cook. Stoned soul steam engines take over, the vocals drop out, and soon Excepter spends the rest of Throne charting along some spooky shores in a haunted sailboat, which of course means that you really need to hear it. Self Destruction is in some ways the more straight-forward, yet hella dubbed-out, record out of the pair, though no less essential in its singularly bizarre messiness. Lanky soulja John Fell Ryan – the leader of the group – commences “Shoot Me First” with his deep-throated shamanistic vibes, going even deeper on vocal meditation/collaboration “I Don’t Get Wet in the Rain.” But there’s the dub/house mutated style present too: “Interplay: Lock Room” and “Interplay: Your House” recontextualize cheesy drum machine beats into higher states – though you probably won’t hear this shit at your local shitbag “dance music” nightclub anytime soon. Unlike Throne, Self Destruction is designed more with each track as a stand-alone, individual unit, and thusly gives ya more variety of the endless Excepter sounds to explore. Take the trips.

Buy Throne from Load Records.
Buy Self Destruction from Fusetron.

Roky Erickson, I Have Always Been Here Before: The Roky Erickson Anthology (Shout! Factory, D2K 32556) 2CD

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From the opening yelp of “We Sell Soul,” his debut single as lead singer of the Spades (remember, p.c.-activist types: this was TEXAS in the mid-1960s), to the final cuts from his 1995 solo LP All That May Do My Rhyme, there is not an inessential cut on I Have Always Been Here Before, the finest retrospective of one of America’s most twisted musical treasures ever produced. I’m talking about Roky Erickson, people, and if you’re not familiar with or weren’t impressed by what you may have heard, take another listen. I’m not going to be so bold as to say that American psychedelic music wouldn’t exist without him (despite whatever Mayo Thompson might say, heh), but it shore would be a whole lot more boring planet without Roky’s music to see us through. Disc One begins with the aforementioned Spades a-side, then delves into the early essentials from Roky’s stint as leader of the legendary 13th Floor Elevators: “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” “Reverberation (Doubt),” and “Slip Inside This House” are the hallmarks, but there’s a few more classic (though less fetishized) Elevators tracks. Only complaint is or could be: where’s stuff from Bull of the Woods? The liner notes insinuate that it ain’t “full-tilt” enough, but I don’t think a track like “Dr. Doom” would be far out of place. Whatever. Anyway, stuff from post-incarceration Roky, mainly tracks with the Aliens, round out the disc, and that’s a great thing. Personally, though I love the Elevators, my absolute favorite Roky stuff is the late-70s-Stu-Cook-from-Creedence-produced Aliens stuff, and both discs have plenty of it. Basically, what Roky made with the Aliens remains some of the creepiest yet most strangely beautiful rock music I’ve ever heard, and I still get chills when I hear “I Think Up Demons” (presented here with its correct title), “Bloody Hammer,” and “If You Have Ghosts,” like I did the first time. This anthology could stop there and satisfy me, but it includes more, and fortunately that’s a good thing. The later tracks, in particular, are revealing, making me think that either Roky got an unfair shake from the music press when Openers and All That May Do My Rhyme came out, or maybe I just did listen right, or something. Either way, you gotta get this.

Buy I Have Always Been Here Before from Shout! Factory.

The Vocokesh, Through the Smoke (Strange Attractors Audio House, SAAH034) CD

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Everybody knows that old adage about not judging a book by its cover. Well it’s nonsense. You can judge a book, a record, a dude, even a cover by its cover. It’s easy to do. Hell, most records have terrible covers, and well, most records are terrible. However, if you took a gander at the Vocokesh’s Through the Smoke with its goofy-ass “retro-lounge” cover (nicked from some probably-bad 1959 Warner Bros. release) and thought “gee this must suck, lookit those douchebags,” you’d be 100-percent wrong, my friend. Then again, if you had to go by its cover because you didn’t have any clue who the Vocokesh are, you’d be the bigger douchebag anyway. The Vocokesh are and remain one of Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s finest musical exports (and hey the Oil Tasters, Couch Flambeau and the Frogs were from there – to name just a few great bands from Laverne and Shirley’s hometown). So if ya don’t know, the Vocokesh is made up of longtime scene stalwarts John Helwig and Richard Franecki (whom you may know from f/i) with various pals helping out here and there. If ya don’t know their previous stuff on Drag City and Strange Attractors (among other places), well what you should expect is some heavy instrumental vibing akin to but different from, say, Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, Popul Vuh, other big fucking names. Is it silly for me to put them alongside such obvious greats? Hell no. This is some great, ominous, filthy stuff. And unlike most of the European psych stuff I just cited, the Vocokesh also rock pretty fucking hard while evoking transcendental moon mountain mists and other nonsense. For as far-out as these guys go (and that’s pretty far, you’ll need more than a canoe my friend), Through the Smoke is still pretty heavily grounded.

Buy Through the Smoke direct from Strange Attractors Audio House.

In other, completely unrelated news, it appears all friends and family living on the Gulf Coast are safe, though most everyone’s houses were destroyed. At least they’re alive, which is what matters most. From just a music fan-standpoint (ugh), given its history, the devastation that New Orleans is struggling to endure is pretty fucking depressing. But obviously more importantly, my condolences go to the living and the dead victims of Katrina and its aftermath. If you can, please donate to the American Red Cross. Thanks.

Goodbye to Two Pioneers of Electronic Music

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This week purveyed the unpleasant news of the demise of two ultra-important innovators of 20th Century music, Bob Moog and Luc Ferrari. I don’t think I have too much to add to the accolades and obituaries I’ve already read online and in print, but suffice to say I feel lucky to have been in the same room (though not at the same time) with these guys. Bob Moog visited Bard College, my alma mater, in 1996, and was as pleasant a guy as you could possibly imagine. It was amazing to me, though perhaps not surprising, that the guy who basically made synthesized music affordable to the masses was so accessible, so sweet and so helpful in spending time with students, answering their questions politely (even the dumb ones). Hearing from him first-hand about his teenage interest in the theremin was pretty amazing, to the point where I wished that I would’ve had half the adolescent curiousity, not to mention ingenuity. I never had the luck to chat with Luc Ferrari, but I did get to see a performance of his work — that he was present at — in Chicago in 2000 (I think), with a question-and-answer session as well. Though I have to admit there were a few moments that I wasn’t into, overall the music was fantastic, and so was the opportunity to see modern music performed in a nice, large space. Generally I’ve found Ferrari’s recorded works to be the most compelling of the stuff I’ve heard by the musique concrete “school” (though to be fair, I haven’t heard everything, obviously). And though Ferrari and Moog were in their 70s, they were still very active, so despite living long and fruitful lives, I consider it a pity that they’re gone.

Thuja, Pine Cone Temples (Strange Attractors Audio House, SAAH3223) 2CD

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The squeaks and plinkity-plonks of post-Bailey not-really-jazz improvisation have seemingly been replaced in the international noise “underground” by a new lexicon of metallic scrapes, low rumbles resembling steady bong hits, and various other underwater soundz. I’m not one for codifying movements – and “noise” or “new beard america” or whatever cockamamie catchphrase The Wire comes up with next week sure are silly vis-à-vis ALL MUSIC IS NOISE, duh (don’t get me wrong though ‘cuz I like The Wire alright) – but there’s a lot more emphasis on DENSITY and VOLUME as parameters in “deep listening” these days, and I ain’t talking about Pauline Oliveros’s moustache (and don’t get me wrong ‘cuz both Pauline and her moustache totally kick ass!). Thuja was, perhaps, ahead of the curve, as I sure wasn’t paying attention. Pine Cone Temples consists of recordings made by the quartet of Loren Chasse, Glenn Donaldson, Rob Reger and Steven R. Smith between 1999 and 2004, and I can’t help but think that most of the stuff is pretty forward-thinking, anticipating today’s crop of I-got-some-pedals drone goons. But it ain’t just a couple of notes spread over a couple hours (again, don’t get me wrong ‘cuz Conrad, Palestine and a few others show how two notes can destroy worlds). But there’s a lot of variety here: organ vamps interrupted by chainsaw-attacked guitar, delicate sustained piano figures reinforced with amplifier static and no-so-random random percussive accidents, and even more stuff – all of it very pretty – than I have the time or space or attention span to go into. Beats hearing some twenty-something chump noodle on an expensive guitar because he – always he – read Thurston namedrop Derek Bailey in an interview (don’t get me wrong, I like Thurston) (and I’m talking about myself there, always).

Buy Pine Cone Temples from Forced Exposure

Andrew Paine and Richard Youngs, Mauve Dawn (Fusetron, FUSE037) LP

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For nearly twenty years, Richard Youngs has confounded collectors of obscure musics with his incredibly singular vision – so singular that it’s difficult for even a seasoned fan to describe – yet all the while sounding completely different with every release. From the early solo classic Advent and the duo masterpiece Lake (with Simon Wickham-Smith) to his more recent, more “accessible” guitar-and-voice work on Sapphie, Youngs has continued to astound listeners with what he’s capable of: beauty, terror, whimsy; sometimes all on the same album. Mauve Dawn, his new duo with Andrew Paine on Chris Freeman’s excellent Fusetron label, is no different. Starting with a heavy drone reminiscent of Ligeti’s pieces on the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack, the title track “Mauve Dawn” announces itself as a primordial blast, an ur-music suitable for either the beginning or the end of the world. Amazingly enough, Paine and Youngs achieve this fantastic heavyosity not with primitive instrumentation, but with electronics, perhaps even, dare I say it, digital signal processing. As the record unfolds into the subsequent songs, the electronics make room for other instruments: bells, voice (clipped phrases here and there), and indecipherable noises. By the second side, the drones have given way to more open spaces, and as a result this side is perhaps the more “modern” of the two. Indeed, some aspects of the second side touch on more resolutely timely laptop-isms, while eschewing the glaringly obvious “hey-lookit-me-I’m-makin’-music-on-a-computer” moves ground into cliché by 10,000 bald geeks-in-tiny-glasses over the past decade or so. This music exists not to demonstrate somebody’s disposable-income purchasing power or even worse some company’s lame software, but because it has to. Knowing Youngs’ and his various collaborators’ music over the years, at this point, I expect nothing less.

SHORT SUMMER SABBATICAL

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Been sorta M.I.A. lately, and I don’t mean some lame Elastica groupie who can’t dance wearin’ a “Golden Girls” outfit that blogger types jerk off to. Apologies for that (the not-posting, I mean — M.I.A. fans can continue to suck at the tit of mediocrity). No explanations forthcoming. Trust me, you don’t wanna know. But more stuff is on the way soon, I promise. I was thinking that, in light of the Tony Conrad review below, I may restart my long-abandoned goal of publishing the Tony Conrad Project (as it is colloquially known on teh interweb) on this here blog, in chapters. But I dunno. We’ll see. I am a lazy man. Aside from, like, booking shows, djing secret Comets on Fire shows and weird parties with swimming pools inside apartments, running around Midtown buying stuff for my friend who makes guitar straps, fulfilling orders, avoiding any mention of the name “Kaz Ishii,” buying groceries, collecting obsolete computers and peripherals, and reading. In the meantime, take a gander at Tony’s very fantastic and fun-filled new site.

Keith Fullerton Whitman, Multiples (Kranky) CD

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Keith Fullerton Whitman aka Hrvatski is mostly known for his older drill n’ bass originals and remixes of fellow travelers such as Matmos, Cex and Kid606. His first solo album under his actual given name, Playthroughs, was more in an experimental-drone mode, and though I like a lotta stuff like that, for some reason it bored me. HOWEVER, Multiples is quite the burner. The premise behind this one is that Mr. Whitman limited himself to building the pieces on the album from toying with vintage synthesizers he had access to during a stint lecturing at Harvard, and while that probably reads as eye-glazing-over, not to mention ear-bores-galore, the end result is anything but. Multiples is, I’m happy to say, a thoroughly engaging and engrossing electronic album, every bit as accessible and intriguing as your standard rock band bullshit, yet made with entirely different components (and no vocals neither). Though the song titles only detail what instruments were used, they have clear schematic and thematic sounds, almost mini-dramas for the ear. Good stuff.

Crime, San Francisco’s Still Doomed (Swami) CD

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OH HOLY FUCK THIS IS AWESOME. Basically, Crime was “San Francisco’s First and Only Rock and Roll Band.” Now, sure, that’s a bit of hyperbole, and even I like Quicksilver, the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Avengers, etc. so it ain’t even accurate. But Crime were the true real deal, one of the first punk bands to release singles in America outside of New York, and of a much higher quality than what would pass for “punk” in the UK. Most of their recordings have been sadly only available as bootlegs, and even the most discerning music fans probably only know Sonic Youth’s cover of “Hot Wire My Heart.” So now here’s your chance to get hip.