Category Archives: Download

Some Recent, Random Compilations from Africa

3 Replies

Since I was in the process of uploading some of these anyway for elsewhere, I thought I’d share some of the good compilations that have come my way this year.

Sir Victor Uwaifo, Guitar Boy Superstar 1970 – 76

First, the excellent Soundway label from the UK (which you may know from their Nigeria Special comps) released a bunch of good stuff from Sir Victor Uwaifo, on the selection entitled Guitar Boy Superstar 1970-1976. Despite the goofy title, this is a serious — and seriously awesome — set of Uwaifo’s ekassa sounds and a good overview for the newcomer (as I am) to 1970s African pop.

V/A, Nigeria Disco Funk Special: The Sound of the Underground Lagos Dancefloor 1974-79

Also in Soundway’s Nigeria Special series is the Nigeria Disco Funk Special compilation. While it’s not my favorite one in the series (that’d probably be either Nigeria Rock Special or Nigeria Special Part 1), it’s still pretty smokin’.

More to come shortly…

UPDATE, 10/30/08:


V/A, African Scream Contest

African Scream Contest is a fantastic compilation of sounds from 1970s Benin and Togo, released by the Analog Africa label (which I don’t know much about except they appear to be based in Germany). The label’s blog has a pretty interesting, though short, post about the release here: http://analogafrica.blogspot.com/2008/01/analog-africa-no3-african-scream.html. Much like the Soundway releases in this post, African Scream Contest is available on vinyl, and I’ve been playing it constantly since I picked it up a few months ago. My favorite track is probably Roger Damawuzan’s “Wait For Me,” a fantastic proto-James Brown number with sweet horns and an even sweeter guitar riff. Boss.

UPDATE, 10/31/08:

V/A, Nigeria Rock Special: Psychedelic Afro-Rock & Fuzz Funk in 1970s Nigeria

V/A, Ghana Soundz: Afro-Beat, Funk and Fusion in 70s Ghana

Mauricio Kagel, R.I.P.

Leave a reply

(above photo of Mauricio Kagel from www.chamberoperamemphis.org)

Argentinian composer Mauricio Kagel died yesterday (from the Guardian’s obituary):

An artist’s originality depends less on ingenious invention than a strongly personal point of view. Mauricio Kagel, who has died aged 76, held a unique position in music of the last half century.

While widely celebrated elsewhere, in Britain he remained perhaps the least well known of the great post-second world war avant garde composers. Only Luigi Nono was comparably under-exposed; Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, György Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis all, to some extent, reached a wider public.

Kagel’s originality reflects his status as an outsider. Born in Buenos Aires, he came from an Argentine-Jewish family of leftist political views. He did not study music at university or conservatory, but privately with several teachers – none for composition, incidentally – and he studied philosophy and literature at the University of Buenos Aires, where the poet and short-story-writer Jorge Luis Borges was one of his lecturers. Kagel became a repetiteur at the famous Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, and music adviser at the university, as well as being editor of cinema and photography for the journal Nueva Visión.

Film remained a practical interest after Kagel moved to Cologne in 1957 on a West German government scholarship. He lived there for the rest of his life, with frequent trips abroad as a guest professor or artist-in-residence.

By the mid-1950s Cologne was one of the great centres of avant garde musical experiment, where Stockhausen was king, but Kagel came to succeed, or replace, him as a magnet for aspiring composers at the Hochschule, and instituted a new course in music theatre.

Although Kagel had no formal education in composition, he acquired a mastery of new vocal and instrumental techniques with surprising speed. Anagrama, a large-scale piece for solo singers, speaking chorus and instrumental ensemble, was written only one year after Kagel’s arrival in Cologne and remains one of the most striking and inventive pieces of its time; it may even have had an influence on Stockhausen’s Momente and Berio’s Laborintus II.

…There is hardly an aspect of contemporary culture that Kagel has not playfully pulled to bits and reassembled like a Heath-Robinson contraption: “early music” was desiccated in Musik für Renaissance-Instrumente (1966), opera and ballet turned inside-out in Staathstheater (1970), Country Music and Nostalgia affectionately travestied in Kantrimiusik (1975), colonialism (characteristically reversed as non-Europeans invading the Mediterranean) lampooned in Mare Nostrum (1975; revised in 1997), the circus celebrated in Variété (1977) and totalitarianism caricatured in Der Tribun (1979) – a harangue which is perhaps too much like the real thing. More recently, The Pieces of the Compass Rose (1988-94) reflect the paradoxes of “world music” with amiable nonchalance.

There have also been tributes-with-a-difference to other composers: the film Ludwig Van celebrated the bicentenary of Beethoven’s birth in 1970 with a burlesque representation of the kitsch cultural tourist industry in which, effectively, Beethoven became a mere consumer product. In Variationen ohne Fuge (1972), Brahms and Handel once more join battle, as they had, very differently, in Brahms’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel. Stravinsky is grist to Kagel’s mill in Fürst Igor (1982), and Debussy in Interview Avec D (1994), in both of which Kagel re-creates, in ghostly form, music of the past, bearing a relation to it much like Miss Havisham to her wedding day.

For the tercentenary of JS Bach’s birth in 1985, Kagel composed his Sankt-Bach Passion – a perfectly respectful re-enactment of Bach’s own life in the manner of one of Bach’s Gospel settings. Kagel characteristically quipped, “No one believes in God any more, but everyone believes in Bach,” a half-truth, as he would surely have admitted.

If you’re unfamiliar with his works, ubuweb has two important albums, Acustica and Der Schall, available for download here: http://www.ubu.com/sound/kagel.html. Some of his films are available here: http://www.ubu.com/film/kagel.html.

Listening to my vinyl copy of 1898 right now. If I get the chance to update this post with more downloads, I will.

More Circle X on WFMU.org

Leave a reply

From our sister blog, State of the Commonwealth:

Circle X Prehistory

We wrote about Louisville art-music crazies Circle X a little while ago, as their Prehistory record was recently reissued by David Grubbs‘ Blue Chopsticks label. You also might have seen the B-Sides column in LEO that discusses the reissue (and where member Rik Letendre’s name is misspelled). As it turns out, Mr. Letendre was recently a guest on the Strength Through Failure with Fabio show on WFMU, probably the best (and maybe the only true) free-form radio station in the entire country. You can stream the show and look at the entire playlist here (the playlist also includes songs from James Last, the Birthday Party and Public Image Ltd.). Special thanks to our pal Brian Labuda from Philadelphia’s Fun Vampires blog for hipping us to the show.

Ones/Hands, 1997-2005 (White Tapes) CD

Leave a reply

Ones

Yet another semi-archival post. This review of the Ones/Hands, 1997-2005 CD on White Tapes originally appeared on April 25, 2005:

So my friend Russ Waterhouse has been running the high-quality, low-quantity White Tapes label off and on for years through various mysterious Brooklyn-located apartments, and 2005 has seen a re-birth of this ongoing concern. One of this year’s new ones is the collaboration CD by Ones and Hands, two American noisy units obscure by even most obscurists’ standards. Having only seen Ones in action, I feel confident in describing their modus operandi as officially awesomely weird: two dudes, crouching low over tables full of tiny objects, make atonal rattly creaky drony soft and oddly compelling noises. I’m assuming they’re responsible for most of those-type sounds on the disc, whereas I assume Hands provides the sweetly melodic guitar and drones that drift in and out, like the sounds of the street outside an open window. The combination of disparate elements makes this CD a fun time for fans of inscrutability, audio-style. Highly recommended.

More entries on White Tapes stuff forthcoming.

CORRECTION MAY 12: Ok, thanks to the benevolent stranger in the comments box, I learned that Hands is actually Hands To, aka Jeph Jerman. I think maybe Russ told me this but I forgot it. Whoops. And Nick from Ones plays the sweet guitar, so that’s good to know.

Download 1997-2005 here.

Angus MacLise, The Cloud Doctrine (Sub Rosa, 2CD)

Leave a reply

Angus MacLise

I published this post, a review of the Angus MacLise 2cd set The Cloud Doctrine on Sub Rosa, back in 2003. Instead of burying it in the archives, I thought I’d re-post it at the top with a link to download the out-of-print release at the bottom. So please enjoy.

This is a two-disc set released by Sub Rosa that has a buncha until-now unreleased Angus MacLise madness for ya dome. In the past couple of years, possibly beginning with that Peel Slowly and See Velvet Underground box set thing (that I still don’t have, dammit), there’s been a steady flow of Angus MacLise material appearing on the marketplace, in legal-or-otherwise forms. For the past decade or so I’ve been pretty obsessed by all manner of stuff that emanated from the Lower East Side of New York during the early-mid 1960s (the Velvet Underground being my earliest and most immediate exposure to what soon became a much more rich and complex world of eccentric characters from those Fluxus freaks to La Monte Young to whatever), and it’s become increasingly clear, with each archival MacLise release (hey that rhymes sorta!), that the most viscerally exciting, most connected-with-the-spirit-world stuff that sprung from those gutters was done by the guy with the least care for ‘leaving a legacy’ or some such bullshit. Fortunately we are now getting to hear this music, to hear the poetry read by its author; we just as easily could’ve been deprived of it, had a tape’s decay been even more extensive, or a ledger not been saved, or whatever.

Disc One begins with a series of three solo electronic suites from 1965 all with the title ‘Tunnel Music,’ and what that sounds like is cracked electronics weirdness. #1 ends with sweet swooping dive bomber sounds, #2 sounds like a march of army ants across a bouncing rubber floor while an inept adept named Aleph repeatedly drops a gong, what my yoga instructor calls extended technique. Then the Rubber Band Man comes to sweep up, helped out by the friendly robot Bleep Bleep. And still, during ‘Tunnel Music #3’ that danged gong keeps dropping, it’s so slippery! Aleph must’ve anointed it with the holy walnut oil of the gods or something. ‘The First Subtle Cabinet’ does a whole ‘nother thing entirely, with Angus playing the cimbalum, joined by super-friends Tony Conrad and Piero Heliczer on additional instruments. What results is a rather long (read: 26 minutes, dang!) excerpt mini-stoned-soul-freakout, mango chutney flavor. A bit of scraping and touching and wheedling and it’s all very nice. The beginning of this gigantic improvisatory treat is great stuff for floating away over the ocean on a grey puffy cloud outlined with tinges of orange light as the sun sets in the West. As things progress and unfold, more percussion is utilized, but never in a heavy-handed, stomp-your-brains-out way. What begins in the clouds becomes rooted in the earth, but never leaden or lumpen. Then, moving ahead over a decade, we get a reading of ‘Description of a Mandala’ from a performance in 1976. Most, if not all, of the archival MacLise releases haven’t had actual poetry readings from the man, so this is a nice treat (Disc Two also has a nearly-twenty minute reading from his ‘Universal Solar Calendar’ which of course provided the basis for the titles of ‘works’ by the Theatre of Eternal Music). ‘Thunder Cut’ ends the disc, a swell 32 minute load of nonsense (in a good way) as Angus, Tony Conrad and Beverly Grant Conrad give us the spiritual business with lots of scraping, scribbling, swooping, stomping and shingy-shing-shing-ing.

Disc Two is a bit more varied, with ten total tracks, and again only two super-long pieces, one of them the afore-mentioned reading. The four minute ‘Chumlum’ soundtrack begins the disc with cimbalum and drum scrapeage, kinda like a condensed version of the longer cuts on Disc One. Next, the four ‘Trance’ pieces are recordings of Tony Conrad, John Cale and Angus MacLise playing together in 1965, so they’re probably the closest we’ll ever get to an approximation of the unreleased Theatre of Eternal Music tapes. They begin with some furied bow-scraping/drumming, then move into a gorgeous repetitive figure, kind of like hearing a shorter version of Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of The Titanic played at the bottom of the ocean interrupted with pinging sonar. The ‘Two Speed Trance’ and ‘Four Speed Trance’ sections are a little more sparse in some ways, but no less enchanting. At a point during the former, MacLise’s rapid-fire drumming is so swift that it takes on an electronic quality then Conrad and Cale come in on guitar and violin, and the whole thing goes off in a sorta rockin’ direction (not a bad thing). The latter does it double-speed, kinda crazy like. ‘Shortwave Piece’ and ‘Electronic Mix for “Expanded Cinema”‘ are probably my favorite things on the entire set, maybe, well at least I think that right now as they play and envelop my room with punctured crystalline shards and midrange squeals and deep sine waves from the blackest coldest parts of space (and all that other good stuff that early electronic music can sound like). ‘Organ & Drum,’ ‘Universal Solar Calendar,’ and ‘Tambura Drone + Sine Wave Generator’ finish the disc with a little bit more flavor of the earlier swami-of-the-L.E.S. vibe that I’ve come to love.

Overall, the two discs are of exceptional quality considering the source material. The murkiness at times actually adds to the feeling that you’re hearing primordial music, something not nearly as ephemeral as most of what passes for ‘Western’ culture (esp. of the ‘pop’ variety). It may take the ‘average’ listener a lot of patience to get through all of this, but for the MacLise fanatic it’s a sure thing.

Sub-Rosa: http://www.subrosa.net/
Angus MacLise discography: http://olivier.landemaine.free.fr/angusmaclise/angusmaclise.html
Angus MacLise chronology: http://melafoundation.org/am01.htm
A really good piece on Angus MacLise from Blastitude: http://www.blastitude.com/13/ETERNITY/angus_maclise.htm

Download The Cloud Doctrine here.

Los Angeles Free Music Society – A Selection

1 Reply

LAFMS

So, for a lark, let’s say you’re interested in the Los Angeles Free Music Society:

The Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) has been, since the early 1970s, the banner heading of a loose collective of experimental musicians in Los Angeles, California who were joined by an aesthetic based around radicalism and playfulness. Key players have included Joe Potts, Tom Recchion, Joseph Hammer, John Duncan, Dennis Duck and Rick Potts.

Notable band configurations have included Le Forte Four, Smegma (who relocated to Portland, OR in the early 1980s), Solid Eye, Airway and Doo-Dooettes. Their influence was most immediately felt by Japanese noise musicians like Hanatarash and Incapacitants.

but you don’t know where to start? Okay, read this Byron Coley mini-essay on LAFMS. And you say you can’t afford to buy The Lowest Form of Music, the ten-CD LAFMS box set? Or maybe you’re just lazy and don’t want to download the whole thing? Or can’t find it? Well, luckily for you, we’ve got a really nice two CDR sampler for you available here:

V/A, “Los Angeles Free Music Society – A Selection”

Tracklisting:

Disc One
1. Chip Chapman, “Getting Ahead/Orbit/Painting the Roses Red”
2. Le Forte Four, “Suburban Magic (Chapman)”
3. Le Forte Four, “Rock Saga”
4. Le Forte Four, “Ka-Bella-Binsky Bungo” (excerpt)
5. Le Forte Four, “What Do You Do, Radiator?/The Grocery Store Is My Heaven”
6. Le Forte Four, “Crank Up the Kids”
7. Le Forte Four, “The Very First Song I Ever Wrote”
8. Le Forte Four, “Keep the Point Up/4000 Holes In Blackburn, Lancashire”
9. Le Forte Four, “From the 12 Pages”
10. Le Forte Four, “Tree Shedding Blues”
11. Le Forte Four, “Do the Crow”
12. Le Forte Four, “Internal C.B. Breakage”
13. Le Forte Four, “Dark Skratcher”
14. Airway, “Live at the Lace, Pt 1”
15. Airway, “Live at the Lace, Pt 2”
16. Airway, “Perpendicular Thrust”

Disc Two
1. Fredrik Nilsen, “Insecticide, A Philosophical Didactic”
2. Harold Schroeder, “Silent Rituals”
3. Kevin Laffey, “Berlin Zug und der Dusseldorf Rag”
4. Monitor, “Pet Wedding”
5. Dennis Duck, “One O’Clock Jump”
6. Paul Is Dead, “Crazy”
7. Friends of Leslie, “Freak Show”
8. Tom Recchion, “Jazz 2000 A.D. Part 3”
9. Tom Recchion, “Herself a Cocoon”
10. Tom Recchion, “The Little Green Thing”
11. Human Hands, “Insomnia”
12. Monique et Aviv, “I Am I”
13. Dinosaurs With Horns, “Totally Gone”
14. Doo-dooettes, “Baby”
15. Doo-dooettes, “Dr. Phibes Visits Chicago”
16. Doo-dooettes, “Scrapyard”
17. Rick Potts, “Squirrel-Proof Man”
18. Rick Potts, “Parasitic Twin”
19. Solid Eye, “Ghost Beef”
20. Extended Organ, “Hum Diddle Um Diddle Um”

This collection was curated/compiled by Darren Misner, one of the original Pataphysics Lab founders, for me a few years ago, and I just thought that, at this late date, I should share. Many thanks to Darren for this and many other fine gifts through the years.

Paul Rutherford, R.I.P.

Leave a reply

Paul Rutherford

(Photos of Paul Rutherford and Iskra 1903 swiped from http://www.efi.group.shef.ac.uk/mrutherf.html, which contains a discography and short biography.)

More bad music news, this time from the world of British free improvisation as Paul Rutherford, trombonist and founding member of Iskra 1903, has apparently passed on. Rutherford also played in the Globe Unity Orchestra and the London Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, as well as in many smaller groups. Additionally, his solo recording The Gentle Harm of the Bourgeoisie is considered to be ground-breaking, though I’ve never heard it.

Iskra 1903, Incus 3

In memoriam, all three discs of Iskra 1903’s Chapter One are available for downloading, starting with disc one, available here; disc two, available here; and disc three, available here.

Additionally, please take a gander at this interesting interview my good friend Cliff conducted with him last year.

Lee Hazlewood, R.I.P.

Leave a reply

Lee Hazlewood, Cake Or Death

His Myspace page is reporting that Lee Hazlewood passed on August 4, 2007 from cancer.

He will be greatly missed.

Update: As a tribute of sorts, I’ve uploaded Hazlewood’s 1963 solo debut Trouble Is A Lonesome Town, which you can download here. Enjoy.

Update 8/9/07: My roommate Joe has added an interview with Lee Hazlewood from his 2001 Loser’s Lounge appearance here.

Recidivist, ep. 2: Codeine

Leave a reply

Codeine Promo

(Codeine promo photo and other images swiped from http://pry.com/codeine)

I doubt they were the first band I “connected” with in the figurative sense — after all I’ve been nuts about music as long as I can remember. Yet I first heard Codeine at a pretty important time, when I was a teenager in Louisville, Kentucky, and they were one of the first out-of-town bands that I got to meet, champion, and really feel, well, connected to.

See the Louisville scene, great as it was at the time, was pretty insular. Not a lot of touring acts came through town at the beginning my formative punk/hardcore show-going years (though this changed as active bands like Rodan and Crain — as well as the legend of Slint — brought more bands interested in playing Louisville). Though despite being from New York City, the band already had some ties to Louisville: in 1990, Stephen Immerwahr (vocals, bass) recorded “Pea” with Bitch Magnet at Sound on Sound in Louisville with Howie Gano (who practically engineered every local punk/hardcore band at some point):

Bitch Magnet + Codeine

Somehow, I bought this single and got into it, sparking a life-long obsession with not only the awesome Bitch Magnet (more about them at a later date), but with this mysterious and nihilistic yet (unlike most hardcore I knew at the time) totally slow and sludgy song “Pea” on the flipside (sorry I don’t have it available for download). At some point I figured it out, and when I spotted Frigid Stars LP in some Sub-Pop print catalog (yes, kids, aside from going to what was called a “record store” to buy records, some of us actually ordered music out of mail-order catalogs too), I snapped it up. Immediately enthralled by the slow, yet melodic and heart-breaking sounds (the catalog described them as “a cross between Galaxie 500 and the Melvins“), I rushed off a letter to the P.O. box in the credits. Not too long after, I received a super-nice reply from Stephen (who am friends with to this day; oddly we first met at a Rodan/Palace Brothers show at the long-gone Highland House one Derby Day). Probably then I became Louisville’s biggest (and to my knowledge, only — until Scott Richter told me he too was a fan), and tried to spread the word on how great they were to all my friends.

Years later, I still listen to Codeine, and still maintain that they’re one of the greatest bands of their era. Despite what could be considered a major influence on quite a few bands (probably would put Low and Mogwai in there, among others), I still kinda think they didn’t quite get their due. Not enough people know, but then again I could be wrong. While goofing around, looking for Codeine info, I found this fantastic site filled with all kinds of great images and information. Although it doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2005, there’s pretty much everything you could want on there, including 6 songs recorded by Codeine for Peel Sessions (download here) and a live set from the Vermonstress Fest in 1992 (download here).

The Peel Sessions contain some excellent performances of four Codeine classics, plus two songs I’d never heard before: “Median” and “Sure Looks That Way.” It’s a shame neither of those saw a proper release. The live show (originally posted on Bradley’s Almanac) starts off a little shaky, but eventually gathers a head of steam. It also documents an interesting period when Codeine was in-between main drummers Chris Brokaw and Doug Scharin, with Josh Madell of Antietam and Other Music filling in on the throne.

Codeine Insert

BONUS TRIVIA: If you can name the Minneapolis band and their record on which Immerwahr worked as assistant engineer, you’ll win… something.

Recidivist, ep. 1: Autechre, Thomas Brinkmann

Leave a reply

Insomnia-filled nights get me to thinkin’ about all sorts of random things. Tonight’s few hours of attempted-but-failed sleep got me on a nostalgic kick, thinking back to days of high school when my best buddy Jesse LeBus and I published a short-lived scandal sheet called The Recidivist (named for a Bastro song, natch). It only really lasted maybe one issue, and I vaguely recall it being a broadside against our high school administration’s perceived hypocracies — nevermind the fact that we were using the school’s computers to edit and publish the dang thing. Ah, the folly of youth. We got in some minor trouble (if that? I don’t recall much), and the whole thing blew over. Maybe if we had stuck with it, or had developed a sense of tact, we could’ve made it into a school paper-y thing, complete with stories and cultural reportage of the day (perhaps an essay or two on how Pearl Jam blows, dude?). But we never were ones for sticking with anything.

At some point in the early morning hours, as the birds started a-chirpin’, I started thinking of another, more worthy snapshot of a place and time even longer gone, that of Mr. Tom Johnson‘s excellent book, The Voice of New Music, a collection of his music criticism that was originally published in the Village Voice from 1972 to 1982 (you can download the whole shebang here — ain’t the internet wonderful?). I read this worthy tome when an undergrad, workin’ on some Tony Conrad stuff, and this book was an incredible resource not only on the specifics of the changes that were taking place in the downtown NYC snooty music scene, but also of a general cultural context that’s sorta disappeared (even if I’d bet more people listen to weird music now more than they did back then).

Big whoop, sez you. All right, all right, so here’s the point: instead of trying to recreate some old feelings about music and cultural what-have-you that would just about be impossible, I thought I’d start a new thing on this blog dedicated to looking back at some music I probably haven’t listened to in a long time, and in the process I hope to share some ideas about the music, the time in which I first experienced it (and how), and just whatever other random stuff may bubble up to the surface. So here goes, episode one of Recidivist…

Autechre, Chiastic Slide (Warp)
Thomas Brinkmann, Klick (max.E.)

Chiastic Slide

Funnily enough, I’ll begin the first installment with two records that have nothing to do with either my high school or college years, unlike the reminiscences that inspired this series. Though I certainly knew of and enjoyed many records on the esteemed Warp label through my college years, it probably wasn’t until I picked up Autechre‘s Chiastic Slide sometime in the summer of 1998 (though it was released in 1997) that everything started to, uh, click (no pun intended). I was a fan of their previous records Amber and Tri Repetae, but Chiastic Slide was the one, maaaaan. Listening to it again last night while reading Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, I was struck by how structurally this record fit with Kundera’s idea of the novel as an exploration of variations. That is, his novel consists of seemingly unrelated episodes which form a coherent summation of his once-an-insider, now-an-outsider-looking-in perspective on the totalitarian regimes of Central Europe in the 1970s.

Now, this connection isn’t explicit by any means. There’s nothing in Autechre’s music that suggests anything similar, thematically, to Kundera. There’s no politics, no laughter, nothing really even that “human.” What I mean is that Chiastic Slide takes some pretty distinct elements and fuses them into studied variations. And like Kundera is compelling to read (I finished The Book of Laughter and Forgetting pretty quickly, granted it’s short), Autechre hit upon what I think was the beginning of an incredible run of densely packed, seemingly-random-yet-not albums filled with intense variation. As Kundera writes about his father’s love of Beethoven’s later variations (Kundera’s father was a composer and teacher who studied with Janacek, btw), I couldn’t help but make the connection to what I was hearing while I was reading.

So Chiastic Slide: it’s a killer album, packed with crunchy, distorted tempos; the detritus of their soon-to-be-abandoned rote-techno melodies (which were generally more off-kilter than a lot of their IDM contemporaries anyway); and a lot of variation. Take one theme, expand on it until it’s worn down to a nub, then add something else in. It’s brilliant, and at the time it sounded FANTASTIC booming out of my car stereo (and it’d prompt some pretty funny looks, too). By the time I finally got to see Autechre (with Russell Haswell and Kevin Drumm!) at the Metro in 2001 (see photo below, swiped from Warp), I’d already moved on to more minimal moves…

Autechre at Metro

At some point in 2000 or 2001, I can’t remember which, Jim Magas opened the long-gone (and sorely missed) Weekend Records and Soap in Wicker Park, a short walk from my pad down Division. I’d gotten increasingly into the more minimalist stuff coming out of Berlin and Koln (how, I don’t really recall, though I’m sure the less-austere Warp scene was somewhat of a gateway drug), and the location of Jim’s shop meant I could find stuff easily without having to run over to the always-annoying Clark Street corridor of Lincoln Park. Again, I don’t really recall, but I somehow got wind of what Thomas Brinkmann was doing, perhaps because it was similar — though different — from a lot of the other Profan/Studio 1/Kompakt axis (er…) around Mike Ink.

What I heard of Brinkmann was compelling, hard yet super-minimal techno of a sort that (at the time) wouldn’t have gone over at Chicago’s dance clubs AT ALL (indeed, the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink nights that Brandon Goodall, Greg Davis and occasionally Kevin Drumm and I’d do around town weren’t well received — and we were far more accessible despite eclecticism than the minimalist stuff), and I was intrigued. Jim would stock EVERYTHING in Weekend, and within the limits of what I could spend, I’d buy pretty much all of it. So imagine my surprise when, after far more straightforward “first-name” 12″s and Studio One releases, Brinkmann releases the Klick 12″ (to be fair he also released more abstract-y Esther Brinkmann stuff, but that was harder to find), followed by the Klick full-length. The methodology behind this new phase was simply described:

10 tracks made with two decks, an isolator, a mixer and some with a tc multieffect. About 15 endless groves, cut with a knife in the last groove of vinyl records, some voices from records as well, and feedbacks are the sound sources. The loops are cut between 1978 and 2000 like the one on Suppose 08 (Feran Loop).

But what I’m hearing is a crazy amount of variation (that word again) on the theme of music-as-recording, a sort of meta-statement about the seeming finality of vinyl being a starting point for a new music. Yeah, yeah, sampling has been a part of music long before Brinkmann (even John Cage fooled around with turntables), but there was something about this record, coming from the context of the Berlin techno scene, that really was something special. And it’s also fun to guess a little bit as to where and what specific contexts it comes from. That is, the rhythms of these pieces get stuck in your brain almost like “regular” pop music (indeed, for some reason the sixth track “0110” reminds me of Can’s “I Want More”).

Klick

Download Klick here for a limited time.

Also, please send comments to hstencil at yahoo dot com, these comment boxes are busted.