Flu season III

It’s still December of 2012

re: ground. Disorientation is a symptom of being too sure

Tragicomedies, by Rudi Zygadlo, is not unnerving. It’s rather slick, it’s got a presentable exterior that makes its truly complex idiosyncrasies seem perfectly palatable. Infact, it’s hard to tell if there’s anything wrong with it at all… it has a hint of Kelley Polar level melodrama (mechanized flint-sparks of methodical lovesickness), and even a bit of its sound (minus the disco beats), but not enough to firm up a solid case, not enough to be accused.

Regardless, Tragicomedies is another album that lives up to its title.

You’ve got it basically right

Subtext monsters, eating all of the words they don’t say
Well-fed critters multiplying to rhetoric
Marry lullabies to piquancy
The Engineering behind the Flying Cups

Tragicomedies are pleasant, but it’s also so many different things at once that it goes down like a euphoric pill with side-effect (the side-effects are euphoria)
Oh, never mind then. No thanks.
So we have Purple Rain, bad memories of musical jewelery boxes snapping shut on your fingers, heavy orchestration side-by-side minimalism, distorted wonky excursion next to bones full of fluid and doo-wop over Balearic waltzes over (polite) breakbeats
Doesn’t it all just make you a little queasy

Flu season II

It’s still December of 2012

Variety Lights – Central Flow

imagine the awful sound you’d get if you tied theremin at the ends until they made a network like highway infrastructure. Imagine you are traveling down one of its dirt roads, a single offshoot sensing, feeling and even curving like an ant antennae, bent under the weight of a pulley with a pedal on either side. You’re going to the hub. It makes so much noise to go anywhere.

the more modern architecture gets the more it imitates nature in its pathways.

It’s amazing that we can have an emotional reaction to analog synthesizers, seeing how far they are from functioning anything like the human mind. We react more like theremins: erratic, fluid, sensitive to proximity. That’s perhaps why analog sounds have come to define (and have come to be defined by their appearance alongside) sci-fi flicks, especially the kind featuring alien saucers. It’s cliche, but the images and sounds are inextricable.

Variety Lights is the new project from the former frontman of Mercury Rev, David Baker. While Mercury Rev are best known for their later work – a syrupy and morose collusion ; Midsummer’s Night Dream meets American Travelogue – during David Baker’s stay in the group, they created absolute maelstroms. Yerself is Steam, their debut full-length, to this day contains some of the most dense psychedelia ever created, matched with abundant youthful energy.

David Baker’s vocal styling, which switches abruptly between lethargic and feverish, playful and dirge-like, sounds inherently sick. Like the analog synths, it may be simply a cultural association. He does sound quite a lot like Syd Barrett, and due to that has inherited some of his myths.

In one of the albums most memorable choruses, he sings, “I see the medicine through / I’m into two kinds of flu / I feel a song and I won’t be denied anymore”

In the very next line, he’s evoking images of pool parties.

Central Flow doesn’t sound much like it’s for flying saucers, it sounds more like music for glowworms. It’s intensely terrestrial. Musically, it is drawing a picture in the dirt with its toe somewhere between American electronic music pioneers Silver Apples and British industrial pioneers Cabaret Voltaire, but there’s also a healthy dose of dub reggae influence.

Even in an ethereal moment, the ground still has a pretty undeniable sway on you, and it only gets more present from there.

Until the sweetness meets salt, you are so famous (it’s true).

Flu season

It’s December of 2012

One miniature trend that’s cropped up in some of my favourite albums 2012 is an embrace of the sounds of a repressed, asthmatic crawl. Sickness as a style. A kind of music that embraces wholeheartedly the discomfort of actually being a person, sometimes. What is really startling about these albums – there are about five of them I have in mind, that I’ll write about in a series of posts (starting now) – is the complete lack of hesitation. This isn’t self-depreciative moaning, but a wholly confident approach to navigating the difficulty of empathy.

And that’s what illness is, isn’t it? A place where empathy can not touch. A state of ‘wrongness’ is also a state that others can not breach or understand fully, bringing with it an intrinsic isolation.

Laural Halo’s Quarantine is the most belligerent of these albums. The title is emblematic of the content, here. Quarantine sounds like recycled air. On “Years”, a series of staggered vocals set a trap, repeating three rhetorical statements that may or may not be related to one another, but catch. “Making eye-contact / I will never see you again / You’re mad because I will not leave you alone”. Cascade and splinter, gritting teeth through a dream.

On Quarantine, many of the vocal tracks seem to drift away from the rest of the mix, both in proximity and in tone. Harmony is rejected, purposefully avoided. There is no sense of completion. As instrumentals alone, these song might not be jarring, but whenever the human element is introduced it is somehow made uncomfortable.

Laural Halo may be most successful in just how completely she has avoided the art-pop cliche of imitating Björk, the reigning Queen and standard bearer when it comes to what an independent female musician taking it solo is ‘allowed’ to sound like. Only the last track, ‘Light + Space’, touches on that style. Likely a consideration when the order was drawn up.

Alien (or alienating), but not offensive. Quarantine is defensive. Quarantine comes completely from the Self, and may be impenetrable to some. And if it makes perfect sense, one day, you might ask, what have you caught?

2 birds 1 stoned

Pulse HandleChilled Mug

Guy Gerber

could write an anthem for all sorts of activities that usually don’t get fanfare.

Getting stoned on turkish delight. Oh, that invisible romance.

His best beats have a synthetic bubble window of structural support with a natural (if isolated) world inside.

Or unnatural stretch of intimacy. You know, an elastic waistband.

There is a certain amount of humour in his music, there is too much giggling joy in these compositions to take completely seriously. The drum-circle grooves suggest a impromptu party, perhaps, one that could dissolve as suddenly as it began. They are suspended so far away from the every day by their enormous hyper-real sheen of production that, if it’s screwing around, it must then be the screwing around of the divine. Or a highly focused human effort after all.

 

 

 

i want to write an essay about how all music is like library music now, library music being stock music that was kept in film studio vaults and could be really inspiring or really vapid, and most of it was composed as incidental music, even the better stuff had that intent. but it was all mixed together in one place. the way people access music through the internet, which is like this infinite filing system for information, is basically going into the vaults and if you don’t dig something up, it doesn’t get heard sure but it continues to be held onto and available. does it become something like a part of our collective unconscious, then, as incidental film music often has? and i see a lot of influences from those types of music coming back into fashion after years of being nowhere to be found. is that a revival, or are they just working in a similar style to how those composers worked, knowing their music was never in focus?

 
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Hear minimal techno, glitch producer Mark Fell talk about his art installation where a microscope tracks the movements of tiny particles and converts them to sound.

Data Garden’s Youtube Channel

choice clippings from the youtube of what is apparently “A record label and arts catalyst encouraging the discovery of electronic music through history, science and community.”

obscure American psych rockers backwards Boards of Canada style tape warp, when reversed, reveals this.

Yellow Magic Orchestra, early synth-pop innovators and often revered as something like “The Japanese Kraftwerk”, from a live television appearance

And finally, a playful Progressive Electronic piece fittingly called “Fireflies’ Delight”

 

 

 

copper tied

I will tell you with no great exaggeration that The Cape May’s Glass Mountain Roads conjures depictions, in my mind, of the most glorious, shambolic utopia – that is, the kind of vibrantly extravagant future that offends our values to such a point where it can only be considered, in our terminology, dystopia. But let’s be honest – in Brave New World, nearly everybody Had It Good. I regress

It’s easy to imagine a crystalline stairway with a view of a segregated natural world, or the trivial activities of life which just happen to be surrounded by great absurdities. Of hiding from brilliant lights and leaving visual signals for those messages that can’t be spoken. “We saw the smoke, we saw the cloud rising up / And we were changed, we were changed where we stood / Nothing remains, but in the trees, where you left it: yellow string”.

Striking imagery is the main focus of that whole album, a band which practices precise post-rock ala Mogwai but with the reluctant tremors of built steam focused around abstract yet intensely personal lyricism.

The Cape May is well regarded in Calgary circles already, as it should be. All of that only set me up to find more interest in an initially puzzling but very rewarding follow-up, a project involving one of the now-defunct band’s members and Matt Skillings of Run Chico Run (who I’m not particularly fond of).

Pale Air Singers’ debut self-titled album from 2009 – the only release from the band – is a much-slept-on piece work which may just outdo Glass Mountain Roads. The lyrics, while present and up to par with previous work, are less pronounced in the mix, favouring a crushed spirit daze of miasmic clutter. The futuristic tilt of electronics which had a mild cameo now are an integral part of a lumbering mass, as digital manipulation colours the entirety. Mountain Roads itself was produced by Steve Albini, who famously denounces digital recording, using all analog equipment instead.

This is the biggest change and, overall, I have to say consistent with themes of human nature catching up to us despite technological advance and abundance. The compositions are elegant, it’s their presentation which misleads. Pale Air Singers also bombard you with hooks, not massive choruses but rather a number of internal constructions keeping their heads low, mingling like conspirators. Tracks are also very brief; the speed at which this all travels past you, there’s too much to process. Another nod; the thematic ideas all presented by way of sound.

Here’s the first track from that album, which has several verses in a row diverge into a lovely little inspirational chorus (as coda) which is never repeated.

intensely hued

These colourful columns of dilapidated inhibition, stylized distortion set against pure synthesized tones.

Rustling leaves set against the isolation in your headphones.

Where the light hits the atmosphere, or a wave of dust. When it rainbows.

That’s touching without surface. Small craft on a visualizer sea.

Kodiak’s Spreo Superbus is a dense, replay worthy single, when paired with the film-negative colour-palette and shifting walls which recall a warp-speed wormhole from a sci-fi feature, it can’t be thought of as anything less than taking you on a journey. Twist-tie hooks meld into the soundscape like René Magritte’s horse (you wonder what it would feel like to come in contact with a treacherous image, the same?). Left free floating, the synthesizer wash is as full and lively as bacteria swabs, technicolour yawns. A bit sickening. The track gives you a glimpse of that, letting the beat drop out momentarily and shifting into one such glitching surreal forest, but it’s the rest of the time that an out-of-place, world bound parade of bouncing percussion keeps it locked down into reality.

September 12th

Less ambitious today than when I set out. Still ambitious enough to write about music.

On September 12th I listened to: neneh cherry and the thing – the cherry thing

The adage goes, you have to know the rules to break the rules properly. When it comes to playing music, I’m not so sure. Not only are some of the most successful and innovative artists of the last century essentially hacks, but the nature of music seems to move in a way in which the amount of time and energy expended translates to a better understanding without the need for an academic approach. What I’m saying is, the more music you play, the more you understand about composition, regardless of if you go out of your way to study it. There are plenty of examples of musicians whose talent grew through sheer will to continue making music – often with from-the-ground-up or self-taught methodologies: Coil, Sonic Youth, John Fahey, The Beatles, Death (inventors of the eponymous sub-genre “death metal”), the vast majority of punk acts. Neneh Cherry herself is one step removed from John Lydon, that is Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols – she formerly fronted post-punk group Rip Rig + Panic whose original drummer had a stint in Public Image Ltd.

So, all of that said, Neneh Cherry & the Thing know the rules and break them with astounding professionalism. This album contains sparkling-clean, diamond-edged and dare I say accessible avant-jazz drawn into the margins of a really likable pop album, with song structures that take the vague shape of trip-hop pieces but with reintroduced organic tendencies and more presence, less blurry impressionism. The playing and mixing here is tactile and lively, the lyrics are raw (if non-specific) and it runs just the right length for repeat listens. Their rendition of of Suicides’ “Dream Baby Dream” is the obvious highlight, showing an amazing amount of versatility in transforming that song’s foreboding, insistent repetition into a playful, sensual and open invitation. The Thing is about watching your expression, seeing how far it can push, seeing how far it can step away without backing into anybody. Not flailing or dancing, maneuvering. Ever challenge yourself to slip through a crowd without breaking your stride OR thrusting your mostly mustard and mayo sandwich into the breast of anyone’s suit? What’s your best time?

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