Nonwrestler Blog

29 April 2008

Weekly MP3 #2: Fennesz - Winter

OK, one week in and I've failed to find a legit, free MP3 off one of my faves of last year (Fennesz & Sakamoto's Cendre). Not ideal. So in lieu of that, here's something by one of the artists.

Fennesz's 'Winter' is from a free MP3 compilation called Warm & Scratchy that Adult Swim (yes, the cartoon channel) released last year. You can get it from MP3.com

. Most of the comp is pretty average and roughly falls in the category of indie rock - bands like Broken Social Scene, The Liars, TV On The Radio, etc. but I think this one's a goody.

'Winter' is fairly typical of Fennesz's material post-Endless Summer. It's a crackly, slightly fractured instrumental piece based on Fennesz's guitar work doing a bit of a fan dance behind dense computer processing. The tendency towards white noise is almost unimaginable and the brutally piercing high-end crackles are gone in favour of ... well, it's ambient music, isn't it?

Christian Fennesz

is an Austrian guitarist who has become something of a darling in contemporary electronic circles. He wins awards from the electro-acoustic academy (e.g. IRCAM's Ars Electronica Prix

) and is loved by people who like more mainstream electronic stuff too. His first release was a 7" called Plays, which had unrecognisable instrumental covers of classics by The Beach Boys and The Rolling Stones. Pretty ideal way to secure your place in arty, post-industrial circles - two pieces of jarring, abrasive noise that at least nod to the rock canon but can be read as either paying tribute or pissing on it from a great height. And on 7"! Oh boy!

All mocking aside, I do find his music by and large pretty engaging and exciting stuff. He's getting increasingly quiet and slushy, which leaves me periodically wondering if he's buffed off too much of what I liked initially.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

25 April 2008

cat prin - the tailor for a cat you know

Courtesy of good ol' popbitch

comes a fine Japanese site extolling the virtues of costumes for cats.

I think the site explains its raison d'etre best:

"You need to dress a cat. And you will say to a cat together with a family. 'It has changed just for a moment'. [ 'it being very dear' or ] You will pass pleasant one time."

Right on. Seems to me a logical impossibility that this won't result in lolcats...

Edit - It turns out the original Japanese page

have a lot more designs. With consistently miserable looking cats... :)

Cats dressed up as mice.

Labels: misc time-wasting

22 April 2008

Weekly MP3 #1: Dntel - The Distance

I decided to do something like the Friday music posts on Look Out, He’s Got A Knife

but for whatever reason am going with only legally available stuff. Thought I’d start with some tracks from my favourite albums of last year.

Right, action...

This song and the title track from Dumb Luck are available for download from Better Propaganda

.

'The Distance' is a boy / girl country song based around a curious, deceptively detailed electronic arrangement. I was going to write deceptively rad, but I think its radness is up front from the opening moment. It's a pity to hear the song out of context, because it's preceded by an even more country song (with vox by Jenny Lewis

of Rilo Kiley

) that ends in such a way that this tune initially sounds like some kind of coda.

The vocals on this one are by Arthur & Yu

, who I dutifully checked out (they toured while I was living in Tokyo) but found fairly boring in their natural habitat. It's the contrast of the style of song with its setting that I like so much, when it's back to a bit of guitar and a tambourine I lose interest...

Dntel himself is a guy called Jimmy Tamborello

. Dumb Luck is his second album (bar a collection of demos) and a switch to Sub Pop

from one of my fave labels, Plug Research

. Jimmy's band The Postal Service provided Sub Pop with their biggest seller since signing Nirvana in the 90s, so I guess the label was eager to jump on his next solo effort.

One thing that I guess makes me love Dntel is that what he's doing is the kind of territory I ordinarily find fairly barren. The musically conservative, smug world of contemporary US indie meets the cosy, all-vitality-subsumed world of 90s UK electronica. Ain't no party like a bourgeois party!

In Dntel's case the music remains fairly outside the gestures of either the soft and easy-listening end of pop electronica (some things on Morr Music

for example) or microsound / clicks & cuts type stuff (I'm thinking of things like Gel: / Dorine Muraille

or So

or some of the things on 12K

and its Happy sublabel). It is pretty big and lush sounding in a lot of ways, but often involving elements wandering a bit out of time or pitch, with lots of keening tones, distant clatters and scuffs, and even (gasp) genuine surprises.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

08 April 2008

The new Cut Copy is quite great

Cut Copy have just put out a second album, In Ghost Colours. It’s heaps better than their first, sounding like they’ve synthesised (hoho) their ridiculously long list of influences much more successfully. The involvement of Tim Goldsworthy (DFA, ex-UNKLE way, way back) probably helps to ensure the overall sound is much fuller and more interesting than on the first album too.

I tried to piece together all the things even one song reminded me of, but it’s a bit of an impossible task. Anyway, here’s my attempt:

After a bit of distorted noodling, Strangers In The Wind kicks off in a verse that sounds like Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams or America’s Ventura Highway. Acoustic guitars, warm bass and acoustic drums, a bit of slide guitar in the background… In come more contemporary electro synth chords and the acoustic guitar abruptly stops as the bassline cranks up a notch for a refrain that sounds like an anthemic moment from Duran Duran (“Run to the lights of the city / This dance will last us forever”). A burst of sizzling noise, house beats drop in and tweaked chunks of sound from the opening verse swirl around between the kick drums – suddenly it’s like that Eric Prydz song that was based on Steve Winwood’s Valerie, except here it’s Cut Copy remixing themselves mid-track. After a few more breakdowns and shifts in scene a super contemporary synth riff comes in, sweeps up into a tinny distorted mess, and the song’s done. At the macro level the steady beat and traditional song structure make the stylistic shifts seem completely natural, but on closer dissection the song seems like it’s stitched together from bits and pieces from the last 40 years of pop history.

I can’t put my finger on who the guy sounds most like – bits sound like Human League, there’s a bit of New Order and when he goes up to the top of his (limited) register he’s heading towards Icehouse and even some Bryan Ferry moments. Oh and the guy from The Church. Maybe I should replace this para with the word “eighties”. ;)

Most of the album’s as dense and blatantly referential as Strangers In The Wind. It creates a weird mix of nostalgia, total familiarity and confusion. All the stylistic nods in a thousand directions could be really off-putting, but I reckon this manages to transcend the shittiness of a lot of “nu rave” acts for two reasons: 1) no song is a direct pastiche of one other thing (e.g. “here’s Cut Copy doing Roxy Music”, nor even “here’s Cut Copy doing 80s disco”) and 2) the guy actually knows how to write songs. The latter is (obviously!) important, because it means there’s something more to latch on to than the initial nerdy fun that comes with hearing familiar things recontextualised, a la mash-ups or someone like The Avalanches.

Sorry, enough babbling! Here’s the vid for Hearts on Fire. Don’t like the vid at all, but the song makes me far too happy. Can't get over the balls required to put that sax solo in!

Edit: Hm, they actually chop out the sax solo in the above vid. Ah well. Here's another one, set to a scene from the BMX racing movie Rad.

Labels: music, youtube