Nonwrestler Blog

Weekly mp3 #19: Matias Aguayo - Minimal (DJ Koze Radio Edit)

Good time party tune! Another one from RCRDLBL ... I admit the site kinda makes me throw up a little each time I look at the coolness on display. Found some good tunes there, regardless.

First up, it's yacht disco. Don't be mislead by the title, the tune is a diss of "minimal", i.e. minimal techno. Matias Aguayo sounds more assured than I'm used to - somehow less annoying than I usually find him - and Koze's remix does big nods to 80s Ballearic stuff (um, Chris Rea, dare I say it?). Mudd or Phoenix would be fair reference points for contemporary stuff. The vox mix up Spanish "mas sensual, indeed) and English to add to the Mediterranean party feel.

Matias Aguayo is a producer and singer signed to über-chic German techno label Kompakt. He was in Closer Musik and did another solo album for Kompakt too. Koze's also released some insane stuff for Kompakt. I like him a lot more than Aguayo usually, but the combination works awesomely, I reckon.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

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weekly mp3 #18: Ten and Tracer - Kunstenaar

The largely excellent label Archipel gives us this week's tune as part of the ridiculously named, free EP L-Msaria B-Lglass. Gah. If it's a nod to Autechre-style titling nonsense it's not to be encouraged. Mind you, at least Autechre's titles suggest some kind of playfulness. Just seems funny to have song titles you can't say.

Kunstenaar is soft and fuzzy textural electronic stuff. Archipel is almost all techno and the choice of sounds and rhythms points that way. Tiny percussion sounds are scattered around rounded, bass drums knocking out a largely regular doof doof doof doof on every beat. An off-beat skank and a bassline that's not only longer than one bar but changes at various times (my gosh!) suggest more of a reggae feel, though.

When I first heard American producer Ten and Tracer his music was more trad "IDM", fitting in with the sound of the heavyweights on Warp Records and wherever else. This EP puts him more in the territory of Jan Jelinek, Murcof, et al - bods making stuff which shows an interest in techy house stuff, but which is really still focused primarily on texture and home listening. That still fits the uncomfortable remit of "intelligent dance music", if you take that tag at face value, i.e. bourgeois music that uses the sounds of dance music but doesn't want you to get sweaty, boozed or your freak on.

Haha, watch my neuroses about the way my own music could be criticised played out in blog-space! ;) In fairness to Mr Canupp, his "about" page suggests he doesn't take himself too seriously. :)

Labels: music, weekly mp3

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Weekly mp3 #17: The Dolls - Martini Never Dries

The band offer up this tune on their website.

Loungey slow jam, all wandering piano and murmury female vox, with a nice touch of menace in the wobbling synth bass and beats.

Here's the blurb about the band from their site:

*The doll number 1: Vladislav Delay (Finland). Natural-born drummer. Acclaimed artist and producer with wide range of output. The studio doll.
*The doll number 2: Ars Electronica-winner Antye Greie aka AGF (Germany). Singer and producer who in addition to her acclaimed solo works has already worked with Craig Armstong on numerous occasions. We call Antye the art doll.
*The doll number 3: Golden Globe-winner Craig Armstrong (Scotland). Composer who has worked with everyone and everything from MOULIN ROUGE and RAY soundtracks to writing chart-topping hits for artists and acts such as Massive Attack, U2 and Madonna. You could say he's the film doll.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

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Weekly mp3 #16: Daniel Maze - How's The Serenity?

This is the title track from the How’s The Serenity? EP, which can be downloaded from the Test Tube net label.

Starts off with nose(-out-of-joint) flutes, acoustic guitar, and rain sticks, with synthesized swells. Should be ridiculously cloying, but things get interrupted. The EP is experiments with tape, apparently, and when some synth + mellotron flute type lushness swamps the intro noises it springs up with that pause-button-being-released tape zhwoing. It’s a thing of awesomeness. And as abruptly as the sound arrives it squelches to a halt, everything falling back to the quiet residue of the sounds from the intro. This approach repeats unpredictably. I love it. Beautiful contrast between the pretty, fluid harmonic content and the way Mr Maze messes with it. Yum.

Daniel Maze is a Canadian who so far has released only net releases. Quite a few of them. Some have beats, but not usually. Some are really glitchy and distorted, but not usually. This EP is my favourite.

Post-rock fans will probably find a lot of interest on Test Tube. I like some of their releases a fair bit.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 13:10  0 Comments Links to this post

Don't mean to do this, but...

Thought I'd share something of mine (kinda) here, because I really want people to see it!

A very nice man has made a video for Malty Media's tune, 'The Mescaline Man', appearing on the upcoming Angry Rabbit compilation Apropos of Nothing. More stuff in my music news... release gigs, etc.

Here's the vid on Youtube:

Labels: music, youtube

Posted at 21:55  2 Comments Links to this post

Weekly mp3 #15: Sonmi451 - Vladivostok

Download this tune, or all of The Quiet EP, from Monotonik.

Soft, chiming chords, muffled clicking beats, and echoing voices yabbering away intermittently in Japanese and English. Something along the lines of Shuttle 358, Biosphere or maybe the quietest moments of Electric Birds.

Sonmi451 is a Belgian guy, named after a robot from the David Mitchell novel Cloud Atlas. He’s done a bunch of albums and the above netlabel release reissues material from an older, out of print CD.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 13:10  1 Comments Links to this post

Weekly mp3 #14: Some Water And Sun - Gloomy Town

Download the song from Better Propaganda.

A very simple soul vocal meets blippy electronica instrumentation. Percussion and slow-mo beats carry a repeating vocal hook sung by a Japanese guy in English. The instrumentation and treatments are very indicative of John Hughes's later output, really. The bassline reminds me of Herbie Hancock's 'Chameleon' (I think it's the dotted-quaver, ascending semitone thing) with added squelch.

I don't know much about the singer, but, yeah, John Hughes. John Hughes III. Hefty Records label boss. Indie rocker turned post-rock solo act turned glitch+Black American music traditions producer. I imagine being the son of the guy who directed The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and all that leaves you in a weird position PR-wise. It's not like John & Julian Lennon or whoever. There's not really a definable audience overlap to milk, you're obviously doing something completely different, working in a different medium, etc. etc. but, man, dad's really famous, so you'll at least pique people's interest if you mention the connection... I guess the best angle is to hook up members of Tortoise to write the soundtrack for your dad's next movie. Then release soundtrack on your label and, yay, you have some relevant connection for journos to go on about.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

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Weekly mp3 #13: Songs: Ohia - The Lioness

Download 'The Lioness' from the label's website . Completely different from the last couple of weeks, this one. Liking immaculately chiselled electronic production doesn't preclude appreciating the exact opposite...

My wife has called this crash-your-car music, but I have a soft spot for a certain kind of gloomy slow rock stuff. The vagely country bits, I guess - Mark Kozelek / Red House Painters, stuff like that. Lyrics like "I want to feel my heart break, if it must break, in your jaws / want you to lick my blood off your paws". This one's not Steve Albini-produced, but has a similar aesthetic to the Songs:Ohia tracks that are. That is, it avoids contemporary standards for sheen and polish in studio recording, and leaves heaps of space for some decent dynamics. Works really well.

Songs:Ohia was essentially Jason Molina's project. He's more recently been recording as Magnolia Electric Co. This tune is another one of those cases where I heard this song and thought "Shit, got to hear more of this!", then heard more of this and went "Ah. Shit." Molina does have other really good songs, but just not much that suits my tastes. Again I find myself pondering what the X factor is, but I won't go on about that again... Just go read Equus to understand my dilemma. ;) Heh, that's probably about as cheerful as this song!

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 13:10  0 Comments Links to this post

Weekly mp3 #12: Dabrye - Smoking The Edge

Download 'Smoking The Edge' from Epitonic .

Dabrye is probably my favourite producer of this century. Heh. It’ll get harder to make such crazy-sounding statements as time goes by, I guess. I'm also probably more deeply influenced by music from the last century, but, still, I love the direction he pushed a sound that I was already in love with. It’s easy enough to trace his influences, especially as he (Tadd Mullinix) does things in a bunch of styles under different names, so when it’s Dabrye time he’s clearly rounding up a particular set of genre tropes and working with them.

This is the first track I ever heard from Dabrye and still one of his better ones. A jagged, wordless robot voice acts as the main riff, swung against the super-crisp drums. It's got a hip-hop feel but Tadd's background in techno is blatant. There's some great staggering drum fills and tweaks but to a large extent you know exactly what's coming from the first 20 seconds. The key with this kind of approach is making the elements sufficiently awesome that you want to hear the same thing over and over again. :) He also knows to keep the track short. Good call.

Since this track came along Dabrye's sound has got grubbier and hazier, and there's been a big surge in people doing things in a similar territory. Things start to get interchangeable to those who aren't already into the sound... I swear most would think it was all one producer if you made a mix from tracks by Dabrye, Flying Lotus (who is getting big post his Warp signing), Lukid, Take, Caural, and other artists on compilations like The Sound of LA and Beat Dimensions. Chuck in some appropriate J Dilla instrumentals to show the common starting point...
So I think I've past saturation point for this kind of sound - while there are undoubtedly good things still going on, after however many albums of similar sounding stuff the pay-off feels pretty diminished. Still, Dabrye. You could nitpick aspects of his sound that make him stand out, but what separates the good from the bad is not something you can neatly map against formal elements... Maybe it comes back to the emotivist assertion that "I like it" is the same as "It's good".

Anyway...

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 13:10  0 Comments Links to this post

Weekly mp3 # 11: Lukas Nystrand & Karl Johansson – Untitled R&B Instrumental

The net label Ageema Music Club mainly seems to be a vanity press for one guy, Lukas Nystrand, with a couple of friends in tow. I could’ve linked to a bunch of different things here, cos there are plenty of good pickings, from Lukiss’s Gameboy-in-dub stylings, through the J Dilla-gone-glitchy / Avalanches territory of Glenny #417, to Julien Love's punky dub-disco tracks.

I’ll be cheeky and link directly to the MP3 , because the page is a bit hard to navigate. It’s on We Shall Not Be Moved from 2005.

The track title should give you a good idea of what you’re in for, but given that R&B extends over the past 40 years and most recently seems to include stadium trance (looking in your direction, Timbaland! ), I’ll make some notes anyway. It’s downbeat and grubby, and sounds to me like they digested what ?uestlove unimaginatively called the “dirty sound” the Soulquarians were reaching for on D’Angelo’s Voodoo and Common’s Like Water For Chocolate. It’s grubbier than that, though, much more of a 4-track home recording vibe. Live bass guitar, by the sounds of it, wonky keys, programmed strings and beats. Always been a fan of those oomf and clap beats and this kind of slightly awkward, staggering rhythmic feel.

Overall, the track has the kind of vibe I always hope to hear from Madlib, but, frankly, he’s about the most over-hyped producer working today. Ridiculously inconsistent anyway.

No idea who Lukas Nystrand & Karl Johansson actually are, other than that Lukas seems to be a designer by trade and they’re presumably both Swedish.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 13:10  1 Comments Links to this post

Never knew 'White Lines' was just a massive rip-off

Liquid Liquid's 'Cavern':



It's so much more interesting too - so live, and weird sounding.

The backstory of the rip-off action on this history of 99 Records is interesting too. Scroll down to the bit about the single "Optimo / Cavern".

Always amazes me to read about these "obscure" songs and then read passing comments that e.g. this song sold more than 30,000 copies at the time. Holy shit. If I could sell a 10th of that I'd be so stoked.

Labels: music, youtube

Posted at 07:57  3 Comments Links to this post

weekly mp3 #10: Antiguo Autómata Mexicano - Broken In Your Room Again

This track is part of a Background Records sampler on the now defunct Minlove site. Well, it may come back some time, but it's been out of action since 2006, so maybe not.

I have fairly minimal love for "minimal" where it's a stand-in for "techno" now that that term is relatively uncool. 'Broken In Your Room Again's not really so techno, it's lead by the bassline more than the beat and spiralling arpeggios and echoing layers of percussion don't exactly cry out "dancefloor fodder". It is electronic music of the right kind of tempo, I guess. Anyway, I like it.

Antiguo Autómata Mexicano is one guy, Ángel Sánchez Borges. He released a really good album last year called Kraut Slut, which opened with a track called 'Rother, Dinger, You and Me', so the guy is demonstrating his kraut rock love fairly unequivocably. I reckon that shows through in 'Broken In Your Room Again' too.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 13:10  0 Comments Links to this post

Weekly mp3 #9 take 2: Albert Kuvezin and Yat-Kha - Love Will Tear Us Apart

OK, since Tuesday’s effort failed, here’s another attempt. You can download a ridiculously lo-fi MP3 from the band's website.

A cover of Joy Division's most famous song. Tuvan throat singing, acoustic guitar. Odd.

This is the only contemporary music I've heard from Tuva, a chunk of Russia that borders Mongolia and which Taiwan claims is part of its China. Throat singing is all about singing two tones at once, by controlled resonance of the nasal cavity. The main tone is brutally low, and the overtone is a whistle that pretty much doesn't sound like it comes from an animal. If anyone knows Massive Attack's 'Karmacoma', the melody in the chorus is actually a throat singer, not a synth.

The information on the band's site makes the situation in Tuva sound pretty bleak. Probably because it is.

I played this at the last Malty Media night.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 15:29  0 Comments Links to this post

weekly mp3 #9: anders dahl - kärrsilja - metal bowls, electronics, bouzouki

This week's offering is a change of pace in two ways - it's not a song (or anything to do with "pop music" in any sense) and it's from a "net audio" release, i.e. it's from a free MP3 release that's not attached to some commercial release available in a physical format.

EDIT 18/06/08: Sorry, turns out Komplott have redesigned their site, and this release is no longer available.

This track is part of an EP called Kärrsilja, flockblomstriga 2 . The EP was released in 2004 by the Swedish "contemporary music" label Komplott, which does both free MP3 and commercial CD releases.

Anders Dahl makes what could be called electro-acoustic music (if you believe that doesn't have to be made by academics), noise (if you believe that doesn't have to be loud or noisy) or free improv (if you don't care about whether he's really improvising!). The ridiculously prosaic subtitle of "metal bowls, electronics, bouzouki" tells you exactly what you're in for. I'm guessing Dahl improvised three or four tracks from these sources, layered them up and did very little additional treatments. Maybe he played along with what he had previously recorded and responded to those tracks. Maybe not. :) Likewise, it's a bit of a moot point as to whether he can play the one traditional instrument in the mix, the bouzouki, because he largely plucks out occasional harmonics.

As may be clear from my description, I can certainly understand how this kind of music can seem artless, frustrating, or plain fruitless to someone listening to it. As with most music, I'm at a loss to say why this particular collection of sounds rocks my world. Formally, I like the restraint in the use of sources, and I like the timbres of those sources individually and in combination. But it's always difficult for me to pin point anything more than that.

Friends have asked in the past whether I derive some kind of intellectual enjoyment out of this kind of thing, but I don't think that's the case any more than with any other kinds of music... There's really not that much to think about here, is there? :)

It's been 4 years now since I first downloaded this EP and I still come back for repeat listens. Not sure it would work for everyone, but I've found the best listening conditions for this kind of thing are first thing in the morning on a sunny day when I have some time to relax.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 13:10  3 Comments Links to this post

weekly mp3 #8: david byrne & brian eno - regiment

My favourite track from 1981's My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts was made available for download when the album was reissued in 2006. Lots has been said and written about it, but if you haven't heard of it around the time Eno was producing Talking Heads he and that band's frontman wrote an album together. It's usually described as instrumental, which is somewhat ironic given it's built around the premise of writing instrumentation around pre-existing vocal recordings. I suspect in this case "instrumental" = "David Byrne does not sing on this record". :p

'Regiment' is the album's most blatant funk moment, which may be in spite of having Bill Laswell guesting on bass. Never liked that guy. I'm much more excited by the soaring guitar laid down by one of Eno's more frequent collaborators, Robert Fripp. It's a slightly edgier sound than the Frippertronic vibes of Bowie's '"Heroes"', but that gives you a general idea of the sound... It's pretty great.

The vocalist, says Wikipedia, is Dunya Yusin, a "Lebanese mountain singer". I thought she sang songs, not mountains, but she sounds amazing anyway. Crikey.

If you have the urge, Byrne and Eno have offered up all the tracks from the original multi-track recordings of a couple of songs, which you can download and remix. As they point out, it's in-keeping with the spirit of the original... although I have to say I think it'd probably be more in-keeping with the spirit of the original if you could release the results under your own name and get royalties off them. ;)

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 13:10  1 Comments Links to this post

weekly mp3 #7: the deadly deaths - see the world

Some New Zealand stuff this week, specifically from the much maligned (fairly, in my experience!) city of Hamilton. You can get four free tracks by The Deadly Deaths from their virb page.

Their songs are fairly samey, but I find 'See The World' the most catchy. Key words, I guess, are "pared back". The appeal for me is definitely in how simple the track is, both in terms of what's being played and its arrangement. Sometimes I love subtlety and detail, but that sense that a band is doing exactly what's needed to make something work is pretty enticing too...

Not much more to say about this one.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 13:10  1 Comments Links to this post

Weekly MP3 #6: Peter, Björn and John - Young Folks

This week's song is available to download from Better Propaganda , which is a relatively unannoying free downloads site.

Whistling intro! Druggy-sounding boy/girl duet! ESL lyrics! Spector-ish 60s throwback vibes! Exclamation marks! I've been listening to this song for a couple of years and haven't got bored of it, which is as good a sign as any that it's worth sharing.

I don't know think it makes a large amount of sense, but 'Young Folks' reminds me a lot of a couple of tunes from the 60s - Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot's 'Bonnie & Clyde' and Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood's 'Some Velvet Morning'. It doesn't really sound that much like either of them (especially not the latter), but in generic terms they're all 60s-sounding duets between two kinda lazy, slightly druggy sounding vocalists, one male the other female. In this case the song is actually only 2 years old and was written in Sweden, but never mind.

The guest singer actually reminds me most of Hope Sandoval (of Mazzy Star), which, again, is a bit more about the vibe than anything quantifiable...

I checked out the album this song is from and was fairly uniformly unimpressed. None of it had the big sound, and the absence of the guest singer showed up how annoying the guy's singing is. :)

When I was living in Tokyo this song and its cute retro cartoon video seemed to win hearts, so you could hear this blaring away on the massive video screens above the big Hachiko crossing in Shibuya 7 days a week for a while. I have no idea whether it was much of a "hit" anywhere...

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 13:10  0 Comments Links to this post

The biggest issue facing modern society

Punctuation in band names. It's got to stop.

Labels: music

Posted at 13:55  3 Comments Links to this post

Weekly MP3 #5: Barbara Morgenstern / Mapstation / Paul Wirkus

OK, my incredible plan of supplying a legally available MP3 from each of my fave albums of last year is turning out to be extra special... my assumption that these days lots of people made available at least one full track from any given new release seems to be all wrong.

I'd also expected the electronica nerds to be the ones most relaxed about this kind of thing. However, two of my enduring favourites of 2007 were quiet electronic affairs - Sart by Norwegian duo Pjusk and All The Birds Were Anarchists by the Austrian/German "supergroup" (heh) September Collective - and I can find no free downloads from either album. There's streaming stuff and what have you, but that's it.

Last on my album list was Woolfy's If You Know What's Good For Ya!! and aside from the fact that doesn't seem to have got a physical release yet (apparently Rong's distribution fell over) I can't find free MP3s from that one either... As per usual, there're some streaming tracks (including my fave, 'Odyssey') on his myspace...

So this is the end of that briefly lived theme, but I've found a means to wrap that up while marking the more free-form approach I'll probably take in coming weeks. It turns out all 3 members of September Collective do have free songs online...



From left to right:

Mapstation - Tapes
Stefan Schneider is the reason I came across September Collective in the first place. As well as his solo guff as Mapstation he's a founding member of two other bands I really like(d?), Kreidler and To Rococo Rot. His music may be considered boring, repetitive, monotonous... or subtle, trance-like and meditative. I like it a lot. His last Mapstation album was one of my faves of 2006 - at that point I hadn't really expected an ambient album to come along and grab me as much as it did.

Barbara Morgenstern - Aus Heiterem Himmel

Morgenstern's also collaborated with another member of To Rococo Rot, Robert Lippok. Her solo work is songs, for the main part, whereas I'm assuming her part in September Collective is mainly pianist...

Paul Wirkus - Blask

His approach seems to involve a giant table of boxes, cables and wires, which certainly has appeal quite distinct from that of the soft environment of laptop performance. There's a certain organic quality to September collective that I've romantically decided is due to Paul's involvement.

I like this track until the vocals come in. Hm. Maybe you'll like it more and be ever so grateful that I shared something I didn't even particularly like! Ah well.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 13:10  0 Comments Links to this post

Bad Cover Version

This is all 7 years too late, but I've been revisiting Pulp's last album, We Love Life, and felt the urge to rave about 'Bad Cover Version'. The lyrics talk about trying to replace lost love using the metaphor of bad covers to get the message across. At the time the album came out I never bothered to track down the video, but, man, it's worth it. It's one of the most nicely married-to-the-song vids I've seen in ages, both in terms of message and tone.



On top of that, the b-side for the single is a cover of 'Disco 2000' by Nick Cave. Follow that concept through! Follow it!

No video, but you can stream it via Youtube too.



Aaand for in-jokey reference bonus points, the lyrics trawl through a list of "bad imitations that got it so wrong". This includes "the second side of Til The Band Comes In", which happens to be an album by the song's producer, Scott Walker. Haha, I guess it's nice to work with someone you get along with well enough that you can take the piss out of them while they're helping you out.

Labels: music, youtube

Posted at 14:30  0 Comments Links to this post

Public CCTV music vid

This is a bit old, but this (terrible-sounding) band The Get Out Clause played in a whole lot of public places in Manchester and then requested the CCTV footage of themselves under the relevant legislation. They edited the footage together, and, hey presto, a novelty video! Was surprised to see footage from inside a taxi!



Pity the idea is wasted on a crap song and apparently having no intent beyond being cool, bro... So it goes.

Labels: music, youtube

Posted at 09:43  0 Comments Links to this post

Weekly MP3 #4: People Press Play - Hanging On

Man, scoured the internet for a free LCD Soundsystem MP3 and came up with nothing. Dumb. Anyway, figure anyone who wanted to hear last year's Sound of Silver has managed to by now.

No luck with the less popular Lukid either...

So, third try, People Press Play. This song is available to stream or download on their Myspace.

This band's self-title album dredged up a lot of memories of music I really loved about 15 years ago - fairly shoegazey stuff with female vox (Curve, Slowdive, Lush, and, yeah, My Bloody Valentine) - but mixed with elements of dance music and electronica from the intervening period. 'Hanging On' is fairly representative of the album, but, to be honest, isn't a highlight. I like the vocal melody, and the beatbox-ish percussion which always has me wondering if I'm hearing a human or a machine...

Three out of four members of People Press Play have been making music together for 12 years, first as Future 3 and more recently as System, and I've always liked what they've got up to, from earlier trip-hop type gear through the skittery glitchiness of the late 90s to their solo stuff as Dub Tractor, Acustic and Opiate (c.f. some of the backing track's on Björk's Vespertine). I wasn't familiar with the vocalist before, but I've read that she has certainly been releasing music prior to this collaboration.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 13:10  0 Comments Links to this post

Weekly MP3 #3: Group Five - Distant Stations

This track's from my mate Andy's second release, Distant Stations, which you can freely download from last.fm .

The EP's title track is pretty indicative of Group Five's "sparse scuffy abstract-hip-hop instrumental stuff." I was thinking about linking to the "my rhythm section is melting!" scratch-collage of 'East India Company', but this is the one that's become an enduring favourite. The sparseness and repetition in some Group Five tracks can generate a degree of intensity, but in this case I find the atmosphere really relaxed. The bending stand-up bass part is nice and languid, and the piano bits are really, uh, widescreen. :) Expansive.

Group Five is the recording moniker of Andrew Loughnan, a friend, some-time collaborator, and co-label owner of Angry Rabbit (haha, sounds so flash when it's really just a few friends!). He notes on his site that someone once compared his style to a faeces-flinging monkey, and I'll have to accept responsibility for that.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 13:10  1 Comments Links to this post

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

Posted at 13:10  0 Comments Links to this post

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

Posted at 13:01  1 Comments Links to this post

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

Posted at 15:11  1 Comments Links to this post

Ghislain Poirier

Been listening to this Quebecois producer a bit recently. He's quite a weird one, insofar as he started out making largely beatless ambient stuff (his first album was on the ever-so-quiet 12k label and was perfectly at home there) and has progressively moved on to more and more rowdy club tunes, working with dancehall and hip-hop vocalists. Production-nerd wise, his sound is still very carefully crafted, but the focus now is on making things as big, crunchy and noisy as possible. I think it would be impossible to listen to something from his first album and something from his brand new one and identify that these are from the same person.

This little promo thing for the new album has him mention the fact he made ambient music, and doesn't now, but he obviously doesn't stop to talk about why.



Quite impressed to see Ninja Tunes putting funding behind something so raw-sounding.

I guess I find the move interesting, cos I often feel an urge to express my love for dumb party music in my own writing, but always end up pulling back towards the careful (mannered) end of things. I guess I could be writing something in every style I like, but it seems a bit unmanageable... Looking at that vid, it seems pretty human to focus on the music you like making which gets you large rooms full of cheering people, too... although I seem to be tending in the opposite direction. ;)


There's a free mix of African hip-hop Poirier did on Pitchfork . Mysterious. Pretty boring, actually. :| Ah well.

Labels: music

Posted at 13:03  0 Comments Links to this post

RIP Teo Macero

Always feel a bit weird about grief for public figures and stuff, but not sure if this guy's death will make that much of a ripple, but also think he's worth knowing about if you're into music. He died on the 19th, aged 82.

I first heard about Teo Macero through the movie Modulations, where he talks about how as early as the 60s he was hacking and splicing the tapes for jazz musicians like Miles Davis, completely blowing apart any purist notions of jazz being something that only happens in real time, and jazz records being real records of an event / performance. For someone who loves production and edits and mixing, it was pretty exciting to learn that that aspect was being totally pushed and developed at the same time that Davis was going electric and giving birth to fusion.

Wikipedia entry
The text of the Modulations interview

Here's an interview about his work on Bitches Brew. Not sure there're any particular insights here, but his impersonations of Davis are pretty classic. :)

Labels: music

Posted at 08:56  0 Comments Links to this post

CD reviews catch-up

I was trying to make last.fm journal entries about CDs I'd bought, but ran out somewhere around the time I left Japan. So here's what I just spurted out...


Jodi Cave - Carbon Series Volume 4 (12x50, 2006)


Lukid - Onandon (Tirk, 2007)


Take - Earthtones & Concrete (Inner Current Recordings, 2007)


LisM - Reverso (Disques Corde, 2007)


Various - Microsolutions #1: Microsolutions To Megaproblems (Soul Jazz Records, 2005)


Over The Atlantic - Junica (Involve, 2006)


Fennesz - +47° 56' 37" -16° 51' 08" (Touch, 1999)


Taylor Deupree & Christopher Willits - Deupree + Willits / Invisible Architecture #8 / Whatever this is! (Audiosphere, 2003)


Sun - I'll Be The Same (Preservation, 2007)

Labels: music

Posted at 21:52  0 Comments Links to this post

Going nuts MP3 shopping

I stumbled upon an MP3 shopping site called Amie St , which works on the premise that songs are initially free and increase in price as demand goes up, i.e. as more people download. Alongside that when customers sign up with some credit they also get "RECs", so they can tag a song as one they recommend and write a little blurb about why they like it. If the price goes up they get additional credit. So basically it's encouraging customer-driven promotion and customers to check out unknown stuff.

Intrigued, I had a chat with Shanan and we agreed to put our Montano album up there. It's kinda stalled after slipping over the threshold into pay-per-download, which seems to be the case for most any unknown material out there. So am not sure about the artist side of it being so beneficial for complete unknowns. For that matter I don't think there's any electronica that's actually making returns, beyond some Ninja Tune crap, but I may be wrong.

Still, on the customer side of it I'm totally hooked. Having got the cable modem set up at home I've got the latest downloads page as my home page and keep checking in to see what I can grab while it's still dirt cheap. I've downloaded a lot of stuff that I've quite liked but never been so moved as to buy at full price in the past, a few things I would've bought on sight at full price, and a bunch of cool things I'd never heard of before. Plus some absolute horse shit. :)

Highlights:

• Antiguo Automata Mexicano's Kraut Slut for free. Have to update my best of 2007 list, this is absolutely superb micro-house / ambient-techno / modifier-noun stuff from Mexico (duh)
  
• Mudd's Claremont 56 for free. As above, absolutely superb 2007 release, this time in the realms of ballearic / beard disco / whatever. Strange mix of slow motion disco, blistering guitar solos and whatever else. Hm. Suits the sunny weather.
  
• Ridiculous amounts of Big Dada's back catalogue, including every Roots Manuva album, every TTC album, both Ty albums, and something from Company Flow's Bigg Jus, all for free.
  
• Completed my Dabrye collection, with his first album and the 12" with the Prefuse 73 remix for free. Dunno why I thought this stuff wasn't worth picking up, it's almost as good as Instrmntl.
  
• Lots of other Ghostly International / Spectral Sound 12"s that I wouldn't bother to buy on vinyl, but which often have a couple of great tunes on them.
  
• J Dilla's Ruff Draft for US$8. Lots more Stones Throw stuff there, but I already have the ones I wanted to get. Keep vacillating over getting Aloe Blacc's album.
  
• A huge Roedelius retrospective for free, going back to Kluster, Cluster, his collabs with Brian Eno and whatever else. Some of it even sounds good.
  

There're lots of things I don't like about how the site works, but it's suckered me. Kind of like watching Lost, I s'pose. ;) Plus they've just published me waxing lyrical about DJ Vadim for extra credit, so I guess I'm on the payroll now. ;)

It's funny, this has curbed my illegal downloading a fair amount.

Labels: misc time-wasting, music

Posted at 11:55  1 Comments Links to this post

Contemporary or not?

I stumbled upon this Youtube clip embedded in a page, so I couldn't see the name or any info about it. The weird thing was I couldn't decide from watching it whether it was contemporary people being very calculatedly retro or something really old...



As it happens, it's from 31 years ago.

Labels: music, youtube

Posted at 00:39  1 Comments Links to this post

2007 music faves

I've posted a couple of lists on last.fm of the stuff I enjoyed most that was released in 2007. As is probably always the case, most of the things I was really getting excited about were released prior to 2007... it's left me toying with the idea of doing a 2006 list too.

Anyway, fave singles:

http://www.last.fm/user/jetjag/journal/2008/01/4/613808/

Fave albums:

http://www.last.fm/user/jetjag/journal/2008/01/4/613810/

Labels: music

Posted at 13:46  0 Comments Links to this post