Monthly Archives: September 2007

Black Moth Super Rainbow: Start a People

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On this, their second full-length disc, Black Moth Super Rainbow present the soundtrack to an enchanted playground as experienced by a happy, inquisitive child. The disc’s sixteen short tracks are less like songs in their own right than snatches of music heard by chance as one explores this warm, sunny hinterland of trees, colors and wizards.

The sounds heard in this way are constructed from a basic template of analogue synths, easygoing beats and amiable, Vocoder’d singing. The all-analogue approach is what makes the disc so immediately arresting and listenable. The synth textures are reminiscent of Pleasure Principle-era Gary Numan, while the vocals recall ’70s Kraftwerk without the minimalist austerity. The lyrics, meanwhile, locate the disc firmly within an endless, summery present: “the sun came up late/tomorrow never came.”

Yet there is a dark heart to this playground that BMSR are frustratingly reluctant to explore. Among the many lyrical references to sun, sunlight and sunbeams, there are hints that all is not as it should be: “there is death and love and awful things/the sunlight takes away all that it brings.” One looks to the music to reflect this ambivalence, but in vain: BMSR are seemingly content to stick to the formula of solarised keyboard melodies, warm, engaging rhythms and lyrics that, happily, remain just the right side of twee. Only in one or two places do the beats approach the vigorous; otherwise the pace is either smooth and mid-tempo, or hazy and de-energised. The disc is an absolute treat – fresh, accessible and appealing – but some acknowledgement of the potential for clouds to blot out the sunshine would not have gone amiss.

Asuna: Organ Leaf

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The changing of the seasons is a potent subject for musicians. Notions of cyclicality, decay and renewal lend themselves naturally to musical tropes such as warmth, coldness and repetition. It’s a challenge risen to with aplomb by Naoyuki Arashi, a young Japanese composer who lurks under the Asuna alias.

Asuna was apparently inspired to create the four pieces on Organ Leaf by the changing view from his window overlooking the hills outside Tokyo. As a result, the disc is a shapeshifting blend of sounds and textures, predominantly pastoral in mood. The titles indicate the time of year depicted by each track, along with imagistic hints at what was outside that window at the time. Thus, the opening “citrus trees, wheels paddle, azurite sea, July” is a light and sunny confection of organic synth washes, soft bass throb and liquid, bubbling drones. The piece’s carefully layered patterns and gentle propulsive motion work perfectly as an evocation of a warm summer’s day.

The second, much shorter track, “stray rabbit, morning fog, November,” adopts a slower, more wintry feel. Abstract metallic frequencies blur and melt into fuzzy, murky tones. This harsher mood is sustained at the outset of track three, “strawberry circuit, childhood, (sister, seasons, letter), October,” with its disorientating collage of voices and street noises. The piece modulates, however, into a beautifully extended reverie, with children’s voices and tinkling bells overlaying a silvery soundscape reminiscent of Tangerine Dream at their spaciest. Finally, Asuna depicts spring in “ten petals, small calm, May” as a time of fragile expectancy, suffused with softly chiming bells and floating, evanescent atmospheres.

David Garland: On the Other Side of the Window

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New York singer-songwriter David Garland is clearly a man who likes to take his time over things. On the Other Side of the Window is only his third album since 1986, not counting a couple of collaborations and an intriguing-sounding album of Beach Boys cover versions that was, for some reason, only released in Japan. Still, the fact that he has a day job as a presenter on a US public radio station goes a long way towards explaining the scarcity of his recorded output.

On this predominantly tasteful collection Garland presents the pop song as a series of artful strategies. Steeped in quicksilver intelligence and musical acumen, these songs easily sate the discerning listener’s desire for ambition and drama, but sacrifice some of the impulse to direct communication that characterises a great song.

This uncomfortable imbalance is well illustrated by the opening title track. A long, tranquil introduction is played out on piano, strings and percussion before Garland’s mellow, wistful baritone enters. The song is a litany of fleeting observations made from a distance: “The pavement laid/the payment made/the travelled mile/the answered smile…” It’s affecting, yet curiously static and disjointed; and matters aren’t helped when the backing chorus (consisting of members of Garland’s family) come in and trill “What was your intention? What was your invention? What was your contention? What was your convention?” in laboured style.

As the album progresses, we find ourselves deep in territory previously occupied by the likes of Magnetic Fields and The Divine Comedy: arch, witty lyrics beautifully sung to a lush instrumental accompaniment. The timbral palette is varied and engaging, with accordion, flute and harmonica adding frequent colour to the basic setting of piano and strings. Yet Garland is no melodist, and too often the music lapses into trite staccato patterns. The words, meanwhile, are persistently too clever by half, and some kind of nadir is reached on “How To” when Garland declaims “On page 290 at the top there’s a diagram marked Figure 4.23, multiply the vector of my gesture and just add the end result to all the crazy things I’ve done.”

There is much to enjoy and admire here, from the pulsing fields of distortion that surround the lengthy “Distance” to the concrète clusters animating “Phantom Limb.” But, for all Garland’s vocal gifts, the eloquence of his texts and the floridity of the music ultimately become wearisome. On the closing “Pastorale,” Garland absents himself entirely in favour of an untreated field recording of water and birdsong. It’s a welcome act of self-effacement that one wishes had been adopted more often.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 13, 2005)

Viv Corringham & Rick Wilson: Glimpses of Recognition

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This is a fine album of songs by a formidable combination of singer and instrumentalist. The songs are long, spare and enigmatic, but they never cease to engage the listener with dynamic shifts of mood and texture. Corringham is a gifted mezzo-soprano whose ability to inhabit the landscape of the song recalls the great Diamanda Galas. Her extended vocal range allows her to stamp her authority on each of the eight tracks, delivering their allusive texts in ways that are constantly challenging and surprising.

Corringham is accompanied by Rick Wilson on drums, keyboards and electronics, and on three tracks by Anne Wood on violin. Wilson’s drumming is always inventive, whether he is powering the song with a steady rhythm or adding colour through his arsenal of percussive effects. Wood’s violin hovers and descends with unerring accuracy, deftly occupying the spaces left by the percussion and voice.

The architecture of this music is subtle and persuasive. A song like ‘Laid Bare’ begins quietly, searchingly, with Corringham’s becalmed yet authoritative voice underpinned by tinkling bells and spooky electronic textures. Wilson ups the urgency almost imperceptibly with busy, confident drumming, before the vocals return to round things off. The album is full of such pleasing attention to detail. Corringham’s voice is so strong that she can sing lines like “we are all participants in eternity” (‘That Moment’) and make them sound eloquent and necessary, rather than empty and pretentious. That strength combines beautifully with Wilson’s vibrant instrumentation, affording the listener far more than mere glimpses of recognition.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 12, 2004)

Shub Niggurath: Testament

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Shub Niggurath: a mysterious name for a mysterious band, who have come up with one of the most perversely compelling albums I have heard in a long time. It transpires that they were named after a demon created by the horror writer HP Lovecraft, and were active in France from the mid-80s to the mid-90s. During that time they released two albums, Les Morts Vont Vite in 1986 and C’Etaient de Très Grandes Vents in 1991. They continued to record until the sad death of bassist Alain Ballaud in 1995, and Testament collects those recordings for the first time. Ballaud’s death is particularly cruel, since on the evidence provided here Shub Niggurath were a group at the height of their powers.

The album contains ten untitled tracks, varying in length from two to ten minutes. Despite the three-year period covered by the recordings, they sound very much of a piece with each other. This is key to the album’s appeal, which lies in the creation of an atmosphere of bewitching heaviness.

In fact, Testament is the music that the largest black hole in the universe must emanate as it remorselessly devours everything around it. Guitarist Jean-Luc Hervé delivers huge, chordal block riffs that lay the foundation for splintering, angular solos, while the late Ballaud’s sub-bass rumbles vie for headspace with Edward Perraud’s powerhouse free drumming. It’s as if the 1973-4 line-up of King Crimson has been pressed into service as the house band in Hell, with Hervé acting as Fripp to Ballaud’s Wetton and Perraud’s Bruford. And just as David Cross’s weedy violin lines marred some of Crimson’s output, so Veronique Verdier’s tentative and unnecessary trombone provides the only faltering moments on this album.

There’s plenty of assured group improvisation here, loading the core trio’s interplay with an exploratory, organic feel. This is especially evident on the first and quietest track, in which spare percussion edges restlessly around subterranean bass throb and eldritch metallic scraping. By the second track the guitar and drums have really kicked in, with great towering structures of fuzz and sustain recalling Ascension or an amped-up AMM. The pace barely lets up over the rest of the album, as the music becomes ever denser and more ominous. These extended freeform workouts left this listener awestruck, humbled and fighting for breath.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 12, 2004)

Nurse With Wound: Salt Marie Celeste

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Driving home late one night, I was listening to Radio 4 when the shipping forecast came on. This evocative broadcast, which I had not heard for many years, immediately transported me back to the times when I would listen to the radio in bed at night, my insomnia soothed by the reassuring, quintessentially English tones of the BBC announcers. In those days, the nightly reading of the shipping forecast was preceded by an appropriately nautical tune, ‘Sailing By’, the playing of which acted as an aid to locating the station on the radio dial. The forecast itself sounded, and still sounds, like a strange litany or code. The mysterious names of the shipping regions – Malin Head, Rockall, German Bight – are followed by warnings of gales and cyclones, all numbered to indicate their severity. Intoned with impeccable Establishment gravitas, the shipping forecast outdoes the legendary ‘numbers stations’ broadcasts for sheer brooding atmosphere. It also recalls the isolated lives of its intended audience, the crews of ocean-going vessels on the high seas, as they huddle around the ship’s radio to await news of frequently treacherous weather conditions.

The decline and fall of one such vessel is evoked with glacial power on Salt Marie Celeste. The album is an expansion of an earlier piece, ‘Salt’, which was included on a limited edition CD released to accompany Steven Stapleton (who, for the uninitiated, is Nurse With Wound) and David Tibet’s art exhibition at the Horse Hospital gallery in London. This fully realised, hour-long version is one of NWW’s most radically minimalist pieces. It consists largely of a single, looming electronic figure, repeated endlessly like the motion of the waves. This incredibly dark and doom-laden sound is punctuated by regular bursts of eerie effects – first a lonely foghorn, then the breathing and creaking of wood, and finally the constant advance of water. Energised by relentless stereo panning, the piece describes a shipwreck as a giant arc of progression and descent.

There are distinct similarities with Gavin Bryars’ epochal The Sinking of the Titanic, although the differences are also clear. Bryars’ ’70s masterpiece takes as its starting point the poignant testimony of several Titanic survivors that the ship’s band continued to play as the ship went down, heroically refusing to abandon their positions and thereby providing the tragedy with a fitting soundtrack. The Titanic itself, meanwhile, was a mass of lively activity in the first days of its doomed maiden voyage, while its sinking was a monument to human folly and hubris. Stapleton’s ship cradles no such vitality, and its sinking tells of no heroism or ambition. This music speaks only of darkness, of isolation and of watery death.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 12, 2004)

Hanna Hartman: Färjesånger/Cikoria/Die Schrauben, die die Welt zusammenhalten

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Housed in a gorgeous red fold-out digipak, this CD from Swedish sound artist Hartman comes with little documentation beyond the fact that its three long pieces were all commissioned by European radio stations. These origins lend an insight into Hartman’s somewhat opaque methods. Listeners to radio dramas are invited to supply their own pictures to complement the sounds given by the broadcast, which on its own is tantalisingly incomplete. Similarly, Hartman’s fractured, multiple sounds strive towards a visualisation that can only be provided by the listener.

Each of the pieces is a collage of found sounds with minimal processing. The title of the opening ‘Färjesånger’ (Ferry Songs) suggests nautical activity, an impression confirmed by many of the sounds included. We appear to be in some kind of workshop or dockyard, with the clank of metal on metal and the hiss of escaping air ranged against deep, indistinct knocks and rumbles. At the same time, the presence of isolated piano notes and what sounds like fabric being torn signals artistic intervention. The piece bursts into life at around 15 minutes, with a frantic collision of industrial textures worthy of Einstürzende Neubauten.

At 20 minutes, ‘Färjesånger’ just about manages to avoid outstaying its welcome, an achievement not shared by the second track. ‘Cikoria’ is an aggregation of further clatters, rumbles and rustles, this time deployed in a more programmed manner. Hartman sets up a facile opposition between city and country life, with police sirens, New York subway announcements and the churning of machinery giving way to birdsong and running water. This movement from an urban to a rural/pastoral setting certainly comes as a relief, but is too schematic to have more than a soothing effect. From then on, the piece really loses its way. The subway announcement is needlessly repeated, a sure sign that creativity is flagging, and the rest of the track is taken up with yet more metallic sounds. Things limp on to the 35-minute mark, but by then this listener had long since lost interest.

The final piece, ‘Die Schrauben, die die Welt zusammenhalten’ (‘the screws that hold the world together’), begins as unpromisingly as its predecessors. As before, we are faced with an array of collaged material that fails, but only just, to engage the attention – this time, organic sounds of wood and bells. Matters improve greatly at around 12 minutes, however, with a slew of rhythmic propulsion that lends the track the irresistible force of a juggernaut. From then on Hartman demonstrates an intuitive deployment of sounds that is sadly wanting elsewhere, showing some of Nurse With Wound’s skill for simultaneously comic and disturbing juxtaposition. A friendly, meandering harmonica solo wanders across the sound stage near the end, capping an uneven and only intermittently enjoyable release.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 12, 2004)

Geoff Smith: The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Salome

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Geoff Smith is a Brighton-based composer and musician who is one of the world’s leading exponents of the hammer dulcimer. This ancient instrument consists of a solid wooden board across which strings are stretched; the player hits the strings with small wooden hammers, producing a lovely, bell-like timbre. In the late 80s and early 90s Smith fronted Attacco Decente, a hard-hitting outfit who made two albums of impassioned, utterly modern folk music. Situated among a battery of equally unusual percussion instruments, and Mark Allen’s rich acoustic guitar work, Smith’s dulcimer formed the bedrock for devastating, harmony-drenched songs that spoke with equal directness of personal will and political commitment. One of the most sharply innovative and creative bands of their time, Attacco never received anything like the recognition they deserved.

Since Attacco split, Smith has continued to explore the possibilities of the hammer dulcimer, and to make some fairly important discoveries of his own, of which more later. These two discs present the audio side of two recent audio-visual projects.

The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari is Smith’s new score to the silent horror film of the same name. Made by the German Robert Wiene in 1919, the film is a classic of cinematic Expressionism. It tells the story of a fairground barker, the eponymous Caligari, who exhibits a sleepwalker that is suspected of murder. The convoluted plot, however, is far less notable than the extraordinary sets and cinematography. The film’s crazed rooms and impossible angles all contribute to its vertiginous, nocturnal state.

In early 2003, Smith embarked on a tour of cinemas around the UK, performing the Caligari score live as the film played above him. Smith uses three dulcimers – chromatic, diatonic and his own customised microtonal model. To watch this live, with little twinkling lights illuminating the instruments as Smith played along with the film’s unearthly scenes from the darkness, was a transfixing spectacle.

Taken on its own, the score is a challenging but rewarding listen. Corresponding to the six acts of the film, its six movements modulate from slow, deliberate exposition to furious outbursts of virtuoso riffing. Smith uses many of the tropes of the classic horror soundtrack – the spine-tingling descending run, the unresolved minor chords that hint at unease and foreboding – but refuses cliché through the constant ebb and flow of pace and rhythm. A delicate melodic motif is introduced halfway through the first movement and recurs at intervals, lending a conceptual unity to the composition that is bolstered elsewhere by tender, wordless vocals. Smith explores the properties of each dulcimer in turn, with the sonorous tones of the chromatic and diatonic models giving way in the fifth movement to the more exotic, Eastern-influenced sounds made possible by the unique tuning mechanism he has developed for the microtonal model. Throughout the piece, Smith ratchets up the tension with sustained melodic inventiveness, releasing silvery clouds of sound that float ominously around the soundworld and then disperse.

Smith demonstrates a more focused side to his craft on Salome, a collection of five instrumental pieces and two songs. This music was used as the accompaniment to a production of Dance of the Seven Veils by the Japanese dancer Shakti, although the album comes across perfectly well as a piece of work in its own right. Bookending the set are ‘Persona’ and ‘Stream of Consciousness’, the only two pieces composed especially for the production; both hammer away at the listener’s nerve endings, creating dreamlike moods through insistent repetition. The songs ‘Mystery of Innocence’ and ‘Sweet Love’ are affecting, but frustratingly slight compared with the heightened erotic and social charge of Smith’s songs for Attacco Decente. The album’s twin highlights, ‘Child Soldier’ and ‘Ferocious Tenderness’, see Smith unleashing the full power of his astonishing virtuosity on the dulcimer, which is however devoid of unnecessary flourish or show. Instead Smith offers a concentrated and sumptuous formalism, with the teeming chimes of the dulcimer rounding out a succession of exquisitely turned atmospheres.

Smith recently announced a major discovery: a device that applies his patented microtonal tuning mechanism to the piano. This has revolutionary implications for the theory and practice of piano playing. Essentially, it enables the piano’s normal equal-tempered tuning to be adjusted at will, opening up the instrument – previously hampered by Western tuning convention – to the microtones situated between the piano’s 88 keys. The pianist will then be able to play music based on unusual and Eastern tunings, providing this most tradition-based of instruments with an entirely new soundworld.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 12, 2004)

Richard Youngs: May

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Richard Youngs follows up Sapphie and Making Paper with a third collection of unearthly minimalist folk songs. This time the album is shorter (a perfectly formed 36 minutes) and the songs less meandering than before, but there is no change in Youngs’ ability to hold the listener in rapt contemplation. There are six songs, starkly arranged for acoustic guitar and voice. Youngs’ strong, confident playing communicates a sense of pastoral longing and quietude, as in the slipping refrain of ‘Trees That Fall’ and the hypnotic, slowly turning phrase of ‘Wynding Hills of Maine’.

The lyrics are allusive, intensely solipsistic texts in which certain key terms – all/call/fall, bloom/dream/wynd – are combined and recombined in various permutations. This is far from being the sterile exercise it may sound. As with the novels and plays of Samuel Beckett, there is a distinctly formal rigour to the layout of the texts, and from that formalism comes a sense of mutability and return to the source. Cyclicality, and in particular seasonal change, are evoked in Youngs’ wistful imagery of blooming, fall and winter.

Youngs’ voice has a strained, yearning quality that permeates the songs and transforms them into bleak transmissions from a hermetic environment. It is this sense of a mind struggling to impose a structure on a world slipping out of control that enables Youngs to sidestep the obvious Nick Drake and Bert Jansch influences and turns May into a work of rare beauty and passion.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 11, 2003)

Various Artists: Infernal Proteus

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How often do you think about plants? However important they are to you, it’s probably not as important as they are to the creators of Infernal Proteus. This is a 96-page hardback book, containing 40 colour illustrations of plants. Each illustration is complemented by a piece of music on one of the four CDs included. Each piece of music is supposed to illustrate the plant in question, although this is not always obvious when listening to them.

I recently spent a day walking around the Eden Project, the former quarry in Cornwall that has been given over to exploring and strengthening mankind’s relationship with the world of plants. The Eden site contains two vast glass domes that meticulously recreate the climatic conditions existing in various parts of the world – the tropical rainforest, the Mediterranean and rural Australia, for example. Plants normally found only in those areas survive and flourish in the domes. It’s a fascinating place, allowing the visitor to experience the beauty and resourcefulness of plants in ways that would otherwise be closed off to most.

In literature, Wordsworth exemplified the Romantic fascination with nature, viewing animals, plants and the landscape as essentially reflective of human experience. At the same time, however, the poet John Clare – a Northamptonshire labourer who, when not being held in asylums, spent the whole of his life working on the land – wrote about nature in a far more direct, unmediated way. For Clare, the existence of animals and plants was so vivid, so powerful, that to write about them in relation to his own life would have been an unthinkable violation. Bolstered by pressing ecological concerns, the Eden Project proposes a similar view of plants as deserving of attention and respect in their own right.

A different approach to the natural world informs Infernal Proteus. The collection is subtitled ‘A Musical Herbal’; traditionally, a herbal is a book containing descriptions of plants with medicinal properties. Although some of the plants here, such as yohimbe, ginkgo and marijuana, do have such properties, most do not, and one or two, such as poison ivy, are positively harmful. Compiler Tyler Davis confirms in his introduction that the book is not intended as a herbal in the traditional sense. Instead, it takes its lead from the Romantic impulse to view plants through a prism of human concerns and desires. Davis writes:

“The world of flora encompasses our lives, and can provide physical and/or spiritual renewal. Each person must have an affinity with at least one plant, yet he or she may not know it.”

This belief is shared by many of the contributors to the compilation, at least those who have included explanatory texts with their images and music. The notes to In Gowan Ring’s homage to the dandelion, and the song itself, anticipate the consumption of wine made from the flower. Makoto Kawabata of Acid Mothers Temple, one of the best known of the artists here, poignantly recollects his childhood fascination with the poisonous equinox flower. Baradelan sees the miniature bonsai tree both as an aid to meditation and as a symbol of mental and physical imprisonment.

The music itself is largely abstract ambient soundscaping, with occasional detours into sinister folk dirges and the occasional rollicking show-stopper. What follows is a selective rundown of some of the highlights.

Disc one concentrates more on gothic/Romantic songform than the later discs. Of these, the previously mentioned In Gowan Ring contribute a plaintive, beautifully wistful paean to the dandelion, its lilting vocals and restrained instrumentation steeped in regret and longing. Venereum Arvum lend an eerie, Wicker Man-inflected atmosphere to ‘Hawthorn’, the words of a traditional English song telling of death and renewal. On ‘Kelp’, Amber Asylum offer an exquisitely sad nocturne for violin, cello and voice. Of the instrumentals, Endura’s ‘Hops’ is a delightful, suitably merry piccolo exercise in praise of the plant judiciously described as “the medicine of the poor”.

Disc two begins the trend towards the ambient that is maintained for the rest of the collection. The pick of these is ‘Beech’ by Jonathan Coleclough (who has collaborated with Nurse With Wound’s Colin Potter) and Tim Hill, a striking and disorientating dronescape. Elsewhere, Kern & Van Pelt’s ‘Pomegranate’ is a vivid evocation of lost love, the crackle of an old record lending the piece a distant, enchanted aura. Steve Roden’s ‘Pine’ is also of interest, being one of the few pieces in the collection where, we are told, the plant itself is used as a sound source. The introduction informs us that the piece was made by rubbing two pine cones together and electronically manipulating the results in the studio. The result is a barrage of unnerving knocking sounds, underpinned by a dark rhythmic pulse. HU’s ‘Tea’ (on disc four) was produced in a similarly organic fashion, by running a violin bow across tea leaves; but the latter piece is far less notable, and the accompanying note on ‘cryptoacoustics’ (a bogus theory that sound can carry ‘spiritual energy’) is risible.

Disc three begins disastrously with The Red King’s ‘Opium Poppy’, a dismal farrago of gothic pomposity, blaring synthesisers and cod-operatic vocals. Quality takes a further nosedive with the dreary sub-Current 93 folk of Numinosum, but picks up again with a trio of looming soundscapes by Wolfskin, Nerthiagh and Mnortham. The closing piece, Baradelan’s ‘Bonsai’, modulates from soothing major chords and an affecting female voice to a spooky netherworld of rumbles and drones.

Disc four lurches unexpectedly into Industrial territory, with Mania and Igor 18 both coming up with intelligent, well crafted blasts of noise. The Lotus Eaters (not, one imagines, the 80s popsters who had a hit with ‘The First Picture of You’) have the pleasure of writing about marijuana. Their contribution is less woozy than you might expect, blending harsh extremes of feedback with languorous, seductive guitar lines. Makoto Kawabata bows his guitar for an extended drone-athon à la Cale and Conrad, while the aptly named Dave Knott depicts the giant sequoia redwood tree with a flickering, Fahey-esque backwoods ambience.

The book is beautifully produced, my only quibble being the tatty plastic pockets inside the front and back covers that house the CDs. The illustrations are uniformly excellent, ranging in medium from photography to pen and ink, oils and computer-treated images. This is a handsome release and a true labour of love. One may take issue with the metaphysical nature of some of the contributors’ speculations, but there is no doubting the seriousness of their engagement with the project, or the success with which they direct our attention towards the often overlooked world of plants, herbs and trees.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 11, 2003)