Monthly Archives: September 2007

Peter Hammill: Clutch

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Peter Hammill continues to hold a unique and ridiculously unheralded place within contemporary music. No-one negotiated the treacherous terrain of progressive rock more adroitly than Hammill did with Van der Graaf Generator, and no-one, with the honourable exception of Robert Fripp, has acquitted himself with more dignity following its inevitable demise. Clutch is firm evidence that Hammill’s creative fire continues to burn as strongly as ever, 35 years after he began making music.

Clutch is as defiant and questing as any of Hammill’s forty-odd previous albums. As usual, these spirited qualities are often submerged beneath a surface of reflectiveness and melancholy. But it is never long before they break through, propelled by the ferocious roar of Hammill’s voice and the unbridled energy of the instrumentation. The songs are performed exclusively on acoustic guitar, with minimal contributions from Hammill’s long-time collaborators David Jackson (saxophone, flute) and Stuart Gordon (violin). This is the first time in his career that the guitar has been so foregrounded, but as Hammill remarks in his sleeve note this “has not turned out as any kind of folk or roots collection.” Hammill describes his guitar playing as ‘functional’, but there is far more than mere utility in the spectral half-melodies that haunt the opening ‘We Are Written’, or the chordal slash and burn of ‘Bareknuckle Trade’.

Lyrically Hammill is, as ever, preoccupied with weighty matters. There are courageous, issue-led songs about religious hatred, anorexia and paedophilia; emotional reflections on life as a father and musician; and philosophical broodings on the nature of free will and predestination. Whatever the subject, the sentiments are expressed powerfully and eloquently, and delivered with peerless authority and gravitas.

Hammill doesn’t merely sing these songs, he inhabits them with serpentine grace and fervent energy. The densely packed, argumentative lyrics tumble forth and constantly threaten to break the limits of the song. He will alight on a word or phrase and invest it with a charged, visionary significance. The guitar gathers restlessly around the voice, now darting in sparkling trails of note clusters, now exploding in bursts of angry riffing. Even at its most becalmed, this is urgent and passionate music.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 11, 2003)

Cranc: All Angels

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A fine album of free improvisation featuring three gifted string players. Rhodri Davies, on harp, is joined by his sister Angharad on violin and Nikos Veliotis on cello. This is intricate, beautifully sculpted music, shaped by the sinuous interplay between the three musicians. Although there are fleeting passages of lyricism, the dominant mood is one of tumultuous energy.

The recording is divided into six tracks, but functions effectively as a continuous whole. The line-up is innovative; with no anchoring bass sound, the trio are free to mesh together as a cohesive unit. There is little time for individual pyrotechnics – the focus is on fierce ensemble playing, with the different string sounds resonating powerfully in the church where the session was recorded and which gives the album its name.

The range of timbres that the players extract from their instruments is startling. Deep, bowed rumbles give way to scurrying pizzicato runs. The violin sings tremulously before erupting into angry dissonance. The harp is bowed as well as plucked, and is not employed to produce the kind of celestial tinklings usually associated with the instrument. Instead it joins the violin and cello in a conversation whose freshness and animation never let up over the course of the disc.

There’s a pleasing internationalism about this release. Although Rhodri Davies is a well known presence in the London free improv scene, he and his sister are both Welsh, and Veliotis is Greek, as is the record label. The excellent booklet has sleevenotes by Steve Beresford and full credits printed in English, Welsh and Greek alongside Michalis Vamvakaris’ haunting artwork.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 11, 2003)

James Coleman: Zuihitsu

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The theremin is a unique instrument, wholly electronic yet requiring physical effort and gesture to be played, rather than mere knob twiddling or mouse clicking. It is also possibly the only instrument that is played without being touched, consisting as it does of a box and an antenna around which the performer waves his hand, producing a diverse range of timbres.

The trademark sound of the theremin is a kind of spooky wail, often employed in the soundtracks of horror and science fiction films as a reliable way of imparting fear or disquiet. This may seem a wholly appropriate and respectable use of the instrument, but it is clearly not enough for certain musicians, who have been determined to ‘extend’ its application into areas of experimental music practice.

In recent years, alt-rock chancers such as Blur, Sonic Boom and Portishead have all been observed adding the theremin’s trademark eerie whistle to their records. Without exception, this trend signifies creatively stunted artists making glib bids to add artistic credibility – what The Wire has felicitously identified as the It’s Really Experimental syndrome.

James Coleman would no doubt wish to distance himself from the names mentioned above. His music foregrounds the theremin, rather than using it merely to add interest. The Sedimental press release, meanwhile, claims that the label “releases original music made by artists devoted to their craft, without concern to trend”. Sadly, however, Coleman is part of the trend whether he likes it or not, and however serious he professes his engagement with the instrument to be. The dilettantes who came before him have irreversibly defined the terms with which any later musician can engage with the theremin.

This project is therefore doomed from the outset. It consists of fifteen short pieces, on which Coleman’s theremin is the only constant presence. He is variously joined by trumpet, cello, saxophone, percussion and voice, and on two tracks by an ‘experimental chamber music group’. Coleman claims to draw inspiration from AMM, among others, but there is little of that group’s restless creativity in these crabbed improvisations. Nor do he and his cohorts approach the instrumental dexterity of a Rowe or a Prevost.

The title ‘Zuihitsu’ translates as ‘miscellany’, and Coleman has deliberately chosen to articulate his vision in brief, spasmodic flurries. This decision is fatal. Instead of playing to the theremin’s strengths and utilising its singular tone to create other-worldly atmospheres, Coleman resolves to demonstrate the instrument’s avant garde capabilities through a barrage of blips, flips and skips that vie for bloodlessness and inconsequentiality.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 11, 2003)

Current 93 & Nurse With Wound: Bright Yellow Moon

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In August 2000 Current 93’s David Tibet was rushed to hospital suffering from peritonitis. He was operated on that night and nearly died. Bright Yellow Moon is his public articulation of this life-threatening and presumably life-changing experience. Although Tibet and Nurse With Wound’s Steven Stapleton are full members of each other’s groups, and have also released two albums as Tibet & Stapleton, this is the first (and, one suspects, the last) full collaboration between Current 93 and Nurse With Wound. The discographical accuracy is appropriate, since Bright Yellow Moon sounds like no previous release involving either party. It sounds, in fact, like a C93 & NWW album ought to sound, with Tibet’s hallucinatory lyrical visions and Michael Cashmore’s ominous threads of acoustic guitar swathed in the livid attack of Stapleton’s hyperreal studio collages.

The album begins with a brief sung fragment, before opening out into the epic ‘Disintegrate Blur 36 Page 03’. This vast dreamscape is both the record’s creative apex and its clearest statement of intent. It depicts Tibet’s fragile state as he drifts in and out of consciousness, pumped full of drugs and experiencing severe mental disorientation. The glacially shifting guitar and doomstruck percussion frame Tibet’s debilitated attempts to come to terms with his condition: “The fault isn’t mine, it was given to me in a red house, in a dead house…”

The next piece, ‘Mothering Sunday (Legion Legion)’, is quite simply one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever heard. In barely three minutes Stapleton piles horror upon unspeakable horror, tracing a confrontation with death when the dying man is not ready or willing to abandon life. Tibet writes in his sleevenotes, “I could already see helicopters chattering over me, and they followed me to the ward.” They follow the listener too, swooping malevolently like those in Apocalypse Now and merging with insane laughter, sirens, marching, distant choirs and the crying of a baby. This is a vision of hell as disturbing in its way as anything imagined by Dante or Goya.

Stapleton and Tibet broaden the sonic palette on ‘Nichts’, acknowledging NWW’s recent turn to rhythm with an infectious bass line and a delirious percussive attack. ‘Die, Flip Or Go To India’ is another long, spacey aural collage, with Tibet’s nightmarishly treated vocal suggesting imminent collapse. The album ends softly with ‘Walking Like Shadow’, its sad text and gentle minor chords hinting at impermanence and recovery.

TS Eliot wrote: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” David Tibet came closer to ruin than most have, and Bright Yellow Moon is a moving collection of fragments attesting to his survival.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 11, 2003)

Angels of Light: How I Loved You, Angels of Light: We Were Alive!, Michael Gira & Dan Matz: What We Did

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When Michael Gira disbanded Swans in 1997, his main reason was that the weight of expectation surrounding the group’s name had become a liability. Since 1982, Swans had marshalled the transformative qualities of sound in a way that was, and remains, unparalleled in rock. The lurching Industrial rhythms of their earliest work were gradually sloughed off in favour of visionary, crescendo-laden sunbursts. Their last album, Soundtracks For The Blind, mixed intense balladry with spoken word tape loops and Ambient textures to ecstatic effect.

Since then, Gira has further refined his exploration into the redemptive powers of the song with the Angels of Light. (The parallel Body Lovers project, of which the first part of a promised trilogy has so far appeared, continues the journey into the realms of the psycho-Ambient.) How I Loved You, the second Angels of Light album, has recently been complemented by the release of a limited (750) edition live CD, We Were Alive!, available only through Gira’s website.

Gira is nothing if not a soul singer, and the ten songs comprising How I Loved You are saturated with pure, heartfelt emotion. The voice is bitter, regretful and yearning, as Gira maps out vast territories of love and loss. While some of Swans’ visceral attack may have been purged, there is certainly no let-up in the masterful play of tension and release on which these songs turn. The acoustic guitar is at the forefront, augmented by breathy accordion, wisps of pedal steel and firmly insistent percussion.

‘Evangeline’ is how Leonard Cohen should sound these days, if his once rich muse hadn’t been terminally derailed by clodhopping irony and an inexplicable liking for cheesy synthesised arrangements. Gira assumes the role of romantic troubadour with ease, his closely miked vocals suffused with a graceful eroticism. ‘My True Body’ is much darker. Gira comes on like an old time preacher, while the song is driven along by thunderous drumming.

The Angels really take flight, however, on the centrepiece ‘New City In The Future’ and the closing ‘Two Women’. Both last over ten minutes, and both are flawless blends of rousing chord progressions and achingly vivid melodic intensity. Multitracked guitars reverberate endlessly around Gira’s passionate incantations of desire and possession.

The live album captures the Angels at a 2001 concert in Toronto. The sound quality is not perfect, but the immense power of the ensemble is well in evidence, as are the sublime touches of glockenspiel and accordion that add light and shade everywhere. Five new songs are aired, including the exceptional ‘All Souls Rising’, and in deference to history the concert ends with emotive readings of two of Swans’ finest songs, ‘God Damn The Sun’ and ‘Failure’. The CD is nicely packaged in a clear plastic wallet with a printed envelope and personalised artwork.

What We Did is a more intimate affair, a collaboration between Gira and Dan Matz of Windsor For The Derby (who supported Swans on tour in 1997). These songs edge towards the mythic Americana of the Band and Gram Parsons. Gira and Matz alternate lead vocals, and the gently played acoustic guitar patterns are strengthened by atmospheric piano and harmonica. The pairing results in an album that quietly seduces the listener with its warmth and understated sensitivity.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 11, 2003)

AMM: Tunes Without Measure or End

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Free improvisation draws up a pact between performer and listener. Refusing the comforting pillars of notation and songform, the art insists that inspiration and interaction are key to the production of meaning. The performer creates music that is unique and unrepeatable; the audience must listen actively, their hearing intent on capturing each successive moment. The improvising ensemble AMM, a 2000 concert of whose is documented on Tunes Without Measure or End, provide a particularly fine example of this singular form of communication. Their live shows are compelling spectacles of rapturous intensity, where the players’ concentration on the dynamics of their sound is matched by a deep and focused listening among the audience.

It is salutary to recall that in the years 1966-7, AMM were kindred spirits of Pink Floyd and other participants in the London psychedelic scene. Tunes Without Measure or End makes the connection clear: like the early Floyd, AMM were and are about exploring the furthest recesses of inner space. Their soundworld is like a constantly threatened earthquake, with the prepared guitar and electronics of Keith Rowe, the piano of John Tilbury and the drums of Eddie Prévost shifting and hovering like tectonic plates as they conduct a conversation that is as challenging as it is eloquent. Alive to the unfolding complexities of the music, the players deploy their instruments with the utmost grace and sensitivity.

Another parallel that comes to mind is with Jackson Pollock’s ‘drip’ paintings, some of the founding texts of abstract expressionism. At first sight, these huge canvases seem like the random or careless work of a rank amateur; it is only on closer inspection that they are revealed as the layered, pulsating creations that they are. Similarly close attention to the music of AMM enables one to discern the sublime way in which the dark rumble of Prévost’s bowed cymbals explodes into ferocious percussive attack, all the while weaving in and out of Rowe’s arsenal of effects and Tilbury’s unnervingly placid lyricism. When Rowe tunes in his radio it sounds like a transmission from a lost planet, the crackling broadcast adding to the overwhelming sense of mystery and drama that emanates from this exquisite music.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 11, 2003)

Richard Youngs: Sapphie, Making Paper

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Two remarkable albums from a genuinely unsung hero. Youngs has collaborated with Brian Lavelle, Simon Wickham Smith and Acid Mothers Temple’s Makoto Kawabata. On these two CDs, however, he shows himself to be a singer of rare sensitivity in his own right, his distinctive voice arcing and swelling to perfection around baroque solo guitar and piano.

Sapphie is a reissue of a 1998 release on which Youngs sings and plays classical guitar. It’s apparently an elegy for his dead dog, although you’d be hard pressed to tell this from the lyrics, many of which are indecipherable due to Youngs’ unusual, almost strangled vocal style. Like the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser or the early Michael Stipe, Youngs intimates through loose, partly formed phrasing that he has found himself at the centre of a complex personal cosmology. The phrases that emerge and form the titles of the songs – ‘Soon It Will Be Fire’, ‘A Fullness of Light in Your Soul’, ‘The Graze of Days’ – reverberate with private significance. On these three long pieces, Youngs sings in tender howls of rage, while his guitar issues forth sublime arpeggios and cadences.

Making Paper is even more opaque and recondite, but no less compelling. The basic template is similar, but on this album Youngs plays piano. His vocal outpourings take on an increasingly unearthly form on the 22-minute ‘Only Haligonian’, the words tumbling and sliding in counterpoint to the ornate structures delineated by the instrument. The equally epic ‘Warriors’ is dark with foreboding, its skeletal text warning of battle and slaughter; while ‘The World Is Silence In Your Head’ provides a calm, much needed interlude.

These recordings occupy a strange territory between avant rock, folk and classical musics. Together they form a serious and profound body of work, daring in conception and immaculate in execution.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 10, 2002)

Goem: Disco

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An intriguing one, this: an hour-long album consisting almost entirely of sequenced beats, yet which manages to avoid all traces of tedium or repetitiveness. The work of Dutchmen Peter Duimelinks, Frans de Waard and Roel Meelkop, its nine untitled tracks unfold in dense salvos of electronic pulses. The rhythms and timbres of these are constantly shifting. Typically, a sharp snare drum crack or metallic texture establishes an arresting presence, gains in rhythmic interest and modulates into softer, less insistent textures.

Within this framework, there is a considerable amount of variation. At first listen anonymous and featureless, the music soon reveals itself to be highly controlled and organised by its makers. In other words, we are in the realm of electronic minimalism, where the slightest textural shift becomes a significant creative intervention.

Not that the majority of the shifts here are slight; far from it. Stripped of all melodic embellishment, the rhythms are infernal and malevolent. The BPM count is certainly too low to make dancing to this album a viable proposition, which presumably makes the title an ironic statement of some kind. So, rather than contributing to feelings of euphoria and release, Goem instead evoke tension and paranoia. These are forced into the listener’s skull like needles, carried along on invasive currents of static electricity. When relief comes, it comes in the form of soft, fuzzy beats and wispy, aerated drones, like being lowered into a warm echo chamber.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 10, 2002)

Metaxu: Metaxu

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Metaxu are Maurizio Martusciello on sampler and electroacoustic objects, and Filippo Paolini on sampler, turntables and CDs. Their debut CD is an undistinguished addition to the sampling genre. Its eight untitled tracks are resolutely formulaic, with bursts of distortion and interference counterbalanced by high-pitched pulses and frequencies. These strategies are too irritating to be memorable, and yet when the soundfield activity turns towards the minimal, the results are no more engaging.

Sampled vocals, strings and flute drift in and out of the mix, failing to make much of an impression amid the barrage of processed sounds. The album only really takes off with the last track, an energetic yet eerie slab of noise that has a sense of urgency sadly lacking elsewhere.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 9, 2001)

Beequeen: Sugarbush

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The German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-86) is now regarded as one of the most important visual artists of the 20th century. I’m no expert on his work, but I have come across a few examples of it in galleries and museums. Particularly memorable was his long encounter with a coyote, in which he was filmed in close proximity to this unfriendly animal in an otherwise bare room for many hours. Throughout his career he exhibited a fascination with fat and felt, which he was drawn to use as raw materials as a result of having been covered in them, and thereby having his life saved, in a wartime incident. Towards the end of his life he became something of an environmental activist, getting involved in tree-planting campaigns and adopting the position of spokesman for a disenfranchised generation.

This release by Holland’s Beequeen (a duo consisting of Frans de Waard and Freek Kinkelaar) is ‘dedicated to and inspired by’ Beuys, and repeats the words ‘nature, matter, form’ (which could be said to be central to his art) in four languages on the insert. However, the parallels break down when one actually listens to the CD. What we have here is an hour’s worth of join-the-dots Ambient, its dogged formalism only occasionally leavened by interesting interventions.

The Beuys influence is most readily noticeable in the opening and best piece, ’10 Minutes Before The Worm’, which has the feel of a processed environmental recording. It begins imperceptibly, with faint clicks and gently breaking waves gradually giving way to insistent sounds of falling water. Eventually a gloomy synth progression comes to predominate, reverberating eerily around the flooded chamber. It’s an accomplished mood piece, richly evocative of old, decaying and abandoned buildings.

Unfortunately, Beequeen cannot sustain this level of creativity, and most of the remaining pieces are fairly sterile exercises in layering and filtering synthesised washes of sound. Interest is sparked by radio tunings and softly circling rhythms, but Beequeen seem reluctant to let these elements intrude too much. Only on ‘Time Waits For No-one’ do things get really interesting, with grinding metallic clashes and focused blasts of noise. Otherwise the CD is content to meander through well trodden Ambient soundscapes, displaying none of the daring and passion of the artist who inspired it.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 9, 2001)