Monthly Archives: September 2007

Vidna Obmana & Serge Devadder: The Shape of Solitude

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Vidna Obmana is a Belgian sound sculptor whose recent Motives for Recycling, a remix of work by Asmus Tietchens, was reviewed in the last Sound Projector. On this occasion he teams up with guitarist Serge Devadder for an hour’s worth of fairly run-of-the-mill Ambient fare.

The CD opens with some virtuoso guitar playing from Devadder. His technique may be faultless, but the effect is soporific. Interwoven with these tasteful pluckings are Obmana’s more testing manipulations, which gradually come to dominate the album.

‘Perceptual Edge’ sees Devadder’s playing move up a notch, his intricate picking complemented nicely by Obmana’s sustained washes of sound. The lengthy ‘A Stinging Memory Of Shared Skin’ is the album’s high point; the heavily treated guitar floats malevolently around the listener, producing an eerie, alien sound world. This ominous mood continues in the album’s effective closing piece, ‘Leaving This Place Again’.

Over the course of an hour, however, interest palls. The above highlights aside, it all sounds so terribly inert, its aimlessness evidence of a lack of imagination and spirit rather than any kind of contemplative detachment.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 7, 2000)

90º South: The Barrier Silence

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The folks at Ochre Records continue their mission to bring quality electronica to the people with this impressive CD by Kevin Fox, aka 90º South. Fox namechecks labelmates EAR on the insert, and he shares Sonic Boom’s fondness for vintage equipment; instruments used include valve amplifiers, Stylophones and ‘various mechanical and electronic toys’. Thankfully, however, such gimmickry is related to a minor role. Instead it’s the Fender electric piano that predominates, its warm emotional timbre lending a quiet strength to these nine mostly instrumental pieces.

As the artwork makes clear, this is programme music. The sleeve note is an extract from a poem by Edward Wilson, the chief scientific officer on the 1911-12 Antarctic expedition, and there is a strong sense of exploration and discovery in the music. The unexplored landscape is evocatively described through the sparing use of bass and percussion. Fluid guitar and piano patterns depict the human presence, their attenuation hinting at the insignificance of the explorers within the vastness of the landscape.  The mood is mostly quiet and sober, evoking stillness and contemplation rather than excitement or danger. Only on ‘Streamliner’ does Fox break into a sweat, pumping out a bustling groove reminiscent of Stereolab.

Occasionally, as on ‘ITOM’, Fox’s debt to Sonic Boom (in his Spectrum incarnation) becomes rather too obvious, as a burbling synth threatens to overwhelm the guitar and piano. But this is a rare lapse of judgement. Otherwise, the tone of the album is summed up in the marvellous ‘Winter Road Movie’, with acoustic and electric elements darting among each other in vivid and highly expressive interplay.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 7, 2000)

Swans: Various Failures, Angels of Light: New Mother, Body Lovers: Body Lovers

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Michael Gira is a myth-maker, acutely aware of the danger of ossification and constantly realigning his position to avoid it. When Swans emerged in the early 1980s, their grindingly repetitious sonic assault (once memorably described as “the sound of a man walking round in circles with his neck chained”) seemed like a strategy for obsessive rearrangement of a basic set of lyrical and musical permutations. The songs didn’t end; they stopped.

Gira eventually tired of this game and, coincident with the introduction of female vocalist/keyboardist Jarboe, began to introduce chilling acoustic elements into his songwriting on 1987’s essential Children of God LP. Over the next several years, Swans would refine and develop this approach in a series of albums that merged immense rhythmic power with an unearthly delicacy of acoustic instrumentation.These records – 1989’s The Burning World, 1991’s White Light from the Mouth of Infinity and 1992’s Love of Life – have long been deleted and are consequently much sought after. Various Failures is a double CD containing a generous selection of material from the period (complete reissues were ruled out, partly on economic grounds but also because Gira was content to let some of the songs disappear).

Listening again to this music, one is struck by how expansive it all sounds, the polar opposite of the early records’ savage inward spin. The loudest pieces here, such as ‘Will We Survive’ and the wonderfully titled ‘The Golden Boy that was Swallowed by the Sea’, are mesmerising dramas of layered orchestration, the massed guitars and drums perfectly framing Gira’s resonant vocals. These songs construct boundaries only to dissolve them: the spaces they occupy are vast and limitless. Elsewhere, Gira and Jarboe offer up unbearable intimacies of form and language, with the shimmering acoustic beauty of the music and the spectral sighs of Jarboe’s voice drawing the listener unmercifully into dense narratives of isolation and failure.

Gira has taken this loose, bluesy strain even further in his new song-based project, Angels of Light. These songs are less reliant on the apocalyptic visual imagery that underpinned Swans’ relentless, thrilling surge. Gira’s new voice is one of humble intimacy, the sound of a man shedding past burdens and discovering new ways of seeing. The musical palette is restrained and absorbing, with accordion and dulcimer adding colour and intimacy throughout.

The results are occasionally stunning; ‘Forever Yours’ and ‘Song For My Father’ in particular are among the most affecting things Gira has written. But there is a schematic quality to some of the other songs that strikes a jarring note. The lyrics are recited slowly and dolefully, with little melodic invention to lighten the mood. At their recent London concert, the Angels of Light shrugged off these limitations in the songs and transformed them into blinding, ecstatic convulsions of pure energy. The record, sadly, suffers from a listlessness that the warm and delicate arrangements are unable to dissipate.

If New Mother represents a slackening off from Swans’ intense emotional charge, Gira’s parallel Body Lovers/Body Haters project can be seen as a move in the opposite direction, a ratcheting of atmosphere and tension. These two CDs, representing the first phase in a projected three-album series, were originally issued separately in the USA and have now been brought together for European release.

Gira accurately describes this mainly instrumental music as ‘psycho-ambient’. While its abstract drifts and swirls share many of the formal properties of Ambient, they are determinedly inward-looking. Also, unlike much Ambient there is a restless intelligence at work here, ordering, shaping and defining. Distant, rumbling drones are picked apart by alien sounds, stately rhythms and sparing acoustic instrumentation. Occasional vocal interventions – a woman’s weeping, a baby’s screaming and a short, mournful song – all serve to heighten the sense of unease. Seriously effective, but not to be listened to with the lights off.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 6, 1999)

Peter Hammill: Typical

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Peter Hammill has regularly complemented his prodigious studio output with a series of finely recorded live albums. His existence as a performer is in a constant state of flux; although generally working with a regular pool of trusted musicians, he frequently changes the configuration of his band in order to avoid slipping into familiarity and routine.

When speaking about his live work, Hammill emphasises the uniqueness of each performance. Whereas the Prog rock bands, with whom Hammill’s former unit, Van der Graaf Generator, were usually and inaccurately bracketed, were concerned with putting on the same show every night, VdGG’s concerts contained major elements of randomness and fragmentation. The results, as might be expected, ranged from the inspired to the chaotic.

Hammill has carried and extended this aesthetic of uniqueness into his work of the 1980s and 1990s, and it is this that makes his live performances such fiercely attractive propositions. This immaculately recorded 2CD set fills an obvious gap in the discography, being the first official record of Hammill’s most angular and discordant take on the live – alone with keyboard or guitar. In such a setting, these songs – most of which were originally recorded with full band treatments – take on the haunted, skeletal form of Giacometti sculptures. Hammill’s sonorous voice swoops manically above his tense, knotted playing, which occasionally lurches to a halt and modulates into something much more soothing and pastoral.

Hammill’s piano playing is often accused of being clumsy. Certainly there is nothing very considered to it, and the number of wrong notes is extraordinary given the frequency with which the songs have been played. But the lack of finesse is a function of the performances themselves. These songs are the vehicles of their own impulses, and both Hammill’s voice and his playing are apt to strain and crack as the emotions that he is struggling to express hit him faster than he is able to articulate them.

Few performers can approach the eloquence of Hammill’s lyrics, or the ferocious beauty of his full-throated vocal attack. This valuable release, complete with lengthy sleeve notes by the man himself, merits your full attention.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 6, 1999)

Current 93: An Introduction to Suffering, Calling for Vanished Faces

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Two more additions to the ever-expanding Durtro catalogue. The untitled C93/Cashmore/Heemann CD is a compilation of out-takes and alternate versions from the last two C93 studio albums, previously unreleased demos, and solo pieces from Tibet’s regular collaborators. The alternate versions make compelling listening; highlights include a sung vocal take of ‘All The Pretty Little Horses’ and the sepulchral ‘Judas As Black Moth’, a long meditative drift from the Soft Black Stars sessions that is the equal of anything on that twilit masterpiece. What makes the disc essential, though, are Christoph Heemann’s two contributions, wherein silvery drones ripple menacingly around everyday sounds to startling effect.

Calling For Vanished Faces is an exhaustive 2CD compilation tracing C93’s development from Dogs Blood Rising to Soft Black Stars. As such it represents a useful update of the 1993 Emblems collection, with only three pieces being duplicated from the earlier set.

The diversity of musical styles on the first disc is startling, from nightmarish looped onslaughts to demented rhythmic freakouts, but they are unified by the tragic quality of Tibet’s voice and the hallucinatory imagism of his lyrics. The disc ends memorably, with three songs from 1992’s epochal Thunder Perfect Mind album and Nick Cave’s sublime reading of ‘All The Pretty Little Horses’ showing how Michael Cashmore’s mournful guitar sound has served to focus and intensify Tibet’s obsessions.

The second disc, for all its emphasis on the fragility and resignation in C93’s recent work, also demonstrates something that is often overlooked, namely that Tibet is the possessor of a great, warped pop/rock sensibility. ‘Lucifer Over London’ is driven unstoppably by a grinding guitar riff; ‘The Dead Side Of The Moon’ has Tibet stepping nimbly through a minefield of bass, drums and the full panoply of Stapleton weirdness; while the epic ‘The Seven Seals…’ attains pure grace and fluency through its endless, achingly sad guitar and glockenspiel figure.

The collection as a whole is further proof, if any were needed, of Tibet’s unfailing ability to disconcert and overwhelm the listener through the precise evocation of atmospheres of fear, despair and terror. Newcomers, start here.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 6, 1999)

Ether column, July-August 2007

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The live music scene in Vienna, like that of any major city, tends to quieten down during the summer months, as the city empties and the outdoor festival circuit takes over. Thankfully, however, there are still a few interesting events taking place in July and August. First up, and buried deep among the shockingly conservative line-up of the Vienna Jazz Festival, is a concert by the veteran American free jazz musician Archie Shepp. Shepp has a long and distinguished history as a saxophonist; he played in Cecil Taylor’s band in the late 50s, before joining John Coltrane’s group in time to appear on Coltrane’s seminal 1965 album Ascension. Stepping into the limelight under his own name in the late 60s, Shepp’s music began to embrace a passionate Afrocentricity on sides such as Fire Music and The Magic of Ju-Ju. At the same time, like many black American musicians of the period, he felt the pull of Europe, where free jazz was – and remains – far more appreciated than at home. He recorded no fewer than five albums for the important French label BYG Actuel, and has in fact made France his adopted home. Shepp’s frenetic avant-garde sax lines, coupled with the rhythms and ideologies of Africa, make his music an exciting proposition. Demonstrating a continued willingness to experiment, he will be accompanied in this performance by two rappers and electronic beats.

The other big summer highlight is the visit of veteran New York avant-garde songsmiths Sonic Youth, playing an open air concert in the relatively intimate surroundings of the courtyard at the Arena. Sonic Youth have seemingly been around forever, constantly varying and refining their avant-edged brand of alternative rock. Emerging in the early 80s from the New York post-punk and No Wave scene, the band have never entirely abandoned their roots in experiment and confrontation. The signature Sonic Youth sound is a maelstrom of squally, guitar-driven noise, tempered with a clever, hookwise pop sensibility. Having enjoyed a degree of commercial success since the release of their 1988 album Daydream Nation, they are now in the rare position of being major label artists who have retained wide critical respect and the freedom to experiment more or less as they please. Daydream Nation itself has now almost achieved ‘classic album’ status, with the result that the band have recently taken to playing it in its entirety at concerts. This development may surprise those who never expected Sonic Youth to yield to the current fad for complete album performances; but, given their rich history of making boundary-breaking rock music, you can hardly blame them for exercising their rights to a little nostalgia. Besides, it’s a dead cert that they will continue to confound their audience’s expectations for a good while yet.

Brendon Anderegg: Falling Air

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Brendon Anderegg’s third album is a diverse yet remarkably coherent collection of songs. Deploying a range of strategies from folky singer-songwriter moves to ambient driftworks and raggle-taggle band workouts, Anderegg avoids any charge of dilettantism through a careful accretion of sonic detail and a sure-footed way with a conversational lyric. The results are consistently fresh and appealing, and the album is sure to bolster Anderegg’s growing reputation in avant circles.

Atypical for this release, the appropriately titled first track “The Open” recalls Anderegg’s previous albums, Anomia and When Rectangles Roll Under Cities, with its busy, rattling drones. Shards of light pierce the gloom as the activity builds, and the piece develops through deft layering of sounds and effects. The album’s only other instrumental, “One More Year,” is a pleasantly loping arrangement for banjo and percussion.

Elsewhere, Anderegg recalls Brian Eno’s early song-based work on tracks like “Off To The Side” and “Street Lights.” Anderegg shares something of Eno’s undemonstrative vocal delivery, yet his voice is perfectly suited to the deceptively artless phraseology of the latter’s lyric: “Don’t go outside, maybe this time you won’t wake up/Don’t trace your next step, just count the street lights and death toll.” The warning note sounded here is couched in deliciously cool acoustic playing, with trumpet and glockenspiel darting around loose bass and drums. On “Off To The Side,” meanwhile, Anderegg’s clipped electric guitar runs mingle with propulsive drumming (courtesy of Jake Morris) and a delectable rhythmic swagger.

Anderegg and his band of accomplished musicians hold the listener’s attention throughout with short, perfectly concise musical statements. The formally elegant “Baby Bird” resembles a waltz, with the warm, soothing tones of the Fender Rhodes and the delicate moves of Jesse Peterson’s violin adding to the glowing atmosphere of the track. The folkish manoeuvres of “Rode, Riding To” and “What Were You Going For” differ dramatically from the intriguing, mysterious “The Holes” – the latter consisting of mumbled words, sparse percussion and haunting effects, and little else – yet the contrast makes perfect sense in the context of Anderegg’s mastery of these diverse forms. The excellent final track, “When They Were,” draws upon a heightening of recollected detail: “all the money that we spent buying things, alone in the ocean while the notes shake.” Its smoky sax and forlorn acoustic guitar provide a nostalgic, emotive end to a fine album.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 14, 2005)

Edward Ka-Spel: Pieces of ∞

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Over the course of some 60 albums since their 1980 debut, Edward Ka-Spel’s Legendary Pink Dots have carved out a unique niche with their quirky blend of electronica and psychedelia. At the same time, Ka-Spel has released around 20 solo albums and numerous side projects. Pieces of ∞ is a 2004 addition to this vast body of work. It’s a very uneven collection, crying out for the kind of quality control that Ka-Spel, given his prodigious output, would appear reluctant to impose.

The album begins in undistinguished fashion with “The Writing On The Wall,” a laboured mid-tempo plod dominated by wheezing French-style accordion. The vaguely surrealistic lyrics are delivered in a mannered style that is not to my taste but is certainly distinctive. Partway through, the song lurches clumsily into a dramatic, piano-led interlude; unfortunately, it then returns to the dull accordion motif.

“Here Comes The Night” is immensely more satisfying – a dark ambient piece that magically evokes a drifting interstellar journey. Twinkling piano clusters sound like a music box floating endlessly through space, while electronic currents pulsate and a softly intoned chorale adds to the lambent beauty of the track. Here too, though, things go awry towards the end, as the piece morphs inexplicably into a tame electro footstomper.

Both “Comedown” and “Alms For Lepers” are routine, blustering synth workouts, the former redeemed by some splendidly disorientating Nurse With Wound-like effects. “Shanti” sees the return of the accordion, this time not without a certain goofy charm. Ka-Spel goes out on a definite high, however, with the mysteriously titled “8.2 8.3.” Here, bustling analogue textures recall the poppier moments of Throbbing Gristle, until the piece dissolves into a meditative dreamworld that evokes Tangerine Dream at their spaciest. One only wishes that Ka-Spel had reined in the tendency towards the novel and absurd that mars some of the album, and concentrated on the imposing electronica that provides it with its many wonderful moments.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 14, 2005)

Marissa Nadler: Ballads of Living and Dying, The Saga of Mayflower May

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With these two albums Marissa Nadler establishes herself as a gifted, utterly distinctive folk talent. Both records are full of beautifully wrought ballads, delivered in a sumptuous mezzo-soprano voice and accompanied by sparkling, fluent acoustic guitar.

On her 2004 debut, Ballads of Living and Dying, Nadler delivers on the stark promise of the album’s title. Playing guitar in the richly resonant picking style of Bert Jansch and Martin Carthy, she sings as if from a haunted netherworld. With eight of the ten tracks being self-penned, Nadler draws on seemingly limitless reserves of darkly potent imagery to create ballads of vast depth and eloquence. It’s a measure of her lyrical skill that the closing “Annabelle Lee,” a setting of a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, seems entirely of a piece with her own texts. (“Hay Tantos Muertos,” a setting of a poem by Pablo Neruda, must remain a mystery to a non-Spanish speaker like myself.) Death, sex and lost or thwarted love are recurrent themes, from the tragic keening of “Box of Cedar” to the desolate eroticism of “Bird Song”:

You said my name so sweetly
That I took my clothes all off…
The birds are calling, and I do not believe for me.

Throughout these ten short, passionate ballads, Nadler instinctively knows when to foreground her voice and when to let the guitar speak for her. Bathed in unearthly reverb, her ethereal voice frequently gives way to ominous finger picking. Currents of strangeness wander among the songs in the form of floating electric guitar and accordion. On “Days of Rum,” meanwhile, Nadler trades guitar for banjo, sounding for all the world like a time traveller from Harry Smith’s Anthology as she intones the spectral tale of a girl who “was young and yearned to die.” Even when the guitar shifts to more relaxed major-chord strumming on “Mayflower May” and “Virginia,” the lyrics remain defiantly sepulchral: “The waves rush against my face as I start to drown…”

Nadler’s 2005 follow-up, The Saga of Mayflower May, makes occasional glancing lyrical references to her first album, reinforcing the sense that the singer inhabits a hermetic, spiritually enclosed realm. Housed in a gorgeous miniature gatefold sleeve, the album extends and deepens its predecessor’s concerns in eleven further outpourings of intense, supernatural balladry. This time the Hammond organ lends its radiant timbre to three tracks, including the delightful “Yellow Lights,” whose softly strummed backing provides the setting for a mandala of colours – blue water, green grass, red rubies.

The album feels like a visitation from a parallel earth where the mythical has become the everyday, populated by damsels, gypsies and river children. If that sounds unbearably twee, then listen to the way Nadler’s filigree guitar, directly descended from Leonard Cohen’s classic 70s work, swoops and glides around lines like “Photographs of your face against the rain/I’m gonna burn them all and bury your name” (“Damsels In The Dark”).

These are the kinds of records you find yourself returning to again and again, drawn by the dark pastoralism of Nadler’s texts and the dangerous yet irresistible pull of her guitar and voice. Recommended without reservation.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 14, 2005)

Letter to The Wire, July 2007

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A pity that David Stubbs’ review of the Donaufestival (On Location, Wire 280) only covered the first half of the event, as some of the festival’s most essential moments took place over the second weekend. Most notably, there were two deeply emotive appearances by the renascent Throbbing Gristle. The first, a set of bruising, uncanny atmospheres in song, was unfortunately preceded by the distinctly underwhelming Alan Vega. Vega resembled a confused pensioner as he wandered around the stage, cantankerously bawling drivel in the audience’s direction.

The next night, the Boredoms gave a riveting percussion-driven performance, before Russell Haswell and Florian Hecker shook the walls with their juddering noise, hypnotically lit by a green laser beam. TG returned to perform their live soundtrack to Derek Jarman’s In the Shadow of the Sun, a slow and infinitely sad dream piece saturated with hypnotic imagery. TG’s soundtrack, featuring a dark and mournful choir, was a suitably plangent and sweeping accompaniment. Lastly, KTL‘s deep and pulverising drones rounded off the festival, sending us queasily into the Austrian night.