Category Archives: The Sound Projector

Josephine Foster, This Coming Gladness

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Absolutely gorgeous album of radiant psychedelic folk from the extraordinarily talented Foster.  Recent work by Foster’s spiritual cousin Marissa Nadler has traced an arc from the overtly folkish stylings of her first two records to the sun- and acid-drenched touches of her third, Bird on the Water.  Foster, it seems, is on a parallel journey; having started out as a straight-up folk singer, she has gradually widened her vision to bring in the harder edges of electric guitar and drums, to mesmerising effect.

None of this is new, of course.  Folk rock was arguably invented in 1965, when Columbia producer Tom Wilson took Simon & Garfunkel’s filigree folk song “The Sound of Silence” and revamped it by adding electric lead guitar and percussion.  In the same year Dylan plugged in for the first time at the Newport Folk Festival, ushering in a period of anti-rock turbulence among the folkie crowd that would culminate a year later in the infamous cry of “Judas!”  What Foster and Nadler are doing, however, is closer in spirit to the two essential late ‘60s Fairport Convention LPs Unhalfbricking and Liege & Lief.  The genius of Fairport was to make the traditional sound thrillingly modern and the modern soberingly traditional; it’s a feat shared by This Coming Gladness, which despite the fact that its ten songs are all composed by Foster, nevertheless imparts that deliciously disconcerting blend of the ancient and the contemporary.

Foster’s gifted fellow musicians, Victor Herrero on lead guitar and Alex Neilson on drums, are essential to the mood of sustained melancholy that grips the record.  Herrero’s guitar work is unfailingly direct, with languid drawn-out lines that occasionally erupt into choppy, acidic riffing.  Neilson, meanwhile, is a revelation.  He’s done plenty of great work with such people as Will Oldham, Ben Chasny, Jandek and David Tibet, but I’ve never before heard him being given as much space to lend his quiet authority to the music as he gets here.  Focusing largely on tom-toms and cymbals, Neilson’s percussive attack is rolling and druggy: a telling counterpoint to the grim sense of psychedelic disquiet imparted by Foster’s soprano.

That voice inhabits these songs with a tender, voluptuous grace.  Opener “The Garden of Earthly Delights” sets the tone perfectly with its sinister pull and extended vocal cadences; here and indeed throughout the record, there’s a kind of fascinated surprise that imparts an intimate and immediate quality reminiscent of the poetry of Emily Dickinson.  “Waltz of Green” starts out as a courtly love story, Foster picking off notes from her harp like rose petals; the entry of Neilson and Herrero, though, sends the song spinning out of the tradition and towards the bleakly solipsistic.  Elsewhere, “Second Sight” sounds like a prayer of blazing contrition:

“All my fears fade like fire
drenched in the drippings of my eyes
Almighty Lord, lord of love
bless us as we walk in our darkest hour”

Her outward poise flecked with human vulnerability, Josephine Foster has created a work that radiates unfashionable optimism in the face of uncertainty and loss.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 18, 2009)

Nancy Wallace, Old Stories

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I’m beginning to think there must be a factory somewhere churning out sensitive female folk singer/songwriters.  Some wily entrepreneur must have spotted a gap in the market and stepped up production accordingly.  Unfortunately, this means that for every Marissa Nadler, Mary Hampton or Josephine Foster that rolls off the production line, you will occasionally get a product of substandard quality – and that is what Nancy Wallace’s début album is, much as it pains me to say so.

Oddly enough, the name that kept occurring to me when listening to Old Stories was one that is never mentioned in avant circles, that of Radio 2-friendly singer and songwriter Dido.  Now I will happily admit to a sneaking admiration for Dido’s homespun tales of love, friendship and loyalty, sung with a warmth and sensitivity that are all too rare in pop music.  Nancy Wallace, on the other hand, seems to me to be striving for, but falling short of, the kind of closeness and simple intimacy that is so affecting in Dido’s work.  Case in point, “The Way You Lie”, in which Wallace prosaically sings “You’ve sewn your heart into my sleeve, I’ll never be alone.”  The acoustic guitar, violin and accordion accompaniment is pleasant enough,  but one never feels drawn into or affected by the song.  Wallace’s voice is simply too plain and unmemorable, and the emotions she conveys too unremarkable, to make any kind of lasting impression.  “I’ve plenty here to put my mind to, while I’m waiting for your love”, she muses pallidly on “Waiting”; well, it doesn’t sound much like it.

Wallace’s major error, however, is to include three traditional ballads on the album alongside the six songs of her own.  These three tracks fatally expose the weaknesses in her own songwriting, even as they tell a different story of her talents as a singer.  The press release for this album blithely states that “[the] traditional songs sit happily alongside Nancy’s original compositions with a flow so effortless you forget which is which.”  This claim is so craven and misleading, even by the normal standards of press releases, that one almost overlooks the fact that Wallace’s readings of “I Live Not Where I Love”, “The True Lover’s Farewell” and “The Drowned Lover” are steeped in the kind of blood and longing that the likes of Shirley Collins and Sandy Denny staked out and made their own in the 60s and 70s.  Wallace’s voice on these songs hits a perfect note of tragic stillness and inevitability (“this grave that I lie in is my new married bed”, as she darkly intones on “The Drowned Lover”), while the acoustic arrangements revel in their starkness and simplicity.

If Nancy Wallace had made a whole album of traditional songs, I would probably at this point be hailing her as a new heroine of English folk music.  As it is, I’m left frustrated by the redundancy of most of this record.  I only wish Wallace hadn’t so seriously diluted the impact of her undoubted interpretative gifts by setting her own, sadly inferior musings alongside those desolate old stories from the past.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 18, 2009)

Benjamin Wetherill, Laura; Hollowbody, Inside the Wolves

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It’s not all acoustic female singer-songwriters from me in this issue of The Sound Projector (see reviews of Josephine Foster and Nancy Wallace elsewhere in these pages).  The boys are here as well, on a mission to prove that they can be just as sensitive and emotionally aware as their female counterparts.  I have no idea if there are such things as distinctively male and female approaches to songcraft, but both the Benjamin Wetherill and Hollowbody albums give strong indications of the rewards and pitfalls of this kind of music.

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Ruby Ruby Ruby, The Shadow of Your Smile

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Ruby Ruby Ruby are more or less a vehicle for experimental German singer Margareth Kammerer, who came to the attention of Sound Projector readers back in issue 13 with her début album To Be an Animal of Real Flesh.  That venture was an ambitious and successful reinterpretation of several modernist poems as song lyrics, with Kammerer’s solo acoustic readings framed by various remixers’ efforts to present them in a more oblique fashion.  Since then, Kammerer has been involved in The Magic ID, a song-based project with Berlin improviser Christof Kurzmann, and also formed Ruby Ruby Ruby to pay homage to Billie Holiday and other jazz singers.  This appears to have been a one-off project, there being no indication that the group (consisting of Derek Shirley and Steve Heather alongside Kammerer) has done anything else or is planning to work together again.  Although the album was recorded in 2007, it only saw release in 2009; kudos, then, to Ignaz Schick of Zarek Records for persevering with it and seeing it through to this eventual release.

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Tom James Scott, School and Rivers; Music For One, The Red Thumb

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Two very different approaches to the acoustic guitar.  Both albums are purely instrumental, yet they come from contrasting schools of thought and as a result exist in considerably differing soundworlds.  The Tom James Scott record emerges from the (art) school of minimalist composition, right down to the Morton Feldman quotation on the sleeve.  Scott clearly believes that the impact of his music comes as much from the spaces between the notes as from the notes themselves.  As a result, much of the time on the record’s five long tracks is given over to silence, with the listener often left wondering when the next note is going to come along.  At times, the effect is unintentionally comic, as for example on the opening title piece “School and Rivers”, which put me in mind of nothing so much as a broken musical box weakly trying to play a tune.  The timbre of the guitar is tinny, while the event horizon is severely circumscribed; you keep waiting for something interesting to happen, but it never arrives.  A tuba emerges at intervals, sounding surprisingly puny for such a physical instrument.

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Felicia Atkinson, La La La

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Here’s an oddity – a slight (only 30 minutes), scrappy album that somehow contrives to hang together better than many more polished, outwardly ‘conceptual’ works.  Felicia Atkinson recorded short vocal and instrumental pieces at home, then subjected them to editing and post-production with collaborator Sylvain Chauveau.  The results are tentative and fragmentary, calling attention to their own provisional status with frequent jarring edits and buckets of tape hiss.  Yet the record possesses a rickety charm that contributes to its being far more than the sum of its parts, thanks in large part to Atkinson’s beautifully intimate-sounding voice and the inspired touches of instrumental colour that span the songs.

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The Sound Projector 2010 issue out now

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Even though I write a blog, I still think print publications are special and important. Which brings me to the just published 2010 issue of Ed Pinsent’s wonderful Sound Projector magazine, a treasure trove of information and opinion on musical weirdness of all kinds. Packed within its 180 densely written pages are interviews with Z’ev, Scott Ryser/The Units and C Joynes, plus dozens of wild and exciting album reviews. This time round I’ve contributed reviews of records by Josephine Foster, Nancy Wallace, Felicia Atkinson, Benjamin Wetherill, Hollowbody, Tom James Scott, Music For One and Ruby Ruby Ruby.

The full details, including a list of every artist reviewed, are here. And you can buy it here.

KTL, IV

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This fourth album from Peter Rehberg and Stephen O’Malley finds the duo upping the ante considerably in terms of grim, hellish and agonisingly slow guitar- and electronic-led drones. Moonlighting from his day job as half of Sunn O))), O’Malley turns away from that group’s relentlessly sludgey twin-guitar attack in favour of more silvery, melancholy tones. Rehberg, for his part, makes scalpel-sharp electronic incisions to take the music ever deeper into uneasy listening territory.

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Nad Spiro, Tinta Invisible

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Nad Spiro is Spanish electronica artist Rosa Arruti, and this is her third album. I was very taken with her 2000 début, Nad Spiro vs. Enemigos de Helix (reviewed in The Sound Projector 9), but Tinta Invisible is, I’m sorry to report, weak and uninvolving by comparison.

Arruti’s principal instrument is the guitar, which she subjects to heavy processing and sequencing. The resultant sounds tend towards the minimal and abstract, with occasional vocal interjections woven into the mix. Arruti’s voice is warm and seductive, but it can’t prevent many of the songs from coming across as sterile and cerebral exercises in sound manipulation.

“Soundhouse” and the title track both sound as though they have attractive melodies struggling to be heard, so it’s frustrating to hear them being denied room to flourish amid a plethora of deconstructive strategies. “Obauba,” meanwhile, is subtitled “Lullaby,” but if I wanted to soothe my son off to sleep I certainly wouldn’t play him this array of juddering bass sounds and twitchy electronic effects.

There are only two pieces here that recall the sparkling energy of Arruti’s début. “Interruptus” is quality IDM, with its shuffling dance beat energised by spidery scrawls of guitar noise. And the closing track “Eye TV” (featuring a guest appearance by American noise musician Kim Cascone) brings a welcome blast of harder and more livid electronic textures. Cascone’s presence seems to inject elements of risk and excitement that are in scant evidence elsewhere on the record.

(originally published in The Sound Projector 17, 2008)

Mary Hampton: Book Two, My Mother’s Children

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Mary Hampton follows up her remarkable debut Book One with two further dispatches from the disquieting core of modern folk music. Book Two, as its title implies, is a kind of sequel to the earlier record, another self-released six-track mini-album. Where Book One carried the subtitle “six songs of refusal,” Book Two is labelled “six songs of hunger”: hunger as in desire, perhaps, an emotion which looms large throughout the record. Four of the songs are are traditional English folk ballads, while the other two are settings of poems by Yeats and Hannah Murgatroyd.

On these six songs, Mary Hampton again demonstrates her unerring ability to sing a centuries-old song and make it sound utterly, rivetingly contemporary. Sounding like the ghost child of Sandy Denny, she sings in a voice impossibly high and pure, yet possessed of great wisdom and the merest hint of evil:

“Well I had to tell him some things are secrets
All you can do is smash them to nothing” (“Silver Pebble”)

“Pretty Polly” is a deathly anatomisation of tragedy and betrayal, a murder ballad so epic and chilling it makes Nick Cave’s efforts in this vein sound like a night in the pub with Girls Aloud. Hampton accompanies herself on spiralling acoustic guitar and adds sinister threads of violin and cello, adding to the song’s unnerving sense of dread and loss.

Like the earlier collection, Book Two comes with a large lyric sheet that has been intricately folded down to fit inside the CD sleeve. Once you’ve unfolded it, it’s hard to get it back to the way it was. Likewise, Hampton’s treatments of these songs expose the listener to emotions and states of mind that run deep through history, but with that exposure become irrevocably closer and clearer.

The Drift CD is Hampton’s first “proper” album, a collection of ten self-penned songs. Inevitably, what impresses most is the way they sound entirely of a piece with the traditional songs on the earlier records, tracing bleak narratives of desire and longing. With more musicians at her disposal and, presumably, a larger recording budget, Hampton brings a richer, fuller band sound to tracks like “Honey,” setting a panoply of strings and percussion against her radiant, transported vocals. The witty “Ballad of the Talking Dog” strips things down to just acapella voices, handclaps and whistling, while on “The Bell They Gave You” Hampton turns to the piano to frame her dramatic, terrorstruck imagery:

“The eel cries out before it is skinned
A strange scream in the high night”

Throughout the album Hampton’s voice, her distinctive guitar work and the swooning rapture of her texts combine to produce an exquisite desolation that puts her far ahead of most contemporary acoustic music.

(originally published in The Sound Projector 17, 2008)