Marissa Nadler: Songs III – Bird on the Water

Posted on by
Reply

Marissa Nadler follows her earlier Ballads of Living & Dying and The Saga of Mayflower May with this remarkable third album. Bird on the Water amplifies and extends Nadler’s emotional concerns while retaining every ounce of the haunted Gothic spirituality that was the defining characteristic of those albums. Its songs resonate with a deeply unsettling power and grace; supernaturally preoccupied with love, death and loneliness, they avoid morbidity and sentimentality by the richness and variety of their arrangements, by the rapturous imagery of Nadler’s texts and by the bewitching beauty of her voice.

The great Canadian songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen is a looming presence throughout the record. The formality of its title acknowledges the many Cohen album titles that contain the word ‘Songs’; the subtitle alludes to one of his most famous songs, “Bird on the Wire”; there’s a reverent cover of another Cohen classic, “Famous Blue Raincoat”; and Nadler’s acoustic guitar playing is glowingly reminiscent of Cohen’s own before he traded guitars for cheap synthesisers. And just as Cohen’s voice has weathered and deepened over the years, so Nadler’s vocals are richer and stranger than on previous outings. Angelically pure, double-tracked and reverb-heavy, the voice sounds as though it emanates from a centuries-old courtly love tradition, a 1960s acid-folk magic spell and a post-apocalyptic future, all at once.

The other thing that sets Bird on the Water apart from its predecessors is the fullness and variety of its instrumentation. Co-produced by Nadler and Greg Weeks of US psych-folk outfit Espers, the album features hard, unflinching electric guitar from Weeks himself as well as dark cello from his Espers colleague Helena Espvall. The confidence of the arrangements is nowhere more apparent than on the album’s extraordinary centrepiece “Bird on Your Grave,” which begins with spacey synthesised effects over plaintive strummed acoustic guitar, before opening out into a helter-skelter folk rock drama that recalls Fairport Convention at their most lysergic. The electric and percussive agitation subsides, but the landscape of the song has altered. Blasted where it once was delicate, Weeks continues his angsty riffing over Nadler’s pealing acoustic cycles; and the song ends with a further dose of electronic strangeness.

The next track, “Silvia,” adds Dylanesque organ to Nadler’s strong, resonant finger-picking style. The song’s gorgeous melody and lilting chorus hint at a pop sensibility that sits comfortably alongside the record’s more overtly folkish moments. These include the devastatingly sad “Mexican Summer,” on which Nadler’s plangent guitar resounds beautifully around her seductive voice; the blissful, sparkling arpeggios of “My Love and I”; and the delicate mandolin that courses playfully alongside the burrowing guitar patterns of “Diamond Heart”.

Lyrically, Bird on the Water is shot through with startlingly vivid imagery. Nadler has the gift of both familiarising the strange and making the strange familiar; in the world of her songs, the elements of earth, air, fire and water mingle with skin, bones, hair and colours. It’s also an intensely feminine world, in which “I thought of you each time I tore off my gown” (“Diamond Heart”), “I’m going to buy you a red dress and put feathers in your hair” (“Silvia”) and “she died all alone with her feathers and bows” (“Leather Made Shoes”). Stripping away the outward manifestations of modesty and decorum, Nadler’s texts conflate love, sex and death in a swooning current of feverish eroticism.

Nadler sings on “Rachel”: “Oh what a day to dance with you, oh what a day to die.” It’s a line that encapsulates the album’s unshakeable conviction that passion exists and is to be grasped through the infernal workings of tragedy. Songs III: Bird on the Water is a work of radical, deathly sensuality; to hear it is to be changed by it.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 15, 2007)

Mary Hampton: Book One

Posted on by
Reply

At a time when it sometimes seems that one cannot move for new folk, free folk, freak folk, weird folk, outsider folk and goodness knows what else, it’s an unqualified joy to discover a collection of songs that sit proudly and uncomplicatedly within the folk tradition. And yet, while Mary Hampton’s début CD (a mini-album, really, with six tracks clocking in at 30 minutes) derives much of its appeal from its appropriation of centuries-old folk idioms, it is certainly no museum piece. Its unearthly radiance and undercurrents of desolate modernity transform it into a vital and contemporary living document.

Hampton’s musical and spiritual antecedents are the spectral English voices of Anne Briggs, Shirley Collins and Sandy Denny, although one also hears echoes of recent work by Marissa Nadler and that staple of otherworldly folk moves, the Wicker Man soundtrack. The album is subtitled “six songs of refusal”; refusal of what? Characteristically, Hampton doesn’t answer the question directly, relying instead on the latent imagery of her chosen texts and the icy chill of her voice to reinforce her message of hope and defiance against the iron grip of history.

Hampton is no prissy English waif; two of the six songs are flinty American ballads, and a third is a setting of a text by that most debauched and feverish of poets, Baudelaire. The two American songs, both narrated by female protagonists, bookend the album on similar notes of imprisonment and yearning: the woman in the opening ‘Silver Dagger’ “wish[es] I was a little sparrow…one of those that flies so high”, and the closing ‘Fare Thee Well’ laments: “If I had wings like Noah’s dove, I’d fly across the river to the one I love.” Yet while the narrator of ‘Silver Dagger’ withdraws into bold, self-willed solipsism (“I’ve decided to sleep alone all of my life”), the woman in “Fare Thee Well” feels her sense of self dissolving in rapturous erotic surrender:

“But I’ve got a man, he’s long and tall
He moves his body like a cannonball…
One of these mornings and it won’t be long
You’ll hear my name but I’ll be gone”

All the while, Hampton’s bewitching voice and luminous acoustic guitar envelop these visions of escape in clouds of radiant beauty.

The Baudelaire adaptation, ‘Eros’, is one of the album’s two highpoints, an epic seven-minute drama that recounts in chilling detail a dreamed encounter with a fiery-eyed lover. On this, the only one of the six tracks to be recorded with overdubs, piano, violin and sparse percussion thread their way ominously through the lyric’s dark tracery of seduction and vulnerability. Hampton’s voice is double-tracked for the words of the lover, creating a sense of unease that is compounded by the eerie stillness of the arrangement. At the song’s end, a woozy harmonium drone floats by, starkly dramatising the evanescence of the vision:

“And when I woke in the light of day
I recalled the line of my lover’s back
I would not drink, and he took his leave
But come back, love, come back.”

The album’s other stand-out track, “The Gardener”, also proceeds for seven long minutes on waves of sinister violin and brushed percussion. The song’s rapt imagery of colours, elements and flowers is framed by gorgeously languorous sonic increments and the barest hint of a rhythmic pulse. Her voice steeped in mythopoeic richness, Hampton sings like a prophesying angel: “the mirk-black rain shall be your coat, with a wind-gale at your breast.”

Rounding out the set are two shorter, sunnier pieces, the traditional ballads “Love Me Little” and “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme” (the latter previously recorded by Anne Briggs, Shelagh McDonald, Sandy Denny and Pentangle). On these tracks Hampton turns to the tenor guitar, a four-stringed acoustic with a bright and bell-like timbre. With their gentle wordplay and attention to plants and flowers, these songs represent the folk lyric at its most idyllic and pastoral. In reclaiming them as songs of refusal, Mary Hampton declares her fidelity to the folk tradition while asserting a committed and self-assured engagement with the hopes and fears of the modern age.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 15, 2007)

Immense: Evil Ones and Zeros

Posted on by
2

The ones and zeros of the title are the binary digits which are all that computers can understand. The title may therefore bespeak some kind of scepticism about the desirability of making music electronically. Whatever, this is a fine album of guitar-bass-and-drums rock music, its eleven instrumental pieces fizzing with inventive ideas and sparkling musicianship.

Most of the tracks are mid-paced. Typically, a relaxed bass line is bolstered by busy, intricate percussion and confident electric or acoustic guitar. “Don’t You Know How To Use Flippers?” (Immense have a winning way with titles; how about “Neil Young In Sportswear”?) adds smoky saxophone to the mix, while “Antro-Lateral Approach” features insistent, quietly ominous piano. But the other tracks don’t suffer from the absence of such enhancements, so varied and striking are the guitar sounds employed.

Occasional snatches of voices taken from the radio attest to the intelligence at work. The opening “Football Chant” has blasts of hard-hitting rock guitar broken up by a voice describing the use of antidepressants. On the impressive “Really Optimistic”, advocates of conservation are gradually overtaken by vigorous drumming and some fairly spectacular lead guitar.

The strengths of the album are its diversity and concision. None of the tracks outstay their welcome; they are sharp, focused and structured; they make a strong impression, then retreat. “Really Optimistic” is followed by a melodic interlude of delicate acoustic picking and strumming, then by the excellent “Spontaneous Combustion”‚ wherein guitar, bass and drums build to a powerful climax. At the end, the heavy and urgent “E Flat Sonic Boom” melts into the closing “Valley Of The Mummies”, in which serene piano and organ curl around sinuous percussion before ebbing sadly away.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 7, April 2000)

Peter Hammill: The Fall of the House of Usher, The Appointed Hour

Posted on by
Reply

The ever prolific Peter Hammill returns with two albums of quite staggering dissimilarity. It’s galling how little attention he gets, this eccentric fifty-year-old who has been responsible for over forty albums, every one of them a Gordian tangle of weighty propositions and speculations. That some of his projects are more successful than others is due less to inconsistency than to the exacting, far-reaching nature of his enquiry, as these two releases demonstrate.

The Fall of the House of Usher is an opera (not a ‘rock opera’) based on Edgar Allan Poe’s tale of the same name. When originally released by Some Bizzare in 1991, after some eighteen years’ on-and-off work by Hammill and his librettist Chris Judge Smith (the co-founders of Van der Graaf Generator), it disappeared without trace. When the rights reverted to Hammill he began a process of revision, using advances in studio technology and rethinking certain key aspects of the piece. He re-recorded his own vocal parts, removed all drums and percussion and added lots of electric guitars.

The result is a revelation. The original version suffered from the limitations of the recording techniques available to Hammill at the time, and sounded dry and colourless. In contrast, the depth and clarity of the new version throw into sharp relief the awesome power and terror of this work.

The unlikely cast of singers includes, besides Hammill, Andy Bell of Erasure, Lene Lovich and Sarah Jane Morris. Together they act out a morbidly fascinating tale of love, friendship, madness and betrayal. The vocal performances are uniformly excellent, particularly that of Hammill himself, who in the role of the increasingly demented Usher reaches jaw-dropping heights of declamatory fervour. When read on the printed page, Smith’s libretto seems rambling and prolix; interpreted by these singers, it becomes lucid and elegant.

The rhetorical richness of the words means that the music is inevitably low on melody. Hammill has never been much of a tunesmith. Instead the guitars and keyboards surge and retreat, pulsing with grandeur and taking on a macabre chill as the drama unfolds.

The collaboration with Roger Eno is an intriguing experiment in aleatory composition which doesn’t really come off. Hammill and Eno improvised in their respective studios for exactly an hour at 1pm on 1 April 1999. The Appointed Hour combines these recordings, with no overdubs. Conceptually, the idea is impeccable; listening to the outcome, however, is less than enthralling. The pair tinkle away pleasantly on guitar and keyboard, and the parallel strands occasionally coalesce to produce moments of stimulation. But for the most part this is inoffensive background music, devoid of the vitality which Hammill normally brings to his work.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 7, 2000)

Breathless: Blue Moon

Posted on by
Reply

Breathless are surely one of the most cruelly ignored groups of the 80s and 90s. Blue Moon arrives a full eight years after their last album, Between Happiness and Heartache, and is likely to be greeted with the same indifferent response. That would be a monumental injustice, for the record is a masterpiece – its deeply passionate romanticism flows with immense power through every one of its sixty minutes.

The group’s singer and keyboardist, Dominic Appleton, achieved a measure of notice with his vocals for the 4AD studio-based project This Mortal Coil. His lisping, forlorn voice is a crucial component of the Breathless sound. On this album it’s surrounded by an abundance of mesmeric instrumentation – strident guitars, eerie keyboards and harsh, clattering percussion.

The opening “Walk Down To The Water” is seven minutes of dramatic, windswept melancholy. In wistful, languorous cadences Appleton describes a condition of pure loss and regret, made tangible by restrained beats and gentle washes of sound. The song’s overwhelming sense of desolation is communicated not by sullen posturing but through a perfect alignment of emotion and gesture.

From here on, Breathless never put a foot wrong. “Magic Lamp” is a desperate invocation of sexual jealousy, its choppy rhythms erupting frantically into ecstatic currents of guitar. Moments such as this, and tracks like “Come Reassure Me” and the thunderous “No Answered Prayers”, recall the tragic luminosity of Joy Division or My Bloody Valentine; but Breathless’ epic vision is wholly their own, manifested in dense harmonic structures and Appleton’s harrowing meditations on desire, pain and confusion.

As if this weren’t enough, a limited edition bonus CD extends the album even further into abstraction and dissonance. “Moonstone” is fifty minutes of sinister rumbles and scrapings, with spare treated guitar and percussion underlining the sense of threat. Perfectly complementing the first CD’s rapt engagement with songform, “Moonstone” completes an emotionally devastating release.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 7, 2000)

Tlon Uqbar: La Bola Perdida

Posted on by
Reply

A fruitful collaboration between two French bands, Internal Fusion and Désaccord Majeur, this is Ambient music with an edge. The CD’s five long pieces convey an impressive range of rhythms and atmospheres, reminiscent of Zoviet France in their layered accretion of organic detail.

All of the tracks, except the closing “Mylodon”, are similarly structured. Ominous ambient sounds – distorted drones, watery splashes, radio interference – frame hypnotic looped rhythms and vivid instrumental strokes. Traces of ethnic-sounding percussion and harsher metallic collisions mingle with diverse human voices (European speech, middle Eastern chant) to form a complex, involving soundscape. Eventually the intricate rhythms come to predominate, forming sharp contours inside the listener’s head.

More ambient than the other pieces, but no less absorbing, Mylodon ends the album on a reflective note. Its restrained beats, disembodied voices and gently vibrant drone are soothing and delightful.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 7, 2000)

SQE: The Abyss Stares Back

Posted on by
Reply

SQE, who in real life goes by the name of J Greco, has produced an album of longish, folky variations on an ambient theme. Amber Asylum’s Kris Force contributes guest vocals on “Jorinda X” and “The Wondrous Boat Ride,” emoting like a dark angel around Greco’s dreamlike soundscapes. Light touches of dulcimer and tubular bells add to the crepuscular atmosphere, evoking the more liturgical moments of Dead Can Dance.

Clocking in at around six minutes each, both songs derive considerable power from their unhurried stillness and quiet, gradual accumulation of detail. Greco draws out similarly extended moods in the instrumental tracks “Epitaph 1” and “Diamond,” but these are largely shorn of the ritualistic elements that make the songs so bewitching. As a result, they lack focus and direction. Things pick up somewhat on “Epitaph 2,” whose clammy drones are disrupted by slashing electric guitar.

Given Greco’s careful attention to detail on these pieces, it’s both surprising and unfortunate that he also chooses to include a song like “Cat” on the album. Here Danielle Hlatky’s breathy alto delivers a clunky lyric including such gems as “your heart regulates the flow of oxygen to the brain,” while the melody is sullied by a lumpen tuba accompaniment. The following “1974,” however, is excellent – propelled by bubbling organ and a racy synth groove, it brings a vertiginous, dubby edge to proceedings. In sum, the disc thankfully doesn’t attempt to live up to the grandiose promise of its title, and is an alluring if uneven collection of nocturnal moments.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 13, 2005)

Various Artists: A Classic Guide to No Man’s Land

Posted on by
Reply

This 2CD compilation presents an overview of the music of two linked German labels, No Man’s Land and Review Records. Formed in the early 80s by Juergen Koeniger and Edith Walz, and operated since 1997 by Gerhard Busse, the labels have amassed a large body of work across a number of genres from free improv to dark ambient, noisy rock and experimental songcraft. The compilation is sensibly organised by genre, with the first disc concentrating on instrumental music and the second on songs. It’s generously compiled, too – every track is previously unreleased.

The pieces on disc one are predominantly American and German in origin. David Weinstein opens the batting with ‘The Economist,’ a rather approximate mix of clunky effects, mid-tempo beats and bloopy analogue synths. Weinstein writes in the sleevenotes that the piece was made “using a variety of computers, keyboards, software and hardware both old and broken and new and confusing,” and frankly the confusion shows. Things soon pick up, however, with the rich classical sonorities of Guy Klucevsek’s ‘Glow/Hearth’ and the distressed atmospherics of Dawn’s ‘Shining.’ Inspired by Kubrick’s film of the same name, the latter is the undoubted highlight of disc one – a bewitching fusion of sinister crackles, resonant bell chimes and faint traces of a female voice.

Elsewhere, there are two vaguely ‘world’ influenced pieces featuring Werner Durand, who makes his own wind instruments out of PVC. The essential pointlessness of this activity is underscored by the pieces themselves, which meander pleasantly enough through thickets of digital delay without ever truly holding the attention. More engaging by far are two tracks by clarinettist Michael Lytle – the first an ear-splitting blast of improv, the second a loose and searching arc of freeform blowing.

Disc two is more diverse geographically, although equally variable in quality. Estonian rocker Leonid Soybelman is represented twice, once under his own name and once under that of his band Ne Zhdali. His songs recall the driven, angular moves of Wire with an irrepressible sense of fun attached. They enable one to overlook the mediocre, guitar-based funk workout by Ich Schwitze Nie that opens the disc, and the ludicrous cod-cabaret outpourings of Chris Newman that close it.

Between these dubious bookends sit a number of intriguing moments, notably Non Credo’s chilling ‘Latex Heart,’ in which singer Kira Vollman delivers a passionate invocation of obsessive desire against a backdrop of churning bass and drums. From a completely different but no less interesting angle, former Ruins member and multi-instrumentalist Tatsuya Yoshida sings (in an invented language) and also essays a range of prog rock manoeuvres from chiming electric guitar and intricate percussion to galloping keyboards that happily (for this listener, at least) recall the glories of early 70s Genesis. Other highlights include Francois Ribac and Eva Schwabe’s lovely piano ballad, ‘Die Dolomiten,’ Peter Cusack and Viv Corringham’s seductive arrangement of a traditional Greek folk song, and Frank Schulte’s inventive electronic setting of Anna Homler’s precise vocalisations.

No compilation can hope to please everyone, but this one has an impressively high strike rate and gives a good sense of the range of approaches adopted by the artists in the No Man’s Land stable. An excellent booklet with detailed and comprehensive notes on each artist rounds out the package.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 13, 2005)

Margareth Kammerer: To Be an Animal of Real Flesh

Posted on by
1

On this, her first solo album, Margareth Kammerer has surrounded herself with a distinguished cast of collaborators and remixers, as well as proving herself to be a talented singer and guitarist in her own right. Kammerer takes as her source material work from a number of modernist poets, including E.E. Cummings, Anne Carson and Paul Celan. These texts share an emotional and lyrical honesty that Kammerer unerringly exploits in her singing and playing. Five of the fourteen tracks here are solo acoustic recordings, on which Kammerer’s fluid and confident guitar work is matched by the arresting qualities of her voice, a bewitching instrument drenched in sustain and vibrato.

The fun really begins when Kammerer invites others to rework and add to the acoustic songs. Of the collaborations, Axel Dorner delights with the jazzy, querulous tone of his trumpet on “I Carry Your Heart With Me,” delivering a soft, breathy lyricism that is wholly in keeping with the romantic bravery of Cummings’ poem. Elsewhere, Yoshida Tatsuya (of Ruins) drums with powerful, effective restraint on “Willow C’Est Que J’Aime,” while the Necks’ Chris Abrahams adds spare, ghostly piano to “As Your Nightly Dreams.”

As one might expect, the remixes are a mixed bag sonically. Highlights include Nicholas Bussmann’s creatively noisy take on “Open His Head Baby,” which is nudged along by a barrage of whooshes, hums and whizzes on a bed of spidery percussion. Philip Jeck impresses, too, with a fleeting vignette of shimmer and distortion that does full justice to the imagistic density of Celan’s “The Bright Stones.” Olivier Lamm, meanwhile, wickedly transforms Yusef Komunyakaa’s somewhat rambling poem “Facing It” into a whirl of electronic playfulness and delirious free drumming.

Surprisingly, it is Fred Frith who most disappoints with his remix of “Somewhere I Have Never Travelled.” His tasteful washes of electric guitar are pleasant enough, but the accompanying drum machine patterns sound tacked-on and misplaced. Christof Kurzmann, too, seems to lose sight of the original with his insistent deconstruction of Kammerer’s voice on his version of “I Carry Your Heart With Me.” Otherwise the collaborators and remixes do a fine job, giving alternate readings of the source poems and providing stimulating contrasts to Kammerer’s unadorned solo approach.

(originally published in The Sound Projector 13, 2005)

Jon Rose: The People’s Music

Posted on by
Reply

The People’s Music springs from an outrageous flight of fancy. English-born, Australia-based violinist Rose kept coming across cheap, Chinese-made violins in Sydney junk shops, and imagined the factories full of workers where they must have been produced. Rose was attracted to these models by their unusually shrill timbre. Similar to that of the traditional Chinese two-string violin, the erhu, it was far removed from the deeper, more resonant sound of violins in the west.

Rose uses the image of the violin factory workers as the basis for this delirious fantasia for string orchestra. It’s unclear from the sleevenotes, however, whether any of his cheap Chinese violins were actually used in the recording of the piece, or in its live premiere. This sounds to have been an awesome event; staged in a remote outback town in Western Australia, it featured Rose performing live sampling of the orchestra alongside back-projected images of modern China and the factory workers.

In thirteen mostly short, hyperactive blasts of kinetic energy, Rose and his People’s String Orchestra (conducted by Lindsay Vickery) set off on a whirlwind tour of the violn factory. Each track contains the word ‘people’ in its title. Together they form a day in the life of the factory and its workers, from “Start the People” and “Wake Up People” through to “Busy People” and “The People’s End.” The relative calm and quiet of the opening piece are rudely shattered by a stentorian female voice, accompanied by Rose on twisting solo violin. “Working People” settles down into a simple, quotidian melody, but this is soon interrupted by the convulsive pummelling of a three-piece percussion ensemble. These vocal and percussive interjections recur at several points during the album. Their effect is to problematise the music: to disrupt the well-turned progress of the string orchestra, and to highlight the material conditions that led to its production.

This may make the album sound like some kind of dreary communist tract; nothing could be further from the truth, since Rose takes evident delight in the sonorities of the classical orchestra. Whether these take the form of the gorgeous swoon of “Big People” or the dissonant chromaticism of “Odd People,” the strings are vibrant and exciting throughout. Despite the piece’s history as part of a multimedia work, the listener never feels short-changed; the music is strong enough to exist as a composition in its own right.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 13, 2005)