Lullatone: Little Songs About Raindrops

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When does the childlike become childish? Or, to put it another way, how much leeway does one grant to a work of art that sacrifices complexity to present itself in a forum that can, whether intentionally or not, be readily understood and enjoyed by a child? These questions are hard to avoid when listening to Lullatone’s latest full-length.

On Little Songs about Raindrops, his third release as Lullatone, Shawn James Seymour abandons the sine-tone-based approach of his earlier Computer Recital and fills the soundfield with toy pianos and glockenspiels. Each of the ten tracks here is like a miniature symphony, bewitching the listener with tiny strands and clusters of melody, while every so often there is a little splash of colour from melodica, ukulele, or voice. As the title and cover indicate, the music is intended to depict rainfall, which it does perfectly with its pitter-pattering melodic presence and nurserry rhymes.

The album’s twinkling repetitiveness recalls the minimalistic orchestrations of Steve Reich and, especially, Raymond Scott’s delightful Soothing Sounds for Baby. Like Scott’s electronic lullabies, Little Songs about Raindrops retains an air of stilled wonderment that transcends its childlike surface. My one-year-old loves it, and you will too.

Bethany Curve: You Brought Us Here

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The highlighted letters in the track listing pick out the words ‘LOVE MISSED’. The album’s title, meanwhile, carries hints of hurt and recrimination. Thus Bethany Curve set out the emotional agenda that is explored at length on this fourth album from the California three-piece. Bethany Curve walk down paths already well trodden by the likes of Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine and Flying Saucer Attack: dreamy, languid vocals drifting over great swathes of feedback-drenched guitar and reverb-heavy percussion. Yet while it would be tempting to label You Brought Us Here as a lame work of copyism, something prevents me from doing so. The album transcends its lineage by virtue of its determination to conjure and sustain a mood of extreme, willed melancholy. There is little in the way of textural variation over the course of the album’s nine tracks and 55 minutes. On only one track, the pastoral ‘Summer Left Me’, does a gently strummed acoustic guitar break through the lowering clouds of electricity, coming as an intense relief before it characteristically makes way for waves of short, abstract drones. In short, as an evocation of lost or thwarted love, this is a remarkable collection. Bethany Curve are without bitterness or rancour; instead the music communicates, through its funereal pace, washed-out vocals and woozy instrumentation, intense regret and wintry resignation.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 10, 2002)

Bernhard Gal: Hinaus:: In den, Wald.

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Bernhard Gal’s fourth album is a journey inside the mind of a disturbed, solipsistic individual. Adolf Woelfli (1864-1930) was a Swiss who spent a deprived childhood as a farmhand. He was imprisoned for sexual attacks on young girls before being transferred to the mental hospital where he spent the last 35 years of his life. While there he created a 25,000-page opus of detailed texts and illustrations. It is Woelfli’s status as an outsider artist that forms the basis for Gal’s enquiry into his life and work.

The disc consists of recordings of Woelfli’s texts, which he wrote in German and in an invented language, recited by Gal and by a young Taiwanese girl. (Some of the texts are reproduced in the CD booklet.) Interspersed with these are field recordings of a man making his way through a forest. The sleevenotes say that the latter are intended to express Woelfli’s ‘permanent creative urge’. The overall effect is disturbing, for several reasons. The girl has an uninflected, naturally pure voice, while Gal’s own often whispered voice ranges in timbre from the idle to the threatening. Together, the voices uneasily register the presence of victim and assailant. The forest sounds, whatever the intention, strongly evoke Woelfli’s estranged status.

Gal is primarily a sound artist, and Hinaus:: In den, Wald was originally the soundtrack of an installation – a dark, immersive sonic environment. It is easy to imagine how disorientating these recordings must have been in this context, and the sleevenotes recommend listening on headphones in darkness to approximate the effect. Without the full spatial awareness given by the installation, listening to the CD is a necessarily incomplete, yet still powerful experience.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 13, 2005)

Bernhard Gal: Defragmentation/Blue

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Defragmentation/Blue is a conceptual piece by a German sound artist who goes under the ridiculous lower-case name of ‘gal’. It was originally designed to accompany a light installation by the Japanese architect Yumi Kori. In the useful sleevenotes, Kori explains how the piece evolved in response to her spending five weeks in a hospital watching a close relative dying. The modern hospital is a place of artifice and routine, where natural rhythms are substituted by new temporal experiences like the serving of meals and daily medical check-ups. Kori was severely disorientated by the experience: ‘after some weeks it turned out to be impossible to tell how much time had passed and even whether time had passed at all’. The installation, together with Gal’s music, was designed to replicate this phenomenon of ‘defragmented time’.

The booklet has a couple of photographs of the installation, which was held in New York in 1999 – a crepuscular affair of the kind most often associated with the American artist James Turrell. I’m a big fan of Turrell’s work, and this looks to have been an excellent piece in similar vein: fine shards of light faintly illuminating a carpeted chamber suffused in the deepest blue.

Although designed for the express purpose of soundtracking the installation, Gal’s music nevertheless retains its impact when listened to as a piece of work in its own right. It’s indexed into five tracks, but is really one continuous piece: a very long and slow unfolding of liquid frequencies and low rumbles. Soft, intermittent bleeps evoke the deathly pulse of the life support machine, while occasional intakes of breath conjure a distinctly Beckettian mood.

Confronted by such a stark piece of conceptualisation, there really is nothing for the listener to do but surrender to its embrace. Listening to this music, time ceases to function as a linear sequence of events and is reconfigured as an endless, painful present, always on the brink of slipping into nothingness but never quite relinquishing its grip.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 9, 2001)

Antony & the Johnsons: Antony & the Johnsons

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The first album by Antony and the Johnsons is a truly rare thing, a debut that doesn’t merely show promise but announces the arrival of a fully formed, major talent. It’s an extraordinary collection of modern torch songs, each one a perfect concentration of emotive vocals and vivid instrumental colors.

For bringing this beautiful creation to our attention, as for so much else, we have to thank David Tibet of Current 93, who was introduced to Antony in New York and, deeply affected by the then unreleased album, became his benevolent patron. The album appears on Tibet’s Durtro label… This is not the first time that Tibet has given prominence via his label to wayward, neglected talents; English folk singer Shirley Collins, Krautrockers Sand and (more dubiously) Tiny Tim have all benefited from his patronage. But these were essentially archival releases, intended to make available once again records from the past which would otherwise have lain dormant. Antony, on the other hand, is utterly of the present; and yet his songs have a dreamlike, yearning quality that equally makes them timeless.

Antony sings his baroque texts in a richly soulful voice that could melt the stoniest of hearts, while the Johnsons deliver an inspired soundtrack of strings, piano, woodwind and percussion. The music’s glorious emotional swell fortifies the listener even as the words tell unbearably of pain, death and atrocity. There is a dark anguish here that moves from nakedly personal confessions to tender elegies for lost friends and poetic meditations on the state of the world. Under Antony’s sorrowful gaze, this anguish assumes an overwhelming density, weighing down these songs tragically and unforgettably.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 8, 2000)

Angels of Light: Everything Is Good Here/Please Come Home

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Michael Gira’s Angels of Light return with another collection of blasted folk-blues laments, at once as ancient as the Bible and as modern as tomorrow. After the first, hesitant steps of the debut Angels album, New Mother (1999) and the rapturous intensity of its follow-up How I Loved You (2001), this third album sounds both like and unlike its predecessors. There is the same careful, layered approach to the dynamics of songform, the same painterly use of a variety of acoustic instruments, and the same rich baritone voice singing lyrics shot through with convulsive, passionate imagery. What is new is a certain concision and a less self-consciously epic tone. The ambiguous, hesitantly reassuring message of the title points to absence and longing – an impression reinforced by the cover art, which foregoes Gira’s usual use of resonant symbols and icons in favour of stark photographs of bare domestic interiors.

The songs reflect this impression of acute emptiness. ‘Palisades’ maps the traces left by a death, or a disappearance; its melancholy vocals and dreamlike percussion are fatally undercut by the closing lines: “Reasons won’t come, and no-one will regret…that you’re gone”. The gentle, soft-focus eroticism of ‘Kosinsky’ similarly turns on a knife edge, with the “blonde hair that’s a river of translucent, liquid light” revealed at the end to belong to one who also has “the eyes of an animal”.

The album is full of such striking lyrical observations, but it is Gira’s remarkable voice that animates them, a thing of great beauty, tenderness and rage. Like the great English vocalist Peter Hammill, Gira shapes his songs through compelling shifts of vocal register, allowing the music to live and breathe around the voice. At times, the results are as noisy and driven as anything by Gira’s former band Swans. ‘All Souls’ Rising’ sounds like an Old Testament prophet celebrating the end of the world: “Leave the righteous ones to rise again and drink the light from enemies”. The song is powered by urgent riffing, foot-stomping tension and blasts of coruscating harmonica. The band barely pause for breath before launching into the ferocious ‘Nations’, in which Gira delivers an unusually biting socio-political tirade on behalf of the poor and destitute.

The Angels enrich the sonic palette with inspired touches of piano, violin, flute and pedal steel guitar. These transform songs like ‘The Family God’ and ‘What You Were’, both of which begin slowly and deliberately before opening out into wide, blissful panoramas. Between the two sits the hectic ‘Rose of Los Angeles’, an incantatory portrait of an old woman close to death that exposes the subject’s frailty while expressing anger at the powerlessness of her condition.

The Angels of Light transfix the listener by giving expression to the pulsating, symbolic energy they perceive to be at the heart of existence. But there is a tragic, darkly Romantic impulse to their creations that keeps the work oscillating between joy and despair. Gira plants one final twist at the end of the swinging, hypnotic ‘Sunset Park’. The song repeats the words “She brings some, she’ll bring some, she brings one, she’ll bring one” over and over, keeping the listener wondering what she will bring, until in the last seconds the answer comes with a quietly spoken, almost throwaway “Love”. It’s a touching, generous moment; and yet, as the rest of the album reminds us, love may be all you need, but it certainly isn’t all that there is.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 12, 2004)

Current 93: Black Ships Ate The Sky

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With Black Ships Ate the Sky, David Tibet breaks a six-year silence since the last Current 93 studio album, Sleep Has His House. That album was a highly personal, autobiographical work inspired by the death of Tibet’s father. This new record is a far more grandiose statement, focusing on Tibet’s obsessions with eschatology and the apocalypse. Tibet has stated that the imagery of black ships underpinning the record came from a recurring nightmare of his. Structurally, too, the album emphasizes notions of recurrence. Eight guest vocalists, plus Tibet himself, deliver versions of “Idumea,” an 18th-century Methodist hymn. Interspersed with these renditions are Tibet’s own apocalyptic ballads, each one tenser than the last, until the nightmare is finally realized on the terror-struck title track.

Of the guest singers, Will Oldham impresses most with his unassuming, sepia-tinted reading, sounding like a kindly preacher in counterpoint to Tibet’s feverish declamations. Clodagh Simonds strikes a note of glacial stillness with her harmonium-backed setting, while Cosey Fanni Tutti shimmers through a fog of harsh soundscapes (courtesy of Nurse With Wound’s Steven Stapleton) to deliver a version replete with seductive enticement. Tibet, however, makes a tactical error in opening the album with Marc Almond, whose queasy voice (recorded before Almond’s near-fatal motorcycle accident) tries but fails to reach the required heights of grandeur. Baby Dee’s cod-operatic rendition singularly fails to ignite, and Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons) continues the downward trend signaled by his recent solo work with a similarly overwrought reading.

Accompanied by the rich guitar work of Michael Cashmore and Ben Chasny, and the doomy cello of John Contreras, Tibet’s own ballads resonate with enormous power, each one edging the listener towards a clearer picture of Tibet’s haunted visions. Tibet delivers his texts in an eerie, half-spoken, half-sung recitative, its tone ranging from hushed and reverent to possessed and delirious. Musical highlights include the lovely, tumbling guitar motif of “Bind Your Tortoise Mouth,” the ominous drone of “This Autistic Imperium Is Nihil Reich,” and the barely discernible pulse threading its way through “Black Ships in the Sky.” The deranged chordal attack of the title track—reverberating around Tibet’s anguished plea “Who will deliver me from myself?”—resolves into the beatific quiescence of “Why Caesar Is Burning Pt II” and English folk-singing legend Shirley Collins’ hesitant, quavering but deeply affecting rendition of “Idumea.”

Ultimately, though, Black Ships Ate the Sky is a Gestalt in which the overall effect of the work is far greater than the sum of its parts. It’s anyone’s guess how Tibet will manage to top this, as he and his distinguished collaborators have created a kaleidoscopic and endlessly mesmerizing theatre of dreams.

Carla Bozulich: Evangelista

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On her third album, Carla Bozulich offers a compelling new twist on the Constellation label’s well-established m.o. of livid paranoia: a siren voice. Branching out from the alt.country stylings of her work with the Geraldine Fibbers and her two previous solo albums, Bozulich moves daringly into territory previously mapped by labelmates Godspeed You! Black Emperor and A Silver Mt. Zion. It’s no surprise, then, to find members of that collective adding their distinctive patina of broken optimism and hinted-at menace to the record. Nowhere is the Constellation effect more pronounced than on the disorienting, nine-minute “Evangelista I,” which sets the Patti Smith-like intensity of Bozulich’s voice against a filmic backdrop of buzz-saw strings, distant crackle, and eerie knocking and creaking sounds. It’s a searingly vivid Expressionist drama whose impact is sustained beautifully over the remaining eight songs.

“How To Survive Being Hit By Lightning” sees Bozulich’s bewitching voice buried low and murky in the mix, emerging with feline grace from liquid drops of guitar and stealthy, undulant noise. On the excellent cover of Low’s “Pissing,” Bozulich’s understated choral vocal is gradually enveloped in screaming guitar and a throbbing, insistent pulse. “Evangelista II,” meanwhile, is an unsettling finale – a restrained concoction in which the tender, erotic closeness of the lyric is lethally undermined by the plumes of feedback emanating from Efrim Menuck’s guitar.

Evangelista is a genuinely collaborative effort in which the one weak point of recent work by A Silver Mt. Zion—Menuck’s reedy, tremulous vocals—is decisively addressed through the seductive elegance of Bozulich’s voice. With her latest album, Bozulich has found a group of musicians able to illustrate with vivid acuity her troubled, affecting songs.

Whitehouse: Bird Seed

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In early 2003 Whitehouse, now down to the core duo of William Bennett and Philip Best played a series of concerts in London to celebrate the release of this new album. At the Conway Hall in Red Lion Square – a long-time rallying point for the angry and the dispossessed – the two men marked out new territory for the band by playing nothing but material from this album. It was as if the departure of Peter Sotos – an American noted for his unsparing documentation of child abuse, kiddie porn and sexual sadism – had spurred Whitehouse to rid themselves of their more bluntly transgressive elements and move towards a more forensic, but no less arresting, form of enquiry. For there has long been an element of investigation in Whitehouse’s art – a sense that, however deeply felt and personally expressed, it has also been aimed at provocation, at goading the listener into a response and measuring the nature of that response. Hence, perhaps, the lengthy recording of fans’ reactions to each new release on the Whitehouse website.

Such reaction so far to Bird Seed has been decidedly mixed, no doubt in part because it represents a distinct move away from the bludgeoning force of the earlier records with which Whitehouse cemented their fearsome reputation. I was regrettably, too young to be aware of their now impossibly rare ’80s albums (including the notorious Right To Kill, of which only 300 copies were made and which, alone among Whitehouse albums, has never been reissued due to Bennett’s admirable insisitence that it be allowed to retain its clandestine quality), but I lapped up the CD reissues and each album up to and including 1992’s blistering Never Forget Death. They dropped off my radar for the rest of the ’90s, but on the evidence of Bird Seed they have not lost any of their creative energy since that time.

The first thing you notice about Bird Seed, from the cover inwards, is how many words there are on it. They flow unchecked like a particularly noxious river, haranguing a nameless ‘you’ with a dense and unforgiving blend of vitiriolic abuse, virulent symbolism and jarring metaphoric imagery. Targets for the abuse may or may not include the tabloid press (‘Why You Never Became A Dancer’), victims of self-harm (‘Cut Hands Has The Solution’) and even Stuart Lubbock, the unfortunate party guest who drowned in Michael Barrymore’s swimming pool (‘Wriggle Like A Fucking Eel’). The words of these three long tracks are spat out by Bennett with demented hysteria, or by the workaday and less compelling voice of Best. Whereas the old Whitehouse would punctuate their assault of noise and feedback with well chosed blasts of verbal obscenity, the new sound is driven by vocals, around which the music swirls in a barrage of uncanny, pulsating rhythms.

The album’s three other pieces take different approaches. The title track ‘Bird Seed’ is Sotos’ farewell to Whitehouse, a harrowing 15-minute collage of spoken word testimonies from rape victims, prostitutes and sexually abused girls. It’s deliberately, calculatedly unpleasant, but not without moments of black humour, as in the following exchange:

Interviewer: “Do you use condoms?”

Woman: “Oh, my God, yes, I’ve got them right now, I don’t want no AIDS, I’m clean.”

Interviewer: “How many months are you pregnant?”

Woman: “Seven…”

Those who would like to hear more of this kind of thing would do well to seek out Sotos’ Buyer’s Market CD which contains an album length’s worth of the stuff. Others will probably not wish to sit through this more than once.

The closing track ‘Munkisi Munkondi’ is an intriguing accretion of lurching, queasy rhythms. Best of all, though, is the chilling ‘Philosophy’. Bennett is restrained, almost conversational, as he lays bare the contents of a mind riven with aggression and confusion: “A terrible thing happened/My friend was stabbed in the street by some drunk/Dead before he arrived at the hospital/Wouldn’t it be horrible?/Think about it/Even if you could get that door opened/And you were to search/You would never find me again…” The softly spoken vocals just about maintain their presence against a complex layering of drones and feedback. The song burns with wounded regret and is the remarkable centrepiece of an album that sees Whitehouse effortlessly reinventing themselves as noise terrorists for the 21st century.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 12, 2004)

Ether column, March 2007

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This month’s column previews two concerts at the Arena, a fine medium-sized venue in the third district. Running under the banner “Love music, hate fascism”, this former slaughterhouse has carved out a niche for itself as a reliable purveyor of alternative entertainments, and has a large courtyard where open-air gigs are held in summer.

Unlikely to be much in the way of summery vibes, though, at the welcome return to Vienna of John Cale. Now pushing 65, this remarkable musician retains every ounce of the tense creativity that marked his earliest work in the mid-1960s. Growing up in a small town in Wales, Cale moved to New York when the music scene there was on the verge of a period of intense innovation. He took up the viola and joined forces with Tony Conrad and La Monte Young in the Theatre of Eternal Music, an experimental ensemble that focused on the hypnotic musical properties of the drone. From there it was a short step to the Velvet Underground, where Cale’s radical dissonance was the perfect foil for Lou Reed’s more pop-wise sensibility. Cale’s musical and vocal contributions to the first two Velvets records were significant, but in 1968 he was deplorably forced to leave the band due to Reed’s control-freak tendencies. Since then he has pursued a prolific solo career, releasing around 15 studio albums as well as numerous collaborations and works for film and dance. His solo work is characterised by a restless intelligence, with passages of great elegance and refinement jostling for space with snarling aggression and spare, controlled atonality.

On his last visit to Vienna in February 2006, Cale warmed up the rather sterile Birdland atmosphere with a slew of songs from his extensive back catalogue and a sprinkling of Velvets classics for good measure. Here in the more relaxed surroundings of the Arena, he’s sure to deliver a powerful and committed performance.

A week or so later, Austrian alt-rock outfit Naked Lunch hit the Arena on the Vienna leg of an extensive tour of Austria and Germany. Formed in Klagenfurt in 1991, Naked Lunch have a turbulent history. Founder member Georg Trattnig died of an alcohol-related condition in 2000, while his co-founder Oliver Welter lived rough for a time after the band had been dropped by two successive record labels. Meanwhile, the band’s studio burned down before they had finished work on their fourth album. That record, Songs for the Exhausted, was not released until 2004, three years after its completion; but it became their breakthrough album, trading indie bluster for wintry electronica. Holding fast to the ‘less is more’ principle, their new record, This Atom Heart of Ours, is a collection of understated songs which should appeal to fans of Mercury Rev’s plaintive melodicism. Like Cale, Naked Lunch are survivors, their continued presence an illustration of the virtues of bloody-mindedness and persistence.