Archive for May, 2016

LXMP – Żony w pracy

Posted: 31 May 2016 in Albums
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Lado ABC – Lado A/18 – 21st March 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s all about the retro vibe. And it’s all about messing with the listener’s brain. Described as ‘an attempt at finding the perfect balance between beautiful and unbearable music,’ the Polish duo’s latest effort, Żony w pracy (trans. Wives at Work) Bringing a carnival of analogue synths to the party in a celebration of the machines of the East (Korg) and the West (Moog). Unfortunately, Żony w pracy often fails to find the balance it seeks, and ends up sounding more like a deranged duel than the homage it’s intended as.

Beneath a throbbing bass track, the time signatures of the percussion on the albums first track, ‘Brasilia’, are ever-changing, slipping the groove with to disorientating results. The track bubbles along nicely, mellow, jazzy easy-listening synth muzak until it sinks underwater into a muffles murk. So far, so middling analogue experimentalism, the likes of which has been done countless times before. It’s fun, it’s clever, but it’s awkward and twisty and difficult to really get into the groove.

But then things go crazy on ‘Torreador Janusz’, a frenzy of synths stab and loop and warp deliriously, descending into a riot of bleeps and squiggles flying in all directions. Wibbly, wobbly and whimsical, it’s smart and techy. But like so much music that’s smart and techy, regardless of genre – from jazz through avant-garde and experimental to post-rock, tech metal and prog rock – the mastery of instruments and a penchant for messing about with convention and form amounts to so much showing off. Yes, you can play – but how about some tunes? Still, XLMP manage to stay on the right side of the precipice that is unlistenable smug muso wank with just enough attention – or concession – to listenability.

‘Kosmos, Teil 1’ is perhaps the album’s most linear piece, a soaring, surging rush of synths in space that hints at Krautrock leanings. There are undeniably rather hipsterish overtones to it all, but it’s well executed and there is a sense that there’s an element of knowingness and self-aware humour at play here: Piotr Zabrodzki and Macio Moretti state that Żony w pracy is an homage to the real working wives, Anna and Zofia, and write, ‘Żony w pracy apart from being an homage to the homages, also, or even above all, ask one question of the “fundamental” sort – “How are you gonna play that live?”.

I’m not going to make any public judgement based on their latest promotional shot, and will keep my attention on the album itself and so, I will say this: guys – maybe you should listen to your wives. Żony w pracy has an indisputable novelty value, and does offer moments of fun, but how enduring its appeal is, well, that’s something that seems less certain.

 

XLMP

 

LXMP on Bandcamp

Listen: ‘Lit Negative’ by MJ Guider

Posted: 31 May 2016 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Kranky will be releasing the alluring debut full length, Precious Systems, from New Orleans trio MJ Guider (led by Melissa Guion) on July 15th.

An ambitious ambient-based record which gazes out in to subterranean pop and sunset electronics, Precious Systems contains great emotional and sonic depth and is sure to make a lasting impression on devotees of subtle grandeur.

Surreal, inspired and intriguing, the washes of bass and selective, expertly employed mixing techniques of Guion are what defines this first foray in to the album format, having previously impressed with the Green Plastic extended play cassette in early 2014 on the Constellation Tatsu label. These are songs that exist in a wholly contained sound environment, minimal yet lush, spare yet saturated, and most importantly, entirely compelling.

Stream ‘Lit Negative’ here:

EPSON MFP image

Sly & the Family Drone – Appetite For Tax Deduction

Posted: 29 May 2016 in Albums
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17th May 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

The ever-awesome Sly & the Family Drone return with another puntastically-labelled slab of awkward noise. Sticking to their staunchly DIY ethos (although, and I mean it as no criticism when I say that this may well be a choice but their options are likely to be limited), this latest effort is released on translucent green C33 cassette in a limited edition of 50, and digitally.

Apart from being a killer live band, their offbeat humour, not least of all as manifested in the referential titles have always been an integral part of their appeal (at least to me): 95 Minutes Over England documented their first tour, and all three of the recorded sets lasted longer than Suicide’s notorious show, and the band are willing participants in the ensuing percussion-led riots.

Understanding Appetite in any context of chronology is rather difficult, given that it originally appeared as a digital-only release a few months before their colossal full-length album proper, Unnecessary Woe. It’s not so much a companion piece but a contemporaneous standalone counterpart. But the main thing is that it contains a whole lot of dark noise.

While each of their other releases features at least one long-form sprawler, Appetite For Tax Deduction is an unusually concise work, with none of the four tracks crossing the ten-minute mark. Still, the first track, ‘Favour for a Favour’, is a dank, rumbling semi-ambient piece. Heavy, shuddering low-end sounds and growling vibrations sound like subterranean earthworks. It bleeds into ‘Wine into Water’. A mangling mesh of distortion and a continuous bottom-end drone that tears the air provides the gut-churning backdrop to extraneous electronic noise, shrieks of feedback and indecipherable, distorted to fuck vocals. It’s pretty sinister stuff, and its claustrophobic intensity is a world away from the cathartic and communal live performances.

With a title worthy of That Fucking Tank, ‘Simply Red Stripe’ is a classic example of the Sly humour. Its nine-minute sonic assault is built around an insistent, low-end throbbing, dense and immersive. Tonal shifts trick the ears into thinking there are fleeting moments of melody submerged in the hum, only for it to become apparent that it’s little more than a rising wail of feedback and the fizz of melting electrodes. It’s by far the most rhythmic track of the set, and, with nods to Suicide, Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse, it’s magnificently uneasy listening.

‘Your Mum’s a Provincial Rock Club’ features what appear to be horse’s hooves – the only overt percussion to feature on Appetite – beneath a cement-mixer mess of collages sound, booming bass blasts and fractured tweets and flutters of treble spiralling in a vortex of echo and infinite delay, building and building until the sound coalesces into a vast tidal wae of white noise that ultimately swallows itself.

 

Sly and the Family Drone - Appetite

Listen: ‘Crook’ by Field Studies

Posted: 28 May 2016 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Taken from the new EP “Rainmaking”, out May 27th via Denizen Recordings, ‘Crook’ was largely inspired by a strange situation that Andrew (the drummer) found himself in a few years ago, where he and his parents saw an assumed criminal being chased by police officers in central London.

According to Andy, the guy mocked him directly as he ran by for not having the courage to step in, which I found deeply funny – to literally be in the act of fleeing from the police, but still make time to critique other people’s moral fibre is quite an achievement. So, with that as a starting point, we started writing with the intention of exploring cowardice, fight or flight instinct, mob psychology; things like that. What came out was probably more of a self-evaluation than anything else.

Stream it here:

 

Field Studies

Ytamo – Mi Wo

Posted: 28 May 2016 in Albums
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Someone Good – RMSG014 – 18th March 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Lawrence English, sound sculptor and the man behind the Room40 label and subdivision Someone Good, has a god ear and a keen sense of what makes for interesting and unusual listening. The liner notes to Mi Wo centre around English’s recollection of his discovery of Ytamo while touring Japan in the early to mid 00s. Specifically, he writes of how the first time he saw her perform, he was completely enthralled by the unusual and soothing music Ytamo conjured.

Listening to Mi Wo, it’s immediately apparent what he found to captivating. There’s an otherworldly quality to the music, and the sounds emerge and fade into one another as if created by some invisible force.

Ytamo’s style is built on diversity and eclecticism, while simultaneously, it’s about understatement and subtlety. The methods by which she draws together seemingly disparate elements transcends not only the boundaries of genre, but also culture and time. Despite its overt modernity, there are motifs and atmospheres which hint at traditionally-rooted music with ancient origins.

Laid back jazz vibes filter through and gradually evaporate in the sparse digital washes of ‘Autopoiesis’, and jaunty bleeps and whistles flicker lightly through trilling easy listening tones and mellow, bumping beats. The familiar blurs into the unfamiliar, with unexpected resonances. Subtly powerful, Mi Wo is a work of musical alchemy.

Print

 

Ytamo on Soundcloud

Nathassia – Light of the World

Posted: 28 May 2016 in Albums
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Inter-Dimensional Recordings – 1st June 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

The greatest pressure for any emerging artist must surely to be to get product out onto the market: something to satisfy new fans and entice prospective fans. The urge to splurge material, whether ready or not, in order to strike while the iron is hot is more than most can resist. Nathassia is indeed a rare artist, and, it would seem, something of a perfectionist. Recording as Nathassia Devine, she had a 13-track debut album recorded, packaged, and in circulation to the press, finding favourable reviews (including one from me). That was 2014. The album was shelved. It’s now 2016, and a lot has happened. Having decided to pull back and regroup, restyling herself as Nathassia, she’s spent the intervening time reshaping her sound and building an enviable audience at home and internationally. Finally, she’s satisfied, and the end product is Light of the World. And yes, it was worth the wait.

Cut back to 10 tracks, only four songs from the original album remain. Having honed her songs with the assistance of Bruce Elliott-Smith, Light of the World finds Nathassia exploring cross-cultural music evermore broadly and evermore confidently. Half Dutch, half Indian and residing in London, Light of the World is very much a 21st century hybrid of these very different cultural backgrounds. It’s an electronic album, but not one that confirms to any one strain or style, leaping hither and thither and picking, magpie-like, from a host of musical strands.

Nathassia’s striking appearance is the perfect visual representation of her sound, and embodies her mixed roots, as East meets West in a perfect amalgamation. But this is no mere marketing schtick: she is very much a self-made package, and one which has immense market appeal both visually and sonically.

Contrast and juxtaposition lie at the heart of Light of the World, but rather than treat this yin and yang as conflicting elements, she embraces them and draws them together to intriguing effect. The sultry ‘Egypt’s Queen’ finds Nathassia rolling her r’s and accentuating the eastern influences of her music. Single cut ‘Turning Headz’ is more hard-edged and showcases a driving, drum ‘n’ bass orientated sound, something which wasn’t present on the original album, and similarly, ‘Parasite’ is driven by a grating bass and insistent, industrial-edged drumming. Melding insistent beats with snarling techno, it’s dark in hue, and paired with Nathassia’s keeningly exotic vocal delivery that’s tinged with a hint of venom, it’s a powerful piece.

Elsewhere, the title track spins out an expansive, cosmic vibe, highlighting the diversity of the material on Light of the World. It certainly isn’t an album that works to a formula, and stands as a truly multidimensional piece. It helps, of course, that the range is matched by the quality of the material.

Light of the World is an album which not only reveals Nathassia to be a fascinating, chameleon-like songsmith and performer, but a distinctive and even unique voice.

 

light-of-the-world-album-artwork

Nathassia Online

Tides From Nebula – Safehaven

Posted: 26 May 2016 in Albums
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Long Branch Records and Mystic – 6th May 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Instrumental four-piece Tides From Nebula are an instrumental 4-piece fail from Poland. Some of you may already know that, especially if you’re reading this in Poland, given that I’m reliably informed that they’re Poland’s most popular post-rock band. But then, how big is post-rock in Poland? Big enough, I guess: it’s something that seems more popular in mainland Europe and beyond than domestically here in the UK, and home-grown post-rock acts like Her Name is Calla seem to have a bigger fanbase beyond the British Isles than at home. It’s not just about catchment or population: the UK seems, in the main, to be depressingly mainstream and conservative in its tastes. Anything remotely alternative is niche, and there’s little to no crossover between mainstream and alternative markets. Elsewhere, music fans seem altogether more accommodating and diverse, and the levels of enthusiasm shown to bands is significantly greater beyond the confines of our island shores too. I daresay that Tides of Nebula have felt the cultural differences during their extensive touring: since their inception, they’ve played over 500 shows globally, and Safehaven is their fourth album.

It is, without doubt, a quintessential post-rock album. The guitars chime and build their way, inexorably, to surging, euphoric crescendos that soar and sustain. Yet there’s an understated power evident here: there are some big chords, and the heavy strikes hang in the air with a long afterburn.

But then, ‘The Lifter’ marks a change of instrumentation and a change of style, the throbbing synths and more mechanised sound beneath the interweaving guitars presenting a sound more electronically focused, hinting more at Depeche Mode than the well-trodden post-rock conventions. And gradually, the album finds Tides from Nebula incorporate an increasing range of electronic instrumentation, and while as I say, it’ a quintessential post-rock album, it’s also an album that does a whole lot more and does so in a way that’s interesting and holds the attention instead of becoming bogged down in indulgent-wankery.

As the album’s cover art – a shot of the Cayan tower in Dubai or a manipuation thereof? – suggests, the album’s architecture is daring, and comes with a big twist. And as Safehaven demonstrates, it’s their ability to move beyond the conventions of straight, guitar-based post-rock – and to do so without it sounding forced or like a desperate push to step out of a well-worn post-rock rut – that really goes in the band’s favour. In fact, while the latest album by Explosions in the Sky sees them trying and failing to achieve precisely the same, Tides of Nebula succeed, striding confidently into expansive new territories. And in that context, it’s reasonable to call Safehaven a triumph.

Tides - Safe

 

Tides From Nebula Online

Watch: ‘Understanding’ by Martin Creed

Posted: 26 May 2016 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Turner Prize winner Martin Creed is a quirky, whimsical, idiosyncratic bugger, and his polyartistry makes him hard to place. Which is part of his appeal.

‘Understanding’ is about arguments.

Creed explains it thus: “I think this song came from some arguments I had. People say it’s good to argue because your true feelings come out, and so it can lead to understanding. But feelings are like hair: you can’t choose what you have. I argued with my hair for years. I tried to persuade it, I tried to deny it, and in the end I had to admit that I was wrong. If you’re arguing with yourself and you realise you’re wrong, where does that leave you? Who wins? And what’s the best hairstyle for you? I want to understand and I wish I could be understood. And I would love it if I could understand myself.”

Hair… who’d have it?

‘Understanding’ is a taster for his his new album, Thoughts Lined Up,  released through Telephone Records on 8th July.


<p><a href=”https://vimeo.com/167247762″>Understanding</a&gt; from <a href=”https://vimeo.com/martincreed”>Martin Creed</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

Natalie Beridze – Guliagava

Posted: 25 May 2016 in Albums
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Monika Enterprise – monika87 – 27th May 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

The enigmatic Natalie Beridze’s latest album is accompanied by an appropriately enigmatic blurb, which references clouds, un and weightlessness. Such abstraction is entirely appropriate for an album that crates a blur of sonic abstraction and is housed in a cover which features artwork which is far from figurative. What does it all mean? Is it a dream? A hallucination? A mirage? Is it even real? Perhaps, perhaps not: it matters little. To capture and confine the material on Guliagava is more or less impossible. Every moment is fleeting, ephemeral. But then, to attempt to capture the moment would be to spoil the effect, and to diminish its power. It’s not about freezing the moment, but living in it.

The woozy, languid sensuality of ‘For Love’ possesses a smoky, opiate dreaminess. Soft-focus, rolling basslines undulate across stuttering, glitchy beats and gauze-like synths which spiral and drift. There’s a lot of space, a lot of smoke and mirrors as the sound reflect and refract to create strange, dislocated soundtracks. The howling metallic scrapes that open ‘Light is Winning’ give way to a dark, murky and menacing bassline and thunderous bass beats. If light is winning, it’s only just got the edge in what appears to be a truly monumental battle. ‘Natalie whispers, half seductive, half threatening, certain but uncertain: ‘Words, emotions, water, sweat / into the void / In outer space / Once there was only dark / But if u ask me / The light is winning.’

Chiming cadences emerge from within wispy, cloud-like atmospheres. But a deep, penetrating blast heralds the arrival of ‘Tore Up All My Maps’, a track built on the juxtaposition of mellow but taut vocals and a frenetic, heavy-duty drum ‘n’ bass rhythm. The shimmering glimmer of ‘Docha with Fading Grey’ is corrupted by the scratching of surface decay, a sonic rust misting the surface.

The soft vinyl-like crackle that casts a sheen over ‘Opening Night’ evokes a nostalgia not for vinyl, but for the heritage of vinyl, the subconscious yearning for another age, a pre-digital age. What precisely is it that one finds oneself pining for? It is, of course, something undefinable, vague – and it stands as a fair analogy for the experience of listening to this album, in that there’s an inescapable sense of the intangible, the unreachable.

The textures Beridze creates, and the way she contrasts them, are magnificent, making Guliagava an evocative, haunting album heavy with implicit meaning and resonance.

 

Natalie Beridze - Guligava

Natalie Beridze Online

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