Archive for January, 2021

Watch: ‘The Truth (Angels Are Coming AI Mix)’ by I Like Trains

Posted: 8 January 2021 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Following the release of their hard-hitting ‘KOMPROMAT’ album in late 2020 via Schubert Music’s recently founded Atlantic Curve label, Leeds-based trailblazers I LIKE TRAINS have shared a series of deepfake remixes of the album’s lead single ‘The Truth’.

Formed in 2004, I LIKE TRAINS is David Martin (vocals/guitar), Alistair Bowis (bass), Guy Bannister (guitar/synths), Simon Fogal (drums) and Ian Jarrold (guitar). For this experiment, the band reunited with long-time visual collaborator Michael Connolly to create a series of ‘deepfake remixes’ for ‘The Truth’.

"As our album KOMPROMAT deals with themes of information and how data misuse has led to this nightmarish present, it feels apt to see how artificial intelligence would rework our music. It seems to think we should be more melodic, throw in a few key changes and also consider using panpipes. The future of music is pretty nightmarish too it seems," says David Martin.

“The audio in these three vignettes is an AI model trying to continue ‘The Truth’, generated using the OpenAI Jukebox. I revisited my auto edit system from ‘The Truth’ & ‘Dig In’ promo videos and poured on more nightmare fuel," says Michael Connolly.

A resonant and timely rally against the powers-that-be, this ominous offering is the latest leg of the expository musical quest, following singles ‘Dig In’ and ‘A Steady Hand’, both of which also offer videos by Michael Connolly – congnizant reactions to a world that has changed beyond all recognition.

Check ‘The Truth (Angels Are Coming AI Mix)’ here:

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Watch: ‘Prove It’ by Divide and Dissolve

Posted: 7 January 2021 in Singles and EPs
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Multidimensional duo Divide and Dissolve share the video for “Prove It”, originally released as a stand alone single in 2019, and appearing on their forthcoming album Gas Lit (Invada, 29th Jan).

The visual expression of Divide and Dissolve’s message has varied across each of their music videos to date (revisit “We Are Really Worried About You” and “Denial”) but the intention of the music remains unchanged: to undermine and destroy the white supremacist colonial framework and to fight for Indigenous Sovereignty, Black and Indigenous Liberation, Water, Earth, and Indigenous land given back.

About this latest single, Divide and Dissolve explains, “Prove It – calls into question the need to prove you experienced something. If someone wasn’t there to witness it, it still happened and may have caused harm. Colonial power structures, power dynamics, and societal expectations rely on Black, Indigenous, and people of colour being Gas Lit and denying our experiences, because the predominant white supremacist narrative demands us to. When a tree falls in the forest, it has fallen. Prove It is about the acceptance of experiences of pain without expectation.”

Watch ‘Prove It’ here:

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Of Thread & Mist – Static Hymns to No One

Posted: 7 January 2021 in Albums
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Gizeh Records – GZH101 – 22nd January 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Gizeh label founder Richard Knox already has a quite remarkable resume of musical projects, often running simultaneously or overlapping. With Shield Patterns currently quiet and A-Sun Amissa standing as his primary collective vehicle, Knox’s contributions to collaborative works over recent years have been numerous, but to fill a gap – or more likely scratch another itch – he’s stepped into the (half) light with a new solo project, Of Thread & Mist. A fair summary is that the project sounds exactly as the name suggests, and one might say representative of the Gizeh ‘house’ style’ – evocative, haunting, juxtapositional, but also evasive, intangible, ephemeral.

Static Hymns contains two longform tracks: the first, ‘Grace and Truth Perish’ has a running time of eighteen and a half minutes, while ‘A Face Full of Drunken Ticks’ is a colossally sprawling thirty-two-minute epic.

The formulation of the album centres around music ‘composed by Knox then deconstructed and manipulated via hand-made tape loops, beaten-up 4-Tracks and modified cassette players’. There’s very much a sense of artistry around the manipulation of the material, an almost avant-garde collaging, repurposing, reconfiguration, destroying – or at least disfiguring – in order to build anew.

There is something old, faded, slightly damaged about the warped, wavering tape drones that seep tentatively from the speakers to begin with, creating a sense of unease, a certain degree of disorientation, a feeling that something isn’t quite right about the way the different layers of sound rub against one another without quite connecting. It’s a slow, trickling turn as gradients of sweeping waves of sound, broad in spectra and subtly textured like pale watercolours spreading into one another, and the edges blur into indistinction.

This type of cinematic, atmospheric ambient drone is very much Knox’s signature, and he’s long demonstrated a knack for slowly shifting from light to shade and back through almost granular gradation, but where Static Hymns stands out is its almost collage-like approach in places. The different elements overlap, and not always comfortably – and this is very much in their favour in the way in which they challenge the recipient: this is no simple drone-over-and-out, but an album that proffers a sensory challenge, and as such, demands more attention than so many exercises in background drift that occupy the ambient sphere.

Toward the end, the sound again begins to waver, waxing and waning, tapering and yawning, stretching and fading in and out unpredictably, as if slowly degenerating, degrading. There are a number of abrupt false endings as the sound fragments into evermore brief flickers. It stutters, it yawns, and finally, it is done – gone, ended.

But when the sound ends, the reflection begins. Static Hymns is an album that invites reflection in the silence which follows the final notes.

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IsoPHeX – Doppelgänger

Posted: 5 January 2021 in Singles and EPs
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Cae Gwyn Records – 22nd January 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s dark. It’s winter. We’re in lockdown – again / still. Whatever cheer Christmas and the prospect of new year brought – and let’s face it more than cheer, it was a flicker of false hope, or worse still, a diminutive moment of delusional hope – has faded with the return to work (from home) and (home) schooling and the prospect of socialising, pubs, and gigs but a snuffed candle for the foreseeable, meaning that the jaunty Christmas tunes that assailed us last month can well and truly delete themselves while we get back to reality.

‘Doppelgänger’, the debut single from IsoPHeX, aka 19-year-old Cian Owen from Anglesey, it pitched as ‘brooding electronica of the highest order’, and it fits the bill and no mistake.

If you’re expecting – or wanting – more dark ambient, you’ll likely be disappointed, although ‘Doppelgänger’ brings atmosphere in spades, and one that’s cold and dark.

It may only be three minutes an eighteen seconds in duration, but ‘Doppelgänger’ melds an array of styles, incorporating hip-hop and sparse electro to create something that’s simultaneously bleak and dynamic, as chilly synths wrapped like mist around a hectic beat: uptempo hip-hop or downtempo drum ‘n’ bass? Who cares? Despite the urgent pace of the stammering rhythm, ‘Doppelgänger’ is sparse, minimal, and edgy, a twitchy trip through dark alleyways at night, tense and paranoid. Is there something there? Or is it all in your head? Keep one eye over your shoulder. Keep moving. Trust no-one. Apart from me, of course, when I tell you this is a killer tune.

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Karen Haglof – Devastation Completed

Posted: 4 January 2021 in Singles and EPs
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1st January 2021

James Wells

After many years out of music – mostly to pursue medical school and a career as an oncologist, Karen Haglof, former luminary of the New York scene and also a member of Band of Susans among others, made her return just a few years ago, and has seen her release a flurry of new material. Making up for lost time, Haglof looks like an artist rejuvenated and energised, and what we’ve heard to date sounds like it too.

Kicking off the new year with new song, ‘Devastation Competed’ is the first of several tracks she’ll be releasing in 2021, and while featuring a host of musicians and instruments, including CP Roth on bass, piano, Hammond organ and percussion and Mitch Easter on Moog, the end result is stripped-back but solid sounding.

Less is more, for sure.

‘Devastation Completed’ is a reflection on the present, but also a call to unity and hints at optimism. It’s been a hard year / no-one would argue that’, she sings by way of an opening, with a chunky bass cranked up and booming fuzz on a rootsy blues riff. It’s simple, repetitive, and ends with an explosion. Right now I wish it would, but meanwhile, this is a great head-nodder of a tune.

Ben Wood & The Bad Ideas – Soho

Posted: 3 January 2021 in Singles and EPs
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31st December 2020

London-based alt-rock quartet Ben Wood & The Bad Ideas have certainly been keeping busy, and ‘Soho’, released on new years’ eve, is their twelfth – and understandably final – single release of 2020.

There have seen various debates as to the sagacity of releasing a single a month over an album with attendant singles, not least of all around the logistics of promotion (with many suggesting it’s easier to promote an ‘event’ like an album release and building up said release and marketing it with singles rather than the singles being the event in themselves, but 2020 has undoubtedly seen a shift in how music is consumed.

Attentions spans are different and while everyone needs something to look forward, the future always seems to be a distant horizon: in this context, a monthly delivery and a more frequent level of engagement feels ‘right’ somehow, fostering a much-needed sense of community and sustained contact.

With Wood and co inviting comparisons from across a broad range of touchstones spanning The Gaslight Anthem and Arctic Monkeys to Elvis Costello & The Attractions and The Associates, ‘Soho’ is a quintessential indie tune with jangling guitars pinned to a tight rhythm section. It’s not just a Smiths meets Wedding Present throwback stylistically, but a song that captures the essence of classic indie rock tunes of yesteryear, merging boy-meets-girl with kitchen sink drama while throwing in appreciative references to Marianne Faithful. It does very much call to mind the time when Morrissey was someone who wrote relatable songs, before he became quite explicitly an embarrassing racist bellend who rendered is entire back-catalogue unlistenable. More than we hate it when our friends become successful, we hate it when our heroes reveal themselves to be vile, obnoxious pricks.

Ben shows no such indications, thankfully, and ‘Soho’ is an accessible, melodic slice of clean indie pop. It’s accompanied by a video that sees Ben wandering the streets of London, and seeing them bereft of people is strange, unreal almost. There is traffic, busses and bicycles, but benches are empty and the Eye is static.

This, of course, is the world in which we find ourselves, and in counterpointing a song which very much centres around the ordinary, the everyday, with the extraordinary times of the now, Ben Wood presents a striking statement that’s very much a summary of 2020.

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Ben Wood _ The Bad Ideas - Soho Cover

Withering of Light – Reliquary

Posted: 3 January 2021 in Albums
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26th December 2020 – Lake Label

Christopher Nosnibor

There was a time when the phrase ‘concept album’ was something of a joke, a term indicative of some self-absorbed, self-important muso cack, all too often of a prog rock persuasion, with connotations of the pompous and grandiose, not to mention the overlong and immensely indulgent. Times have changed, things have moved on, and it’s no longer deemed pretentious to talk about art, at least in many circles, when it comes to the making of music. Outside the mainstream, at least, the movement against intellectualism and the war against intelligence has slowed.

It stands to reason that there would be a concept behind a sprawling forty-three-minute exploration of moody murkiness that is the latest (burnt) offering from Todd Janeczek via his dark ambient vehicle, the evocatively-named Withering of Light. As Janeczek explains, “The concept behind this album became how each of the words that are the titles took me out of the mundane everyday and put my mind in somewhat of a different state… For instance, ‘Reliquary’ is a vessel that contains a sacred or holy relic of some kind. We as humans fetishize objects, moments, memories. Even your mind can become a reliquary harboring the sacred, profane and otherwise. Each of these words I found carried some kind of weight, a spectral resonance (hence that title) and the sounds here are the aural embodiment of these.”

The dark ambient medium has always operated within the realm of the evocative, and while the pieces are born out of the artist’s internal thought processes and reflections, most of how one responds to such works is dictated by one’s own mindset, headstate, and experience. The question is therefore less ‘what is this album saying?’ than ‘what does this album say to me?’

I’ve been stuck at home for a long time with only my immediate family – wife, nine-year-old child, demented housecat – and a lot of music for company. As such, I’m not particularly attenuated to the nuances of the meaning of the song titles, and am more situated to feel the physicality of the rumbles and tensions of the dark undercurrents that course through the six compositions what comprise Reliquary. For the most part, it ushers a sense of discomfort and a sepulchral gloom that corresponds with my innate desire to hibernate. The atmosphere is dark and heavy and it hangs, lingering in the thick air. And yet… what does it say? Your back bows, and you want to move away. You want peace. But just as this has no words, you have no words.

‘Hive’ sees the arrival of percussion in the form of slow crashing cymbals and as such stands out from the thick sonic fog of the rest of the album. Apart from this, nothing happens, there is no punctuation and no other shift that adds to the appeal or otherwise draws the listener in.

‘Reliquary’ offers little more than dank darkness and dripping, a condensation of gloom that clings to every surface in the mind. It offers little enticement beyond the opportunity to sit in darkness and stare at the wall. And sometimes, that’s the soundtrack we need and the wall is ok with me.

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Ghost Road Fest – bands and tickets!

Posted: 1 January 2021 in Previews and Editorial
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Having talked with Lori Forster just a few weeks ago about her plans for a new, curated festival straddling London and Leeds in 2021, things have moved on apace at Ghost Road Fest HQ, with the announcement of the first four acts and the release of a batch of super-discounted, super-early bird tickets… and here’s where things start to get exciting.

Announced so far:

The Virginmarys (London only)

SHEAFS (Leeds only)

Weekend Recovery (London and Leeds)

SNAYX (London and Leeds)

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The Virginmarys are clearly major draw for the London show, being a well-established and respected live act with a solid and swelling fanbase, and running parallel, SHEAFS are very much a band on the up, having been booked to support The Slow Readers Club on their next tour when it finally happens. This is a big deal, and the chances are that with exposure like that, SHEAFS will be laying considerably larger venues before long. This makes the opportunity to see them likely to be pretty special.

But the measure of any festival is the depth of the lineup, and the early signs are that Ghost Road Fest is packing the lineup with quality all the way, with SNAYX playing both London and Leeds. The crunchy bass / guitar alt-rock duo sold out their last show before lockdown in March and again, after a string of high-profile support slots have shown they’ve got game.

Weekend Recovery have been AA regulars for an age, and they just kick ass harder the further on they go. Stripped back to an ultra-dynamic power trio with the immensely talented Loz Campbell now on bass, and a new album out early next year, they threaten to be explosive while playing both the London and Leeds shows.

With November a safe enough distance away, this looks like being a belter already.

Tickets and updates are available here.

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Procter / Poulsen – Parallel Perspectives

Posted: 1 January 2021 in Albums
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Ojud Records – 1st January 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

It may only be January 1st, but 2021 already feels very much – as expected – like a continuation of 2020. As a friend pointed out to me only this morning, in summarising the fact that the pandemic position remained unchanged and now we had the added shit bonus of having fully left the EU, ‘shit never sleeps’. Seeing so many post on social media about being glad to see the back of 2020 was somewhat depressing: I get the sentiment, and very much am on board with the significance and psychology of book-ending a period of time with the striking of midnight marking the start of a new calendar, but really, what changes? This year or ever?

One positive of this continuity is that Dave Procter is kicking off the new year where he left off the old one, namely by making and releasing more noise, and its timing is noteworthy, as a common theme within Procter’s work is some form of commemoration or ritual, with events like midsummer drone walks

This time, it’s with an alliteratively-titled work with occasional collaborator Claus Poulsen, with whom he plays one concert and makes one release every year. Parallel Perspectives is very much from the dronier end of his working spectrum, and follows Solaris (2019) and Minimum / Maximum (2018) in a continuum stretching back to 2015 and the release of his first work with Poulsen, PP. The release of Parallel Perspectives being a day late for 2020, despite having been recorded almost a year ago on 20th January 2020 also seems somehow, if accidentally appropriate, and something that won’t be lost on the artists, not least of all with Procter having relocated to Sweden ahead of the finalisation of Brexit. And works like Parallel Perspectives illustrate why: when creativity is so reliant on collaboration, free movement is essential, and this is a perfect advertisement for everything the un-UK has just thrown away in the name of ‘sovereignty’.

Not that there is anything remotely political about the album itself: this is purely a coming together of musical minds, and a celebration of their commonalities and differences – and it’s that mutual understanding, paired with an awareness of the power of contrast that make this.

As the liner notes detail, Parallel Perspectives was recorded in Copenhagen. The single track on the album is an extension of Procter’s Fibonacci Drone Organ minimalistic project, but with Poulsen adding overdubs. With his different perspective, he quickly forgets the minimalistic nature of the piece and details it with waves of half speed vinyl and samples.

An elongated organ drone hums, hovering and wavering gently in semi-stasis. Ruptures and incidentals abound, from seemingly random discordant cascades of sound and piano interjections to slow-whispering thermal winds and desolately chill nuclear gusts, and I’s remarkable just how much those details prove to dramatically colour the mood. Perhaps it’s the – for a better term – blankness of the flat organ drone that is as much key here, in that as of and in itself, it has no particular ‘mood’; it’s a neutral sound, imbued with precisely nothing. It’s only when rubbing against or along with another sound that it slides upwards or downwards, into light or darkness. There is no shortage of either over the course of the album’s fifty-three minutes, but there are many protracted passages which explore the realms of the ominous and eerie, the uncomfortable and the suspenseful, as fear chords creep like drifting mist in a dark city alley.

At times, it chimes, and at others, it grates. Sometimes it rings, and at others it drifts. At times, it swells, at others it tapers to nearly nothing. Its pace is barely perceptible, a continuously creeping shift, not so much a slow-burn as a smoulder of smoke tricking from a peat burner, and the layers added by Poulson only serve to protract the transitions, grinding a slow-motion audio that has a cognitive effect as you feel yourself slowing in line with its interminable aural crawl. And for all the moments that sounds like there is a heavy craft looming on the horizon, for all the protracted ponderous spells, there are moments that sound very like the soundtrack to breaking dawn, the soundtrack to redemption on the horizon.

Parallel Perspectives is subtle, but the devil is very much in the detail here.

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