Posts Tagged ‘eponymous’

The Yets – The Yets

Posted: 18 December 2022 in Singles and EPs
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12th December 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

The eponymous debut EP by South Carolina indie pop-rock duo The Yets is steeped in the tropes of quintessential vintage alternative pop, absorbing a range of influences, while keeping a clear eye on classic and ultimately accessible forms – embracing Fleetwood Mac and Cocteau Twins in equal measure, as the press release suggests with remarkable accuracy.

Robin Wilson has a superb voice, delicate, emotive, easy on the ear, and at the same time rich and gutsy. It’s key to the sound of The Yets, and the six songs on this debut EP really showcase both her versatility and that of their songwriting.

There’s a weird booming sound – not quite a beat, not quite a bass note – that cuts through the mellow drift of ‘Waterline’, and it’s one of those things that once you’re attuned to it, you can’t detune, like the duck in Whigfield’s ‘Saturday Night’ or the cowbell on ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’, but if you can ignore it, it’s a superbly-executed song with a clean guitar chug that keep it moving along nicely while the lead guitar chimes and washes melodically.

‘Remember’ is perfection, a layered, easy alt-rock tune that’s Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Dreams’ and it floats along in a dreamy drift that closes out with a delicate guitar solo.

They strip things right back for ‘Lesser Evil’, which swings between brooding indie and moody post-punk with hints of Siouxsie, before spinning into ethereal shoegaze territory on the dreamy ‘Letter to a Boy’, which really does find the band revelling in the misty ethereal shadows of Cocteau Twins.

‘Fades to Grey’ makes an obvious reference to Visage, and the band’s 80s leanings are on clear display, but that’s where the connection severs: this is a smooth, atmospheric rippling piece with chiming, echo-heavy guitar that owes much to Disintegration-era Cure, and ‘Happy Now’ builds on that thickly atmospheric sound with a loping rhythm and layers of vocals that really fill out the sound as the guitars and it’s the most overtly goth song of the set.

With a broad pallet of tuneful wistfulness and textured, layered instrumentation, coupled with some smart and sensitive production, The Yets have landed with a seriously accomplished debut: there’s a lot happening here, and there’s a significant range but at the same time a cohesive feel to it.

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The Yets 4 - photo by Gordon Backman

Photo: Gordon Backman

Sever The Servants – Sever The Servants

Posted: 25 July 2022 in Albums
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20th July 2022 – Produkt 42

Christopher Nosnibor

Sever The Servants – a nice play on words – have dished up an eponymous debut that’s as dark as darkwave gets, with subsonic bass, thudding beats and hushed, deadened vocals. As much as anything, I’m reminded of Test Department’s The Unacceptable Face of Freedom, only much more muted, and less abrasive, antagonistic, and slowed to a crawl.

Sever The Servants are no less political, skewering slabs off both ‘political and social commentary. From the ‘right wing hivemind’ theme of the title track to the things that slowly kill us day to day’, STS are seething… but with a taut musical restraint. It’s stripped back, minimal. No samples, no loops, just an undulating larval creep.

Instead of going all-out raging, industrial-style either by means of guitars (e.g. Ministry) or snarling synths (e.g. Nine Inch Nails), Sever The Servants create a dense, suffocating soundtrack that recreates the pressure of oppression with a sonic density and uncomfortable weight. Listening to this album is like having a heavy cloak pulled over your head. Everything is muffled, and you can’t think straight. You panic. The drum beats are like kicks to the chest. It’s hard to breathe. And they never let up. You feel the atmosphere thicken.

I was sold on the pitch that ‘The album’s themes are generally apocalyptical with some each of the album’s six tracks represent the freedom to explore with a complete lack of care towards staying in a “box”.’ Having spent the last couple of years effectively living in a box, I’ve grown accustomed to a certain sense of claustrophobia, but Sever the Servants manage to intensify this with the six tracks on the menu here. As for the apocalyptic… the world is quite literally burning now. And yet right-wing boomers are decrying those who dare to mention climate crisis as ‘woke’. We are fucked beyond fucked. The end of the world is truly nigh, and I’m out of words to describe just how fucked we are. But Sever The Servants at least manage to create a soundtrack that goes some way to articulating it – for as long as we have power, before the blackouts commence.

The vocals wheeze uncomfortably amidst tense soundscapes that roll and lurch, and the weight doesn’t come from volume or abrasive, but a menacing dark force.

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twAt klAxon – twAt klAxon

Posted: 12 November 2021 in Albums
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Dret Skivor – 1st October 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Dret Skivor continue to provide an outlet for the weird and wonderful, not to mention the obscure and droney with the eponymous release from the enigmatic but somewhat amusingly-monikered twAt klaxon. All we know of twAt klAxon is that they’re a Finnish sound artist – but then, so we really need more (beyond the advice to ‘Play through decent speakers/headphones for best results’)? Sometimes, it’s preferable to engage simply with the music than to become side-tracked by biography and theory.

Being a Dret release, twAt klAxon is an album of two halves, created very much with the cassette format in mind (with just four copies of the limited C45 physical edition produced), and each side contains a single longform track. The first of these, the inspirationally-titled ‘twAt’ manifests as a single, thrumming, humming drone. It hovers predominantly in the midrange, and not a lot happens for a long time. Fleetingly, it stammers and stalls, before pulsing back with a stronger, more overtly rhythmic phase. While the variations are minimal, the sonic ripples yield some good vibrations – not just metaphonically, but literally, sending waved through my elbows and forearms as they west on the surface of my desk as I listen. And listen I do. Sometimes, to focus intently on a single sound can be a quite remarkable experience, one that’s both relaxing and liberating. The sound thickens and sticks, and slowly it creeps over you. It’s a frequency that doesn’t drill into your skull, but instead wraps your head tightly and squeezes, a smothering compression of emptiness.

As a child, I had a recurring dream in which pencil-drawn planes crashed and scrumpled in succession. This dream was soundtracked by a deafening silence. This is not that sound, but it reminds me of it, and in doing do, recalls the anguish caused by that dream, and it’s not pleasant. Even without that association, the tension of that single note that hovers from around the fourteen minute mark and on and on and on for all eternity is challenging. The reason I admire this as a work of sonic art because of the level of patience that must have been required to produce it – unless, of course, they left the room and made a cuppa while the sound continued, in which case I would feel somewhat cheated, and making them a twAt of the highest order.

‘klAxon’ is more drone: there are more vibrations, the sound is thicker, denser, buzzier, and there are intimations of beats of at least regular pulsations that thump rhythmically low in the mix. This slides into some heavy phase and throbs endlessly hard. It’s primitive, with undertones of early Whitehouse, mining that analogue seam minus the pink and white noise. twenty-one minutes of that undulating, slow-shifting bubbling almost inevitably has an effect, and it’s deeply disorientating. Perhaps less klAxon and simply more twAt.

Quippage aside, this album is certainly no accident: it is designed to register physically, while torturing psychologically. And no, torture is not too extreme a word: that isn’t to say that twAt klAxon is intended to inflict any kind of trauma, but it does employ the methods of torture within an artistic context to create a work that’s perverse and purposefully challenging – and it succeeds.

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Paroxysm – Paroxysm

Posted: 5 October 2021 in Albums
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A Front Recordings – AFR01

Christopher Noosnibor

A paroxysm is either a fit, attack, or sudden increase or recurrence of symptoms, or a sudden violent emotion or action, an outburst.

This paroxysm – the act – consists of Werner Dafeldecker (double bass) and Roy Carroll (electracoustic media), and between them, they forge a paroxysm – the work – which is a sustained sonic spasm consisting of two longform compositions that each extend to around the twenty-five minute mark.

This is one of those works that doesn’t really feel or sound like the sum of its parts – partly because it’s difficult to disentangle precisely what the parts actually are. Especially when it comes to ‘electracoustic media’. That’s not a criticism, so much as a passing critique: this isa collection of soundscapes forged from sounds of non-specific origin. Ominous hums and drones and scrapes and hesitant feedback loops all toss and turn together to conjure an ever-shifting expanse of amorphous, mellifluous sound. Clunks and thunks and clatters provide a percussive element of sorts, but again, these sounds are non-specific in their origins. As notes hang, quivering, or otherwise scrawl and hover around certain frequencies, the way they resonate and rub against one another becomes the listening focus. Listen closely, and some notes just nip the side of consciousness, and they’re bearable until there’s a friction against other frequencies, other rates of resonance. Upper-frequency chimes and tinkles collide with lower-end clanks and thuds, the swing of heavy bells decay slowly over shivering, shuddering extranea. It’s a slow creep, and while the sound never settles, over time one grows accustomed to the whistling, the how, and the hum.

If side two’s ‘Basalt’ contains all of the same elements as ‘Tendencies’, that’s because Paroxysm is a work that’s very much focused on detail, and progressively delves deeper into it with cumulative effect. As such, ‘Basalt’ is starker, sparser, sonically harder in every sense – but particularly tonally, and as an experience. Around the mid-point things get really dark and murky, before the percussion dominates the final minutes of slashing, crashing, difficult sounds.

And this – THIS – is the point of paroxysm. For most of the album, it feels drony hummy scrapy, but it emerges climactic, dense, a physical force that is longer merely background. It comes by stealth but hits by force. Boom. Never underestimate the subtle, slow build.

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DarkSonicTales – DarkSonicTales

Posted: 5 August 2021 in Albums
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Hallow Ground – HG2104 – 13th August 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

There are few things in life you can really rely on, but Hallow Ground is one of them, if you’re seeking music from the darker side. The clue’s pretty much in the name here: this is pretty dark. Of course it is. It’s also quite an interesting and unusual blend of styles and sounds, for while this forty-minute, seven-track work is predominantly instrumental and ambient in its leanings, it pushes wider and deeper than that, to span a range of territories, with often quite unsettling results.

DarkSonicTales is a project by Rolf Gisler, who was granted an artist residency in a 300-year-old farmhouse in the Swiss countryside in autumn 2019, by the label. How this sort of thing comes about, I’m not really sure, but there it is. I am a shade covetous of artists who get dedicated time and space to work on their art in whatever medium, because the simple fact is that in ordinary life there never seems to be enough time. For anything. And creativity requires headspace and time, both of which are rare and precious commodities.

Rolf seems to have made the most of his time, and the result is an album that’s varied in terms of form and tonality, which makes for a fascinating listening experience. From the mellow chiming of the short intro piece, ‘Info Pandemie’, to the eight-minute drone-swirl of ‘Best Buddies’ that drags the album to a slow-simmering conclusion in a bilious fog of sonic drift, DarkSonicTales is a deeply exploratory piece.

‘I Still Believe’ is a long, slow-burning, low-key, low-tempo gothy tune, where Gisler whispers in a baritone croon over a delicately picked guitar that’s hauntingly atmospheric and pinned down by a distant but insistent drum machine, its cracking snare cutting through the sonic haze.

‘Best Buddies’ brings the finale, and there’s a stuttering heartbeat drum flickering like a palpitation against the slow, majestic musical backdrop.

In some respects, it’s a challenge, simply because however much the album leans towards electronics, the way the instrumentation is used is so widely varied this feels like an album that’s harder to accommodate far more than it actually is. Somehow, the pieces of the jigsaw fit together.

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White People Killed Them – White People Killed Them

Posted: 2 August 2021 in Albums
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SIGE Records – SIGE100 – 25th June 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Woah! Dizzying, head-spinning chaos and cacophony! Twangs and bangs – strings stretched to within a millimetre of snapping, bending and scraping and scratching. Every instrument is playing across the others at an angle. About ten minutes into side one, you realise the discoordinated racket, having had some flickers of brass bubble through – like tentative flames licking around an oversized log on a fire that’s yet to fully establish itself -has congealed into a dense, soupy drone with industrial strength hip-hop beats played by a live drummer. And it just doesn’t stop. For twenty minutes straight. It gargles and parps and booms and toots and parps and growls and farts on and on and on, while the drums clatter and crash and thwack and thwock and bump and fuck me it’s an almighty headache-inducing din.

Details about this release are fairly limited, but details tend to be lost to history anyway. And most of history suggests that White People Killed Them is a common recurring theme throughout. There are so many of ‘them’, anonymous, often buried in unmarked graves in the name of progress – white progress. History is a narrative of shameful exploitation and bloodshed.

Whether or not the three musicians, Raven Chacon, John Dieterich, and Marshall Trammel, intended any such connotations when they came together in New Mexico in 2019, I have no idea, but the forty minutes of music recorded and relayed on this eponymous release would certainly make for a fitting soundtrack to the sheer brutality of history as a catalogue of killing. It’s so relentless, it makes you want to stand up and shout ‘stop! Enough is enough!’ But of course, as history shows us, it never stops. And nor, seemingly, does this album. It’s not a particularly pleasurable experience. It is an intense experience, and one that instils a kind of anxious excitement, even exhilaration. But pleasure… not really.

Things take a turn for the strange on side two, where from some warped, stretched-tape nastiness, there’s some twangy, spaghetti western weirdness that emerges briefly, before everything gets fucked up and mangled again. And it just builds and then sustains this massive wall of thick, discomfiting sound. The end leaves you absolutely drained, desiccated, mentally and physically decimated. If it was possible to achieve death by avant-jazz, White People Killed Them have slain us all with this monster.

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Teethers – Teethers

Posted: 17 February 2021 in Singles and EPs
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26th February 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

LA instrumentalists Teethers, centred around drummer and composer Andrew Lessman, brings together an unusual fusion for their debut release. With contributions straddling jazz, avant garde, and indie pop, for Teethers, Lessman has brought together an eclectic lineup, consisting of Graham Chapman on bass, guitarist Alexander Noise, Joe Sanata Maria and Ted Faforo on saxophones and Stefan Kac on tuba. The results are, as you might expect, unusual.

There’s a smooth, jazzy, swingy pop vibe that permeates the EP#s three tracks, and as ‘Goose Chasing’ indicates, they can locks down a tidy groove and create music you can bop to, nod along to, even dance to… and then they’re more than capable of – and willing to – drive that train straight off a cliff into a wild frenzy of horn-driven discord and madness. This is bit a brief introduction that sets the scene for what Teethers are really all about: the twelve-minute ‘Monopoly on Violence / Mushroom dance’ is a multi-faceted, shifting exploration of rippling shades and expansive soundscapes.

It’s rambling, at times immensely proggy in a vintage sense, and at times it just can’t seem to make up its mind as it ambles and weaves hither and thither, a mellow jazz meandering that hits some frenzies peaks and altogether more sedate intersections. It’s one of those pieces that transitions enticing and irritating in a mere blink – and that’s not even a criticism. Condensing so many elements into its space, it’s difficult to keep up.

The third track, ‘Love Poem’ is seven-and-a-half minutes of dappled sunlight painted in music, with a clean, picked guitar chiming in a simple, hypnotic sequence that’s a post-rock / contemporary prog crossover laced with soft, delicate strings. It’s perhaps the most focused and conventionally coherent of the three compositions, on what is a fairly wide-ranging set – so wide-ranging that it’s not easy to immediately assimilate, and even more difficult to pin down – not just stylistically, but in the most basic terms of formulating an opinion. Is it any good? Do I like it? Does it matter? There’s certainly no doubting the technical proficiency on display here, and having the confidence and audacity to make music that straddles so many boundaries and genuinely challenges the listener is an achievement worthy of recognition.

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Short-Haired Domestic – Short-Haired Domestic

Posted: 4 October 2020 in Albums
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2nd October 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Having been brought into Talk Talk to assist with remixing on ‘It’s My Life’ in 1984, Tim Friese-Greene became an integral contributor to the band on their subsequent albums. Short Haired Domestic sees Tim come together with his wife, Lee, formerly of 90s act Sidi Bou Said and currently lead vocalist and guitar player for Pavlova.

As the liner notes explain, the vocals for each song are sung in a different language, and ‘have at their heart a breakbeat loop, sampled fragments, scratching, insistent funk and Latin rhythms, surprising appearances of acoustic guitar and just about every sound it’s possible to wring from a WASP synthesiser’.

This manifests as a collection of songs with a quirky charm to their style, which has something of a mainland European, vaguely gallic feel to it, and their touchstones of Stereolab and Francois Hardy, among others, sit comfortably. It’s so not my regular bag, but sometimes I need something to chill to, and a complete change of scene by way of a pallete-cleanser.

The titles are helpful in their explanatory nature but disclose little about the stance on the subjects being sung about – but that probably speaks more of a global Anglocentrism when it comes to song lyrics than anything – and also highlights that you don’t necessarily need words to appreciate a song.

It’s a laid-back sashaying groove and swinging beat that sets the scene with ‘A song in Latin about the importance of comfortable shoes’, and without a lyric sheet and translation, it’s hard to be certain, but it sounds like they rather like them. And who wouldn’t? Who says you can’t have style and comfort?

They hit an insistent funk groove of ‘A song in Spanish addressed to men who drive big cars’, and work it hard, while ‘A Song in Bulgrian for Lovers of Gin; is positively loungey in its laid-back jazziness, a head-nodding groove as smooth as the silkiest chocolate. Things get a bit Prince on ‘A song in Italian saluting his mother’, and there’s even a dash of piano reminiscent of Talk Talk on the slower, sparser head-nodding A song in Hindi for insomniacs’.

For their sugared pop coating of sunny melodies, these simple-sounding and accessible tunes are layered and steeped in experimentalism, and they pull it off with a deceptive ease.

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Short-Haired Domestic (album cover)

break_fold – break_fold

Posted: 29 September 2020 in Albums
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23rd October 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been a while since we’ve heard from break_fold, the electro-semiambient project of former i concur front man Tim Hann. But life has a habit of getting on the way of creative endeavours, so it’s not entirely surprising. This is the third eponymous break_fold release, and it marks a clear continuation from its precedents, including the song titling, with the majority of tracks denoted as a date which this indicates when work started on the song. The two exceptions are ‘Gaps_in_the_Mesh_(Remix)’, a reworking of a track by ambient artist and collaborator, Ten, and ‘JP’, which is dedicated to a friend of Tim’s who unfortunately passed away in 2019.

That the first two tracks date back to 2018 give an indication of the length and laboriousness of the assembly of this third excursion. The previous release, 27_05_17 – 21_01_18 was a comparatively speedy work.

The first piece, ‘22_12_18_Pt1’ is soft, supple, floating mellifluous ambience that evolves from an elongated, ominous drone, into a cascading piano motif, while its counterpart brings the beats – soft, yet strong, clear, and propellent, it’s a cinematic electro groover, which radiates an uplifting vibe.

From this point, the album begins to develop a definite sense of having a forward trajectory. A dark, serrated hum blossoms into a multi-hued shimmer of radiance, pushed along by a solid danceable rhythm on ‘15_11_18’. There are some quite noodly synth details behind the broader sweeps. There are hints of Jan Hammer about some of this, and there are moments that stray into drivetime dance that’s kinda smooth, kinda accessible: the buoyant basslines are easy on the ear and there’s an undeniable bounce in the background. It feels rather escapist, and it’s rather nice: we all need somewhere to escape to at times, especially now, so immersion is good. And breathe…

‘29_04_18’ feels fully formed as ripple waves of gentle sound pulse across a flickering, understated dance beat – more one to nod along to than to get down t, but nevertheless, it’s unexpectedly uptempo, and while it does still evoke chin-stroking ponderousness, it equally creates a rich atmosphere in which to wander and ponder.

There is a lot off space to be explored on break_fold, a lot of texture and tone, and while it may largely favour the light and melodic and easy on the ear, it’s got range and ventures into shadowier realms in places. There are parts that evoke 80s film soundtracks, and others still more chillwave in their orientation.

The album ends with ‘JP’, and one can’t help but feel the abrupt ending is significant, a work truncated, unfinished and unresolved. But for all that, it feels like the work for this album is done, as though this particular creative cycle is complete. Where to go from here remains to be seen, but in the now this resonates majestically.

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This Valley of Old Mountains – This Valley of Old Mountains

Posted: 31 July 2020 in Albums
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24th July 2020

This Valley Of Old Mountains is a collaboration between Taylor Deupree and Federico Durand, which the press release informs us, ‘quietly creates the folklore of an imaginary land. From a hemisphere apart, share simple sounds with complex stories. Their music balances an edge between translucency and exploration, focusing on obscurity, repetition and a shared

fascination of the mountains between them’.

The album’s thirteen tracks are sparse and lilting, and oftentimes intimate a certain oriental influence as the notes – picked and struck – ring out into a confined-sounding space. For the remainder, they simply hover and hum, an easy, effortless wash of sound. You don’t you just sit as the glitches play out, twisting your psyche fleetingly, and wonder where it’s actually going as you venture into your own head.

Not a lot happens here, but then again, this isn’t about events, and more about atmosphere. Listening to This Valley of Old Mountains, there are moments where I can’t tell if I’m listening to the album or just the throb of the extractor fan in the bathroom next to my office. In a way, it doesn’t really matter either way.

‘Honii’ brings trilling twitters of birdsong to join the slow, echoing chimes of dulcimer and similar, while ‘Wintir’ is minimal, atmospheric, and exemplary of sparsely-arranged warps and wefts. ‘Polei’ is a slow, soporific tinkling piece, and fits with most of This Valley of Old Mountains’ mellow mellifluousness.

This Valley of Old Mountains is background, is barely-present, is vague in structure. It’s a perfectly ambient work of ambience, and works perfectly.

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