Monthly Archive for August, 2008

Steve Hauschildt — Rapt for Liquid Minister c20 (Arbor, 2008)

Published
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sean
on August 27, 2008
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No Fun Fest — New York City’s annual, earth-scorching, three day noise music event — is the sort of hedonistic celebration of niche-noise that could only flourish in an handful of cities across the world.  It’s here that Emeralds made their first major east-coast live appearance in support of Solar Bridge, the group’s proper release debut; the Cleveland trio of Steve Hauschildt, Mark McGuire, and John Elliot performed on stage alongside the luminaries of noise, kraut, electronic and drone, including canonized genre pioneers like Cluster, Thurston Moore, and Tony Conrad, and celebrated contemporaries like Keith Fullerton Whitman.  After two years toiling in relative obscurity, with dozens of limited run releases on microlabels over the past two years, Emeralds have now released one of the year’s best drone albums, and performed admirably alongside the genre’s giants in New York.  With Rapt for Liquid Minister (Arbor, 2008), an album of sparse dronescapes and heady moog jubilation, Steve Hauschildt proves perfectly capable of enhancing an already sterling reputation as part of Emeralds with stunning music of his own.

Krautrock and analog-synth adulation abound here; ‘Cybernetic Inevitable‘, the album’s ten minute climactic closer, bears an uncanny resemblance to Popol Vuh’s unforgettable 1975 album Aguirre (specifically, Aguirre II), opening with an ethereal chorus of vocal drones.  Aside from Rapt’s additional layer of familiar tape fuzz, the Popol Vuh and Hauschildt tracks, recorded generations apart, mirror each other wonderfully, and together echo No Fun Fest’s testament to krautrock’s enduring vibrancy.  Just as S.H. seems to be settling into a familiar foggy drone piece five minutes into ‘Cybernetic’, the track departs abruptly from Aguirre and the vocal chorus with a blinding, colorful orchestra of analog-synths.  Too brief Cluster or Göttschingand scale analog-synth jaunts, like those found at the tail end of ‘Cybernetic’ and enveloping the album opener ‘Indoor Travel’, prove to be Rapt’s most alluring feature.  Rapt for Liquid Minister is balanced nicely with an equal serving of abundant open, droning soundscapes, best represented by the album’s modest title track.

Aside from its unfortunate brevity, the album is a complete pleasure.  With only twenty minutes total running time, the album does feels somewhat stunted.  Considering Rapt isn’t presented as a full, proper album, however, these complaints are easy enough to dismiss.  The album’s brevity does, on the other hand, make for easy and enjoyable listening in short sittings, a rare quality in drone music.

Rapt for Liquid Minister is long OOP at Arbor, but there may still be copies in stock at Fusetron Sound and Mimaroglu Sound for the next few weeks.  Expect remaining copies to disappear quickly; aside from an earlier release on Emeralds’ house label Gneiss Things, Rapt is Hauschildt’s only proper solo-release.  Fortunately, three new releases, two cassettes and an LP, are on the way, so Steven Hauschildt — performing independently, and as part of Emeralds — should be increasingly visible in the coming months.  With any luck, Rapt for Liquid Minister will receive the attention and wider release it deserves.  Kranky would fit nicely.

cybernetic_inevitable.mp3

Emeralds @ No Fun Festival, 2008

Cluster @ No Fun Festival, 2008

picture: No Fun Fest 2008-42 by flickr user donatellodoesmachines (please don’t sue me)

strangelet

Published
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sean
on August 22, 2008
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This likewise I humbly pray, that things human may not interfere with things divine, and that from the opening of the ways of sense and the increase of natural light there may arise in our minds no incredulity or darkness with regard to the divine mysteries; but rather that the understanding being thereby purified and purged of fancies and vanity, and yet not the less subject and entirely submissive to the divine oracles, may give to faith that which is faith’s. Lastly, that knowledge being now discharged of that venom which the serpent infused into it, and which makes the mind of man to swell, we may not be wise above measure and sobriety, but cultivate truth in charity. — Instauratio Magna, Francis Bacon

feat. John Carpenter/Alan Howart, Robert Wyatt, Excepter, Kemialliset Ystävät,  La Octracina, Deathprod, Ulaan Khol, The Velvet Underground, Sir Victor Uwaifo, and Mike Taylor

tracklist

image: View of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment Tracker Outer Barrel (TOB) in the cleaning room. The CMS is one of two general-purpose LHC experiments designed to explore the physics of the Terascale, the energy region where physicists believe they will find answers to the central questions at the heart of 21st-century particle physics. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN) — Large Hadron Collider nearly ready

 
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Muxtape kicked to the curb

Published
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sean
on August 21, 2008
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Wired reports today that muxtape — the slick, music and mixtape networking webapp — has become the latest victim of the Recording Industry’s tireless quest to kill all the internet’s happy places.  Despite a sunny statement from the muxtape crew, “Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA,” this development does not bode well for the site.

Meanwhile, Pandora — another of the internet’s broadcast pioneers — have recently indicated that last summer’s egregious Copyright Royalty Board internet broadcast rate hikes are finally catching up with the company, slowly strangling the life from their successful business model.

Pandora is one of the nation’s most popular Web radio services, with about 1 million listeners daily. Its Music Genome Project allows customers to create stations tailored to their own tastes. It is one of the 10 most popular applications for Apple’s iPhone and attracts 40,000 new customers a day.

Yet the burgeoning company may be on the verge of collapse, according to its founder, and so may be others like it.

“We’re approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision,” said Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora. “This is like a last stand for webcasting.”

Last year, an obscure federal panel [Copyright Royalty Board] ordered a doubling of the per-song performance royalty that Web radio stations pay to performers and record companies.

Traditional radio, by contrast, pays no such fee. Satellite radio pays a fee but at a less onerous rate, at least by some measures. — Giant of Internet Radio Nears Its ‘Last Stand’ By Peter Whoriskey

As for Pandora, its royalty fees this year will amount to 70 percent of its projected revenue of $25 million, Westergren said, a level that could doom it and other Web radio outfits.

Techcrunch naively suggests (”Pandora, Our Sacrificial Lamb“) that Pandora’s demise will rouse the music industry giant’s from their slumber, compelling the industry to recognize the potential of open content communities like YouTube, muxtape and Pandora at long last.  Fat chance Mr. Arrington.  Content industries want nothing less than absolute control over their creative properties.  The very existence the DMCA — a law that turns customers into criminals if they dare circumvent DRM for the sake of convenience/usability — demonstrates the content industry’s unwillingness to play fair.  The growth of internet broadcasting, while providing new choices for consumers, leaves the labels with little control over content delivery and presentation, upsetting a business cycle that maintains profitability and ensures predictable outcomes in an unpredictable market, but depends on payola, brain-dead product placement, and incestuous partnerships with content patsies like Clear Channel, the Disney Channel or MTV.  Internet broadcast introduced an element of unpreditability, and had to be killed.

Lawrence Lessig — Stanford law professor, founder of Creative Commons, and indispensable advocate of digital rights — puts the CRB internet broadcast rate hike and Pandora’s demise into a broader context with his final presentation on creative rights (embedded below); in his final speech, and tirelessly on his blog, Lessig highlights the corrosive relationship between Congress and the content industry, and their collaborative, slow-motion erosion of “free culture.”  With payola, drm/DVD John, the Sonny Bono Act, Napster, the riaa’s frightening litigation strategy, and Pandora in mind, it’s hard to imagine the music industry ever willingly cedeing power, as Arrington suggests.

Bowerbirds — “In Our Talons”

Published
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sean
on August 13, 2008
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In support of Bowerbirds recently released debut album (technically a re-release) Hymns for a Dark Horse on Dead Ocean — home, also, to Will-Oldham-analogue Phosphorescent and indie-dissonance-rockers Dirty Projectors — the label releases a stunning stop-motion music video for ‘In Our Talons’.  Since touring with John Darnielle’s Mountain Goats last year, the North Carolina trio have been attracting a great deal of attention from pop-folk observants.  If this video is any indication, the album must be pretty splendid.

Directed by Alan Poon and inspired by films like Microcosmos [clip] and The Planet Earth series, the video takes the visual spectacle of a nature documentary and puts it into a stop-motion animated world. The video explores three magical creatures from three different lands, equally beautiful, yet doomed by the hand of man.

Not only is the result stunning, but the process is equally impressive. The stop-motion puppets were custom made for this video. The bird alone took over a month for the puppet fabricators to build with over 300 feathers manually sized and glued on. For the animals to come to life, the puppet is put into position, a picture is taken, then the puppet is moved slightly and another picture is taken. This is done 24 times for one second of animation, shooting approximately five seconds per day. Most of the miniature sets were made out of foam and clay and then painted, while the clouds were made from cotton. Watch the stunning results on Subterranean’s blog below, or wait for Saturday, August 9th and see it in the comforts of your own home on MTV2. — 08/06/08 Bowerbirds video premiere on MTV’s Subterranean

Under the account SecretlyJag, the Dead Oceans, Jagjaguwar and Secretly Canadian labels have cozied up on youtube, publishing videos together under the single collaborative account.  The channel has a veritable goldmine of content already available.  Black Mountain’s “Wucan“, another recent SecretlyJag upload, is yet just one more pleasant example of the great content emerging from the label conglomerate.

also: BBC’s Attenborough on the ‘Bower Bird‘

Paavoharju — ‘Tyttö tanssii’

Published
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sean
on August 12, 2008
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Paavoharju’s ‘Tyttö tanssii’, yet another highlight of the year from Finland.

Max Richter’s ‘24 Postcards’ promo

Published
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sean
on August 4, 2008
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24 Postcards In Full Colour

Gearing up for the album release of Max Richter’s24 Postcards in Full Colour, FatCat/130701 and Max Richter have launched a splendid promo site, explaining the project’s conceptual underpinnings.  Basically, each of the twenty-four tracks were composed as ringtones, only squeezed into an album format for conveniece or tradition’s sake.

The 24 postcards are not an album - but my first attempt to look at ringtones as a vehicle for music performance.

…

Unlike my previous records, which I wrote sequentially from beginning to end, I have no control over how these tracks will be played back, or in what order, so they are composed as a collection of related pieces with many shared references between them – so the more of them you hear, the more they will connect.

I have made an ‘album cut’ version for the CD and vinyl releases, but that is only one way through the material – I’d expect people to find other ways to use the tracks.

The planned premiere performances will be by invited audiences at events in London, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo – where the audience’s phones (having previously registered and downloaded the MP3s) will actually be performing the pieces (as a text alert) in response to text messages from me.

While it’s unlikely 24 Postcards compositions will ever work effectively outside Richter’s concept performances as actual ringtones.  Despite this obvious shortcoming, these individual, short-attention-span slices of contemporary composition, by embracing our music culture’s continued evolution away from traditional, album-centric listening experiences, address some fascinating cultural issues with surprising courage and grace.  Each track on 24postcards.co.uk must be individually selected, looping continuously until another choice is made — the sort of music that would live most comfortably on an iPod shuffle.  With the rise of mp3s, iTunes, the iPod, and even ring-tones, it seems only a matter of time before pop culture has discarded the album for good.  Richter’s 24 Postcards demonstrates effectively why there’s no reason to fear the increasing popularity of this new technology, or to expect a coinciding annihilation musical creativity with the rise of 99 cent mp3s.  Music, like organic life, finds a way to adapt to changing conditions.

Of course, on the fringes of music culture, where the submersible dirigible, drone music, BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, circuit bending, and Max Richter reside, experimentation will always survive, regardless (sometimes even in spite of) conditions in the mainstream.  Cdr, tape and vinyl culture continues to thrive today, despite the growing commercial dominance of track-by-track iTunes style one-hit-wonder culture.  While technology hasn’t exactly democratized mass media, delivering niche culture to the masses, it does create a habitat where experimental culture can flourish comfortably — surviving like the varied, highly-specilized Galapagos tortoise populations, comfortable in isolation and obscurity.

http://www.24postcards.co.uk/

http://fat-cat.co.uk/fatcat/news.php?id=816

Richter’s 24 Postcards in Full Colour is scheduled for release in the UK on 25 August 2008.

Colleen — I’ll Read You a Story

Published
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sean
on August 3, 2008
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“I’ll Read You A Story” taken from The Golden Morning Breaks and Colleen Et Les Boîtes À Musique. The video was made by Jon Nordstrom

Kemialliset Ystävät — Harmaa Laguuni (Secret Eye, 2008)

Published
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sean
on August 1, 2008
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KEMIALLISET YSTÄVÄT - Harmaa Laguuni

HARMAA LAGUUNI is psych free-folk composed inside an iron-lung OR scandinavian bare-bones communal folk enhanced with exoskeleton.

Even before the release of their untitled late-2007 comeback spectacular, Kemialliset Ystävät had secured a place in outsider music history, recognized as one of the Finnish folk invasion’s most creative and prolific pioneers.  Jan Anderzén’s characteristic shambolic free-folk helped define the genre, and served as inspiration for countless artists within the larger (commercially at least) freak-folk movement.  Despite a dependable musical formula, last year’s untitled release — KY’s first in years — was a surprising departure from their established sound, the new album sounding like a seamless blend of the group’s familiar communal acoustics with experimental electronics in the spirit of early-electronic and musique concrète composers like Pierre Henry or Tod Dockstader.  Harmaa Laguuni — originally released as supplemental tour material –  continues Kemialliset Ystävät’s ambitious fusion with electronics.

‘Tervehdys Roskasakki‘ — Harmaa Laguuni’s opener — epitomizes this renewed focus on electronics;the track opens with wispy oscillator vocal-warmups, sounding like rubbery vocoder do-re-mee-fah-soh-lah-tee-’dohs.  Discernable vocoder vocalizations and a soft-focus synth organ build naturally from the opener’s breezy introduction, joining Kemialliset’s familiar hardly-tuned stringed instruments in short order, developing into an otherwordly, 21st century free-folk.  ‘Menneisyyden Tulvaisuudessa‘ provides another stunning example of the album’s abundant electric-tribalism, a simple pairing of a solitary oscillator and an acoustic ewe-style drum rhythm, like an aural précis of the group’s new approach.  As expected from Kemialliset Ystävät, experimentation and improvisation abounds here, only enhanced by the deeper lineup of noise makers.  ‘Synti Muissa Maailmoissa’ and ‘Synti Muissa Maailmoissa’ bear some resemblance to the self-titled’s edgier offerings — ‘Älyvaahtoa’ (youtube) for example, or the catchy ‘Superhimmeli’ (mp3).

New KYY featuring performances from quite a few of our favorite Finnish noisemakers, including members of Avarus, Kiila and Es. Also - Tom + Christina of Charlambidies guest! All exclusive tracks, this was released for Kemialliset Ystävät’s 2008 USA tour. LIMITED tour-only release…and NOT available in stores! Eat up. Fast. — Secret Eye

Harmaa Laguuni is simply extraordinary.  Considering the cd is still available for order at Secret Eye for only $12 (I think that’s around 43 pence in the UK, at the going conversion rate), I’d consider this release nearly essential listening.


Kemialliset Ystävät shreds (Sami Sänpäkkilä on Vimeo).

also: still working on some coherent, identifiable, and useful review format, so things will likely continue to change here.  I do like to provide a quick summary take on the album up top, a reaction to my own tendency to quickly skim through my rss subscriptions, looking for items of interest.  I find targeted summaries can be useful way of introducing content, and hope others will as well.