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| With Guillermo Scott Herren’s albums under the Prefuse 73 moniker becoming increasingly dense affairs, stuffed to the gunnels with contrasting styles and collaborators, a new release under his Savath and Savalas guise is more welcome than ever. It has gentle guitars, hypnotic harmonies, soft Spanish vocals, and most definitely no place for a guest spot from Ghostface Killah. [img] [img] Jose Gonzalez, however, is permitted to somnambulate through “Estrella De Dos Caros”, fitting the prevailing mood so well that you barely notice him entering. For the most part it is Herren himself taking the lead [... ]
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| May 25, 2007 |
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| 7:58pm | | |
| Kammerflimmer Kollektief’s previously releases have been an exercise in liminality; one one side restrained jazz and electronic background, on the other an incongruous skronky dissonance. Jinx, their sublime sixth album, starts by tip-toeing gingerly along this fence, but by the end it is plying it apart with a crowbar and using the wooden fragments to crucify bunnies. [img] [img] The bossa-shuffle of “Palimpsest” (seeing as Tim Hecker and Kammerflimmer have used this as a track title in the last year, I’ve now had to go and look it up: “A manuscript, typically of papyrus or [. ..]
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| May 23, 2007 |
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| 8:55am | | |
| I’ve totally lost track of all semi-official bootleg CD-Rs and whatnots that may or may not comprise the Sunburned Hand Of The Man canon*, but this one is probably more significant than most, being released on what is probably their spiritual home, Ecstatic Peace. Of course when I say spiritual I mean shamanic. If ever an album needed a front cover featuring a drum festooned with animal bones, it would be this. [img] [img] 5 tracks on Z, all given a multiple of infinity for names, and I can’t find the infinity key on my [. ..]
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| May 22, 2007 |
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| 7:56pm | | |
| I’ve totally lost track of all semi-official bootleg CD-Rs and whatnots that may or may not comprise the Sunburned Hand Of The Man canon, but this one is probably more significant than most, being released on what is probably their spiritual home, Ecstatic Peace. Of course when I say spiritual I mean shamanic. If ever an album needed a front cover featuring a drum festooned with animal bones, it would be this. [img] [img] 5 tracks on Z, all given a multiple of infinity for names, and I can’t find the infinity key on my [. ..]
| | | 4:47am | | | | [img] It was a busy old weekend. In between a visit to the Anthony Gormley fog-in-a-box exhibition at the Hayward (disorientating), watching the FA cup final (disenchanting), going to the cinema to see Zodiac (discomfiting), and a trip to London Zoo (ummmm, brilliant, actually, hooray for the spider monkeys!) I squeezed in this London Sinfonietta Ligeti tribute, which also had an art installation - pictured above - and a bit of Reich thrown in as a sweetener. [img] Ligeti s Self-Portrait with Reich and Riley (and Chopin in the Background) had two pianists setting about each other [. ..]
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| | | | May 18, 2007 | | | | 7:52pm | | | | Apparently composed with instruments they battered together themselves, Alog’s new album is an unexpected delight, betraying a depth only hinted at previously. Alog’s previous three albums on Rune Grammofon are precise abstract electronic affairs which never entirely escape the atmosphere of the beat, but Amateur has a ramshackle found sound charm which defies all scientific principle to propel it skywards. [img] [img] The new Alog find themselves appending Robert Wyatt soundy-likey vocals to the coda to“Write Your Thoughts In Water”, sprinkling twinkly percussion and fragments of words all over “Son Of King” (reminds me very [.. .]
| | | 7:54pm | | | | I’d been thinking that the reason so many people are covering Leonard Cohen songs these days has much less to do with the magical poetry of those lyrics, and more to do with the fact that someone with half a voice must reckon they stand a good chance of improving on the original. Replace Cohen’s weary shrug and almost embarrassed hint at melody with some swooping melodrama, and you can’t help but improve on the original, can you? Weeeeeeell, not so sure that is always the case, but I listened to Marissa Nadler’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” and thought I [... ]
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| | | | May 12, 2007 | | | | 7:53pm | | | | Blimey, that is quite a weighty title for a post. After a bit of a hiatus, there has been so much going on over at Smalltown Superjazzz (I do like the third z) in recent months, I need to get something written down just to help me take stock and make sense of it all. [img] [img] [img] Original Silence are an overwhelming noise combo featuring avant-rock and jazz royalty in Thurston Moore and Jim O’Rourke of/ex of Sonic Youth, and Paal Nilssen-Love and Mats Gustafsson of The Thing, as well as a few other miscreants and ne’er-do-wells [. ..]
| | | 7:54pm | | | | I’ve been besmitten and besotted by the latest release on the unimpeachable Kranky for a goodly number of weeks now. It hovers spectrally and improvisationally in the void between Charalambides’ bewitched folk, Double Leopards’ buzzy drones, and Sigur Ros’s blurry wordlessness. [img] [img] Anyone expecting “Vevor of Agassou” to be a tribute to a Glasgow Celtic centre-forward would be doubtless disappointed by the ambling acoustic guitar and ethereal cooing on show, not to mention the lack of boozy terrace chantability; although others (including those with less of an interest in the minutiae of Scottish football) will [.. .]
| | | 3:55pm | | | | [img] The Luminaire was packed out for this Leaf showcase, featuring two artists who don t play in the UK often enough for my liking. The Luminaire is a wide venue, but with the stage in an enclosed space in the middle, meaning it was a bit of a tight squeeze, and that you could be standing within two feet of someone without actually being able to see them. [img] Laptop artist Dave Miller (such an unimaginative name, I m sure he could have done better than that) is a regular collaborator of Triosk and Pivot drummer Laurence Pike. [.. .]
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| | | | May 1, 2007 | | | | 7:41pm | | | | As this blog seems at present to be lurching drunkenly from leering unpleasantly at one foreign female musical iconoclast to another, its gaze would inevitably be attracted to Colleen. Well, what with Bjork’s restraining order not expiring for another few days. To give her some credit, Cecile Schott did a pretty good job of hiding, going as far as to ditch the clothing I was expecting to see her in favour of some fine renaissance period garb. [img] [img] For Les Ondes Silencieuses (The Silent Waves, by my wayward reckoning) marks a significant change in [.. .]
| | | 3:55pm | | | | [img] Standing in one of the Scala s interminable queues is like being trapped in a 21st century London update of a Hieronymous Bosch painting, with the bleak environs of Kings Cross populated by red-faced ticket touts, Robocop-esque security guards (head-mounted video cameras, I kid you not), confused drunks falling out of neon-signed pizza establishments , as well as a thousand frustrated queue-shufflers - and high proportion of those were even French. Well, I suppose they would be, seeing as we were hear to see the Gallic polymath Yann Tiersen. [img] And a high proportion of that high proportion were, [... ]
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| | | | April 28, 2007 | | | | 7:49pm | | | | I went to see Islaja play as part of a Fonal showcase (with Es and Kiila) last year in St Giles-in-the-Field church in central London (watch a clip here from the Wire’s website, dancing bunny included). I enjoyed the show very much, despite my confessing at the end that the evening left me none-the-wiser idea as to whether Islaja had any musical talent in anything approaching a conventional sense. That strange otherworldly voice – undoubtedly strong and pure, but happiest when leaping around carefree shorn of any link to melody. She played guitar too; but it was a shambling, strangely [... ]
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| | | | April 25, 2007 | | | | 7:54pm | | | | OK, so I’m such a latecomer to this record. I could blame that on my confusion over the release schedule of Mego (or eMego even, that is how befuddled I am), which seems for long periods to be a steady diet of reissues. More truthfully, it is just that I didn’t give it the attention it deserved when I first got my hands on it; listening to the lovely Moskitoo record recently rekindled my interest in Japanese pop-flavoured electronic music, and I dug this one again. And then the sun came out, the UK got unseasonably warm, we all [... ]
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| | | | | | 5:19am | | | | [img] Another week, another deliciously independent and vital arts and music venue veers towards the ditch. After the demise last week of NYC s cauldron of cutting edge creativity Tonic comes the sad news that one of my favourite London venues The Spitz has hit trouble with the landlords. The property developers have deemed that a location this proximate to the big money swishing around Bishopsgate has no business enriching the nation s cultural wealth when it could be filling their own pockets with the tepid overflow from the city bankers bonus pot. The Pitz is always reliably eclectic; [... ]
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| | | | April 23, 2007 | | | | 7:19am | | | | The greats of jazz have been dropping at an alarming rate this year. I only mentioned him in passing last week (re Nels Cline s tribute album from last year) but have been saddened today to hear about the passing of the extremely influential pianist Andrew Hill over the weekend. [img] His run of fine albums for Blue Note in the 1960s, while not elevating Hill to the position of a Monk or a Tyner at the time, have belatedly come to be recognised as out and out classics: Point of Departure garners most of the plaudits, but [. ..]
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| | | | April 22, 2007 | | | | 7:44pm | | | | From the moment the first notes of piano are pushed crustward from this sound world, this collaboration more than fulfils my weighty expectations. Cendre is much closer in aesthetic to Sakamoto’s much-lauded previous collaborations with Alva Noto (on the Raster-Noton label) than to the earlier live recording with Fennesz (also on Touch); gone are Santa Cecilia’s abrasive surfaces, to be replaced by a calmer, warmer veneer. [img] [img] Where Noto punctuated the long gaps between Sakamoto’s notes with his imperceptible-to-those-of-a-certain-age high frequencies and clipped morse clicks, Fennesz floods the area around the piano, leaving it an archipelago [.. .]
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| | | | April 19, 2007 | | | | 7:27pm | | | | I’m not sure whether I want to fly-tip any more words onto the festering pile of articles which will have been written about Wilco. The internet is getting pretty full now, and the backwash is causing people to come home from work to find track-by-track appraisals of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot lapping around their ankles. [img] [img] I’ll keep it brief then. The addition of the great jazz guitarist Nels Cline (I am by no means tired yet of his Andrew Hill tribute album from last year) and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansome to [.. .
Keywords: Nels Cline, Sunburned Hand, Cd Rs, Andrew Hill
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