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LushOut Of Control
'Lush was never actually just a shoegaze band; having continued to change over the release of four main albums (Gala (a compilation of early EPs), Spooky, Split, and Lovelife), moving in general from a sharply punky or ephemeral sound to full-on dream-pop, and finally to catchy indie-pop. Lush’s first new tune “Out Of Control” premiered on Steve Lamacq’s show on BBC Radio 6 Music and also appeared in video form this past Friday. It’s one of four fresh original songs that comprise the Blind Spot EP, due around mid-April on the band’s own Edamame record label. (The other songs on EP are titled “Lost Boy”, “Burnham Beaches”, and “Rosebud”.) “Out Of Control” shows the band in a dreamily pensive mood, with Miki singing in a soft tone that is both forlorn and hopeful amid chiming guitars rife with intriguing key changes as of yore, gentle drum beats and cymbal crash, and a floating synth line that increases in intensity toward the end of the song. It makes a sonically spellbinding and lyrically insightful impact.'-- Delusions of Adequacy
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Wanda GroupThe Storm Car Vat
'Ornate Circular, the latest release from Louis Johnstone’s Wanda Group, presents the pure “creative manipulation of the sounds of earthly existence, void of context… creating a totality of abstraction which nullifies context altogether.” The project’s third NNA Tapes release is full of crackles, squeaks, and hums, with the occasional rattle and faint animal-like sounds. Whatever space warrants this kind of conglomerate is an obscure one. Words like “void,” “abstract,” and “nullifying,” though, clearly don’t get at Ornate Circular’s otherwise meaningful, real, and validating temperament. Ornate Circular is not concerned with tone, per se, but with envelopes and tangents, in the ornamental way that Johnstone’s all-caps Twitter tongue is down to a simple visual preference of form, and the album can be first appreciated for its fittingly ornate circus: an arena of rhetoric, gaudy pageantry. Of course, the question of musique concrète itself is to accumulate material sounds and ransack their aesthetic worth. This is not new ground, but its inferences are.'-- Tiny Mix Tapes
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Anna MeredithR-Type
'As one of Britain's promising young composers during the latter 2000s, Scottish composer and performer Anna Meredith first came to prominence within the classical genre before branching out into electronica. Speaking to Crack Magazine, Meredith says: “With 'R-Type' I was trying to write something punchy, driving, and raw, that flips between the relentless rising scale figure you hear being hammered out on guitars, cello, and clarinet to great rolling synth lines with a sense of shape and build. (Incidentally, it took me about 500 takes to get that clarinet line right, clearly not quite got the chops I once had…) I love playing this track live too and consider it a bit of a failure if the entire band aren't drenched in sweat by the end.”'-- collaged
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Boris with MerzbouwHuge
'Renowned Japanese innovators BORIS and MERZBOW have teamed up with Relapse for their new collaborative 2xCD/4xLP Gensho, one of the artists’ most daring works to date. Named after the Japanese word for “phenomenon”, Gensho is a unique release featuring over 150 minutes of new music spread across two CDs and four LPs (available as two separate double LP sets or a deluxe 4xLP edition). The BORIS songs are percussion-less reinventions of classic tracks from the band’s storied catalog, while MERZBOW‘s songs are entirely new compositions. The two sets are intended to be played at the same time at varying volumes so that the listener can experience their own “gensho/phenomenon” every time. The artists also commented, “Of course you can enjoy both albums separately, as a separate work.” A live music video of the two artist’s performing the song’s “Huge” and “Planet of the Cows” together can be viewed below:'-- Relapse
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Cavern Of Anti-MatterPulsing River Velvet Phase
'Stereolab may have hung up their hats in 2009, but their motorik pulse and utopian spirit live on in founder Tim Gane's new project Cavern of Anti-Matter. The project also features original Stereolab drummer Joe Dilworth, who played on Peng!, and Holger Zapf, a synthesizer player whose resumé includes a stint in Jan Jelinek's Ursula Bogner ensemble. They released their debut album, the out-of-print Blood Drums, in 2013, but Void Beats / Invocation Trex feels in some ways like a proper debut, taking the tones and drones of that release and sculpting them into mesmerizing and thrilling pieces.'-- Phillip Sherburne
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Rob Crow's Gloomy PlaceOh, The Sadmakers
'Pinback’s Rob Crow has gone back and forth on his decision to quit music, and now he’s releasing a new project that apparently draws inspiration from that ambivalence. He’s just announced an album titled You’re Doomed. Be Nice. with his new band, Rob Crow’s Gloomy Place. You're Doomed presents a fascinating dichotomy: dynamic, eclectic prog-pop backing alarmingly confessional, often acerbic lyrical themes. This juxtaposition makes for an album of confrontational yet accessible songs filled with wry wit and emotional depth. You're Doomed. Be Nice. is the diamond carved out of a particularly rough chunk of Rob Crow's life – one that's either the first gem of an inspired second act, or the culmination of an undeniably influential career.'-- collaged
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Pierre BastienLive in London
'Pierre Bastien plays cornet along with his ensemble of instruments - turntables, a keyboard played by a rotating cylinder, meccano sets of rotating rhythm wheels, and even a paperclip hanging on a piece of paper is turned into a drum as it rattles against a hard surface. The speed of each rotating object is controlled by Pierre as he demonstrates as this song ends. By his own admission, Bastien has been re-engineering everyday objects and instruments from an early age, unlocking the percussive potential from items which usually remain untapped, whilst reshaping existing musical instruments with eccentric additions. More recently, Bastien produced a live performance which exhibited his latest explorations in this area under the intriguing title 'Silent Motors'. It's a project which builds on previous forays, most notably his Mecanium orchestra, 'an ensemble of musical automatons constructed from meccano parts and activated by electro-motors, that are playing on acoustic instruments from all over the world' (as his official biography would have it). This time gears, paper and variously redesigned objects are utilised to create a layered mechanical symphony, an intricate series of sounds worthy of profuse onomatopoeiac descriptions that I'll spare you. It's more scaled back than his Mecanium work but no less ambitious, taking on the resemblance of a university music room and a back garden workshop brought together and alive by oddball ingenuity.'-- collaged
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Let's Eat Grandma Deep Six Textbook (live)
'Seeing British duo Let's Eat Grandma live for the first time was terrifying. In the back room of a pub in the East of England on a Thursday evening, they took up half the room with drums, stands, and strings, climbing over instruments to clap into the mic with the biggest reverb while white noise crackled behind them. That was a year and a half ago now. Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth were 15-years-old and their live shows were experimental and scattered, screeches and screams undercut by mellow keys and soft melodies. Nobody dared guess which musical direction Let's Eat Grandma would take—there were at least 20 that they could have chosen from in their six-song set—but one inevitability was the industry swooping in. The room was full of A&R types. Well, thankfully, Walton and Hollingworth found a good home with Transgressive Records—home to Foals, Flume, and the newly-reformed At The Drive-In—and now have a debut single to show for their two years of sporadic touring and homework. "Deep Six Textbook" is a gorgeous slow-burner of a track, embracing the pat-a-cake eccentricities that make the band's live sets so disturbing and adding layers of breathy harmonies on top.'-- Noisey
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WireNocturnal Koreans
'Wire returned last spring with their self-titled effort, their 14th studio album to date. Now, just 12 months later, the influential post-punk outfit is readying its follow-up. Nocturnal Koreans is due out on April 22nd through Pink Flag. As a press release notes, the forthcoming LP was born out of the sessions for Wire’s previous full-length. Despite this, Nocturnal Koreans is expected to sound much different, says Newman: “The WIRE album was quite respectful of the band, and Nocturnal Koreans is less respectful of the band—or, more accurately, it’s the band being less respectful to itself—in that it’s more created in the studio, rather than recorded basically as the band played it, which was mostly the case with WIRE. A general rule for this record was: any trickery is fair game, if it makes it sound better.”'-- CoS
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Daniel Menche and MamifferCalyx
'Mamiffer, the duo of Faith Coloccia and Aaron Turner of the band ISIS, have recorded with a slew of artists who work in similarly contrasting fields of noise and music, but this is the first true work with Pacific Northwest neighbor and the world’s loudest school librarian, Daniel Menche. A previous release, Live Through Menche featured him reworking Coloccia and Turner's recorded work as a performance, but Crater is the first time they have truly worked together on record. "Calyx" makes for the two most conventionally musical song on the album. It features Turner's guitar and Coloccia's piano playing complimentary melodies, as processing (by I assume the hand of Menche) pushes both into distorted, at times abrasive territory, and then back again. Even though the resulting sound is by no means traditionally beautiful, that hint of chaos is a splendid additional facet to the songs.'-- Brainwashed
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Robert PollardCats Love A Parade
'Silverfish Trivia is a Pollard solo “mini-LP,” released independently while he was on Merge Records. It’s a stately, cinematic-sounding EP, containing three instrumentals and a predominately slow tempo and hazy psychedelic atmosphere. In its earlier incarnations, however, it was a more traditional full-length record called The Killers, with an emphasis on rock and pop. None of The Killers’ twelve songs were dropped, three instrumentals were added, and the track order was reconfigured. Suddenly, the melancholy, cinematic core of the album comes into focus. After a few more edits, Pollard ultimately jettisoned the rock and pop songs and exposed the core for itself. And then there's the eight-minute "Cats Love a Parade", which follows much the same pattern as "Boys Club" or "Touched", before taking a left turn into a near-industrial lurch halfway through, while Pollard adopts a husky, creepy tone and repeats the song's strange chorus at length.'-- collaged
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Collapsible ShoulderThree
'e v e r y w h e r e - the first release by Collapsible Shoulder - formed by Chris Cochrane, featuring Brian Chase, Kato Hideki, and Kevin Bud Jones. Collapsible Shoulder is a mostly-instrumental quartet that plays taut, high-tension post-everything rock. Their music is drawn from its members' years in the downtown NYC and Brooklyn music scenes: neo-psychedelic with unpredictable twists and turns, an electronic-acoustic-sonic mash. This is their first collection of studio recordings captured in a live room, with further recording and composition completed at Kato Hideki's studio, during the alchemy of mixing and mastering.'-- collaged
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Pere UbuGolden Surf II
'Very few bands display such dedication to constant self-reinvention as Pere Ubu, whose highly methodological madness always seeks new ways of evolving their sound, whilst paradoxically keeping their DNA essentially unchanged. Perhaps only The Fall (who John Peel once famously described as "always different, always the same") can be said to have walked such a similarly fine line over such a lengthy career arc. Ubu began performing live soundtracks to classic black-and-white cult films starting in 2002 with Jack Arnold's 1953 science-fiction epic It Came From Outer Space and moving on two years later to Roger Corman's X: The Man With The X-ray Eyes. Given David Thomas's often stated acknowledgement of the influence of Ghoulardi (the anarchic fictional persona of Ernie Anderson, presenter of late night B movies and father of the film maker PT Anderson) in imparting a sense of 'otherness' to Cleveland bands of the 70s, such films could hardly have found a more apt band to underscore them. Indeed, Pere Ubu's inherent sense of inner darkness and use of widely ranging electronic textures–including the classic sci-fi instrument the theremin–made them the perfect B movie house band.'-- The Quietus
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Kenward ElmslieWho'll Prop Me Up in the Rain
'In the 1950's Kenward Elmslie was the protege of the well-known lyricist John Latouche, who had worked with Duke Ellington and many others. Elmslie, at times uncredited, helped Latouche with such chores as writing a lyric for Leonard Bernstein's theme to On the Waterfront, and songs for on and off-Broadway revues. Elmslie even had a jukebox hit (or, per Elmslie, "hitlet") in 1959: "Love-Wise," sung by Nat King Cole. Latouche threw penthouse parties that included guests ranging from Lena Horne (who drummed on a wastebasket and sang) to the pre-On the Road Jack Kerouac. On one occasion, the poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara and Barbara Guest came to read. Ashbery's poetry, smooth and sophisticated in unusual ways, in particular caught Elmslie's attention. Soon after this, Elmslie read a short play by another "New York School" poet, James Schuyler, and recognized in it a language much similar to what he had been trying to dig at as he wrote lyrics. Musical theatre productions move at a glacial pace, and Elmslie began to write poems to fill in his free time--and in a very short period of time, he became the most language-intense and interesting of the New York poets. For years, his desk was strictly segregated: lyrics for songs for musicals were kept in one drawer, poems in another. But in the end, this separation of powers broke down, resulting in a number of uniquely artful, beautifully loopy Poem Songs. Much has been made in recent years of "The Great American Songbook" -- Gershwin, Porter, Carmichael, et al -- generally spoken of with the falling inflection that suggests the golden age of song was choked off when the kudzu of rock, soul and other thornier strains of music overgrew it. Songs of syrupy gush, 2-D personality (crayon-bright "types"), overly-toothy sincerity, and rhythms in clown shoes have indeed largely been choked out, along with the Classic Broadway Musical form for which Elmslie once wrote (never to return...?). But the Poem Songs he has created out of much the same material--stripped down and divvied up differently--are, if we listen, Great American songs, full of word and rhythm play, melodic invention, and emotions as glinting and mysterious as the aforementioned mica in a cup. They only await being taken up by singers who are adventurous and literate.'-- Perfect Sound Forever
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Venetian SnaresMagnificent Stumble V2
'Venetian Snares has just released Traditional Synthesizer Music, an LP comprised of songs created and performed live exclusively on a modular synthesizer with no overdubbing or editing. According to press materials: “Each song was approached from the ground up and dismantled upon the completion of it’s recording. The goal was to develop songs with interchangeable structures and sub structures, yet musically pleasing motifs. Many techniques were incorporated to “humanize” or vary the rhythmic results within these sub structures. An exercise in constructing surprises, patches interrupting each other to create unforeseen progressions. Multiple takes were recorded for each song resulting in vastly different versions of each piece.”'-- Fact Mag
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MatmosUltimate Care II live @ Floristry
'Baltimore-based experimental electronic duo Matmos have never shied away from a concept. Now, the band is back with a 38-minute ode to their washing machine, the eponymous Ultimate Care II. Every sound on the single-track album is produced, in some way, by the machine, whether from a wash cycle or by Schmidt and Daniel hitting, scraping, or manipulating it themselves. The result is, as you would guess, an album full of hypnotic rhythms and bubbling textures, easing its way through the actual sounds of the washer at work: driving metallic tribal beats, tinkling marimba-like tones, sweeping synth swells, and delightfully organic howls and squeals. It all begins with the turning of the machine’s dial and the water flowing in, and ends, of course, with the final buzzer going off.'-- Consequence of Sound
*
p.s. RIP: Fred Holland. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. That would be a very tricky hybrid to ace, but, yeah, if I could figure out how to do that in a unified way, it would be cool. Really enjoyed and admired your piece on Apichatpong Weerasethakul. ** James, Hi. Yeah, of course they were intentional. It couldn't have been a white stripe without them. Thanks very much for the close attention and close read of the gif work. I really appreciate it. ** Tosh Berman, Thank you very kindly, Tosh! ** Bill, Hi. Thank you very much. Yeah, I'm kind of excited that I was able to open up the gif literary form a little more. Sorry about the spike, glad it was short-lived. Nice word: spike(d). I'm going to use it more. A more image based work by you is fascinating prospect, naturally. May the necessary time appear. That sentence was a prayer. I hope the off-ness turned you on. ** Steevee, Hi. Yes, yes, what you're saying seems really true. The problem is systematic, and that makes it a very difficult problem to solve. And of course a real problem is in the priorities and standards of the venues that assign and host film criticism. I think one of the probably many reasons why experimental film has been swallowed up by contemporary art is that the prominent magazines that cover visual art don't have the idea that a show or project or work needs to have had a certain amount of wide exposure to warrant being covered because, obviously, art, with exceptions, arrives in the form of a single entity that is generally only seen in one venue -- gallery or museum or space -- in one city. But of course it's hard to lay the blame on most of the places that cover film, including a lot of the places you write for, because they allot a limited space to film criticism, and there are a ton of wide-release films vying for that space. Honestly, I'm always very impressed that you're able to get places like Gay City News, for instance, to let you cover some of the serious films you do there. That's actually quite a victory. So, I don't know what the solution is. I suspect there isn't one, and that writing about experimental film is going to continue happening largely on the blogs, etc. of related buffs. Which is better than nothing by far. I do miss the days when magazine like Film Comment and Sight and Sound and others were more daring in their film coverage, but I suppose the shift there is a kind of evolution, and you can't fight evolution. Ill get that Adrian Younge album. I like his stuff in general. Thank you! ** Postitbreakup, Hi. Yeah, I think you can get the German DVD if you don't want to wait for the American one. Zac's and my only ugh about it is that the German DVD company decided for some unknown and boring reason to alter the color in the film's first scene, and we're really not happy about that. As I told James, the white spaces were extremely intentional. I watched maybe half of one episode of 'House of Cards' during one of my visits to LA, and I thought it was super dull, and I hated the extremely color graded visual look of it. But I literally only watched maybe thirty minutes, so I can't really know about the show. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi Dóra! Okay, I'll keep my fingers crossed for the next month. Well, except when I'm typing. 'Cos that might be difficult, ha ha. Yeah, these texts we're working on suck. They combine two of my least favorite things in the world: schmoozing and explaining. I get offers and requests to give lectures about my work all the tim, and I just can't and won't do it because I hate doing that so much, even though the income from those gigs (at least relative to what a writer earns) would really help. Oh, well. We have to finish the texts by Thursday, and we will. Puce Mary was so great! I love her records, but what she did was more amazing than anything I've heard by her before. There is a pretty big audience for experimental music here. At the Puce Mary gig, and again last night -- because we went to the last night of the PE festival, which featured the great electronic music pioneer Beatriz Ferreyra, John Wiese, my collaborator Pita aka Peter Rehberg, and Lichens, who I didn't know before and who was pretty incredible -- there were probably 700 people in attendance. So, yeah. I hope your exam today went really well as far as you can tell. And thanks so much about the gif work! Bon Monday! ** MANCY, Hi, S! Oh, thank you so, so much! That means a lot, man! I'm dying to see 'The Witch'. It still hasn't opened here, grr. I saw an email from you, and I'll open it pronto. And, yeah, a guest post would be amazing! Thanks! ** _Black_Acrylic, Thank you so much for saying that, Ben. I hope that cold vamooses immediately. A lot of people are down with colds here right now. Time of the year? Hope hope hope about the Art101 meeting! ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. You got it, wow. Awesome. That's an extremely interesting phobia thing you have going on there. I've never heard of that before. Wow. Mm, maybe you don't need the password but, hey, it's a snap to do, and you never know what creeps and thieves are into. ** Chris Dankland, Hi, Chris. That sounds totally fun: the big molly dose. And, actually, I take it as a really high compliment that 'White stripe' worked on your mollied mind. Back when I used to do a lot drugs, mostly hallucinogens, it was always really important to me whether the things I was into while sober still worked when I was high. Well, except for books because reading while on hallucinogens doesn't really work. But when I got high, I would usually pull out, like, records and art and even movies, when possible, and test them under those controlled/uncontrolled circumstances, and if they didn't seem as great as they had or, ideally, greater, I'd usually decide I was dumb to have liked them. Anyway, your careful read of the gif work is a total thrill, thank you so much! That was, like, my dream response. Oh, it was stripe rather than strip because ... the word stripe suggests something wider and more potential-laden to me for some reason. Strip seems kind of constricted to me, I don't know why. And stripe seems like a more decorative thing, like a striped shirt. And it's a warmer and more fun, cheerful word. I don't know. Those are my guesses. If I ever get zonked again, and, god, I sure hope to, I'll slap on M83. You've sold me. Thank you again so much, Chris. I hope your come-down was a soft, resonant one. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Thanks so much about the gif work. I do feel very happy that I think I advanced the literary gif form in it, yeah. I approached it originally as a possible exercise to work with white, but then it ended up being very challenging, and I ended up taking it very seriously, and I am pretty proud of it. So, yeah, thank you! Ah, yes, Mathew Barney. There's an example that weirdly didn't bring to mind. He is an, if not the, exception. 'Cremaster' did totally cross over and was contextualized and exhibited and written about as a film. Mm, I definitely see the 'Cremaster' cycle and his other motion-works as serious, viable experimental cinema. For me, there are sections in them that are incredible, and there are sections, and more of them, that I admire as far as his intentions go, but think are kind of labored and not as interesting at their origins as he seems to think. I do think he's a sincere, serious, and ambitious artist. I wasn't sure if I felt that way until I spent time with him, and then, after talking with him and observing him in person, I believed he is. Oh, no doubt that drastically shrinking pay has a lot to do with it, sure. I totally agree about that and about the effect of that on criticism. And unfamiliarity is big too. Experimental film tends to be written nowadays about as a historical form. That's laziness, but it's also understandable, or, rather, critics' lack of impetus to challenge that bracketing off makes a sad sense. I mean, it's a deeply conservative time right now, obviously. A lot of people are curious about experimentation, but only when it happens within a fully recognizable surrounding form, and they talk the talk about going further, but they don't seem to want to go. They seem to like the idea of aesthetic boundaries being pushed, but they seem to insist on the results being comfortable. So you know, Kanye West, Radiohead, pop stars' image-tinkering, etc. are wild enough. And, to hopefully zip in and out of this subject as quickly as possible, that particular kind of conservatism is prevalent beyond just a taste in art. Such as how the idea of a 'revolution' in politics is so in vogue and on so many lips and filling up so many newsfeeds, but so many revolution-fetishizers seem satisfied with the softcore fantasy that a left of center President Sanders would constitute revolution. Nothing against Sanders or his candidacy or so on. And I absolutely do not want to engage in a discussion about American presidential election preferences. I'm talking about how the current conservatism re: aesthetics seeps into everything. I'm talking about how people have made 'revolution' into Sanders' brand, and how a lot of people seem to think supporting that brand, whether it's attached to art or to politics or to whatever, is wild enough. I don't know. Thanks, Jeff! ** Okay. There's a gig. This one actually has some rock and songs and stuff in it for those of you who like your music to have a song-like shape. I hope you enjoy. See you tomorrow.