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2562 - Aerial (Tectonic)

2008-07-10T08:05:00.001-07:00

Of all the movements to find a transatlantic appreciation, dubstep seems an unlikely one to have its subterranean bleak beats rubbing up against the muted Donuts-gone-cold hip-hop of Flying Lotus’s Los Angeles, juddering space-age loops of Ras G or Echospace’s pursuing of sparse soundscape avenues with The Coldest Season - dronestep, anyone? Listen though, it’s there; Croydon unpacked its bags. But across the Channel a Belgian brute, equally persuaded by its juggernaut basslines, has woven an equally beguiling knit as techno tyke Dave Huismans tries his hand at its taut structures with a minimal panache.

Ever eager to leap on a tangent, Hague beatnik Huismans has been something of a cuckoo in previous years, going under various aliases, releasing broken beat as Dogdaze and techno as A Made Up Sound over the last half decade, picking made nests to call his own. But rather than sit quietly, he’s soon moving the furniture round to suit him, no more so here where as 2562 he has fed a focused techno guile to the London-bred bastard genre’s blanket of comatose beats, dragged by the collar towards something less vacant. Dare it be said, in the direction of a dubstep girls might want to dance to.

Rather than the figureheads most are drawn to in both camps – Burial and Villalobos – 2562, along with fellow countryman Martyn, lays it down with a straight-laced approach, far closer to a mesmeric midway between Alex Smoke and Skream. ‘Kameleon’ remains the finest example of Huisman’s newfound craft, soaking acidic spits of micro habit into the familiar lumbering reverberations of SE1 basslines. And bongos. Released through Bristol-based dubstep minefield Tectonic and having previously gone through Hyperdub, 2562’s sound is indebted to the owners of both imprints, whether the snatching detail to ‘Movern’ close to the stuttering Detroit drops of Pinch’s Underwater Dancehall or the anesthetising browbeaten wash of ‘Greyscale’ like 2562 holding hands with kode9.

Aerial is a record that, as opposed to his incarnation as A Made Up Sound’s deep house, has a tendency to step out of the shadows to something far more hypnotic. In particular, ‘Channel Two’ (a new take on ‘Channel One’, released earlier this year) finds spacious techno sucked in and spat out as cobweb-ridden, knee-beaten dubstep. If there’s a fault it’s that from this earnest incarnation of the genre we’re in danger of the inevitable, ending up awash with either a supermarket shelf or coffee table version of the genre. But, as it stands, with shards of passing 2-step, dub, broken beat, Basic Channel bites and whatever else will fit in the basket sneaking in on the mix, Aerial provides a decent indication of strides away from the decline.

Scraps rather than a moveable feast, but one remarkable siphoning off of various influences to provide a dissonant slab of techno-fuelled dubstep.

Abe Vigoda - Skeleton (PPM)

2008-07-10T08:02:00.000-07:00

After drifting out at sea Abe Vigoda have finally washed up amid the foam and jellies, a panic-stricken mess set to a holy racket, wild children picked from the wilderness. Since releasing the berserk underground haemorrhage-pop jams of Sky Route/Star Roof back in 2005, these self-proclaimed ‘tropical punks’ have pushed their head out the swamp surrounding Los Angeles’ DIY scene that they’ve been festering in the last few years, with their intoxicating jumble sale of wired influences - noise-pop set to gamelan - a mannered madness away from mother, giddy on unlimited refills.

Whether the stalled tin-pan chimes of ‘Bear Face’ or their efforts as drone tyrants for ‘Whatever Forever’, Skeletons is their finest outing yet. With the nonsensical chants that have riddled prior records incessant at the fore, their nursery rhyme lyrics are proudly hollered by Juan Velazquez and Michael Vidal’s clumsy tongues with a treehouse child exuberance, yelps coating their raucous calypso cuts.

With HEALTH and No Age’s noise-pop conundrums bearing the juiciest fruit from the scene surrounding all-ages grotbag vegan venue and DIY hub The Smell, Abe Vigoda now have something of audience to tend to. Released on PPM (run by No Age’s Dean Spunt) and with a name taken from an actor renowned for his support roles rather than any showcase performance, it’d be easy to accuse Vigoda of being background cast rather than leading role. But, with a record possessing such an untamed imagination it’s fair to say that Abe Vigoda’s maddened prattle is a talent worth nurturing, whether soil in their teeth or blood on their knees. Their screams are cowardly cries - this the sound of a breakdown set to music.

From the moment ‘Dead City/Waste Wilderness’ bursts in there’s rarely a let up; Skeletons is exhausting. Seeming overlong at only a half hour, it’s like taking a child full of pop round a toy store, incessant down each isle. Yet there’s so much in there to pick at that it’s just a case of heading back to the start for another round as you place your finger on another delicacy they’ve fed into the mix.

Silence. Momentarily this gaggle are sedate, with the shimmering instrumental ‘Visi Rings’ combining the dissonant drone passages that have rolled around Brooklyn gutters for the last few years and the splintering shards of sunburnt noise Ecstatic Sunshine lap on. Whether the exotic fruits on show in‘The Garden’ or ‘Hyacinth Girls’ flaunting its garish bloom there’s a hardcore brutishness amid the gamelan pan slaps, rumba rumbles and soca tussles. But these kids are not the sort rushing for world music credentials, they just want some way to soundtrack their unhinged downfall. “Leave me in the street,” bawls Vidal, as if an abandoned mongrel.

No wave dilettantes, tropical punk prophets, Abe Vigoda are all smiles. Rightly so.

GRAFFITI ISLAND (20JFG)

2008-07-10T08:01:00.000-07:00

The sound of monotony swamping your skull, Graffiti Island are not typical. Brought together through a mutual love of the deranged dilettante Jan Terri, their bludgeoned lo-fi is the sort that’d have even Calvin Johnson turning his nose with frontman Pete Dee’s vocal a coarse narcotic, one dragged from a LA suburb through Dalston high street, wading its way through a swamp of comotose reverberating basslines.

Though they’re yet to release a record (a 7” is due through House Anxiety in coming months) there’s plenty to set a jaw round. ‘Mountain Man’ is from a while back now, something no ointment can treat, rabid and pent up with carnal desires, the sort of output you’d expect from an outfit citing Meat Puppets beside The Pastels. Self-loathing mongrel pop.

Graffiti Island- Mountain Man

GAS - Nah Und Fern (KOMPAKT)

2008-07-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

With GAS it’s all too easy to suck hard on hyperbole’s teat – dissonant symphonies set to 4/4, drawing on a Cologne forest with its entrenched heritage for inspiration. But we’ll try and avoid this and just underline what many have been keen to embolden recently: Nah Und Fern is an incredible leftfield techno tide.

Wolfgang Voigt has long gone under various aliases – most notably as Mike Ink and Grungerman. Yet GAS remains his most revered guise, removed from the techno landscape he helped established. Nah Und Fern compiles the four records Voigt released under his GAS moniker between 1996 and 2000, all out of print and unavailable unless you had a few hundred euros going spare. After releasing the Modern EP in 1995, Voigt went on to industriously churn out Gas (1996), Zauberberg (1997), and Königsforst (1999), culminating in the release of Pop in 2000.

Kompakt shopkeeper and founder of the Cologne imprint when Jürgen Paape, Jorg Burger and brother Reinhart began releasing under Delirium in 1993, Voigt was central in the micro-house scene that blossomed in the ‘90s after assembling his Profan and Studio1 labels. Voigt’s influence throughout techno has been remarkable, yet some unlikely characters have honed the alienated squall of GAS, with some of this year’s finest – Growing’s Lateral, Echospace’s The Coldest Season, The Field’s Sound of Light EP – all easily tied with the same bow, with Voigt’s ethereal blanket easily a central reference point for their varying anaesthetizing drone passages.

Endless paragraphs could be spent dreaming up lucid explanations of each album, all of which take a similar approach but with a different tack, each having kept the local Königsforst Voigt used to go to take acid in his younger years as a recurring conceptual theme. But it is the looming bleak beats of Zauberberg that remain the most remarkable, wilted minimalism like Mike Ink’s techno strokes sat sick with sunstroke, a muted glory, mesmerisingly adroit and as if they’re corroding the inside layer of your skull.

Like Axel Willner’s The Field, GAS’s output is built up of blocks of samples – many classical, picking at Wagner and Schöenberg, and, like his previous incarnation as BLEI, traditional music you imagine haunted Voigt in his youth. But as opposed to Willner’s brand of Stockholm Syndrome sampling with glimpses of Tusk and Hounds of Love beneath the wash, GAS guts the records and leaves them all but unidentifiable, a mirage of washed orchestral works, losing any previous context as they’re sucked into GAS’s vacuum.

Despite the wavering tone, it’s difficult to peg this all as just ‘ambient’ – this is a taut, industrial direction far from any limp post-rock stew. That so much of Kompakt’s strand of technopop derives from this vacant thread of Voigt’s focus is credit to the muscle of the material. Speaking recently to Rob Young, Voigt said that “due to the mass overkill, loss of values and arbitrariness, the once liberating movement of international minimal techno has degenerated into an uninspired, unglamorous DJ kit, a boring pap”. (You listening, Paape?) Veering off, away from the pop plateaus Kompakt went on to scale, this dense catalogue - with each disk touching an hour - is Voigt’s attempt to climb the same mountain from another direction.

Far from a bloated indulgence, Nah Und Fern is a sunken masterpiece.

Bringing '88 Back: The Cool Kids

2008-07-10T07:59:00.002-07:00

A slew of critics have proclaimed Chicago/Detriot hip-hop duo The Cool Kids as some throwback bastard, sucking on Eric B and Rakim samples and playing out feel-good lines about “bringing ‘88 back” that kick with a failsafe nod back to Kool Herc’s heyday.

Well, that’s what they are to some extent, but there’s a whole lot more in their basket. Far from mere bloated good-timers prattling on about mastering ‘the elements’ and that “no-one lays it down like Bambaataa any more”, there’s more to these kids, who attach an astute minimalism to their lumbering beats; a greater substance that you’d initially think The Neptunes may be behind.

Mikey Rocks (real name Antoine Reed) and Chuck Inglish (Evan Ingersoll) met in 2005. After years learning their trade selling mixtapes over the ‘net on their own imprint C.A.K.E., the pair are now prepping their first record proper, When Fish Ride Bicycles, for some time in the near future. They’re testing wider waters with The Bake Sale, compiling their finest moments so far – it’s soon to be released officially in the UK via XL Recordings, the majority of its material lifted from 2007’s Totally Flossed Out EP.

Meeting at the XL pit with the pair, psyched by the fact they’re playing the Maharishi store later that night, DiS speaks to Mikey and Chuck as one gets their hair clipped and the other chain-smokes spliffs; they swap duties mid-interview. With loose tongues, we talk shop and dispel some myths.

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The Cool Kids (l-r): Mikey Rocks and Chuck Inglish

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On suffering from and surviving ‘the hype’…

Chuck: “We don’t suffer from the hype syndrome as much any more. Hype can’t tour Europe twice. [Europe] ain’t the most forgiving place on the globe to tour without a record. So either you’re good or you suck.

“We don’t polarise our music. We kind of make it how we are, and we got along with a lot of people. That’s not because we try to but it’s just we’re attracted to all types of people and we make music in the same way as our personalities work. It’s probably that we connect to others. If there is another reason then I don’t know it.”

Mikey: “In hip-hop there are no rules, but some people believe there are guidelines: can’t do this, can’t do that, can’t look like this, can’t talk about that. Two, three years ago when we started first making stuff they wouldn’t have that shit and there weren’t any hip-hop shows we could go perform at, us looking like we did and us rapping about the stuff; they wouldn’t have that shit and it underlined there’s some close-mindedness that goes into it. A lot of the powers that be have that attitude and that stigma of what you can and can’t sound like and wouldn’t have accepted it, so that’s what we accepted and pushed it instead. We got a crowd of people who were eager to hear a load of different shit, whether indie rock or jazz.”

Why they’re not bothered about appearing to have their heads lodged too deeply in the old school…

Chuck: “They only say that shit about hip-hop. Everybody has to put it in a sort of way for people to have a bit of direction, but nobody asks The White Stripes about that shit. But since we rap and took it back to something we grew up with we get asked that question. That’s just what we we’re about. There’s nothing wrong with that from the beginning – it’s just that people have a sick obsession with classifying everything, especially when it comes to hip-hop artists.

“We’re not seen as musicians. I think that’s because rappers aren’t considered musicians. Not by too many people. Bands though, they’re perceived to work harder to get that sound. Hip-hop artists use samples and shit, so I think that’s why it’s not as criticised as much. Shows are half-arse, beats are half-arsed, rhymes just ride the beat.” (Conversation curtails into where The Roots stand in all this.)

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Video: The Cool Kids, 'Bassment Party' live in Seattle

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The influence of The Neptunes, and sounding better than they look…

Chuck: “They struck up a curiosity with me of ,‘Oh, you can do that?’ I always had that sound in my head but didn’t know how it could be done and they shined a light on it and how to be unorthodox but for it still to sound good. I think I followed that and took it from a load of people. N*E*R*D’s In Search Of… album was the one that showed to me you can do whatever you want and it’s kind of where I’m at with it.”

Mikey: “A lot of the influence was in the imagery, because they would reference a song that I could easily identify as having an old school theme to it but then thinking of completely new age stuff. People would reference a certain song with old school beats and I could clearly see the throwback references, and at that point I saw that people subconsciously associate the picture with the sound of it. Because people say ‘Black Mags’ sounds retro, and I don’t see that.”

Chuck: “He makes an excellent point, because if you put The Pharcyde in a different context they would have been seen as retro hip-hop. They would have been like, ‘This is the new Tribe [Called Quest], they’re exactly like Tribe’.

“I think we make music that’s better than how we look. If you don’t do that then you kinda can’t make it out the gate. You can’t look better than your music. So we can dress and this and that, but that doesn’t make dudes like you. Pretty boy rappers - there’s not too many male Nelly fans. His fans, LL Cool J’s fans, they’re a majority of… dudes don’t want to see you rapping with your shirt off. It’s not the cool thing to do because people aren’t looking at it like that, people are just thinking, ‘Why’s this guy got his shirt off?’ If you’re going to look good, you’ve got to make better music.”

Mikey: “Otherwise it’ll overshadow you and then you’re just a fashion guy. I’ve seen it happen plenty of times, where someone’s image overpowers their music. You could point out some guy as so-and-so but can’t name one of his songs. I know plenty of those.”

They’re peas in a pod, like Outkast…

Mikey: “If there was a two-piece puzzle – no cheesiness involved – it works like that. Anything that doesn’t click in his head that he doesn’t see probably clicks in my head, and things that I might not see or I’m not conscious of click in his head. It works like that to cover certain bases and it doesn’t clash because the pieces fit into the right spots. If there are two dudes in a group and both of them rap exactly the same about the same stuff then you’ve just got two of the same dude, the same guy rapping the same stuff twice rather than two different perspectives.

“We’re not exactly alike and we look at stuff different and that’s why it works. Look at Outkast – that shit works perfectly. I’ve never questioned the pair of them. They’re both doing exactly what they need to do. It’s like playing Battleships where every peg if filled in and they’re not missing anything. You might receive that initial hate at first and that ‘this is not what it’s meant to sound like’. But once you get that respect it’s there and solid. So, you’ve got to go through the whips on the back and slaps in the face from people when you’re a new artist, but it’s a part of getting respect from the people listening if you want to do your own thing.”

Going it alone and signing to XL after independence…

Mikey: “See, when we came here the first time and met up with the staff, we sat out and talked about music and creativity and people we like with the head of the company. And when the head of company can come and sit and talk tit for tat about their love for whatever that’s already a good sign. And their track record of the super-dope artists they’ve put out is a plus too.”

Chuck: “When all your favourite players are on one team you know who to support.”

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Video: The Cool Kids, ‘Black Mags’

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RATATAT

2008-07-10T07:59:00.001-07:00

Whereas most acts get berated for churning out material with the same formula, Brooklyn instrumental duo Ratatat’s return with LP3 and the same hurdy-gurdy waltz they’ve always had avoids such a pitfall, as their material proves as intoxicating as ever.

“Always different, always the same”? Pretty much. After using Björk’s house for the tail end of the recording of second album Classics, Mike Stroud and Evan Mast decided to bunk up and lay down the record at Old Soul Studios, full of dusty Wurlitzers and discarded harpsichords to satisfy their warped musical tendencies. As a result, their new record entangles as many Arabian epilogues as Daft Punk cushioned basslines.

Mast guides us through LP3 and how they’d rather have a sparrow providing vocals than Lil’ Wayne.

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Only taking a few of weeks to record, as opposed to the months that previous albums took to write, would it be fair to say that LP3 was written during something of a glut of inspiration?
Yes that’s a good way to describe it. We rented this studio for 40 days and 40 nights and just got really deep into making music. We made something like 25 songs during that time, start to finish. I’ve never really experienced anything like it before. It felt like we got caught up in a fast moving current. We were like El Niño and LP3 was the Gulf of Mexico.

What do you put this glut down to?
I think a lot of things just crystallised all at once. We had been out touring for about two years, playing shows all over the world. It was a really amazing and inspiring time - to see crowds of people showing up at our shows, in countries we've never even been to before. So we'd had all these great experiences and we went into the studio with a very positive feeling. We also found the perfect studio at the perfect time. We were very lucky.

Do you see the record as a continuation of the same themes you picked at on Classics, or a record removed from previous ventures?
It'd been so long since we recorded Classics (released in 2006) I wasn't really thinking much about those songs. I think LP3 is pretty far removed from that, actually. Of course it’s still me and Mike though, so certain ideas carry over. I think ’Dura’ sounds a bit like Classics - that was the first song we made for LP3, so maybe that was the transitional period.

How important was recording at Old Soul to the broader sound?
Old Soul definitely had a influence on the sound. There’re a lot of great instruments there. We were particularly inspired by the harpsichord. It was just amazing to suddenly have access to this new palette of sounds.

Was it a better environment to record in than Björk’s house?
Björk's house was amazing in its own way, but when we recorded there we basically just transplanted our home studio into her house. So the environment changed, but the tools were exactly the same as what we'd already been used to. At Old Soul we had a lot of new stuff to play with, so a lot of ideas came out of that.

Ratatat, Classics and LP3: is it fair to say that Ratatat struggle with record titles?
Would you prefer something like Viva La Vida? In Rainbows? Personally, I think we nailed it.

Would you say LP3 is better or worse ‘party record’ compared to previous records?
It's better for parties than previous records, and I don't just mean our records. I mean all records.

Can we expect another instalment in your remix series?
We haven't been working on any hip-hop remixes lately. I’ve been getting really into making videos though, so I’ve had the thought to do a DVD mixtape with videos. There's a lot to do though. I don't know if I’ll really find the time for it.

Who do you think has the portfolio to front Ratatat on a full-time basis: Lil’ Wayne or Jay-Z?
Shit, it almost pains me to admit it, but I think I’d go with Wayne at the moment. I only say that because I some of my most favourite albums were made by Jay-Z. I just haven't been as excited about his recent stuff. If we ever got a vocalist, it'd have to be some kind of bird. Birds have a double set of vocal chords so they can create two tones at once. Their vocal chords are also situated at the bottom of their oesophagus, which gives them much more flexibility than humans, which is why they can create such a broad range of sounds. Human voices are really quite limited.

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Video: ‘Mirando’, from LP3

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You’ve strayed from The Knife to Missy Elliott when remixing. Who is the most absurd person you’ve been asked to meddle beats for?
Fergie.

Going back at bit, but ‘Seventeen Years’ was used to advertise the Hummer H2, whereas ‘Bustelo’ was used to soundtrack the Jaguar driving experience. What ride typifies the Ratatat sound?
We started out on a hang glider. Moved on to a Lambo’. I think now we're approaching hydrofoil.

There seems a Balkan pomp underpinning LP3. Was there any temptation to go the full hog and leave the synths behind for a focused gypsy sensibility?
I think you can have synthesizers and still have a focused gypsy sensibility. In fact, that is what LP3 aims to prove. If LP3 was an essay that would be its title.

How do you respond to the claim: “Ratatat will be signed by Star Trak as the understudies of The Neptunes”?
I haven't signed anything yet. We're negotiating for a bigger advance and a company car.

Finally, for people shelling out for the record, what is the perfect setting to listen to LP3?
Put your head in between the biggest, bassiest speakers you can find, slowly turn the volume knob until it becomes painful, then turn it back slightly or you'll damage your ears - you'll need those for LP4. Turn the lights down, if not off. You might want to close your eyes, but you don’t have to. Don’t read anything though. If you need to get up to get a snack or use the restroom, wait for the end of the song, press pause and go do what you have to do. Don’t listen from the other room, the sounds will be muffled. That’s fine for subsequent listenings, but first time listeners should really be focusing here. Listen to the whole record. I know 42 and a half minutes is a lot of time to ask of you, but I think you will find that the songs will reward you for your attention. Most importantly please don't listen through laptop speakers or the free ear plug headphones that came with your mp3 player. Give it a real go on a proper sound system. Otherwise you'll be missing out on some important frequencies.

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That is science talking. Follow those instructions and you’ll have those bowels back in working order.

Label Focus #17: KOMPAKT

2008-07-10T07:58:00.000-07:00

Under various guises, one way or another, KOMPAKT has existed for 15 years as of last month. The label celebrated with Gui Boratto, Burger/Voigt, Thomas Fehlman and Mouse on Mars all performing at The Dome last month. The Cologne-based imprint began when Wolfgang Voigt, along with brother Reinhard, Jürgen Paape and Jorg Burger, founded Delirium in 1993. In 1998 all expanded with KOMPAKT made the bonafide umbrella for the shops, label and distribution (for such labels as Traum and Dial) to work under after the initial success of Voigt’s various imprints, particularly Profan - critically lauded as the pinnacle of microhouse in the mid-90s.

Alongside fellow KOMPAKT chiefs Paape and Michael Mayer, Voigt has shaped his own strain of micro under such aliases as Grungerman, Wasserman and Mike Ink, but most notably with the ethereal techno of GAS, returning this month with the reissued release of Gas, Zauberberg, Konigsforst and Pop as the 4-disc collection Nah Und Fern, conveniently coinciding with KOMPAKT’s recent anniversary celebrations. We spoke to Voigt, president of the label, about the past and present of one of the most innovative co-op’s going.

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Can you explain the motivations behind starting the KOMPAKT label, away from Profan and Studio1?

Profan and Studio1 were labels were for Voigt releases only. The idea behind KOMPAKT is to provide a strong platform for various kinds of sound styles. KOMPAKT was and still is the label where innumerable demos submitted from all over the world became famous records.

How important do you think having all the sub-labels?

From a certain business size on, sub-labels allow you to better organize all the releases and the work involved. And moreover, they provide the best platform to release different music styles. Sub-labels are fun because you can react very fast to sub-trends.

What do you feel has been the most significant KOMPAKT release? And which are you most proud of?

I think it is up to the listener to decide which KOMPAKT release he likes most. The label has always covered a really broad spectrum of different music styles. Honestly, I cannot tell which one of all the releases was the best, because every single release was always a heartfelt decision. Each one seems the best at the time of its release.

For someone trying to understand what KOMPAKT is about what is the one release you'd recommend from your catalogue?

After more than 300 releases, it is in fact really hard for newcomers to get an overall perspective on the KOMPAKT cosmos. The best thing you can do is to listen to the yearly KOMPAKT TOTAL and POP AMBIENT compilation releases to get a representative overview.

How has Cologne influenced the way you operate? How crucial was having the shop as a hub of activity?

Not Cologne had an effect on KOMPAKT, it was the other way round: KOMPAKT had a vital effect on Cologne. The shop was really important.

On the one hand, it was great to celebrate our enthusiasm for techno music thanks to the constant supply of fresh music. On the other hand, it was a real advantage that we could offer home-productions a place of direct reflexion under one roof.

--- BURGER/VOIGT LIVE AT KOMPAKT TOTAL 8, 2007
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How has having the label helped or hindered your own musical efforts?

At long sight, to run a label as big as KOMPAKT is rather counterproductive for your own creativity. It involves a lot of time and the excessive occupation with external input can be an obstacle as it affects your own creative work and ideas.

How do you feel the label has changed over the last 10 years?

We are in constant and consequent development, yet we have never lost track of our own characteristic style. We love to make spontaneous decisions on releases in order to surprise both, our fans and ourselves. Over the years, profile album projects have become more and more important. The so-called author techno.

Do you still see KOMPAKT as “a castle that you never want to leave”?

The original quote is: “...a castle you never want to leave, if you do not want to”. The quote refers to a comparison of KOMPAKT and Andy Warhol’s Factory and to Wolfgang Voigt’s very own life draft. KOMPAKT might remind a bit of a castle but it is an open castle, with gates wide open towards the world.

How do you see the role of record labels' changing in the next few years? Has the move into the digital age been a good or bad thing for KOMPAKT?

The history of KOMPAKT is the history of the vinyl record in the DJ age. Although KOMPAKT is a contemporary, flexible company, we believe that a digital world and digital music sales without any haptic music sales would represent an irresponsible cultural loss of values.

Are there any records you regret having put out? Whether you disliked the music, because the artist was a jerk to work with or otherwise.

The catalogue number XXX is really a nightmare and if I had only known before what kind of “jerk” the artist XXX was, I then...

Where would you like to see the label in another ten years?

Right here.

How would KOMPAKT’s eulogy read?

I think this is up to the others...

Which German footballer do you feel encapsulates KOMPAKT?

Birgit Prinz.

Currently on KOMPAKT’s record player...

ABBA.

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KOMPAKT release GAS’s Nah Und Fern collection on June 10.

Roaming Free: pop profanities Wild Beasts on their surreal balancing act

2008-07-10T07:57:00.001-07:00

“I did an Irish Car Bomb once,” starts up pencil-‘tached balladeering lead Hayden Thorpe.

“You have to down the Guinness before the Baileys curdles.”

Comparing Jägerbomb experiences isn’t quite what you’d expect walking in to meet the modest Kendal gents, but it’s a welcome introduction to the warped world of the intoxicating Wild Beasts.

Resembling something of a No Man’s Land between the off-kilter pop of Orange Juice and a post-war church fete, all doilies and dancing, there is a timeless, surreal charm to the outfit. A deranged detail lies underneath Thorpe’s beguiling falsetto operatics, talk of “chips with cheese” and a sense of humour not far removed from the pages of Viz (more). So is there a conscious ‘spanky bottom’ sensibility to the forthcoming LP, Limbo, Panto?

A smirk curls across Thorpe’s face at the remark. “That sense of humour and awareness doesn’t get old. My favourite albums are from bands that become more concentrated, and even parodies of what they are, as they go on. There is that element of 'spanky bottom' and what you can get away with, which is something that is exciting to push.

“There is that sweet spot between being outrageous and how-the-fuck-can-we-
get-away-with-that and yet being acceptable and accessible.”

Bassist and baritone to Thorpe’s shrill vocal, Tom Fleming joins. “You’ve kind of got to go there and come back, push it above the threshold and bring it back a bit to understand where you lie. We’re bobbing between right and wrong. It’s a question of both how playful we can be and how serious we can be.”

As glorious as they are nauseating, the balance to the ludicracies being struck is somewhat detailed in the decision to title their magnificent debut Limbo, Panto.

“We didn’t have a title until the end of the record. We had a song called ‘My Home, The Ghetto’ which was one of our first songs and had the words “limbo, panto” in it. It was a terrible song and that was about as much good that came from it, but we feel it depicts the duality in the album between the limbo – that quite morose, tragic state – and the panto – which is the dramatic, larger-than-life sensibility. So it was making a panto out of the limbo and making the misery theatrical.”

--- Video: ‘The Devil’s Crayon’
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Revitalising, refreshing, but with one foot sunk firmly into some fictional heyday, if not in their braces-and-boots get-up alone, Wild Beasts are truly removed, surreally difficult to place. But for all the wincing vocal acrobatics there is a noble pop sensibility that underpins the remarkable bawl. Pop sensationalists?

“We feel we make pop music that is accessible, and universal in that we’re not trying to catch on to a certain audience. That’s our ideal and I don’t mind being told that the ideal is wrong but we make unpretentious pop music that can be appreciated by a wide range of people. In terms of the future we just want to have that strain of pop music which is both creative and outrageous,” says Thorpe.

“For me, the front line of pop is Radio 1, where the battles are lost and won. You grow up with that music so it makes a vast impression,” finishes Fleming on their dose of musical aniseed.

Truth is, it’s not a line you expect these young gents to breach any time soon. As eager as some may be to proclaim their recent release of ‘The Devil’s Crayon’ as an utter triumph, such unequivocal madness is not made for Woolworths. So, if they were to have one bona-fide pop hit of yesteryear to call their own?

Thorpe: “‘Billie Jean’.”

“‘When Doves Cry’,” replies Fleming.

“‘Nothing Compares 2 U’,” comes the trumping response.

That tag of being ‘eccentric’ is one to be suffered as well as celebrated; sat as the oddball everyone knows in the corner. “Wild Beasts aren't concerned with being of the modern, or being of the renaissance, being baggy pantsed or being tight pantsed, being in a scene or being in a place. Wild Beasts' music just is,” reads the record’s inlay and underlines they appreciative the withdrawn otherworldliness. It’s one that fellow Cumbrian compatriots British Sea Power have recently bemoaned and that Wild Beasts see as a clumsy peg to hang them from.

“I think these ‘quirks’ are often structural to the music and implies they’re like little decorations when I don’t think it’s the case at all. I think they’re integral,” exhausts Fleming on their rockist seniors. “With their lyrical twists that are seen as unusual, I think they are a way of seeing the world which we feel we understand, or at least empathise with.”

Thorpe interjects. “In Kendal people don’t see us as eccentric. We’re only eccentric in that we want to be musicians.”

Young ducks seized, Wild Beasts signed to Domino last year off the back of a string of releases on Bad Sneakers. It was time to play the waiting game and off to Malmö to gather their thoughts and record an album.

“When you’re 18 you think you can write the best album in the world, but it took ‘til we were 22,” remarks Thorpe. “It wasn’t as if we were trying to get on the back of a smash-and-grab scene so we were lucky enough to be able to wait and, to be honest, it then took forever to record the album. But looking back on it, it was an important fermentation period.

“It's live by the sword, die by the sword. If we do try to be that different then we’re going find that group of people who will just think ‘this is fucking awful, get this off my stereo’.”

It seems fair to assume that may well be the case. Outsiders splitting opinions, Wild Beasts are obtuse pop profanities that should be celebrated.

Feathers Ruffled: Dirty Projectors rule the roost

2008-07-10T07:56:00.000-07:00

Within minutes of meeting Dave Longstreth he’s carelessly cooing a Ne-Yo song as everyone else settles down around him. Weigh his wavering avant-garde up however you like, all these ears are hearing that’s akin to his broken songbird croon is Parades-era Prince. Last month it was Green Gartside’s white boy soul. Before that, Arthur Russell. It goes some way to illustrating how difficult it is to pin him and his Dirty Projectors down.

After reworking Black Flag’s seminal hardcore racket Damaged as Rise Above, a batch of off-kilter attempts from Longstreth to reinterpret the 1981 record from memory, a decade on from when he last opened up the cassette cart, dusty eyes opened on an act that had an impressive back-catalogue to delve into. With three-chord thrashes replaced with fractured art-pop (in the meantime toning down the strong orchestral focus that had underpinned Longstreth’s output since the release of The Graceful Fallen Mango back in 2002), it was quite some interpretation, far removed from just another covers record.

When speaking to Deerhoof’s John Dieterich at the tail-end of last year, he had nothing but praise to lavish on Longstreth & Co., labelling their Black Flag molestation “crushing brilliance”. Previously tying Dirty Projectors with the same bow wrapped round Beyonce’s B’Day, they share a similar brand of broken noise-pop to Deerhoof, but it seemed obvious to get down to the R‘n’B roots of the act, only for Longstreth to rebuff the question.

“I don’t really know. To me it’s difficult to differentiate between pop music and, like, rock music – it doesn’t make that much sense anymore […] It’s less that I’d avoid such a categorisation as I’d like to steer you away from it just because I don’t think it makes any sense to think of us like that.”

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Amber Coffman, Dave Longstreth,
Brian Mcomber, Angel Deradoorian

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We meet the day after the Brooklyn outfit announce they’ve signed a deal with Domino that’ll see them release two records simultaneously next year. That they’re being carted around for a day of press with the Rough Trade cronies seems odd for all, especially when asking about the forthcoming double-release and whether that is a risky approach to take when writing.

“Oh no, it’s the opposite. One of them is more in the vein of what we’ve been doing live; it’ll sound a lot more like that than, say, something from The Getty Address. And then there’s another one that I’m currently making…”

A hand reaches across Longstreth’s face, the first of many over the course over the interview. “That’s so Muhammad Ali,” remarks Longstreth, as Amber Coffman (guitar, lulls) attempts to pick a fly out mid-air. She missed. For the rest of the interview he ogles that darting insect with far more focus than any question put out to feed off.

Longstreth eventually gets 'round to closing the sentence. “…But then there is going to be a record more focused around a load of different frames of sound.”

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‘Gimme Gimme Pt.1’ (from Rise Above) at the Knitty Factory, NYC

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Longstreth has eternally mixed and matched musicians on previous records, so that all three of the current accompanying roster (Coffman, Angel Deradoorian, Brian Mcomber) are sat round with Longstreth would suggest that, having been together for over a couple of years, this is perhaps a more permanent line-up than previous incarnations. The transition towards a more group-based effort certainly seemed to effect Rise Above with the orchestral focus of old dropped “for the time being” with all scaled down somewhat.

“I’m thinking of these ideas and these things happening together and what’s the natural way to realise that. It seems fair to say that the orchestral format or weird cut-up chamber music isn’t necessarily the way go about it.”

With the numbers of musicians Longstreth has managed to go through in the last few years through recording and touring, Longstreth insists that any glimpses of a Mark E. Smith tyrant in his approach to writing, turfing out members to install new waves of inspiration, are nothing for the surrounding roster to worry about and that his old attitude to contributors was different to the current set-up.

“It was a good relationship but it was that I wrote the arrangements and had no idea what it was for or what it would become. There was that distance […] I can understand the sense it makes but there are enough elements happening in the songs to make it difficult and we’ve just managed to form a good team.”

Based in Brooklyn, the outfit has seen many other acts from the New York borough rise up the ranks, particularly with the preppy bop of Vampire Weekend, headed by Ezra Koenig - a former bit-part player in Dirty Projectors - winning a wide audience. But rather than the Brooklyn coterie of avant-garde acts that have eternally held hands from record to record (with endless splits shared between Black Dice, Gang Gang Dance and Animal Collective), the band insist they feel removed from such a scene, and that any focus on them off the back of other success stories shouldn’t hinder the act whatsoever.

“I don’t think so, I don’t think anyone takes it seriously enough. It’s definitely the cultural capital of the States and so you have to expect generations coming through.”

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‘Time Birthed Spilled Blood’ (from The Getty Address)

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Usually a failsafe bloated epitaph for greying Strat-straddlers, concept records have often been the last resource for those lacking inspiration. Odd, then, that whether using a fictional incarnation of the Eagles’ Don Henley as the central character on 2005’s The Getty AddressRise Above, Dirty Projectors have so regularly used recurring themes and concepts to base records on. tied together with stray Eagles lyrics, or with the aforementioned

“It never happens very consciously. I don't think that I went about creating concept albums per-se but was more interested in creating a unifying body of songs, a set of characters to work around. It makes sense for me, I don’t think either of the two were me ploughing particular depths.”

As for Longstreth’s eternal references in songs to finches across the six records he’s released, he deems there is little meaning in the regular inclusion of the feathered passerines, insisting that it’s little more than the fact his parents were into bird watching when he was growing up.

Even after an afternoon of fly-swatting and easy conversation it feels that, however provoked, only the surface has been scratched on what lies deeper into Dirty Projectors' splendid, sideways world. But, like grabbing glimpses of some exotic bird, it somehow seems right that way.

Animal Collective - Water Curses (Domino)

2008-07-10T07:55:00.000-07:00

Released a year on from its parent album, these EP outings tend to offer up nothing more than giblets not worth the salt, hosed-down versions for aficionados and few others. Water Curses? Quite.

But Animal Collective have been releasing post-record leftovers for the last few LPs with the neo-tribal haunts of Prospect Hummer (2005) and People (2006) both fine concluding chapters for Sung Tongs and Feels, these coming before the Baltimore co-op dived headfirst into the electronic swamp of last year’s blissful sugar-rush album, Strawberry Jam (review).

Now far removed from their initial psych freak-folk tag, Noah Lennox’s sedating stints as Panda Bear seem to have informed proceedings, with the usual exhausting haywire procession here toned down, with the epiphanic screamo tendencies beaten to a post-Person Pitch pulp, hazy amidst the dub hubbub. Even at their most docile Animal Collective previously managed to sound manic, even with the tranquil lull of ‘Leaf House’ underpinned by a frenzied hullabaloo with Lennox and David Portner (Avey Tare) gargling away. Odd, then, that Water Curses clambers up pop plateaus with a far more straight-laced approach than evident in previous output, a marriage between the placid Person Pitch and the mayhem of Strawberry Jam, with Portner’s unhinged Jackanory rhymes a subdued jabber, slipping in haunting remarks that he’ll “slip down your throat” between the usual verses of vivid hypercolour imagery.

‘Water Curses’ is a bout of sickening carousel chimes, tin-pan Tropicália and corroded dub (haven’t we been here before this year?), but as opposed to El Guincho’s draining fanfare Animal Collective are just as remarkable leading a maddened march as they are when introspectively inspecting their acid-splattered insides during moments of calm. Whilst everyone, from thesp beaus to Battles’ ginger stepchild, pine after Dave Sitek’s attentions as if he’s the William Orbit for the Pitchfork generation, it is producer Scott Colburn that has underpinned Animal Collective’s transformation from primal buffoonery to off-kilter electro-pop extraordinaires, with all but ‘Seal Eyeing’ recorded during his Strawberry Jam‘Street Flash’ working with the same paint palette as ‘Winter Wonderland’, Porter’s disjointed delivery drowned by lumbering basslines, it resembles cLOUDDEAD’s rasping raps and deadened beats. sessions, marking similar tracks the record rode down. With the methodical chug of

Difficult to pin down, ever glad to fly the nest, Water Curses gives few clues to where Animal Collective want to head next, but is all the better for providing a rare moment of retrospective restraint as we all play catch-up.

Awesome offcuts.

The Fall - Imperial Wax Solvent (Sanctuary)

2008-07-10T07:52:00.000-07:00

He’s there again. Propped in the corner. Back stooped. Ale-soaked tongue hanging out his haggard gob, slaying gentle folk ordering their mid-afternoon spritzers and snacks with monosyllabic jabs. Fuck. He’s caught your eye, called you over. Speed-addled gums sucking away to keep from the indignity of having dentures drop out, readying conversation. Leaning a wiry limb round your neck in a grasp indecisive, between throttle and affectionate clinch. It’s the same story you’ve heard that awful cunt tell 26 times before, through three decades, in differing states of intoxication. Today, though, there’s a contented gurn plastered across his face. He’ll be back to his bitter bastard self tomorrow; lap it up. “I’m a 50-year-old man”“And I like it”. he starts.

And so, Imperial Wax Solvent, outing #27 for The Fall, opens with the kinked jazz of ‘Alton Towers’, a weather-beaten reincarnation of Edvard Grieg’s ‘In The Hall Of The Mountain King’ with Mark E. Smith’s whispered drawl about as sexy as it’s ever been, reduced to a haunting husk. For a fellow that harbours such an utter contempt for the world of gash-flashing celebrity culture Smith sure dedicates a fair share of attention to its smug faces, sniping at “the spawn of J Loaded Brown” and “L. Laverne” within the opening minute of it all, later turning his tongue to Jeffrey Archer and Jeremy Kyle. But this skulking introduction is one of the few moments on IWS that could truly be identified as delving into unfamiliar waters. Instead it’s those perennial rugged Fall basslines of old that hug the limelight.

Ever toying with techno throughout the ‘90s (to particular effect on The Unutterable in 2000), Smith’s recent escapades with Mouse On Mars as Von Südenfed provide a sore-gummed influence, with the scattered acid-house remnants of Tromatic Reflexxions rearing up most unmistakably in the industrial hip-swivelling instrumental grind of ‘Taurig’. MOM lynchpin Andi Toma contributes to the production, alongside heyday mainstay Grant Showbiz, whose contribution was sorely missed on last year’s empty-lunged exhalation Reformation Post TLC, with its turgid production drawing the eye away from its occasional delights. Again, rather than blanket-wrapped by his backing band, Smith’s worn bingo call vocal - less bafflingly prophetical from the man whom “used to be psychic, but I drank my way out of it” - sits high in the mix over his makeshift roster’s brutal brouhaha, his maddened riddles the centre of attention, particularly when ‘Fifty Year Old Man’ – clocking in at over eleven minutes – rears up with Smith beating his breast, proud of this middle-aged mayhem he’s stoked up.

Whether trademark terrace chants, Elena Poulou’s usual sickly sweet Europop delivery on ‘I’ve Been Duped’ (not far removed from Billy Childish’s pairing up with beau Nurse Julie) or Smith’s usual nanny state baiting on ‘Latch Key Kid’ (it’s difficult to not to imagine ‘Japanese prison camp’) the record is typified by resounding optimism, even with the gun-toting ‘Is This New’’s band-savaging or the psychotic psychedelic closer ‘Exploding Chimney’ laying on debonair putdowns, with Smith mentioning rat poison as if he’s vermin you can’t kill off. There’s even enough time for the Iggy-adulating Prestwich priest, as with ‘Elves’ way back in 1984 and a hundred times in between, to find another excuse to regurgitate ‘Wanna Be My Dog’ with a ramshackle cover of Brit blues cohort the Groundhogs’ ‘Strange Town’. All good fun y’see.

So sit in that corner and soak it up, Smith spitting those same nonsensical stories you’ve had jabbered away to you so many times before, because, frankly, after a few duds peppered over the past few years’ releases, Imperial Wax Solvent is another remarkable batch of brilliantly deranged tales no whiskey-breathed war veteran across the bar could trump.

Harmonia - Queen Elizabeth Hall (18/04/2008)

2008-04-25T09:10:00.000-07:00

Ushered on as idle chatter dies away and pin-drop silence fills the QEH, Harmonia set up shop in a manner not far removed from Dr. Gunther von Hagens’ prepping his televised lobotomies, readying to rip brain tissues for all to gawp at in fascination as they gnaw on supper. As Michael Rother, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Möebius skulk on towards each of their desks it doesn’t half seem like we’re sat in at a Regency autopsy viewing gallery waiting for an innocent serf to be torn open or, worse still, Peter Ebdon’s latest Crucible-based tedium. But these collaborating professors don’t want to dissect your spleen nor rack up laborious 147s, they want to burrow back into their well dug krautrock furrows for the first time ever in the UK. As all opens, a father and his Wotsit-stained, snot-drenched son find their seat. Poor fucker.

After reforming to perform last year following three decades pursuing various alternative avenues (with Roedelius releasing the acclaimed Inlandish with Tim Story earlier this year), Harmonia marked their return with the release of Live 1974 for all to rekindle memories of what was or, for young Kharas and I, familiarise ourselves with their well-noted live incarnation, often withdrawn from their tendency for doting ambience. But opening with a batch of comatose beats in unenthused fits and starts it’s not quite the start that seemed obvious to anticipate. Projections overhead play clips of the outfit from their initial days circa ‘73-‘76 with flashbacks to three stern-looking men manning vast machinery, with three weathered but buff gentlemen in front stood before a modest array of equipment, seemingly not much more than a sampler and laptop each (and is that a CD player? CHEATS!).

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Quit crying, kid. A solitary box of tricks is all Panda Bear and el Guincho have needed to enthral in recent months so it’s enough for these Kosmische forefathers and, soon enough, rising out of the minimal chirrups and meandering ambience, methodical Motorik kicks interrupt, (fitting given the recent death of NEU! noisenik Klaus Dinger, who established the signature beat), with ‘Deluxe’ getting an outing in one form or another, serving to point the influence the trio have had, whether upon the intricate micro-house of Ricardo Villalobos or the straight-laced imitation from ex-Tussle man Arp. These waves come and go, lapping against wine-soaked minds ‘til heads start to droop towards the end of the hour and a half procession, until Rother’s crunching guitar hooks flood the event with striding NEU!-isms and all wish this Friday draw was a place for bitter-tongued revelry rather than polite inspection, and offer up the remarkable spectacle that was anticipated.

The setting is both the making and breaking of the show. For all the cosy comfort of watching Harmonia in such a lethargic state this music needn’t be such a sterilised sat-down study. Regardless, the kid may be sobbing tears of infuriation into mother’s knit, but it’s a remarkable showcase.

Photography by Maria Jefferis

El Guincho (Stool Pigeon)

2008-04-25T09:09:00.000-07:00

Knitting parts of Tropicália, space-age pop and calypso together, El Guincho’s Alegranza is one glorious patchwork piece. Bossa nova cadence and psychedelic lunacy wash up against each other to create a record of captivating reference points; a chaotic collage as enchanting as it is exhausting.

El Guincho is 24-year-old Canary Islander Pablo Díaz-Reixa, who, having spent the last few years contributing to Barcelonan outfit Coconot’s maddened Animal Collective-esque procession, decided to go it alone after envisaging an archipelago idyll of his own. “I actually started writing material for this record a long time ago but I didn't know it was going to be a part of Alegranza. I really wanted to study musicology and research on islands’ music.”

Though Díaz-Reixa never ended up at university, his debut record (which takes its title from an uninhabited isle off Lanzarote) seems a decent stab at independent analysis. Envisioned off the Catalunyan coast, Alegranza is reminiscent of the dub hubbub and mesmeric carnival march Animal Collective lynchpin Noah Lennox led us on as Panda Bear with last year’s Person Pitch, with the same chattering drums and infectious Jackanory rhyme harmonies riding high above the underlying mayhem.

But Díaz-Reixa is keen to indicate that the reference points shared with Person Pitch are those that were obvious for Alegranza to have drawn, rather than a mere numbskulled imitation. Having grown up surrounded by Latin, African and Spanish influences, it was an environment that made it difficult to involve himself with the usual indie mainstay. “It was really hard to find a Pavement record in Gran Canaria,” he says. “Almost everyday I listened to Los Gofiones whether I liked it or not.”

Though he admits to being inspired by fifties ‘50s exotica artists like Martin Denny, Díaz-Reixa insists that the key informant for the record was J Dilla’s deathbed masterpiece Donuts. He used similar sampling techniques to the infamous Detroit producer, layering syncopated drum loops over the original tracks to breathe a new life into lost tapes of archive material from across the globe.

Recently herded over the Atlantic with the rest of Europe’s prize cattle to showcase himself at SXSW only to be asked what part of Mexico Spain was in. Simultaneously, Beggars imprint XL decided that Alegranza deserved a proper release, following its limited circulation earlier this year. With that and the various festival appearances lined up for the summer, one would assume that El Guincho’s profile is bound to rise as all clamber to dance to his hypnotic beat. However, removed from the usual fanfare, he seems sure to remain suitably set adrift as an exotic treasure. World Music, in the truest sense.

Happy hardcore: How Black Dice mutated into...

2008-04-18T08:41:00.002-07:00

Load Blown’s hiccups of frenzied beats competing for space are a long way from home for Brooklyn noise cadets Black Dice. As its lethargic rhythms rub up against frenetic gabba, the 2007 release (review) is a sonic wash of discarded pop hooks boiled down to form a sickening soup, a broth of maddened party tracks far removed from their initial post-hardcore incarnation.

We might have been over some of this before, but, fully formed in 1999, like a chrysalis opening up to reveal no beautiful butterfly cocooned away but a skanky moth, the act decided back in 2002 it was time for a change from their early manifestation of carnal hardcore – celebrated throughout the New York underground, releasing numerous limited 7”s and EPs on DIY imprints (particularly Mike Simonetti’s Troubleman) – by signing with DFA.

The decision left something of a wide-eyed disbelief on the faces of onlookers, but equal to a hospitable wren making a compassionate gesture by continuing to feed an egg-toppling, nest-nicking cuckoo (see) Black Dice (Bjorn Copeland, Eric Copeland, Aaron Warren) far from alienated their adoring hardcore aficionados, instead embracing the decision to mutate from fisting raucousness to fractured electro squall. Beaches & Canyons marked the transformation and Copeland, B. guides us through events:

“When we started, the only labels that were even close to putting out what we were recording were hardcore labels. So for the first couple of years that anyone could even put out a 7” of ours was amazing. By the time we started doing stuff with Troubleman, [Simonetti] seemed a little more ambitious than other labels.

“The shows used to be a lot different and used to be really physically violent and just like bloody, fucked-up events. As soon as people came to the shows expecting that nobody wanted to put on a show. I feel that the direction we took musically was natural and marked us using the same fucked up sounds that our instruments were making when banging on them and then starting basing songs more around these abstract sounds rather than chord progressions.”

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Video: ‘KOKOMO’ (from Load Blown, 2007)

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Under the wreckage a real pop sensibility exists to the experimentalists, FM influences being crammed in. As opposed to 2002’s ethereal soundscape Beaches & Canyons, Load Blown was a conscious effort by the outfit to harness more of a pop focus, a collection of tracks released as EPs in the 18 months leading up to its issuing as an LP proper.

“What we wanted to do was create something that read like a pop record in the sense that you could break it down into a series of singles.

“A Black Dice song could almost be any song – it could be a Kenny Rogers song – if you were able to zoom in close enough to a point where you weren’t seeing smooth bass, but where the frequencies were all of a sudden overtaking the song and the melody and becoming the keystone to the song. I feel our inspirations for everything are very much rooted in classic rock, or like television or shitty movies. I like the idea of taking elements of pop culture and mutating it because even when you’re referencing pop culture at least there is something people can identify with in one way as opposed to have your whole set being based around bondage or something that is so extreme it lacks a particular reference point.

“For us though, we still feel like a punk band. The way that we operate and the type of energy – whether it’s a band going nuts or the sounds – the notion of punk and its confrontation is something that remains central. The shows are always interesting because people are often unclear with what their role is in the room.”

And the one pop song Bjorn wishes Black Dice could have written?

“Something off the first three Os Mutantes albums. But then I’ll go back to my record collection and it might be like a Van Halen song. Somewhere in between. That’s our way.”

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Video: LIVE AT CHAIN REACTION, CA (hardcore days, 19/05/2002)

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Rather than the previous off-shoot projects from the cohort (particularly brother Eric’s involvements with Animal Collective’s Dave Portner) being far more fanfare than final product, Eric released Hermaphrodite at the tail-end of 2007. Bjorn states this was “a big fuck you to people and helped me remind myself of why I got involved with music in the first place”.

It’s one of the few moments that Bjorn shows any genuine resent, by increasingly has a tendency to casually snap into rants regarding the way they’re often perceived. Copeland clearly finds that promoters expect the same rapturous adulation that their peers Animal Collective and Battles have picked up over the last year as an irritant, mentioning it throughout the interview and brings in the wider topic of whether they feel they’ve benefited from certain affiliations.

“I can’t tell really. Yes and no. I think that we’ve benefited a lot in just having people around us you understand and are supportive of what we are doing and the Animal Collective guys, Lightning Bolt, Wolf Eyes, those are all bands that I feel operate in an extremely honourable way. I got in some shitty conversation with a promoter the other evening because he seemed to think that because we’re friends with Animal Collective it’s the same thing and we’ll pull the same size crowds. We were around six years before they were a fucking band. That’s the only shit that drives me nuts, when they ask about our friends all the time. ‘Oh, what’s up with Panda Bear? You know Battles? What’s Gang Gang Dance like?’ They’re all great people and want to champion what they’re doing, but it’s difficult.”

With their own trademark bowel explosions, Black Dice have had to master their sound, with their peers in order to delve down the holes they’ve dug themselves. Again, from absolute calm, he’s briefly pent up as I mention mastering their signature sound.

“People get irate with our sound and, particularly sound guys (glances over to Cargo’s sound guy; we’re talking at the London venue) and some people just don’t understand that we had to learn our sound from scratch. The only way we figured out how to make our stuff was getting together with Lightning Bolt to work the same sound issues out. There was nobody to teach you, and it was liberating because you make your own standards as you go along. The rock band is no longer the cool romantic idea it once was.”

Whilst this therapeutic session continues it seems suitable to ask how he perceives the way they are covered. Often, when writing about the Brooklyn scene, journalists have had their claws out with Black Dice, as if they’re the lame duck writers are willing to shoot off in order to validate the other acts.

“It’s frustrating. I do feel that happens. I guess I wish that those comments were based more on research. We share practise spaces and helped these bands start out so it gets annoying sometimes when you hear a band you know and you hear sounds that are familiar to when you were touring with them. But it’s more annoying with the promoters asking about why we haven’t sold as many tickets as Battles. I hope we don’t spend our whole career where people only understand what we did in retrospect, which has been the trajectory so far, writing a record and two albums later people really wanting to hear that record. There’s something nice about it but I don’t want to have to worry about not being able to pay rent. But I had Thurston Moore and Jim O’Rourke recently say how no-one would come to their shows and it made me realise.”

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Video: ‘SMILING OFF’ (from Broken Ear Record, 2006)

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Having signed to Animal Collective’s imprint Paw Tracks after five years at DFA given this slightly bitter turn, conversation turns to their time at the hip New York label, where they stood out both as an act on the roster yet, though peripheral, encompassed the ideal DFA was pushing.

“In a lot of ways the label has changed a lot, particularly in its reputation abroad and the way it’s perceived outside of New York is different to the initial vibe when we got involved. They were into shit loads of music: crazy hardcore, Latin jazz, house, techno, fierce punk or whatever, and there did feel a lot of common ground at the time, and it was at a time that The Rapture were also making the switch and had also previously been on Gravity [influential San Diego independent]. At the time it wasn’t quite as etched out, there wasn’t that figurehead like James Murphy – I mean, he was there, but he was all talk as nothing had really happened yet.

“But it was a pain in the arse dealing with EMI and Astralwerks because we just wanted to put music out. The labels are never as adventurous as the bands. We were a nightmare for them. You couldn’t even play the videos because of the epilepsy warnings. I just thought they should market it as some anarchists’ cookbook. People get surprisingly conservative when there’s so much money on the table.”

But standing out as their own baffling procession, the act are far from an obvious outfit to market.

“If we like a band like Bloc Party or some shit like that, where there’s some already very established formula to package it... It’s not that we’re not into that music but it’s like if a band references The Who, it seems stupid to look exactly like The Who and act like The Who and do the same drugs. To me that seems boring, it ignores the specifics that made that initially significant and on the whole just seems contrived. I like the way artists choose to present their music, the way that Parliament or Funkadelic who were a funk band but presenting it as acid rock to gain the audience.”

Getting worked up again, we close on a lighter note: what’s the best environment to listen to Black Dice?

“Our friend Luomo apparently likes to listen to us with his baby when he’s giving him a bath.”

By all means follow these words of advice, just mind drowning in their suffocating soup of mind-numbing bleak beats.

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Black Dice, MySpace, here.

Ecstatic Sunshine - WAY (Cardboard Records)

2008-04-18T08:41:00.001-07:00

And so Baltimore babes Ecstatic Sunshine (Matthew Papich, Dustin Wong, Kieran Gillen) return, with the weaving surf punk episodes of their early incarnation having mutated from intense snapshots to jittering drone passages; those same darting hooks weaving into each other like shattered reggae shards forming a cosy noise knit but now resembling the frenetic glitch-stomp of Black Dice drawn out to form flittering drone-lite.

There’s a bridge in Yes’s ‘Long Distance Runaround’ that I’m sure gave rise to what underpins Ecstatic Sunshine’s cacophonous noise, with the duelling guitars resembling Don Caballero hooks chiming away in their Sunday best. Either way – regardless of their penchant for Rick Wakeman’s lubed prog indulgences – as opposed to the previous brainstorming sessions of debut Freckle Wars (2006, 12 tracks, 31mins) WAY (2008, three tracks, 30mins) instead follows a niche carved out long ago of lumbering drone bouts coated in shimmering hooks like a summery shitstorm hailing as a half-hour typhoon, an awesome unnatural disaster. Citing Glenn Branca besides Brian Eno (“Full Positive Eno World + Pure Trust Branca Cloud”), they churn up their own signature thrashing guitar symphonies.

With opener ‘B’ chiming methodically until stalling 12 minutes in and ‘Herrona’ plays out like a distorted electronic opus, there are clear points of comparison with the recently defunct LA drone-merchants Yellow Swans’ electronic squall. But, whilst those grubby Swans tended to offer up a brand of removed ethereal drone, there’s something comforting about Ecstatic Sunshine’s wash, a sort of discomforting comfort, like having laid out in your deckchair, sand in your jellies, and the sun having gently burnt away your skin, only to then coat your blistering body in a soothing lather of after-sun.

More than content now to wallow in their own cleansing wash, WAY removes many aspects of what initially marked their lunacy-ridden noise-pop out. But, though an admitted level back on the recent disco-drone of Growing’s Lateral (review) and even their fantastic EP release of Living (review) from last year, these noise troupers have set up a decent new stall.

Rather than ever erupting, WAY gently spits away. Still, a sun-scorched spectacle.

The House that punk built: Italians Do It Better

2008-04-18T08:40:00.001-07:00

“Let’s get to know the drums to which we march…”

Turning their backs on you from across the dancefloor, Italians Do It Better are the best cold shoulder you’re going to receive. The release of their compilation record After Dark – sultry, spaced-out acid house, ominous heartless disco drones and layered arpeggio flutters that would make Goblin, Moroder or Dschinghis Khan blush – acted as a roll call from label founder Mike Simonetti and Italians production deity Johnny Jewell as the New Jersey imprint’s roster assembled a remarkable line-up, a collection of bleary-eyed interpretations of former glories and own individual leaps forward.

Vultures like us suddenly swept, yet most of the affiliated acts had spent years lurking in the shadows before the label came about. What seemed crucial was the formation of this makeshift coop, one point for beady eyes to glance at; Chromatics, Professor Genius, Glass Candy all drawn to the ethic of the label after rolling around on their own contentedly enough. But from there others have joined the ranks, recently with the Villalobos-cum-Cluster micro-house of Invisible Conga People and Göteborg cosmic disco cohort Tiedye receiving trademark limited releases to call their own from under the Italians umbrella.

As an offshoot of DIY punk imprint Troubleman Unlimited (TMU), Simonetti started Italians Do It Better at the beginning of 2007 to give Glass Candy a playground of their own to run around in after the release of Love Love Love in 2003 seemed removed from the noise tendencies of the Troubleman posse, with Wolf Eyes, Isis and Black Dice (in their hardcore incarnation) central artists since Simonetti set the label up as a kid in 1993. But from his first love of the US hardcore scene, a fondness for disco bloomed. Simonetti explains how it all came about.

“I released Glass Candy on Troubleman and as Glass Candy became more and more dance style, I noticed the audiences were changing. So I proposed starting a new label for dance music, and Johnny from the band said I should put Glass Candy and Chromatics on the label. It’s strange, because I don’t think these bands would've received the amount of recognition if we were to have kept them on TMU.

“It’s funny what a new coat of paint can do!”

In the way his fanzine Wanna Comminicate? went on to mutate into TMU, the label initially started as nothing more than a blog-based avenue for Simonetti to reveal his sordid dance tendencies. Soon releasing records under the moniker the name lent itself for all affiliated acts to be quickly drawn to associations with Italo-disco, with Giorgio Moroder mentioned more times in the last few months than he was when Donna Summer was prancing round to his beat. But fingers can be pointed in any direction, drawing points of influence though are largely redundant, the output has been as indebted to the Hi-NRG excess of departed disco gent Patrick Cowley as it is the new-wave drift of DNA. All in all, the Italians roster stands out on its own.

“I started a blog to announce my DJ gigs and to write about records I like. This is before we started a label. And the label grew out of that because we all loved the name! We really didn’t think it was going to blow up the way it has.”

Often overlooked by the leering press, dance sub-cultures tend to provide the most refreshing scenes to delve into, suited to the DIY approach Simonetti has been ploughing for over a decade with the constant stream of soft release vinyl. Simonetti is quick to appreciate that the ethic that Troubleman harnessed has been a blueprint brilliantly suited for Italians Do It Better to work round.

“It was a huge help. People think I.D.I.B. is a brand new label, but I’ve been doing TMU for almost 15 years! So I know the ins and outs of the record business, and I know how to handle offers and all that stuff. I would like to think that Johnny and I run I.D.I.B. a lot like a punk label in the aspect that we treat the artists fairly and like to be closer to the fans. We like to give shit away like shirts and CDs. Glass Candy gives away more shirts and CDs than they sell, and we keep free mp3 downloads available on the bands MySpace. Yes, I still run both, but TMU has been laying off the CD releases as CDs are a dying format. We are doing more and more limited vinyl releases.

“After Dark really opened the doors. That release started it all. I think our new Italians sub-label venture is going to be fun. It’s more geared to the heavy record nerds like myself. I cannot disclose any other information though – it’s a secret.” - - -

Video: GLASS CANDY - ‘DIGITAL VERSICOLOR’

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Founded in 1998, Glass Candy released their first three records off their own backs until Simonetti approached the act about releasing a record (Love Love Love) through Troubleman. From there Johnny Jewell, founding member of the New Jersey outfit with Ida No, shifted the focus from no-wave disco to bona-fide dance outfit. Now a central character to all that is I.D.I.B., helping with running of the label with Simonetti, Jewell has also produced the lion’s share of the label’s output. After forming a close allegiance with Chromatics lynchpin Adam Miller when producing the band in 2004, Jewell ended up becoming a full-time figure, as well as now contributing to various other projects, most notably with Farah.

“We [Glass Candy] were a little apprehensive about having someone involved at first, but he’s been great. He’s the only label we know that gives 100 per cent control over the groups. No contracts, no bullshit, just music.

“He was thinking of starting the Italians dance imprint at the same time I started working with Farah. We had discovered Mirage and Chromatics were going in a dancier direction, so we decided to put all the artists coming out of the Suite 304 studio on a label together.”

Suite 304 is Jewell’s nocturnal hideout, a paint warehouse that the Italians lot can only use at night when the noxious gases have settled. It goes some way to typify the way things are done on Italians: low-budget with endless reprints to keep up with demand.

“Last summer I put together the After Dark CD-R for Glass Candy fans to check out the other projects we were feeling. The first 300 copies were coloured by hand by us. We thought it was just a temporary thing and then the disc just blew up. It’s now being repressed for the sixth time.

“In hip-hop, electronic music, disco music, the feel of a crew is so vital. This is our camp and this is how we do it. The association is good for all the artists. We’re all feeling certain rhythms and textures, but putting our own mark on it. Italians Do It Better has a singular vision with multiple sides and each side has its own mood or colour, like a Rubik’s Cube.”

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Video: CHROMATICS - ‘IN THE CITY’

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Since the wave of press that accompanied the release of After Dark, a light has been shone down on the darkened hole within which I.D.I.B. dwell. As a result, since speaking to the pair, they have since stopped doing interviews to retain a certain mystique.

“We don’t read press and Ida doesn’t even have a computer but we hear that it’s been blowing up online, but we don’t have enough time to digest all the media. We originally put the CD out as a limited tour CD-R but the mail order went through the roof so we kept making more. The record is already in its fourth pressing and getting an official LP this month. We had intended for B/E/A/T/B/O/X (review) to be a teaser for a double LP. Ida and I have nine other songs that no-one has heard yet but the demand for B/E/A/T/B/O/X superseded our original plan. Sometimes you have to let go of your concepts and appreciate what’s happening.

“The only way things’ll go bad is if we forget what got us here in the first place. The most important thing is the way the projects work is distillation. All the songs are allowed to marinade in the studio for month before anyone hears them. The label has no regard for the music industry’s process or proper release schedules. Art always comes before business. I think that’s why people find the groups so refreshing. We treat every release like our last and our first. We come out swinging and give everything we can on a record. That’s all we can do. We don’t spend our nights predicting what someone will and will not like. We think music is secondary to art. If the heart and soul is there, it will touch people regardless of the musical aesthetic it is cloaked in. The core of all Italians Do It Better records is soul. Period.”

Removed from a scene with a particular focus, the acts are bound together by nothing but the one parasol held overhead. Based throughout the US, from Portland to Texas, with even their very own Italians, Mirage, when asked what is the one defining factor that ties the Italians Do It Better roster Simonetti’s got it nailed:

“I think the unifying aspect is that they’re all quality releases, all unique in their own way.”

Neo-disco kicks for punk pricks.

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As well as another run of reprints of records from last year, Italians Do It Better release Invisible Conga People (review), Rubies and Tiedye 12”'s.

European tour dates:

CHROMATICS

April
17 Berlin Roter Salon
18 Poznan Lech Party Inspirations
19 London Cafe 1001
21 Glasgow Stereo
23 Brighton Barfly
24 Dublin Andrews Lane Theatre
25 Kortrijk De Kruen
26 Ghent Make Up

GLASS CANDY

May
8 London Cargo
10 Camber Sands ATP vs Pitchfork

Want more? Check Simonetti’s I.D.I.B. blogspot here. MySpace here.

Santo Claws: talking S1W, M.I.A. and Mark Ronson with Santogold

2008-04-18T08:39:00.000-07:00

Some, when writing their debut records, are forced to degrade themselves, lower to standards far below their heady expectations. Some, though, call in Diplo, Switch, FreQ Nasty, Radioclit, Sinden, M.I.A., Trouble Andrew, Clifford ‘Moonie’ Pusey (Steel Pulse), Chuck Treece (Bad Brains) and XXXchange and Naeem Juwan (Spank Rock) to help out.

It’s not a bad list of production contributors and cred-bolstering guest appearances to assemble for your debut foray, but then with Santogold, arguably pop’s new princess, it seems a case of them being as eager to work with her as her calling on favours from her long haul in the industry (she was an A&R gremlin for Epic before ploughing her own musical furrows with her new-wave cadets Stiffed and writing for US R&B chart-fodder Res).

Derided and admired in equal amounts for the similarities between her lead single, ‘Creator’, and the brittle lo-fi of M.I.A. (the track is now used to advertise hair gel over here and Budweiser in the US), it’s new-wave juggernaut ‘L.E.S. Artistes’ that instead provides a more suitable portrait of the artist known to her mother as Santi White. Hailing from Brooklyn-through-Philadelphia, her pop hooks are just as reminiscent of the dappy hair-braid twirling of Cyndi Lauper as they are M.I.A.’s gallivanting beats. After the initial wave of press to shroud her in a cloak of vague importance at the turn of the year, a crusty eye has been kept out for what her eponymous debut would offer up.

We met up to find out whether debut album Santogold was worth dusting that sleep away for.

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Despite being from Brooklyn you’ve been here a fair few times now. Have you targeted the UK as a place to showcase yourself?

I feel very comfortable being here musically because I feel that this project has grown from two places at once from the beginning. Early on I was working with British producers – well, Switch and Radioclit – and my original label, Lizard King, has more of a British presence. And I was working with Mark Ronson who was doing a lot of touring over here and there was a lot of stuff that was UK-based that I was doing at the time, even before I had put together than a couple of songs there was more of a buzz here because of the people I had been working with over here. I had performed in Fabric before I performed anywhere else, and that was because of Switch and Sinden, who had done a remix for one of my first songs, so there seemed more of a hype here than in New York.

Do you feel people like Switch have given you a blueprint to work round and possess the audience that you are most likely to immediately appeal to?

Yes and no. I think that my record has a lot more than just that element – the programmed electronic element. That is only a small fragment of what my record is, though I would say that that element was obvious from the tracks up on the MySpace, so a lot of the initial buzz was from real music-head people asking “Switch: what is he doing next?”. As more people hear other material that is leaking they seem to be realising that a lot of the record is inspired by new-wave and dub.

Bringing her up early here, but M.I.A. has often suffered criticism for having such a broad range of influences that it seems a hollow picking. You seem eager to show your range, but do you feel that covering so many bases can detract from having anything particular to say?

It’s not a neat box. I was worried at the beginning that it might be a problem, but it hasn’t been. I think it’s just on time because people are getting really bored of things being so the same, and fitting into these pre-fabricated genre boxes; right now it’s how it used to be in the early ‘90s when you used to get all kinds of music because people are just done with it, and the industry is falling apart, and the internet makes it a fair playground. People are like, “Fuck it, I’m going to do what I want”, and people are excited about it. Part of the reason I have got so much attention is probably due to the fact I’m difficult to put into a certain genre.

At the same time though, you’ve presumably read enough of your press to be wary of – having worked with Diplo – as being typecast as nothing more than an identikit M.I.A.?

No, I don’t at all and I think that the press has got a little ahead of itself considering that they haven’t heard that much music. That’s one of the reasons why I’m so excited for the record to be coming out. Diplo worked on two tracks, y’know, and press are going to be putting their foot in their mouths with the M.I.A. comparison when the record comes out because it is so different. In terms of press I don’t get mad at it because I realise that people need a reference point and I think that on the outside that is a good one.

There could be far worse…

Yeah. She’s cool, she’s my friend. We’ve worked with some of the same people and both are brown girls who aren’t just doing and R‘n’B or rap, but have similar influences. But the way we go around implementing those influences are very different, and I am in no way influenced by what the press are saying. I’m excited that most of it has being good and supportive, but I’m confident of what the record is and I don’t feel it will be pigeonholed because it doesn’t fit.

I think part of the reason people like Switch and Diplo have been excited to work on it is because it is actually outside the box of what they do and people are going to be surprised at them because it’s not what they’re usually behind. John [Hill, former Stiffed bassist] and I brought them in on the live stuff and it’s been great for everyone to find out what our limitations are and though John and I were comfortable with live instruments, they’re not and so this project has been putting people out of their comfort zones and seeing what happens.

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Video: ‘L.E.S. Artistes’

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Do you have a grand live show planned?

Well, it actually all started out as a live show. The first couple of shows I did were with Architecture In Helsinki and we did it with a full live band, doing four dates with them and then three shows with Björk with a live band and then Diplo joined in doing sound effects and then, for ‘Creator’ and ‘Unstoppable’, he DJed at the end. That end is difficult because you’re working with a limited budget so I’ve got to figure out how to get round not having a band for monetary reasons at the beginning and then for bigger shows I get a live band but still have to figure out how to tie in digital tracks with a live band, so what we did was get the band to digitally replay tracks.

Sometimes artists can lose the intricacies when moving electronic tracks to a live setting…

That’s the challenge, for sure. But what we tried to do was to keep the electronic element so had a drummer playing drum pads and it’s close to replicating how it sounds on record. I’ve got a DJ and two dancers at the moment.

Do you enjoy live performances? Are you an exhibitionist of sorts?

I love having the dancers, because they’re so fucking amazing. They take so much pressure off of me because the music is different to how my other band Stiffed were with so much energy and the singing was a lot easier whereas these songs are far more difficult to sing making it a lot more difficult to jump around, but without a band it can get dull if I’m not. So the dancers free me up with what is more S1W-styled dancers and has become a really interesting element to the performance. In the mean time, while there’s no band, they’re awesome.

Presumably you consider this more of a solo venture than your work with Stiffed?

Well, Stiffed (MySpace) was really my project too. The members of the band changed and it started out as just me. It was different though. I never wanted to be a performer and I feel as if I have grown into it because really my desire to make music has pushed me into doing everything. I never wanted to be a star and the motivation was always the music, so I find myself doing this solo and I need all the experience that I could get to do it because it wasn’t motivated by this need to be onstage, so I’ve had to grow into that.

We don’t know that much about the forthcoming self-titled record. You seem to think it’s got an eclectic focus, with ‘80s synth-pop as crucial an influence as any other…

I think that I write pop songs as far as song structure and writing hooks goes, but I like to put in a context that is interesting. So, I felt that a lot of pop music from the ‘80s had a depth to it, and I hope to bring back some more good pop songs. It goes from songs like ‘Lights Out’, which sounds close to the Pixies, to ‘Creator’, which is on the other side of the spectrum, programmed. Then there’s all kind of stuff. Vocally I’ve really pushed myself and tried to use my voice as an instrument rather than having a style that I use right through, so it takes the record to different places, which is the job of a record.

You seem to value creative freedom. Did you have a degree of freedom on Lizard King, and why move to Atlantic?

Lizard King didn’t allow me any freedoms. The label was a joke and I’ll say that on the record. They weren’t involved at all and pretty much got in the way.

So, Atlantic stepped up. I’m signed to Downtown in the States and that’s an indie, though it’s got major money. Me, Spank Rock, Justice and Gnarls Barkley. They let us do our own things whilst Atlantic, honestly, is exactly the same way, appreciating that I had got a lot going on and done a lot of it on my own and that I know what I’m doing, so keep doing what I’m doing. So, they’ve been very supportive and not really pushed anything on me.

So you don’t feel there is a pressure to fill a role as M.I.A.-lite?

No, because they got involved after the record was finished. Totally done. In fact, they were asking me not to change things when I had suggested I might alter a few bits. So it was far from the experience of them manipulating and instead pretty much approaching me and opening up the machine. In the long run it means more people will hear the record.

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SEE?
May
16 Manchester Wireless
17 Brighton Great Escape (DiS show)
18 Brighton Concorde 2
24 Bristol Dot to Dot
25 Nottingham Dot to Dot
26 Bimringham Bar Academy
28 Liverpool Sound City Festival
30 Glasgow Sub Club

June
1 Dublin Crawdaddy
2 London Scala

HEAR?
MySpace here.

BUY?
Santogold is out on May 12, through Atlantic.

Singles Round-up (14/04/2008)

2008-04-18T08:37:00.000-07:00

SINGLE OF THE WEEK

Shape Of Broad Minds – ‘Opr8r’ (Lex)
Given Dungeon Family’s seedy output has recently dried up and OutKast have been pulling in different directions in deciding where to rub their Stankonia stink for a while, introduce yourself to Shape Of Broad Minds for a slice of effortless southern schizophrenia.

Roll call? Jneiro Jarel, Jawwaad, Rocque Wun, Panama Black and Dr Who Dat? are SOBM and all contribute to pitch which disorientating route debut record Craft Of The Lost Art (review) should attempt to pull down. But, other than Jawaad, this lot are no more than a figment of Jarel’s imagination, as the Brooklyn beatnik puts on one the finest pantomime performances in recent memory, dropping masks and changing personas as crooner Khujo Goodie looks on at the madness. Amid the tin-pan chimes, flamenco piano flurries and slovenly G-funk sits ‘Opr8r’, barely even there. It’s like a noxious gas making its way through your skull, recalling the psychedelic turn of Big Boi and ‘Dre on ATLiens.

With its wheezing fits and starts of paranoid southern funk re-imagined on the Collie Park remix sat beside a second take of album gem ‘Let’s Go’, with MF Doom letting off ever-inspiring bouts of comic-book rap, this is solid and subtle.

Too often on other occasions Jarel tries to be too clever. This, though, is liquid.

No video is available, but check out the track and its Collie Park remix on MySpace - - -

ALSO OUT TODAY

No Age – ‘Eraser’ (Sub Pop)
From the impenetrable slew of noise coming from LA’s suburbs over the last few years, No Age’s pot-marked amalgamation of teenage angst and anesthetizing drone is the cream of the crop. Whilst a good dose of Randy Randall and Dean Spunt’s forthcoming debut record proper, Nouns, sees the unassuming stadium rock of Dinosaur Jr. rubbing up against the noise tendencies of Growing, ‘Eraser’ is a modest stomp, like a blitzkrieg jig. Picking at equal parts Butthole Surfers to My Bloody Valentine, this would’ve been a shoe-in for Single of the Week were it not for being eclipsed by the rest of Nouns. Truly sonic youth.

Kode9 & the Spaceape – ‘Konfusion’ (Hyperdub)
Dubstep scrubberboy Kode9 has long been sat in the shadows since his pioneering foray with ‘Sine’. As opposed to critical darling Burial, the Glaswegian lays a far more conventional path with the same juggernaut basslines that make the genre better to listen to than dance to. ‘[vox]’‘[dub]’ is as unnerving as recent ventures (‘Magnetic City’). Despite the success of ‘Night’ and critics celebrating Untrue with their arms round Benga, dupstep and its skulking beats are bound to remain in the shadows of the mainstream, and is all the better for it. has the Spaceape rolling his tongue round its lolling beats whilst

The Last Shadow Puppets – ‘The Age of Understatement’ (Domino)
Taking David Axelrod and Scott Walker as influences but failing to not sound like a collaboration between a pair of rapscallions of Arctic Monkeys and The Rascals fame, The Last Shadow Puppets sounds like Alex Turner (with Miles Kane) is deliberately trying to wind up Enemy urchin Tom Clarke, as the Monkeys vocalist turns his nose from the fag-and-hag focus of old for something with a whole new bravado, driving around in tanks on the video, no doubt to their neighbouring castles. Dapper, if not just ‘Brianstorm’ with strings.

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Video: ‘The Age of Understatement’

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Plastic Little – ‘Get Close’ (White Label)
On the other side of the coin to the grace of SOBM are Philadelphia collective Plastic Little, effectively a huge ‘why?’ on the smug face of music. In a week that also sees Kanye West manage to release a record, ‘Flashing Lights’, that isn’t just a lift from elsewhere with no accredited sample pinned to its hind (and so deserves some applause), this abomination is also released, with some lumbering raps sat over a straight play of The Cure’s ‘Close To Me’. But rather than any of the engrossing pining Robert Smith puts up on the original, these oafs are bristling with confidence announcing the charming hook line “Get close, I wanna talk about my bone with you”, sounding like they’re gathered round comparing cocks with each other. Heralded as relevant for their DIY roots, sometimes that’s just mandatory for acts to get their shit released. Towards the end inspiration truly runs dry, with repeated lines bandied around like your dad reiterating a joke over and over again at the dinner table because he thinks nobody heard through the chatter. They did, they just hate your guts.

Kap Bambino – ‘Save’ (Alt Delete)
With its gurning punch-drunk beats, this is the same glorious gutter roll that has left East London’s neon-clad community in fits the last couple of years. Hailing from Bordeaux, duo Orion Bouvier and Caroline Martial sweat out a jabbering glitch fever as revellers come and suck beads of sweat from their brows and grind their teeth like mules.

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Video: ‘Save’

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Portishead – ‘Machine Gun’ (Island)
Everyone got glimpses of what Portishead have been listening to on their break away when they curated ATP’s Nightmare Before Christmas weekender. SunnO))), Silver Apples and Autolux are all present here for this shuddering bootstomp, sounding like it was recorded in a Berlin mineshaft. But, for all these sources of inspiration, far from their trademark archive hip-hop after six kegs of scrumpy, ‘Machine Gun’ is like having your head trodden into the ground as Sarah Connor bawls away beside you, closer to plagiarising The Terminator’s title theme than anything else. That said, Beth Gibbons sounds more like Edith Piaf nowadays. Either way, dressed up in a new frock, it’s all fairly befitting. Trip-hop is dead. Long live drone-hop.

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‘Machine Gun’

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White Williams – ‘New Violence’ (Double Six)
Many will have had a picture painted of life on the streets of Baltimore that doesn’t quite match up, with the lunacy ventures of the Maryland city’s deranged avant-garde and its Wham City cronies significantly contrasting the world depicted in HBO masterpiece The Wire. It’s difficult to imagine Dan Deacon crossing paths with a gun-toting Omar on his way to buy sweets. Joe ‘White’ Williams is another Baltimore babe, but far more happy to tow a more conventional line. No revelations here, other than just repeating that ‘New Violence’ is the best slice from album Smoke, a track that entangles the faux-pop pretence of Roxy Music and Ariel Pink with the driving proto-punk of Neu!.

Malcolm Middleton – ‘Blue Plastic Bags’ (Full Time Hobby)
Given borderline alcoholics are usually drawn to Malcolm Middleton, it’s of little surprise that here the ex-Arab Strap miserablist is again with ‘Blue Plastic Bags’ sympathising with you, almost willing you to spend your weekdays eating jelly out the packet and drinking Kahlúa through a straw. But rather than Middleton’s previous tendency to languish in satirical self-pity this outing picks up as the usual moroseness from the Falkirk troubadour builds to teary string crescendos to the point you feel there’s nothing to do but open another can of your good friend Frosty Jacks.

Jamie Lidell – ‘Little Bit Of Feel Good’ (Warp)
Given Jamiroquai’s current hiatus someone had to write spineless funk-lite. People love this bespectacled Lothario when they should be getting massaged by Cody ChesnuTT’s perverted husk.

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‘Little Bit Of Feel Good’

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As always, other singles are available from today in your local stores and online places what stock such things. But if they’re not here… we didn’t listen to them. Time is money.

Gnarls Barkley - The Odd Couple (Warner Bros.)

2008-04-18T08:36:00.000-07:00

Whether Del the Funky Homosapien spitting off about sci-fi, Ice Cube’s cartoon incarnation or Lupe Fiasco’s tedious Marvel-inspired alter-egos, there’s always been something of an unspoken affinity between hip-hop and comics, not far removed from the same nerd-core sensation of those pristine boxed sneakers (circa ‘58, thanks) stacked away under the bed. Odd then that this partiality seems so central to why Gnarls Barkley are such a drab proposition.

Since deciding to name himself after an eye-patched super-rodent voiced by David Jason, this comic book association seems to have stuck in the head of Danger Mouse (born Brian Burton), with the New York beatnik continually ploughing headfirst into various brands of caricature pop, eternally affiliating himself with characters who seem straight out the pages of some archive cartoon caper. But, whilst his production of Gorillaz and MF Doom for Demon DaysDangerdoom perfectly encapsulated the quirky essence of the act, as Gnarls Barkley it feels little beyond the comfort of a pastiche, failing to capture Cee-Lo Green’s bleak tendencies by coating the Goodie Mob crooner in such a gross gloss. and

Whether due to a penchant for costume or the dusty production of another era, retro-ism and nostalgia underpins their sound and a karaoke sheen cloaks Cee-Lo’s riveting melancholy. The finest moments on The Odd Couple are when he takes charge of things, particularly when his trademark diva bawl takes centre-stage on the teary balladeering of ‘Who’s Going To Save My Soul’, affecting where on St. Elsewhere it seemed contrived. You feel Danger Mouse should be aware of the space he should give Cee-Lo to croon following the looming success of ‘Crazy’ two years ago but, instead, the vocalist is either swamped by the confused jungle pomp of ‘Open Book’, sounding like Tarzan trying to get his head round using Autechre’s equipment, or his pining tones are slowed down to a drab soul-pop shuffle. For all of its reasonable moments – particularly ‘Mary’’s clunking carousel chimes – this schizophrenic venture just seems overly eager to please all with a hodgepodge of Motown, funk and soul.

No matter what themes Cee-Lo delves into, The Odd Couple, as with its predecessor, struggles to remove itself from being much more than inert comic-book soul. Solid and safe fun perhaps, but when Cee-Lo questioned “Was it the story or was it the song?” that was wrong on St. Elsewhere, who thought The Odd Couple would be such a resounding answer for the latter?

TELEPATHE

2008-04-02T08:28:00.001-07:00

Brooklyn banshees with a brand new beat, Telepathe stand out from the NY district’s vacuum of avant-garde. Though the same stifling pursuits of local noiseniks Gang Gang Dance and Effi Briest remain, a realised pop sensibility now stands to the fore, as harmonies and chants call out with blood-curdling brilliance against their lapping tape loops and darting hooks. Years in the making, Dance Mother, the outfit’s debut full-length, waits in the wings, its makers the latest darlings to be produced by TV On The Radio’s industrious Dave Sitek.

With something of a revolving cast, it’s difficult to plot Telepathe’s makeshift roster. Initially formed in 2004 as an aside for Busy Gangnes (from prog-punk experimentalists Wikkid) and Shahin Motia (no-wave rapscallions Ex-Models), Telepathe (pronounced “TEL-EP-ATH-EE”) have seen core contributors come and go but seem to have finally found some stability with the current crux, with Gangnes, fellow Wikkid and First Nation guitarist Melissa Livaudais and Mirror Mirror’s (US) Ryan Lucero.

After releasing Farewell Forest EP and the ‘Sinister Militia’ 12" through Social Registry last year – records indebted to the usual cast of Brooklyn and Baltimore avant-garde – recent outings ‘I Can’t Stand It’ and ‘Chrome’s On It’, recorded with Don Cabellero’s Eric Emm, suggest that, away from awkward Paw Tracks beatniks and noise-folk dilettantes, Telepathe have a newfound focus as Hot 97 hip-hop and totemic drone experimentalism collide.

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Telepathe
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What records and moments of inspiration made you want to start the band? You seem to identify influences closer to 3-6 Mafia and 8-Ball & MJG than Gang Gang Dance and Animal Collective…

Melissa Livaudais: Honestly, the thing that I listen to the most is the local hip-hop radio station in NYC, Hot 97. I love it, and I have to say that it is the greatest source of inspiration for me, as well as my friend White Williams and his Prophet ‘08 synthesizer. I’m in love with that thing.

How do you feel the act has changed since you formed? Do you think Farewell Forest still shows up your strengths?

ML: I would say that Farewell Forest shows that we were really trying to break out of our Wikkid days, but we had very limited instrumentation at the time… so we did what we could to make something that felt new and challenging to us.

I read somewhere that the direction was going to follow ‘Chrome’s On It’’s pop charms away from previous drone-y pursuits. True?

ML: That is absolutely true, Busy and I are ‘hookers’. That’s what Dave Sitek calls us, in that we are totally into making music with sick hooks. We got bored with making drone music and now we are obsessed with making the catchiest fucking music ever.

How did you come to work with Sitek?

ML: Sitek found us. My bro, Nicky Mao from Effi Briest, played him our music and he really liked it. He offered us an entire month in his studio, so we were like kids in a candy store. That man has the hugest collection of synths and everything. We love him and he is family now to us. Sometimes his wild ideas would make us nervous, but then of course it would turn out incredible. He is from another planet.

What do you think he had brought to your sound, a heightened pop sensibility one would imagine?

ML: Of course, Sitek is a sucker for pop. He took our sound and multiplied it by ten. It sounds so huge… I mean bigger than we could have imagined on our own for our first full record. We learned so much from him. He made room for all of our sounds. He’s really good at creating space, and he’s not afraid to use 100 tracks or more for one song. His production style is full force and maximal.

Pop sensibility is central and we love dance music. I don’t mean just ‘four on the floor’. We love syncopated rhythms. That’s why we love hip-hop so much. We are really trying to take it to the next level of pop. Just a little bit more than ‘new disco’.

The record will be called Dance Mother. We have a song about taking a guy into the woods for a BJ and then killing him. The rest is pretty straightforward, you know. It has serious bass. We put so much love into it.

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Video: ‘Threads and Knives’

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Would you say it was fair to label you quite spiritual people: the yoga, the trances, the telepathy?

ML: We are very spiritual people, but I don’t want that to be tied into our music or some New Age scene bullshit. If you are not listening for subliminal messages, you won’t find any. Hopefully, though, our songs will put you in a trance and make you wanna dance.

Are there any deeply considered themes to the act?

ML: Crimes and killings, blood, dying and being in love… the usual.

How relevant has the school of Brooklyn avant-garde been on your ascent? (Gang Gang Dance and the Social Registry crew, Effi Briest, Dirty Projectors, et al.)

ML: ‘The Briest’ are our crew. Gang Gang Dance do cool stuff. I have no idea what the Dirty Projectors sound like – I’ve really got to listen to them soon. Are they like a huge band or something? Relevant, I guess, but Brooklyn is really overrun by ‘avant-garde’ dudes. I could walk out of my apartment and throw a stone and hit someone making avant-garde music. (Guffaws)

What role do you play in this glut of inspiration?

ML: I would like to think that our role is to raise the bar. We want to get our minds blown and, in exchange, blow some minds.

What’s been your finest moment so far and what does the future hold for Telepathe?

ML: The moments just get finer and finer. We work very hard and I feel like we have been very lucky for all of the wonderful things that have happened to our band. We’re so grateful for the awesome people we get to collaborate with - including Busy’s mom, who threw down a track on the record - and the awesome bands we get to play with. The future for us is about making many more records and not getting attached to any certain process of music making. We always want a good challenge. We never want to be locked into any certain genre or whatever. We are psyched to go on tour.

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DROWNLOAD: ‘Chrome’s On It’

Dance Mother is due for release some time this year.

MySpace

Foot Village - Friendship Nation (Tome)

2008-04-02T08:26:00.002-07:00

The apocalypse shall come, society shall be crippled, and these buffoons will be jabbering away as if nothing happened.

From the same cesspit that fellow noise-mongering beserkers Kevin Shields, Pocahaunted and Los Angeles’ most diseased noise mavericks rose from come Foot Village, a mutant hybrid made up of members from LA headache-merchants Gang Wizard and Load mainstay Friends Forever, with Brian Miller, head honcho of LA DIY imprint Deathbomb Arc’s (recent releasers of Thrash Sabbatical, review), the prophetical chief of this cult community leading them on their ramshackle procession.

Starting as they mean to go on, Miller and his Luddite cronies offer up a brand of neo-tribal haunts produced using non-electrical instruments in a procession that is back to year zero in about every way possible. ‘Urination’’s Lightning Bolt assault is a blundered thunder, a rampant death roll slowed down to a drunken tumble. Think of Liars’ imperious Drum’s Not Dead but with incessant Jackanory rhymes and riddles (“I like pee-pee in my coat / I’m not afraid to eat my greens”) replacing stout Gregorian chants and kindergarten percussive snapshots instead of meticulous totemic drum factions.

But whilst the dufus drum punk of ‘Narc Party (Let’s Make It Fucked Up)’ and ‘Erecting the Wall of Separation’ is like an uncomfortable lobotomy-sound, the sound of your mind being dismantled by a fumbling toddler, this destitute toxic wasteland, produced by Euro-pop perverts Captain Ahab’s Jonathan Snipes and mastered by drone-merchants Yellow Swans’ Pete Swanson, is not all that bad once you bed down and find comfort in your own soiled kegs and the unhinged company, with ‘Crow Call’ and ‘1998’’s groin-stamping shenanigans a banal brand of acoustic noise assault which, in fact, seems over before you’ve really got your teeth in to the company.

After two untitled tracks allow a silence to break in and the chaos to ebb away, it breaks back in with the reckless use of electricity as four remixes are melded onto the tail end of the record, with Tussle tidying up ‘1998’’s beats into neat piles before Robedoor’s re-jig of ‘Projective Nourishment’. It leaves Friendship Nation spinning out in a gurning delight, all dressed up decent ready for civilization, as heads turn from earlier atrocities.

Drum Is Dead. These jerks broke it.

Casual Strides: Tapes 'n Tapes talk Walk It Off

2008-04-02T08:26:00.001-07:00

From the pirouetting can-can chaos of ‘Le Ruse’ to the hurdy-gurdy agitation of ‘Lines’, Walk It Off resembles a somewhat familiar collection of calamitous showtunes. With a recognisable hustle and bustle, Minneapolis outfit Tapes ‘n Tapes return, trekking a familiar terrain, with the follow-up to their widely applauded debut effort The Loon, a many-visaged menace that left many unsure as to where the quartet were headed.

But rather than attempt to steer proceedings into a realm that’ll see them wrapping arms ‘round a new set of enthusiasts, the record instead cements their status as a band taking a traditional tack but then bending it back out of fashion.

Since lynchpin Josh Grier formed the act at college in 2003, the band have eternally been tied to Pavement and Pixies, an association that is largely down to nothing more than the difficulty in pinpointing Tapes ‘n Tapes and the unassuming college slacker quality to the band. Speaking to the act before they returned to the scene of the crime, jetting off to SXSW to display themselves like graduates returning to college to parade round their newfound status, having some level of expectation doesn’t seem to suit the band. Having shot to blog infamy after a soft-release of their debut in 2004 on their own imprint, Ibid, before XL picked The Loon up amid the furore that surrounded the act at the turn of 2006.

As opposed to their debut platter, written in a Wisconsin shack with no water (one amenity you'd expect renowned knob-twiddler Dave Fridmann, producer of Walk It Off, to have provided), there is a level of anticipation circling over where Tapes ‘n Tapes take off from the initial success. So do they feel certain obligations?

“There’s a fine line to toe because in one respect you don’t want to say ‘fuck you’ to the people who liked the last record by making something that deliberately goes against what you’ve previously done,” begins multi-instrumentalist Matt Kretzman before being interrupted by Grier.

“Or do anything to please anyone besides ourselves. The main focus was the same as with The Loon, of making a record we were proud of, and that was all we ever set out to do with this record. It’s one of those things you can’t control, what people think of your music, and as long as we like it at least we can live with ourselves at night. I would be pissed off if we were doing it for the money.”

“I think for the most part we approach each song as its own little entity and so never feel there's a need to move on from The Loon because there wasn’t a certain treatment we applied or a particular conceptual focus.”

“We didn’t feel the need for any orchestral arrangements just because we had the budget”, Kretzman keenly points out.

‘Insistor’

Resembling the same tumbling lunacy of The Loon, a continuity of sorts between their debut foray and its follow-up is established, if not just in the colour scheme of Walk It Off’s artwork featuring its creators' confident strut. The title (which also happens to appear as an album track on labelmates the Breeders’ forthcoming record) picks from a scenario of a typically betrodden outlook.

For the first time in the interview drummer Jeremy Hanson, the youngest member, having joined the band whilst still in college, perks up. “Well, the very beginning of Walk It Off was my idea I guess. I got it from what baseball coaches would shout at me when I got hurt in baseball. Sometimes it is good to walk something off and sometimes it definitely isn’t good to walk something off.”

“We had joked about the cover being a man crippled, something really demonic, but we decided it was taking it a little too far”, adds Grier.

So, WALK IT OFF. WALK IT OFF. WALK IT OFF.

If there is one charm that particularly remains it’s the sound of the record, cracking with that same rusty lo-fi sheen and ramshackle recording approach that was evident on their initial EP release in 2004 when only half the current roster was involved. Recorded with Dave Fridmann (of Flaming Lips/Mercury Rev/Mogwai producing notoriety) at his Cassadaga bunker, Kretzman saw his influence over proceedings as invaluable.

“He was like a Zen master. He’d take his shoes off when he came in and knew everything we needed to ask him.”

“There’s not a rigid click-track mentality and we didn’t necessarily try to make it perfect as that aesthetic wouldn’t really contribute to the songs.”

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(l-r) Erik Appelwick, Josh Grier, Jeremy Hanson, Matt Kretzman

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Where previously mumbled and grumbled, there seems a newfound confidence to Grier’s vocal delivery, still a neurotic rasp, but muscular in the same way as Modest Mouse ringleader Isaac Brock. Yet the ambiguity remains with lyrics eternally muddled and it difficult to figure out the themes of tracks with what seems a deliberate confusing of states.

“I think for me on this record I was more confident with the stories I had in mind whilst leaving things abstract enough for there to be an open interpretation. Rather than a hard line of instruction of what a song is about we'd rather people read their own interpretation of the lyrics.”

“I think it makes it more interesting it have some ambiguity and to leave it open for people to read it one way or another.”

Also crucial to the charms of Walk It Off is the contented attitude they seem to have adopted. Having previously mentioned that this may be the last record for a while it seems appropriate to ask whether the act has much of a future plan laid out, or if they see themselves as having much longevity beyond Walk It Off.

Grier casually turns to his bandmates. “Do you want to make another record?” The others shrug non-committedly.

Grier continues. “I do. We all get along and we’re all friends and we’re all interested musically. Having my job on the side is not an indication of how well I think the band is going to do but more an indication I want to continue to make records as long as people want to listen. If everybody hates this record then all of us will still be writing music and making records because it’s what we enjoy doing.”

Looking slightly resigned as he says this Grier seems utterly convinced that Tapes ‘n Tapes continuation to plough head-first into the furrow The Loon buried. Though not breaking any rules or pushing any boundaries that have not previously been crossed, Walk It Off finds Tapes ‘n Tapes stepping into a confident stride.

“I’d like to continue to release records, especially if we can continue to record in the way we were able to on this one. Even if we’re doing it from home and it’s interesting then I don’t see why there’d be any reason to stop.”

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Walk It Off is available from April 7 on XL Recordings; the band tour the UK at the tail-end of May and into June. Looksee:

May
28 London ULU
30 Birmingham Barfly
31 Glasgow Stereo

June
1 Manchester Academy

These are men of their word. Walking it off, Tapes 'n Tapes are appealing for walk-a-thon donations for Cancer Research. Head to their website for more info.

KIM KI O / ERRORS / TELEPATHE / HEALTH / BANJO OR FREAKOUT

2008-04-02T08:24:00.000-07:00

Regardless of your vitamin intake, daily rowing routines or five-a-day, it seems safe to assume there is not enough Turkish riot grrrl in your life. Ekin Sanac and Berna Gol make up Istanbul DIY outfit Kim Ki O and have just released Digerleri Nerde? (Where Are The Others? for those ill-informed non-Turkish tongued readers) as the follow-up to 2007’s En Az Iki, En Falza Sekiz, and with its turgid basslines and synth-pop backdrops sounds like Bikini Kill taking the piss out of the Human League. Rippin’, eh? The pair can be seen supporting Göteborg crooner Jens Lekman on his upcoming European tour.
MySpace

As Glaswegian jerk-merchants Errors continue to court admirers with a trail of sprawling electronic soundscapes, ‘Hans Herman’ seems an appropriate introduction for the Scottish beatniks.

Signed to Mogwai’s Rock Action imprint since 2006, rather than any particular rock-rock pretence the quartet are far more indebted to Autechre’s paranoid electronica and the spiralling intricacies of Gui Boratto’s minimal tech, as soft drones and fractured hooks scythe into the skull.

With waves of their electronic sprawl lapping more violently than ever, Errors found themselves awkwardly thrust to the forefront as support for Underworld three-night spell at London’s Roundhouse. Needless to say that bitter-tongued revellers took to the act, which - with an imminent debut album set to follow the sold-out release of the How Clean Is Your Acid House? EP - surely underlines the potential of these young rapscallions. Find your exclusive download below.

Download: Errors - 'Hans Herman'

“Busy and I are ‘hookers’. That’s what Dave Sitek calls us, in that we are totally into making music with sick hooks. We got bored with making drone music and now we are obsessed with making the catchiest fucking music ever.”

Where are Telepathe going? Far from their initial guise, which found central players Busy Gangnes and Melissa Livaudais playfully mimicking the esoteric pursuits of Brooklyn beatniks Gang Gang Dance and Effi Briest on the barren bastard Farewell Forest EP (Social Registry; link).

The glut of inspired avant-garde out in the NYC district has swollen with the addition of Gangnes and Livaudais’s new Telepathe, one that’s comfortable enough to mess around with the girl-group shenanigans of The Shangri-Las as well as wrestle with the heavier weight of Gang Gang; the broken beat of Black Dice.

“The future for us is about making many more records and not getting attached to any certain process of music making. We always want a good challenge. We never want to be locked into any certain genre or whatever.”

With their debut record, Dance Mother, produced by TV On The Radio’s Dave Sitek, waiting in the wings, rarely have such haunted pop frolics seemed so essential. With über-pop baron White Williams’ Prophet ’08 synth admired like a shiny new toy, ‘Chrome’s On It’ is viciously sweet, a totemic flutter of pulses and those Prophet ’08’s artfully jostled into place by Don Caballero’s Eric Emm. ‘Chrome’s On It’ will satisfy, we promise. You do want your pulses to flutter, don’t you?

“We can do the real bang bang, but first you gotta know my name.”

"tə - lěp' ə - thě"

Download: Telepathe - 'Chrome's On It'

Telepathe @ RCRD LBL

Telepathe @ MySpace

When bodies lie in heaps, there’s little dignity in dancing to hardcore. Knees strut, muscles rupture and grind to this awkward racket; ‘til the wallflower goes mad with a blade and then the disco’s all to shit, all at sea among blood and oil spewed like milk and grease have been before in these pages. Obviously though, it’s not quite the same, and nor will the dancefloor ever be again after this twin rhythmic test; even if HEALTH’s rampant ‘Triceratops’ conducts all his menace in bedroom coreography now that the Acid Girls are interested.

Having had glitchers Crystal Castles shifting the bastard behemoth from its rust-ridden docking for a recent re-jig of ‘Glitter Pills’, Lost Angelese noiseniks HEALTH find their shrieking neu-kraut hardcore turmoil again lathered in lubricant for this pair of remixes from California’s fluo-kid affiliated Acid Girls.

Rubbing a Euro-pop stink up against HEALTH’s volatile noise, bleak beats are chewed up and regurgitated with a think-on-your-feet dancefloor ingenuity, putting a still-beating heart under the track’s detached neo-tribal stomp. Ultimately though, you can dress a ‘Triceratops’ up in whatever flimsy finery you want, it’s still gonne be a fucking triceratops.

“Are you broken? Are you leaving? Is your blood red? Are you breathing?”

Feet stomp, still-hearts beaten tonight.

Download: HEALTH - 'Triceratops' (Acid Girls 2Steps2Freedom Mix)

Download: HEALTH - 'Triceratops' (Acid Girls Before Dancefloorasaurases Ruled the Earth Mix)

HEALTH @ RCRD LBL

HEALTH @ MySpace

Acid Girls @ MySpace

Feature: DiScover: HEALTH

Album Review: HEALTH - Health

Moments of inspiration pass more frequent with boredom. Lonely souls contrive to conjure a lot of the best things out of thin air ringing with the sound of silence. In your ears. Sat waiting for his work-bound girlfriend in her Hackney flat, Alessio Natalizia decided that he may as well take some of that dead time and turn it into the most fragile, haunting but brilliantly busy music we’ve heard all year. Pop makes girlfriends proud, we reckon.

Born in Turin, Natalizia has lived in London for the last three years, shops at Sounds of the Universe and continues to release in streams that hark back to some of the most affecting sounds of the year. Shocking Pinks’s desolate monotone, the hushed menace of Deerhunter’s Cryptograms and No Age’s lo-fi psychedelic noise scream softly as they get channelled through the stark surface and constant grind of Arthur Russell. His timid voice rises in brave arcs like a Panda Bear cub.

That idea of not letting those moments pass by to become lost opportunities extends into his recording technique - working around the one premise that each track is recorded after its first take, it's up to Natalizia to tweak and prang things into shape thereafter. He plays his third gig at the Amersham Arms in New Cross on the 7th of January.

With this track, ‘Mr No’, seizured beats chime and chatter, eating into each other as they find a mutual rhythm, as beats carve abrupt tangent changes. There’s a delirium-induced vocal, haunted like a voice lost to the city, as muted brass, piano hooks and splintering chords rustle under a wall of distortion.

Loose-fingered fumbles, a mess seems to come together. The sound of a man marching to his own mild-mannered madness, skipping to his own disjointed beat.

Download: Banjo or Freakout – ‘Mr. No’

Drenched in Distortion: Stephin Merritt on Magnetic Fields’ stab at chamber pop

2008-04-02T08:23:00.000-07:00

Propped in the corner, below billowing speakers that spill out dreary lounge music filling out the lapses in lunchtime chatter, sits Stephin Merrit, Magnetic Fields lynchpin, contented with his three-disc This Is Psychedelia acquisition and hefty pot of green tea. Weary and bleary eyed from jetlag and an appearance DJing at London dive The George & Dragon the previous evening seems far from the ideal circumstances to meet Merritt. He is renowned for being an awkward proposition to interview, possessing an austere sense of intellect, who within two minutes has already asked to swap seats twice in order to hear through the tin can din.

But immediately there seems a sense that so many of Merritt’s critics (most notably the Chicago Reader journalist Sasha Frere-Jones’s attempt to label Merritt a racist, link) are blind to the bitter irony that soaks his conversation, because if there is one thing Merritt can not be accused of it is lacking consideration. Throughout the interview each response is methodically laboured, interspersed with unnerving long pauses of deliberation, refreshingly removed from the reels of spiel delivered by so many artists.

Distortion, the band’s eighth record, marks another move away from the New York cohort’s previous synth-pop groundings. Alongside the familiar Magnetic Fields line-up of cellist Sam Davol, guitarist John Woo, accordionist Daniel Handler and pianist Claudia Gonson, Shirley Simms - a central contributor to the seminal 69 Love Songs - returns to the fray following 2004’s wholly Merritt-fronted i; her grand melancholic delivery again sits brilliantly beside Merritt’s hollow-hearted baritone bawl.

Since releasing i, Merritt has focused attentions on his other outlets, namely with his “goth bubblegum” outfit the Gothic Archies, producing a compilation for Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events, and Showtunes, a collaboration with Chinese theatre director Chen Shi-Zheng consisting of three pieces of musical theatre. So it seems strange when Merritt responds with a shrug when questioned over which moniker he most likes to produce records under, declaring that he places little regard on the name of the project his work is released under, nor upon the musicians he works with, later revealing the distanced relationship that he and the rest of Magnetic Fields share, tending to only see each other at wedding functions.

But Merritt can never be expected to go by the script. Having stated a few years back that he was tired with what rock music had to offer, Distortion is an interesting direction for him to take. It is a record drenched in feedback, with amps attached to every instrument in an attempt to “sound more like Jesus and Mary Chain than Jesus and Mary Chain”.

Merritt: “I was told this morning that it [Distortion] sounded like Lush. I don’t think it’s very accurate but was just very curious that they would say Lush rather than the Jesus and Mary Chain.” He sounds somewhat put aback by the comment. “Psychocandy is the last significant event in popular music production. That’s the last thing I’ve heard which sounds blaringly original. I haven’t heard anything else since then that says, ‘this is a new way of making records’.”

Asked about what it was he most hoped to echo from Mary Chain’s 1985 debut, Merritt is succinct: “Huge masses of shrieking feedback; the sense of singing over an espresso machine.” But through the feedback the same unabashed pop sensibility and Merritt’s affections for the glorious pop melodrama of Phil Spector and ABBA, for not striving for realism but being content in their own cocooned idylls, remains, with the songwriter seemingly having found his own current comfort zone.

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Now that I’m only singing alternate tracks, no-one thinks those alternate tracks seem angry. Psychology: can’t live with it, can’t live without it
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“If I were told that I need to continue making records featuring lots of feedback but I don’t need to keep it to the same instruments doing it I don’t think I’d be very unhappy about that. What I love that it brings to the music is the extra notes that I didn’t have to write and the element of indeterminacy, that it isn’t just somebody else’s ego intruding but the machine, the circuits.”

New York and its infamous avenues have always seemed central to the narratives Merritt has offered up, so it seems surprising to learn that the 41 year old has packed up and moved from his Manhattan studio to California since recording the album. Revealing how the choice of vegetation for his new home in Los Angeles effected Simms’ vocals and provided her with some additional grain on the record, it eventually transpires that, peculiarly, the decision to include Simms was made particularly late in the recording process.

“I thought that I was going to sing the whole album, and did sing it – we even mastered it with me singing the whole album and then decided that it would be more entertaining if we were to give half the album to Shirley.

“For some reason people thought that I sounded angry singing throughout the whole record. Whereas now that I’m only singing alternate tracks, no-one thinks those alternate tracks seem angry. Psychology: can’t live with it, can’t live without it.

“Perhaps it is that people feel less threatened by a woman’s anger. Or, that people are less likely to imagine anger from a female voice because it’s ‘mama’,” he continues. “The way tracks were split between us had a lot to with the key which the tracks were in. We didn’t want to have to go back and redo all the backing tracks or degrade the sound quality by changing the key on the computer, so we chose what songs Shirley would sing based on what keys were appropriate for her.”

The ability for Merritt to chop and change vocal duties on Distortion underlines the sexual ambiguity that runs throughout Magnetic Fields’ lyrics. Rarely do his and Simms’ voices meet on record, always seeming together but apart, to the extent that it has always seemed a deliberate polarisation. But it turns out Merritt’s decision to divide each contribution was far more straightforward a decision than expected.

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Video: 'If You Don't Cry' (live)

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“I don’t like duets, so I only use duets for comic effect. The duet on ‘Please Stop Dancing’ is pointedly arbitrary, so we don’t even have gender assignments. I’m the one who sings, ‘I will never be your wife’; we’re not singing to each other but instead alternating lines from maybe the same protagonist, if there is one. It ordinarily wouldn’t occur to me to stick the two of us together in the same songs. It’s not so much that I was deliberately keeping us separate as it wouldn’t occur to me to put us together.

“When I was the only singer on Distortion, it wasn’t really clear what the gender of the protagonists were in the songs. I think you now notice the female protagonists.”

It’s often a struggle to figure how much of Merritt is within his music, to decipher where he ends and his beguiling characters begin, with any clear-cut sincerity often hacked at moments later with a moment of cynical absurdity. Openly gay, a sufferer of hyperacusis - a condition that leaves him particularly sensitive to loud sounds - and rarely seen without his pet Chihuahua - named after Irving Berlin - cradled in his arms, Merritt is a fascinating individual. But how much of this that shines through in on his songwriting seems debateable. Merritt seems to relinquish a distance, side-footing the issue when questioned on whether he feels his characters, however ridden with irony, often denote exaggerated representations of his own perspectives.

“Take ‘Zombie Boy’. (A track with the sample lyric, ‘No blood ever drips, when I widen your holes’.) I wouldn’t say it was an exaggeration of my actual life because there is nothing that I do that would resemble digging up children’s corpses in Haiti for sexual gratification.”“And ‘California Girls’: I don’t disappear to California with a battleaxe to attack thin, tanned teenagers. So I wouldn’t say that my characters tend to be exaggerations of me.” Another long pause sits between sentences as he thinks through his response.

He continues: “In fact, I’m not at all irritated by the California lifestyle. The character is one of the many women we hear about, in the media at least, that feels oppressed by media portrayals of a certain ideal of women and she decides to take it out on the models rather than the media. I identify, maybe, with feeling oppressed – not even that, I don’t feel oppressed by media portrayals of the perfect body and such. I certainly feel oppressed by media portrayals of myself, but not since I stopped reading my press. Now I’m perfectly happy with media portrayals of myself because I don’t know what they are. It’s very refreshing. But, no, it’s not something I particularly identify with, but more a character than I enjoy inhabiting for the several hours it takes to write the lyrics. Maybe if it were a really involved, intricate song with a riveting rhyme scheme and was going to take me weeks to write the lyrics, maybe I wouldn’t be so happy about spending those weeks method acting.”

- - -
I think I like dramatic lyrics with conflict in them and nastiness, unpleasant protagonists and unreliable narrators
- - -

Though Merritt likes to think of each character as another distant creation, it seems odd that someone as opinionated as he is - previously acting as an editor for Spin before deciding he was tired of slaying artists - feels that this does not spill over in to his narratives.

“I think that some of my lyrics are opinions exaggerated in some way, but maybe even those lyrics only are coincidently my opinion exaggerated in some way and actually they are just whatever rhymes well and has dramatic content. I think I like dramatic lyrics with conflict in them and nastiness, unpleasant protagonists and unreliable narrators and the whole modern agenda with maybe some post-modern deliberate inconsistencies and self-contradictory stories.

“Like in Sergeant Pepper’s…, where each song has its own set of characters, maybe its own aesthetic. But it’s something that I do naturally. In fact, it is far more difficult to maintain the same aesthetic, the same character viewpoints, from song to song. It’s very tempting to change the characters according what happens to rhyme.”

Merritt and The Magnetic Fields found mainstream renown when they released the gargantuan 69 Love Songs in 1999. As Merritt plunged the knife in on Ferdinand de Saussure and dryly wore his heart on his sleeve, it lead to comparisons to Cole Porter and subsequently a new focus upon his work. Merritt, though, is still perfectly pleased to be affiliated with the three-disc epic.

“69 Love Songs is really iconic enough to use as a calling card, so if someone asks ‘Who are you?’ I can say, ‘I’m the ‘69 Love Songs guy’”; I’m perfectly happy about that, it doesn’t upset me. If in 50 years I am still primarily known for 69 Love Songs, that’s not going to bother me. I spent a great deal of time on 69 Love Songs and hope that I will never have to spend that much effort on anything ever again in my whole life, so I’m happy to be known by it.”

Providing those same skewed Scott Walker pop symphonies and tragic comic tales - albeit now entrenched in a ditch of feedback - Distortion underlines why the diminutive Merritt, so removed from the usual brouhaha, remains a brilliantly unlikely pop deity.

---

Distortion is released on January 14 on Nonesuch.

Fuck Buttons - Street Horrrsing (ATP)

2008-03-27T04:02:00.000-07:00

Regardless of what Street Horrrsing offered up it was always going to alienate the majority of the idle minds drawn to Fuck Buttons when the hype lists were published at the turn of the year. Far removed from the usual candidates, backed like noble greyhounds bound for the rot pile before the year’s out, Fuck Buttons’ debut venture is withdrawn from the mainstream furrows their peers have since ploughed. Beyond their maladroit name there seems little to have provoked the decision for the Bristol duo to be touted as ‘ones to watch’, as indebted to the fractured dance patterns of Black Dice as the droning negligence of Yellow Swans’ wanton quagmire - hardly a pair of folk-pop cretins from the BRIT School - with Andrew Hung and Benjamin Power offering up an electronic tide of drone nurtured on a dance teat.

But whereas Black Dice wallow in a swamp of comatose un-aspiring beats, like sun-soaked wasps diving drearily into the nearest jam jar, Fuck Buttons provide uncomfortable bouts of methodical rapture to their taut compositions. Within no time awkward pulsating basslines drenched in anaesthetizing feedback disrupt opener ‘Sweet Love For Planet Earth’’s modest carousel chimes, as a nagging bass hook chisels in and sprawls out like SunnO))) disrobed and deranged on speed dabs, sat in a Nova in a Bridgend car park gurning away to Clubland Xtreme. A cacophonous nihilistic squall soon interrupts the fun, but rather than the confrontational noise that marked them out on the limited release of Let’s See If Any Ghosts Are In Here, Yeah? EP in 2006, the indecipherable toy-mic screams are removed from Wolf Eyes’ gratuitous industrial grind to which they’ve been compared, instead acting as no more than additional hook to layer on to their sonic wash of sterilizing noise.

As the neo-tribal rout of ‘Ribst Out’ clumsily cajoles in on ‘Sweet Love…’ it starts to showcase the duo’s range away from the familiar formula many thought their debut foray would follow. Though the occasional glance (with ‘Okay, Let’s Talk About Magic’ overly drawn out with its haggard Scotch dialogue gnawing away for ten minutes), Street Horrrsing is cut from post-rock drudgery, the Mogwai connections largely down to association (the record produced by the Scottish titans’ John Cummings and Part Chimp’s Tim Cedar). Yet, with a bit of nous, the pair have embraced much of their production team’s savviness, no more so than with ‘Bright Tomorrow’’s glorious subterranean comedown call and the taste of the tongue losing its bitter acidity in the early hours before ‘Colours Move’ intervenes with its scything feedback sifting through lax bowels, cutting through numbed skulls.

Though far from flawless, removed from any brouhaha Street Horrrsing sees Fuck Buttons carve their own niche and not only produce a debut record that will claw at any prejudices over its 40-minute span but show up their drone brethren as too often resiliently stuck in the mud. Both blissful and blistering, this is the sound of an act doom-mongering to their own unique nauseating beat.

Ivor Cutler - A Flat Man (Hoorgi House)

2008-03-27T04:01:00.002-07:00

“One eye
shut

a man is flat.

Through
a shut
eye

a flat man”

Last week marked two years since the death of Ivor Cutler.

Unavailable since 1999, A Flat Man was originally released in 1998 through Creation and found the Glaswegian absurdist, as ever, wrapping his tongue round verses in his soft Scottish brogue, where euphemisms confuse the pure and drag the odd down into the dark.

Cutler’s life was as beguiling as his works. Born all but by the gates of Ibrox Park in 1923, young Cutler suffered from anti-Semitic abuse throughout his impoverished upbringing due to his eastern European ancestry, schemed to kill his younger brother, object of his mother’s affections, before eventually being caught by his aunt in the heat of the act, as well as struggling at school to develop his handwriting much beyond a wanton scrawl. Later in life, after being dismissed as ‘absent-minded’ during his brief stint with RAF during WWII, Cutler became a schoolteacher – the career he would continue with into his late 30s.

Cutler began to pen pieces of prose and poetry with half a mind towards publication which remained largely idle indulgences until in 1959 when he was asked to perform on BBC’s Tonight programme. It was with this appearance that his career took a true turn, eventually culminating in his debut foray, in what would eventually become a vast discography spanning five decades, with Ivor Cutler Of Y’Hup released in 1959, before endearing himself to John Peel (for whom Cutler would notch up nearly as many session recordings as The Fall – 21), John Lennon (enrolling him as Buster Bloodvessel for Magical Mystery Tour) and Robert Wyatt (with Cutler appearing on the Soft Machine lynchpin’s seminal Rock Bottom).

As a man who once said Kafka's bleak final novel The Castle encapsulated him perfectly, Cutler dives into a brand of his own unique miserabilism, opening with ‘A Bubble Or Two’ – detailing the suicide of a drowning mother – and followed soon by ‘Jam’ - “What’s your favourite jam? Traffic jam - it’s the jam for a man” - A Flat Man showcases one of his darker turns, lightened by the usual melée of mischievous innuendo (‘I Ate A Lady’s Bun’) and surreal wit (‘Birdswing’). With all 48 tracks rarely making it past the minute mark the record is not far removed from collection of short stories, modest compositions sat round Cutler’s stoic enunciation and outstanding appreciation of comic timing. As with the current works of artist David Shrigley, it is Cutler’s ability to bend the surreal and arbitrary into something gloriously poignant that makes his contribution so outstanding.

As one of the less musically-focused records released by Cutler (with his harmonium recorded low in the mix), this isn’t necessarily the best entrance point into his catalogue – perhaps instead go for the George Martin-produced Ludo (1967) or peerless Jammy Smears (1976) - but as his final release before his death in 2006 and second release in as many years (following A Wet Handle), A Flat Man is a defining moment as the closing chapter on a poet laureate for a deranged generation.

Unclassifiable brilliance.

Hoorgie House is a new imprint - set up by Jeremy Cutler, son of Ivor - with the intention of circulating rare Cutler material over the next few years.

The Teenagers - Reality Check (XL)

2008-03-27T04:01:00.001-07:00

Fuck Serge Gainsbourg. Plagued with moronic gurns plastered to their faces, these oiks reek of the smug idiocy behind the post-modern pop culture conundrums that the nineties barfed up on its Global Hypercolour tee, as most still try to wrap their minds round the programming of a decade dumbed down.

Eurotrash encapsulated this and still leaves me in a quandary as to whether it was actually any cop, as Antoine de Caunes showcased the latest in continental trans-gender pop catastrophes. Tongue was locked firmly in cheek but retained enough of the sensibility of Viz to keep the karaoke masses chortling at Lolo Ferrari’s grossly inflated tits and ridiculous foreign tongues wrapped round the English language.

Preying on that same shtick of innocently enunciated cum-sodden innuendos, Parisian trio The Teenagers offer sniping narratives on teenage romance and provide the same baffling proposition, backed by what is little more than a brand of Backstreet Boys bile channelled through the usual mêlée of Euro-pop and a gentle gust of croissant-table dance connoisseurs, M83 and Air.

If ever there was a marking of territory with a putrid turd, ‘Homecoming’ is it. It’s fantastic, with the brattish pronounciation of “slut” as if it had eight syllables and a brilliant snatching parody of hedonistic youth culture as Quentin Delafon mouths off that “On day one I met her step-daughter. She was a virgin, a cheerleader and she was really tanned”, before launching into its tact-lacking chorus and closing with the female of Delafon’s attentions shouting back “…and don’t forget to send me a friend request” having just laid legs agape.

But from there Reality Check seems nothing more than that same joke peddled another eleven times, lagging all but immediately as ‘Love No’ struts in all cocksure but, like a batch of Gordon Raphael-produced 8-bit Kleenex capers, leaves the sense of having just walked in on some kid jerking off whilst Road Rash sits left on pause.

The biggest disservice you could pay The Teenagers (all in their mid-twenties) is fail to appreciate they’re not in on the act. But as the record drags on the cynicism fades and the trio find comfort on their pop-pervert mantle, the pithy one-liners weaken and they seem to find comfort in the fact that ‘Wheel of Fortune’ and ‘Make It Happen’ sound nothing more than drab backing tracks to moments of poignant dancefloor contemplation on teen flicks.

Rather than this being a catastrophic album, it’s more I can’t imagine anyone buying it not being an utter cunt. If you’ve got the savvy to work out how some of Reality Check is actually occasionally brilliant, then you should also be able to figure out it’s also absolute shit. That’s without even picking out the elephant in the room of the questionable sexism to it all.

If these pestering sex gannets’ debut serves one purpose, it’s to underline that Eurotrash really was cack.

ATLAS SOUND

2008-03-04T03:13:00.001-08:00

“I thought I'd do everything on 4-track, and then I'll record every instrument myself in a studio, and then I'll have a solo album released by spring.” Kim Deal

Though such aspirations from the Breeders and Pixies anchor never materialised as a bona-fide solo venture (those demos eventually ending up on The Amps’ 1995 debut Pacer), it’s as if Bradford Cox was holding on to every word uttered from his teenage idol as, over a decade on, he decides to go it alone for a while as Atlas Sound. Away from his usual oikish pursuits with his Atlantan outfit Deerhunter, Cox has compiled the catalogue of solo material that has built up, prolifically churning out demo material posted up on his notorious blogspot for all to see and hear.

And from that well of works Cox has pieced together Let The Blind Lead Those That Can See But Cannot Feel as his debut solo foray, a record reminiscent of the subtle miserablism of Beach Boys’ Surf’s Up and the comatose melancholy of Lou Reed’s Berlin, with tales of bleak adolescent troubles.

Having kept Cox up until 5am a few days before after failing to be notified when the interview actually was, it seemed reasonable enough to expect a frosty reception. Yet, over the hour we spoke, Cox was more than happy to take the time out of his regular day - mainly thrift store perusal and playing Tetris - to speak to us before he and his makeshift cohort embark on a brief US jaunt.

- - -

You’ve got the tour starting next month, but presumably right now is a spot of downtime. Is this time to yourself a time you enjoy?

Oh no. I don’t like downtime because it makes you feel useless. This is my job now and I never was one to particularly enjoy laying out of work. Everyone told me that I needed a break but I feel right spacey not knowing what to do. That and I’m really anticipating the upcoming tour.

You’re working with Adam (Forker) from White Rainbow and Brian (Foote, from Kranky) and few other interesting characters. How did that all come about?

I originally knew that I wanted to have Brian involved because he helped figure out how to produce [the record], coaching me and helping me out in the middle of the day with the production and could handle playing the parts off the computer. Originally I was going to have a computer onstage, which was odd because I’m not a fan of computer music and I never want a laptop on stage as there are certain textures that you can only create with the instrument, but I can’t afford a harp or marimba so I’ve got to use samplers.

Essentially it doesn’t matter whether you’re using a piece of cardboard with two drumsticks or a seven-million dollar Russian synthesizer.

Lately I’ve been thinking about going back to record on my 4-track. Listening to all Deerhunter’s Fluorescent Grey demos that I’ve just released on the blog, all those were done on a 4-track and I feel I was more experimental, using more organic techniques of making sounds.

- - -

ATLAS SOUND
- - -

I understand that on certain tracks with the Atlas Sound record you would have rather have collected up the demos rather than re-recording, because they were a little more raw, a little more...

…Rock. And, yeah, just possessed a little more life in them. One of my favourite records when I was at high-school was PJ Harvey’s 4-Track Demos. I always thought that it was so cool that Island, this major label, released that. It was such a weird CD and lo-fi was the trend for a while when I was growing up, with Pavement a real influence on me and my aspirations to make lo-fi music. Fuck…

[drops phone]

…and now of course you cannot put out a record like that because kids want to hear this ultra-compressed garbage like Fall Out Boy, or some shit.

The record comes out at the end of February, one of the aspects to the way you’ve recently come to distribute material has been immediate, over the blog. Is it a difficult time to wait out?

No, because all the kids have already downloaded it.

To be honest, that’s just the way things are now and it would be hypocritical for me to criticise. Even the record industry people who complain about it are all downloading music for free.

But do you not think there is something of the spoilt brat – both of us included – to the way the people go about music now?

Yes, I do think that but what I’m glad about is the fact that if we can’t help but be spoilt brats, everyone is a spoilt brat.

Spoilt brats together?

Yeah. It’s better than having some elitist level. When I was 16 I worked at Wendy’s to buy CDs but that’s just not the way it works anymore, and no-one knows what to do about it. I mean I literally spent all my money on CDs and now I don’t and I don’t think kids do either. It’s not like you’re going to dismantle the internet and make it go away. You can close down blogs and remove links but it’ll just pop up elsewhere. I think it’s most important to find a way to make sure that the music doesn’t suffer.

Do you think it might be good thing in shaking up the industry?

I don’t think it’s good or bad. I do feel bad that it’s not as simple for artists and record labels to make a living now. And like I said, I remember working at Wendy’s or delivering Chinese food and all these little shit jobs I worked, and every Friday night I would go and spend that money on hundreds of CDs. And all the bands that I bought the CDs of got way bigger royalty checks than I’ll ever get because if I was a 16-year-old kid and Deerhunter was around I definitely would have bought the CDs, whereas now I would download it. The only reason to buy CDs now is if you are a packaging whore. But a load more kids listen to Deerhunter now that they can download our music that if we had been around ‘before’. I think acts need to give people a reason to buy a CD and make it special. I don’t know how it will work itself out

Do you feel artists should be expected to find more engaging ways to get their audience excited about a record?

It’s not really fair for me to say but there’s some people who really don’t give a shit how their music is marketed and just want to make songs. It’s all just a game and, though I don’t really know what I’m doing with this blog, I’d really rather that material was given away for free than spend ages figuring out how to sell it.

There is a distinct focus on childhood throughout the record though, whether nostalgic or otherwise. ‘On Guard’ even sounds like a children’s music box […]

[…] like a lullaby. I think that was the intention. I think it’s a boy’s record. It’s a young boy’s record and documents the transition from childhood to adolescence and a losing of innocence. I think I still have the mentality of a boy and suffer from ADHD pretty bad and still play with toys – they’re just guitars and effects pedals now. Benzodiazepine probably helps.

Was it a conscience decision to focus on the period of growing up?

I don’t really know. Part of the deal you should know is that I tend not to have many particular motives other than to just make tracks. It’s afterwards that I can piece together what it all stands for. I think if I’m too conscious of what I am doing I steer the car way too hard. With Deerhunter in the past I think I’ve come across so badly and after watching videos of our performances I just feel that if I was a member of the audience I would just have to say ‘shut up skinny man, calm the fuck down, stop trying so hard’. And that’s the way it turns out if I try to steer things too much.

- - -

Atlas Sound ‘River Card’
- - - With this record, as opposed to previous Deerhunter records, the lyrics are printed on the inlay. Rather than be ambiguous you’ve also come out and posted explanations of what each track details (here). Was this a conscious decision to open up and reveal a bit more?

Yeah, it was. I just know that people can misinterpret things. Sometimes I feel really concerned about those things and sometimes I couldn’t care less but I thought it best just to knock it out in one. Pavement used to do that whenever a record came out and Malkmus would write a hilarious song-by-song guide to the album.

But do you feel that this was a conscious decision to demystify the record, avoid any crypticism?

Yeah, in a way... I’m not really sure. I don’t think things through too much before I do them and in the same way I don’t try to create a big amount of cryptic mysteriousness.

I don’t know what I think. Take Beach Boys: When they made Surf’s Up - and that’s a deep arse fucking record - they made this really abstract record with cryptic lyrics and it’s like “what has happened to little Brian Wilson? Did his girlfriend leave him” and it’s natural to want to know the personal events that brought on.

There are many aspects to Let The Blind… that are also reminiscent of Lou Reed’s Berlin if not just in that the music does not necessarily replicate the melancholy [...]

It’s similar in experience I guess, but I don’t consider myself profound. It was written during a very down time. I think I was trying to cheer myself up a little and I think some of the saddest songs – like Velvet Underground’s ‘I Found A Reason’ – are the most miserable even though the tune itself is not particularly downbeat.

With the Atlas Sound record – and ‘River Card’ is great example – where you’ve used really traditional methods of songwriting […]

I went through a big influence of the Arcade Fire. I’d been listening to the last record a lot.

That surprises me because you don’t use a similar sense on melodrama […]

Oh no, I’m not into that. That’s the aspect I don’t like to Arcade Fire and never have liked the (makes peculiar Win Butler wail) which is odd because I was really into Echo and The Bunnymen. But then they annoyed the shit out of me and I still loved it, I don’t know why. I wouldn’t want them any other way (sings some of ‘You Promise’). But it works in the context of the music and makes it seem really urgent when the song itself (‘You Promise’ still) is just this droning drudge.

- - -

Atlas Sound - Live at FADER Sideshow (19/10/2007)
- - -

Would you say many of the moves made with this record were conscious decisions to move away from the work you’d done with Deerhunter?

I don’t even hate it as much as I previously have said I did. I go back and listen to it and think it’s alright but I just don’t think it sounds right and the recording was neither hi-fi or lo-fi, it was just weak and middling.

I don’t really like abrasive music right now. When we did the first Deerhunter album I was a lot inspired by angular records and a lot more into things like The Birthday Party. And now, I’m not there at all.

Is that indicative of you feeling less reactionary than previously?

Definitely, I think I’m a lot less reactionary.

Because when you arrived on the scene the dresses and the confrontational approach you took. Does it all seem quite distant now?

Very distant. A kid made a video for Atlas Sound and I didn’t realise he was making it and he sent me this email and I’ve never been into looking into press for Deerhunter but I ended up on YouTube clicking through all these old clips of performances and I’m almost embarrassed by my old stage style. What was I trying to prove? At that point I thought I was just trying to be myself and maybe I’ve just grown up a little. It may only be like a year but it seems like ten or something.

Do you feel Atlas Sound has more worth because of it being a solo recording?

Oh, I don’t think that’s up to me to determine. I think that’s up to whoever is interested in listening to the music to decide. You can never judge the worth of your own work.

I made that mistake with the first Deerhunter record and said how worthless it was when there were some kids writing to me, upset with me, asking why I am saying that and that the album is awesome and I felt kind of weirded-out that their favourite album is one that I am sat there dismissing. And it’s happened myself with bands I really liked and since Deerhunter started travelling and doing all these shows, meeting loads of bands that I’ve always looked up to in the past and will be sitting backstage with them having awkward small talk and mention how I like a certain album of theirs and they’ll say “that’s the worst thing I ever did, I hate that record”, and I’m just like “well, fuck you arsehole”. Take a compliment. But I’ve done the same saying how Turn It Up Faggot blows.

Each record has been in tribute to specific people. This one is dedicated to Lockett. Presumably his influence was as great as ever?

(Apprehensively) Yeah. It’s something I don’t really feel I can discuss at this point. Y’know? When I made the record and did the artwork that was how I felt at the time, but things have kind of changed a bit. But everybody asks about it so it’s a bit awkward.

Okay, some easier questions: how are you dealing with the US mortgage crisis?

I just stay out on the road as much as possible and avoid buying houses. My rent’s pretty cheap. The mortgage crisis helps because they could not sell this house if they wanted to and it’s a historical neighbourhood so they can’t just bulldoze me down.

What are your plans beyond the tour?

Well, I’m always writing songs and I want the Deerhunter record to come out before the fall of this year, so we’re going to work on that.

But as such a prolific artist presumably this isn’t a standalone Atlas Sound release?

I’m going to make Atlas Sound records until I’m old, ‘til I’m like Robert Wyatt’s age and hopefully they’ll change and maybe write a country record...

- - -

As conversation curtails, mainly about his obsession with ‘Britishness’, the forthcoming Breeders and Times New Viking records and Karen O’s recent infatuation with The Mighty Boosh, discussion surrounding the record grinds to a halt..

Let The Blind Lead Those That Can See But Cannot Feel is released on Kranky on February 28. Atlas Sound can be found on MySpace HERE.

Hercules and Love Affair - 'Blind' (DFA/EMI)

2008-03-04T03:11:00.000-08:00

You are a bird now? Piss off.

For many, taken aback with his mawkish croons of the last decade, Anthony Hegarty spearheading Andrew Butler’s disco-aspiring New York outfit wouldn’t have seemed the most appetising of prospects. But, away from his Johnsons, Hegarty proves a brilliantly unlikely disco diva, somewhere between Gloria Gaynor and Boy George’s trapped-boy call.

Amid the subdued leftfield house, the Manhattan songbird flails about, brooding in the early hours, dancing away his troubles like a bloated Gloria Estafan swanning about in a smock having forgotten her Fluoxetine. Initially recorded four years ago, ‘Blind’ is an iridescent bout of melodramatic miserabilism for quivering lips on the discothèque dancefloor. Tied to the same sinister bite as Italians Do It Better’s recent output, there is an introspective resilience as Hegarty croons “Now that I’m older the stars should light up on my face, but when I find myself alone I feel like I am blind”.

Crucial to the self-titled debut, Hegarty’s contribution is particularly reminiscent of Arthur Russell’s confident stride from lonesome baritone balladeering towards disco notoriety in 1970 under the Dinosaur moniker. Fittingly remixed by Studio 54 mainstay Frankie Knuckles (and a host of other meddlers), the track calls with hollow vigour back to the golden era of disco.

If there is one flaw to pick out from ‘Blind’, it is that it shows the rest of the record up as decidedly tame.

Glorious.

INVISIBLE CONGA PEOPLE

2008-03-04T03:09:00.000-08:00

In equal parts Kompakt to Komische, New York duo Invisible Conga People are the next instalment from New Jersey imprint Italians Do It Better. But rather than the Moroder arpeggio flutters that tied the acts on the lauded After Dark compilation together (Glass Candy, Chromatics, Farah), ICP is a far more dark, detached affair, with aborted bass licks quivering like bleak dubstep lines knitted to a new beat. Comprised of beatniks Eric Tsai and Justin Simon, ICP release their debut 12" through IDIB in a few weeks, with ‘Weird Pains’ containing a Turkish dialogue from Tsai amid its slew of Neu-isms, backed by ‘Cable Dazed’’s modest minimal tech swell. With their Kraut-rock claws out, Invisible Conga People are one brilliant Kluster fuck.
MySpace

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!! (Mute)

2008-03-04T03:07:00.000-08:00

Having so enjoyed marching round with a proud erection stood between his loins, instead of a sordid one night stand Nick Cave had underlined that his pursuits with Grinderman would inform the next Bad Seeds record.

Keeping true to his word, with glands now hanging between wide strides, shooting fingers like a well-groomed city slicker fresh from divorce, ‘DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!!’ (lifted from the forthcoming album of the same name) finds Cave and his cronies strutting round, as if off to play their lots at Vegas. Less Abattoir Blues and more Bingo Hall Blues.

Whatsay Cave?

“Ever since I can remember hearing the Lazarus story, when I was a kid, you know, back in church, I was disturbed and worried by it. Traumatised, actually. We are all, of course, in awe of the greatest of Christ's miracles - raising a man from the dead - but I couldn't help but wonder how Lazarus felt about it.”

Whether tongue is firmly locked in cheek or not, rather than soundtracking his yearning scrotum, DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!! finds Cave returning to sneering narratives, blaring out declarations and observations to make you feel like the little fuck you probably are, documenting your downfall. Young Lazarus is the focus here, a parable plucked from the Gospel of John and placed into a suffocating New York City, with Cave laying off suitably prophetical descriptions of Lazarus’s decline following his unwanted resurrection and an apparent vehicle for Houdini to speak to us from grave. An unassuming return, then.

Why buy and not just wait for the long-play proper? The modest country croon of ‘Accidents Can Happen’ which is further proof that, fourteen records in, electrifyingly pent up, a gentleman’s mid-life crisis has never resulted in such glorious consequences.

Wu Tang Clan - 8 Diagrams (Bodog)

2008-03-04T03:05:00.001-08:00

As is the ramshackle nature of the Staten Island statesmen, it’s difficult to even peg down whether 8 Diagrams has yet to receive a bona-fide release in the UK. Either way, in some form or other, it received another release on Monday, February 11, and provides another opportunity to herald it as another staple dose of Wu Tang’s usual beguiling bedlam in their first return since 2001’s lukewarm bedpan, Iron Flag.

The album comes shrouded in the usual nonsense that has made the Wu such a spectacle: Raekwon labelling RZA as “fumbling the ball [...] his music wasn't sounding like how it was when we first came in”, and calling the Wu lynchpin a “hip-hop hippie” all but as soon as this return had been announced. Amid the humdrum it was then broadcast that the record was to be released on the same day as Ghostface’s Big Doe Rehab. Despite the debacle, 8 Diagrams, whittled down from an apparent 50 tracks, more than fills the gut, even if others weren’t content with what RZA had served up. But as GZA proclaims “we criticize producers ‘til they joints are right” on the symphonic stomp of ‘Rushing Elephants’, there seems the sense that it’s little more than some blithe jibes.

It’s easy enough to see where the complaints came from as soon as Method Man cuts in over the standard kung-fu cuts and ‘Campfire’’s Curtis Mayfield sample and hefty bluesy blow; his lumbering raps, alongside Masta Killah and U-God’s, suit the dub hubbub and lolling pace of the record but it leaves the spitfire lyricists of Ghostface and Raekwon ostracised, the pair spending half the time waiting for the beat to catch them up. But for all the calls that RZA has softened, listening back to the crew’s 1993 debut venture, 36 Chambers, it’s easy to forget the similarities. Those cumbersome bass lines and inebriated bar piano hooks remain, particularly with the hushed ruckus of ‘Take It Back’.

Tacked on to the end of the UK edition are three tracks that basically pay tribute to the absence of Ol’ Dirty Bastard following his overdose in 2004, particularly in the form of ‘Life Changes’ as all gather round to pay their respects. It is more than enough to distract from all the nit-picking surrounding whether the Beatles sample on the droll-as-fuck ‘The Heart Gently Weeps’ was an interpolation or direct rip. Instead, George Clinton is about as fitting a contributor as Wu Tang could have roped in, with his deranged bawl on ‘Wolves’ as fitting as an ode to ODB as any, rambling on about eating grandma and later his “full-metal jacket of vernacular ballistic” on ‘Tar Pit’ before an old rip of ODB’s ‘16th Chamber’ plays out.

As ever it’s an erratic outing. But even when 8 Diagrams hits a dud - the occasional mawkish crooning that creeps in on ‘Starter’ and ‘Stick ‘Em For Your Riches’, RZA’s self-fellating ‘Windmill’, and Mobb Deep off-cut ‘Gun Will Go’ - there’s plenty to captivate if not just Inspectah Deck’s ever hit-and-miss announcements (“Notice how we band it with them knuckles bare / WU TANG! / keep it fresh like Tuperware”).

All in all, it’s the usual captivating chaos.

el Guincho - Alegranza! (Discoteca Oceano)

2008-03-04T03:03:00.000-08:00

“I just wanted Alegranza to be a space age-exotica kind of record. Like Martin Denny, Esquivel, Attilo Mineo, Arthur Lyman, Jimmie Haskell and all that. The kind of record you play and it makes you feel like travelling to all these places but never stopping at one and then finding an empty space in the middle for you to get into it.” - Pablo Díaz-Reixa

Amid the sickening carousel chimes, tin-pan Tropicália and corroded dub, Alegranza leaps manically from one beaming influence to another, constantly shifting guises, knitting a comfortable coastal paradise. Reminiscent of Panda Bear’s pursuits on the Portuguese coast with Person Pitch, Pablo Díaz-Reixa’s debut outing was recorded off the lapping Catalunyan shores and, as influences come colliding, manages to provide the same intoxicating carnival-esque procession for all to marvel at.

Sickening as it is captivating, as maddened chants gather round a familiar psychedelic wash, ‘Palamitos Park’ opens and el Guincho’s ambition to make a space-age exotica record suddenly seems realised as beats chime and chatter with an itching delirium as disorientating calypso hooks loop. ‘Antillas’ soon rolls in on events, indebted to the frenetic acid trip bop of Baltimore mainstay Animal Collective, Black Dice and Ariel Pink and their deranged frolics.

So set adrift though, Alegranza is difficult to pin down, picking at benga and bhangra in equal amounts, and seems its own odd spectacle. ‘Fata Morgans’ mutates from an unassuming calm to darting delirium with effortless ease as el Guincho’s signature rasping chants rear up throughout; familiar echoes impossible to place, music without a home.

Wilting with sunstroke, ‘Bueno Matrimonios Ahi Afuera’ and its stuttering military drum rolls offers a rare spot of calm before ‘Costa Paraíso’’s jittering beat interrupts and recalls the psychedelic psychosis of Os Mutantes. With retiring grace ‘Polca Mazurca’ is an appropriate comedown close following the festivities that have just passed by.

Out in glorious hyper-colour, Alegranza feels so beguilingly withdrawn from reality, a tropical idyll creeping ‘round repetitious routine like a friendly iguana cooling you in humid heat. Pieced together from bits of wreckage, this is music created in glorious isolation, drawing on its own influences to create something just as fresh and just as joyous; drifting out into the ocean on its own shonky raft.

These New Puritans - Beat Pyramid (Angular)

2008-01-31T08:32:00.000-08:00

Withdrawn from reality, Beat Pyramid’s attention has drifted from numerological divination to alchemical pursuits within its opening five minutes; theoretical furrows that make Scritti Politti’s fusing of hegemonic contemplations into darling three-minute ditties suddenly seem formulaic. Talking in tongues, princes of pretension These New Puritans are a baffling proposition, blanketed by a layer of frustrating puns and paradoxes running amok.

Shifting through guises, Beat Pyramid’s surreal qualities are discomfortingly dreamlike, tape loops lapping as the record circles in on itself with ‘..ce I Will Say This Twice’ and ‘I Will Say This Twi…’ acting as bookending passages. Recurring verses rear up repeatedly, with the same raw hooks fed back through the same gut until they sit contentedly digested.

With hypnotic instrumentals as indebted to cLOUDDEAD’s esoteric hip-hop soundscapes as they are Brooklyn beatniks Gang Gang Dance’s broken beats, and skewed philosophical musings as close to Wu Tang’s Shaolin ramblings as Klaxons’ post-graduate hyper-realities, all is brilliantly bent out of fashion, its scope deliriously set adrift. John Dee entangled with Jay Dee. At the centre of events is deranged young gentleman and self-proclaimed ‘director’ Jack Barnett, whose solipsistic bawl resembles the brattish bark of a juvenile Mark E Smith, leaking out demented declarations like the lecherous calls that “she’s into numerology, she’s into astrology, she’s into phenomenology” amid ‘En Papier’’s cacophonous choruses. It’s as banal as it is brilliant.

Trouble is, for all the reckless ingenuity, Beat Pyramid seems a somewhat calculated chaos, closing out the brutish resonance of 2006’s unhinged Now Pluvial EP. In many senses TNPS are reminiscent of the clinical butterfly collection of influences that Radiohead have eternally showcased, leaving the music struggling for an identity of its own and cloaking any clear-cut character as a record of reference points.

This is perfectly detailed in the record’s most introspective moment, ‘MKK3’, an alleged piecing-together of excerpts from adolescent love poems posted on the internet. Far from as plaintive as it initially seems, Barnett at one point bemoaning that he’s “far out of happiness”, the exclamation that Michael Barrymore’s jerking off in the suburbs of Milton Keynes underlines that the po-faces are part of the façade. It’s a stark lyrical folly that underlines the snide humour and absurdism employed, and an example of their collage-like approach, even if the track itself resembles a lumbering pastiche of The Rakes’ Pink Flag punk.

But as an outfit named after a track from The Real New Fall LP, Smith remains the most appropriate reference point. ‘Elvis’ chaotically recalls ‘Theme For Sparta FC’, with Barnett delivering an endless list of inane hooks. Elsewhere, ‘Navigate’ – previously a stark 16-minute behemoth – is warped and morphed into a reprise of ‘Colours’. Towards the close, bits of every track seem to bleed into each other, held together by George Barnett’s totemic drum beat. Forget the krautrock and dubstep references, hollow-hearted tearjerker ‘Costume’ is as closely connected to the Watership Down soundtrack as anything else, as ‘Doppelganger’ feeds back in and a recurring nightmare burrows back into the brain.

Pent-up princes, Beat Pyramid suffers occasional uncomfortable lapses where the impenetrable slew of riddles leave the record struggling to seem much more than the deranged shrieking of more myths of the near future as it flickers from the ridiculous (‘Infinity Ytinifni’, ‘£4’) to the remarkable (‘Swords of Truth’, ‘Navigate-Colours’). But, cut adrift with its own bewildering reference points, peppered with glimpses of cryptic brilliance and slabs of deceptive nonsense, Beat Pyramid is a flawed patchwork masterpiece.

Yellow Swans - At All Ends (Load)

2008-01-31T08:31:00.000-08:00

Far from previous guttural ventures from the prolific Portland noise-mongering duo Gabriel Mindel Salomon and Pete Swanson, At All Ends finds Yellow Swans sifting through the bowels with their staple drones clipped, mannered where once they were vulgar bouts of neutered noise. As part of a DIY scene that has witnessed the pair self-release impenetrable catalogues of their numbing drone via the CD-R distribution of material, At All Ends is a difficult dose, constantly in uncomfortable limbo as it flickers between the outfit’s trademark squall and something far more transient.

Feeling like the initial stages of a comedown, it’s all too awkwardly sobering, uncomfortable rather than a snug rut; away from the gorgeous dirge of 2005’s Psychic Secession and towards something far more self-effacing as each composition stretches out and sifts through guises. It takes some time for the opening title-track to nestle in, as distortion increasingly bleeds into the track over its twelve-minute span, often conveying aspects of a collage pasted together as hooks chime starkly through the fuzz like a resilient national anthem – equal moments of brilliance alongside their usual electronic usual tide.

But on the whole, At All Ends lacks invention. 2007 saw drone taken on tangents, particularly memorably for the way that No Age pasted Yellow Swans’ bitter brand of ambient drone into their raucous hardcore to produce one bastard hybrid, compulsivity standing out of a ditch of digital white noise. At All Ends, though, is tiringly elongated, not too far removed from an unassuming film score. This is no more the case than on slow-burning closer ‘Endlessly Making An End Of Things’ (a title taken from poet Paul Celan) where, rather than anything lapping to arrest attentions, the song merely contentedly plays out.

Rather than the cold industrial grind of Wolf Eyes or the seditious pining white noise of Whitehouse, Yellow Swans are use noise as a tool to build an atmosphere now surely for making children weep. But other than the occasional undercurrent that drags you down amid its electronic swell, At All Ends is difficult to engage with as it uneasily sprawls itself out. Still, there are plenty of signs that these DIY darlings are attempting to change the shade of their piss-stained coat.

British Sea Power - Do You Like Rock Music (Rough Trade)

2008-01-31T08:30:00.000-08:00

Having beckoned all in with a question as banal as it is brilliant, the muscular tide of ‘All In It’British Sea Power inhabit, and ‘No Lucifer’ rears up, all brawn and gusto. Cries to “give me the dummy, tit” are surrounded by familiar chants of “easy!”, a tribute to years of Shirley Crabtree Jr’s flailing fists and the grappling wrestling prowess of family favourite Big Daddy and his belly-gutted conquests. ushers us back into the skewed world

But, away from the belligerent knuckles that The Decline of British Sea Power waved around so haphazardly, with bloodied lip and winded gut Do You Like Rock Music?’s heavy hands are a guileful flurry of throws rather than one solid blow, recklessly flitting between the delicate, retiring grace of Open Season and their rabid 2003 debut.

Bookending the record, ‘All In It’ and its curtain-closing reprise ‘We Close Our Eyes’ are largely redundant other than to provide amiable welcoming and parting shakes. Instead, as good manners fade, it's the calamitous Surfer Rosa hook to ‘Lights Out For Darker Skies’ that arrests attentions, darting infectiously as gusts of chamber noise break in and comfortably nestle alongside Yan’s trademark streak of Betjeman romanticism.

With Efrim Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor), Howard Bilerman (Arcade Fire) and Graham Sutton (Bark Psychosis) all contributing at various legs of production - Czech plains, Canadian bunkers and the coastal climbs of pigeon shit-retreat Fort Tregantle all scaled - the modest charms of BSP initially seem engulfed by an opportunistic shift towards a post-rock pretence, as if making hollow calls to greying rock enthusiasts shifting ‘round Waitrose.

But this is their call to arms. Reverb drenches the awkward silences that once sat so starkly atop the anthemic hollering and as symphonies ring out for Slavic friends on ‘Waving Flags’ - a national anthem for those crossing eastern peninsulas for minimum wage - it’s clear the Cumbrian eccentrics have decided to open their arms to a wider audience, whether Shiraz-stained sophisticates or bopping cretins. The instrumental ode to gannet-pilfing Nordic seabird ‘The Great Skua’ most closely mirrors Open Season’s orchestral aspirations in its focus upon acute intricacies, but elsewhere strings are instead welded onto giant riffs to form crushing blows.

Rather than Yan’s rousing, Thin White Duke delivery, it is usual side-dish Hamilton’s modest rasp that contributes the defining leads, with his delirious delivery an uncomfortable brand of whimsy, beguiling as he pines on the withdrawn ‘No Need To Cry’, lecherously cooing “I don’t mind if you’re queer”.

That same uncomfortable bawl seeps in on the reckless disregard of ‘Down On The Ground’, a track that reared its snout from the trough on the recent Krankenhaus? EP alongside ‘Atom’, providing something between Clap Your Hands’ hurdy-gurdy headfuck and the Red Army Choir’s stoic roar. As gargled shouts and air raid sirens call out with Niels Bohr’s quantum conundrum causing concerns, it provides a track chaotic amidst the calm as ‘Open The Door’ tones down proceedings and Sea Power pick out their Sunday best to close.

Wired with a sense of opportunity, these little Caesars continue to play mother’s favourite rather than the ostracised gurning recluses they initially cast themselves as. Yet the trademark peculiarities remain. As with previous odes to arctic glaciers and ebbing tides, few others could bemoan with such nonsensical brilliance the loss of lives and football club records when estuary isle ‘Canvey Island’ was drowned out in 1953.

For all the rhetoric surrounding these pomped-up epic pursuits, away from Arcade Fire’s entrenched inwardness, there's an underlying sense of egalitarian spirit and warped optimism to British Sea Power’s raucous gambol, inviting you in on the gently demented proceedings rather than leaving you a cold onlooker. Do you like rock music? That doesn’t matter. Little Richard or Richard Littlejohn? It’s all just a front, all just an invite into Sea Power’s crowded nest.

Upset! The Rhythm (John Maus, Cutting Pink With Knives, No Age, Gay Against You, Dan Deacon) - Tufnell Park Dome (07/12/2007)

2007-12-25T08:28:00.000-08:00

Away from the humdrum, withdrawn from sanity, Upset! The Rhythm have been curating these events round London nether regions all year, with stateside spectacles (Dirty Projectors, HEALTH, Gang Gang Dance) lining up alongside the finest slew of artists from the UK’s cesspit of deranged noise (Munch Munch, PRE, Birds Of Delay). If ever there were a signpost to the eclectic nonsense going on at U!TR events, as hundreds descended upon Tufnell Park’s echo hall The Dome, it felt like this evening was it.

JOHN MAUS

Gay Against You’s usual scything electronic scramble and costume change tangles follows on from the teenage tantrum skulduggery that Cutting Pink With Knives opened events with, roaming around open hall space, a seizure-ridden rendition of ‘Laser Hannon’ hailing down like Hale-Bop upon diseased minds. Picking from Muscle Milk’s frenetic sprawl, GAY’s bleating beats crash like piñata’s packed with Commodore’s pelted belligerently, hardcore-cum-happy hardcore, coming to a close with Germlin and Yoko Oh No offering out their instruments to the audience, caped cabbage-brained cretins goading onlookers with their sugar-soaked disco-noise disarray.

Eyes twitch and heads flick to the side of the hall and an idle grotto. Out appears John Maus, suitably housed as his hollow-hearted bawl rings out as ‘My Whole World Is Coming Apart’ opens, reverb drenching his vocal. Never has comrade Ariel Pink’s proclamation that Maus “is a maniac on a bloody crusade” sounded more apt as fists pump, enlightened; a preacher with his feet stuck in the same swamp as Pink’s new romantic cohort Haunted Graffiti. For every moment Maus seems on the verge of teetering too close to inane, there is one that captivatingly sucks you back in to his sad world.

This relentless tirade continues as Los Angeles’s finest rapscallions No Age drag attentions back to the main stage. As Randy Randall’s chiming undercurrents waver under Dean Spunt’s mechanical percussion and throaty vocal it’s a cute close to a year that has seen the duo’s casual release of Weirdo Rippers pick up prestige and to end up herald as one of the best records of ‘07: not bad for a collection of EPs. Short glances with new material get offered up; faster in pace, akin to ‘Boy Void’, and an immediate assault that suggests the big ideas waiting in the wings from Sub Pop’s newest darlings. Towards the end hands are held out as men mount the stage, promptly filled as pedals are crushed under clumsy footed oiks and events come to a fittingly ramshackle finale, distorted hooks continuing to gently wrestle with mind.

DAN DEACON

And so, with his usual stall of electronics set up in the centre of the venue, Dan Deacon, rotund pied piper leading feeble-minded men off nearby cliffs, begins his incessant brand of unhinged glitch-pop. Deacon’s open-armed inclusiveness is symbolic of the evening as people start to dance like no-one is looking. This is no scene, but a collection of people that don’t give a shit what you’re thinking, throwing shapes as gabba beats knock chaotically against Deacon’s jackanory rhymes.

Bodies gather round and close off glimpses of the Baltimore Lord Of The Dance, tonight sporting a soft beard that provides him with an inappropriate air of austerity. As the role of children’s entertainer and musician merge bodies circle the ringmaster, and from Deacon’s bunker come demands for all to run amok, colliding in an afterschool mid-afternoon delirium. With crib sheets handed out to accompany ‘Wham City’, the assembled choir chants out “there is a mountain of snow, beyond the big glen...”, bellowed out with vigour, therapeutic, as brains turn a soft pulp inside cemented skulls.

Instructions from Deacon ring out as the crowd ebbs away from his stall so individuals can loop round the hall. Playtime’s soon over; an appropriate close. Flailing bodies fall to the floor, left exhausted and utterly invigorated.

Fuck Buttons - Stool Pigeon

2007-12-14T11:06:00.001-08:00

Right Time Capsule: Deerhoof reflect on Ocean's Eleven concept records and ballet pumps

2007-12-12T09:51:00.001-08:00

Even after another deranged outburst in the form of Friend Opportunity earlier this year, Deerhoof remain a distinctly peripheral act despite the stretch of time that the San Francisco beat-merchants have now been leaning out a hand to hold. So, a time for reflection. As the avant-garde pop minstrels remain one of the most relentlessly refreshing outfits around, DiS meets guitarist John Dieterich to ruminate over the life that Deerhoof has lead to date, under its various guises, spanning the genres and deadening the brain. So, forever billed as a new act for each album, is it that Deerhoof feel eternal nearly men? Not so.

“For us it would be strange either way. It’s like when you have your birthday and you feel both incredibly young and incredibly old at the same time. If we were billed as an age-old band that’s been around, that would feel just as odd.”

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The act was initially a vehicle for lonely noisenik Rob Fisk’s solo bass improvisation project. Under the Deerhoof moniker some 16 years later, they resemble a somewhat different beast. After little in the way of productivity on his own, in 1995 Fisk came in to contact with drummer Greg Saunier, recently out of conservatory, whose jarring percussion Fisk saw as complementing his curtailing improvisation. The pair promptly began writing material together, releasing their debut 7”, ‘Return Of The Wood M’Lady’, later that year; five winding instrumentals recorded on a 4-track for Kill Rock Stars’ imprint 5RC – a label centred on supporting leftfield acts and ensuring they retain a pivotal role in the release of their records. Nine records in, Deerhoof continue to release material through the Washington based outfit.

In 1996, as the pair searched for a vocalist to develop their sound, they came across Tokyo balladeer Satomi Matsuzaki, an untrained musician whose ramshackle melody brought a calming influence to the pair’s frenetic output and immediately became a central character to Deerhoof’s increasingly charismatic identity. Within one week of joining the pair, Matsuzaki – who is now married to Saunier – had left for a tour, clutching the makeshift paper-maché microphone that she used for the initial batch of her incredibly anxiety-ridden performances. With the release of the act’s debut record The Man, The King, The Girl in 1997, her contribution marked a dramatic transition into a more melodic terrain of no-wave.

‘Gore In A Rut’ (from The Man, The King, The Girl; dir: Children of Hoof Education Centre)

By 1999 keyboardist Kelly Goode had joined the Deerhoof roster adding yet another dimension to the group to incorporate into Holdypaws. But, with poor sales a factor, midway through writing Halfbird (later released in 2001) Fisk left the act, along with Goode, to pursue alternative avenues. (Now married, the pair perform in 7 Year Rabbit Cycle with Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart among others, and also run the Free Porcupine Society label). The departure of Fisk, a central character to Deerhoof, cast doubts over the future of the act. But, after a chance encounter, former Colossamite guitarist Dieterich came to join the Deerhoof ranks and tack changed again.

“For me, discovering Deerhoof and Deerhoof’s music and then getting to know Greg and Satomi and then starting to play with them, that entire period was maybe one month. I had never heard of Deerhoof before I moved to Oakland just eight years ago. Greg and I had a class together just at a time when Rob and Kelly were moving to Alaska so nobody really knew what was going to happen.

“The space of time before discovering the band for the first time and the playing with them was so short that I didn’t have a whole lot of preconceptions about what the band was. I had heard one CD the night before I went to the see them play for the first time. I had known Greg a couple of days at that point, and then went to see them play and immediately though I could relate. There wasn’t a lot of deep consideration, especially on my part; I just though how much I would love to play with these musicians and I can relate to their aesthetic, and I just felt it was an opportunity that I hadn’t had up to that point musically. Basically the possibility of having melody, real melody, co-existing with all these other musical elements that often don’t co-exist – to me the possibilities were very exciting.”

Though still with a strong focus on instrumental compositions, Reveille was a potent indication to the increasing pop sensibility Deerhoof were employing, a move “incidental” by Dieterich’s accounts but one that marked a significant spread in critical praise for the act. Joined by Chris Cohen a year later, the act have released successive bouts of skewed experimental pop since, ranging from 2002’s modestly orchestral rummage round the Garden of Eden with Apple O', past Milk Man’s surreal shenanigans through to the 20-track pop battalion of The Runners Four. Though Cohen left in 2006 to pursue his own musical ventures, Deerhoof returned earlier this year with Friend Opportunity, the most rounded and universally lauded release from the act yet, as genuine moments of melancholy (‘Wither the Invisible Birds’) were met in equal parts by spiralling nonsensical noise (‘Look Away’) and the exuberant childish quality to their music running amok (‘+81’).

‘Wrong Time Capsule’ (from The Runners Four; dir: Martha Colburn)

Members, both past and present, have continually involved themselves in a range of side-projects and collaborations. From the current line-up Saunier previously contributed to Cohen’s awkward pop project The Curtains, and also participated in the previous outing with Tudorian mistress Joanna Newsom and Hella’s Zach Hill as Nervous Cop, among other projects. Dieterich has also had his share of holding hands with Cohen outside of Deerhoof, partnering up his former band mate and Dilute drummer Jay Pellucci for the instrumental act Natural Dreamers, as well as Oakland experimentalists Gorge Trio. Dieterich identifies this autonomy to the group as central to each member of Deerhoof feeling able to develop their own distinct direction as each individual drags the act in a different direction.

“For me, it is absolutely necessary. Whether or not it is happening within the band at that moment or not, I sometimes find that if I am finding myself musically frustrated the first place I will go is to liberate. I think music needs to have an element of freedom and even musicians who are not playing improvised, in order to be able to communicate anything, need to feel free. So even if playing the most tightly composed music, there needs to be an element of freedom.”

So is there anything planned either within or outside of Deerhoof’s confines now that touring Friend Opportunity is out the way?

“There’s a possible collaboration with this guy Busdriver who we toured with in the US and really admire. We have made some tentative approaches but it is only in the preliminary stages and we have no idea what that will end up being, if anything. And then beyond that, everything is really open; we don’t know what next year will be like apart from recording at some point.

“Other than that the only other thing I’ve cued up, musically, is with these three musicians I meet up with every three months. It’s an improvisational recording project – we have no idea what form it is going to take other than it is loosely based around the Ocean's Eleven series of movies. That’s all we know for the moment with what we’re going to do with it.”

Though forever littered with peculiarities, this was never more the case than after receiving a call from enthusiast Courtney Naliboff in 2005 who voiced a dream she had had to the band of adapting Milk Man for the stage. Taken with a pinch of salt the act politely replied how great that sounded and left the woman to find her own way back to sanity. But, in late 2006, Deerhoof were going to the ballet.

“It was a random brainstorm that this woman had. Basically, she had this idea and e-mailed us about it long before she had the ability to put it on; she wasn’t affiliated with any theatre group, or anything. She was living in Boston at the time and had just finished journalism school and had this idea whilst lying in bed at night. We thought it sounded great but had no idea how it would ever happen. But then six months later she was offered a job as the theatre and musical director on this island off the coast of Maine. She though that maybe we could do this, which was huge risk for her being a new teacher and pushing something so conceptual, but it turned out amazing and was an amazing experience for us.”

As school children manically pirouetted on stage beside the local bluegrass collective, the island’s church reverend and the neighbouring island’s reverend played trumpet and clarinet respectively. Alongside a host of other musical accompaniments, put together by Naliboff and P.E. teacher Ken Jones, it brought an entirely new meaning to ‘Giga Dance’.

“If only the mothers could have gone. The experience of being there – you can get the DVD – but the experience of going there, taking the ferry to the island, driving off the ferry and then looking out to the parking lot where you get off the ferry and there’s all these kids in white costumes jumping up and down welcoming us to the island. It was just like ‘this is totally not real’ and it only got more surreal just getting to know these people who had put so much time and energy into creating this new work of art that completely inspiring for me.”

North Haven Community School and Deerhoof
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Deerhoof have always remained a visually exciting prospect. Having previously had record artwork designed by Trevor Shimizu (The Runners Four) and Ken Kagami (Milk Man), as well as Fisk and Matsuzaki’s occasional contributions, Friend Opportunity took its props from Sonic Youth’s Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star as twelve various covers were designed to accompany the record, designed by absurd Glaswegian David Shrigley (more).

“It was just amazing luck. Basically Tomlab, they had released the original Worried Noodles and they showed us copies of it and we got completely in and when talking about artwork for the record were immediately taken with working with him. He basically came up with the twelve covers and we loved all of them.”

‘Perfect Me’(from Friend Opportunity; dir: Eric Landmark)

Conversation drifts on to Dieterich’s favourite records from the year. Immediately he enquires whether I have heard Dirty Projectors Rise Above, after which he then proceeds to gush about the “crushing” brilliance of the Dave Longstreth’s Black Flag-molesting project before describing how excited he is to be heading home over the next week and finally getting round to getting his head round trying to download In Rainbows. Recently having made an array of tracks available for free download from their website (here), it seems that Deerhoof are as eager as any act to embrace such opportunities to get people listening to their music. Dieterich is keen to explain that the group are all but cynical about the possibilities and the horizons the modern media poses.

“For me it [In Rainbows’ method of release] was an incredibly good idea. As far as whether or not it’s manipulating, from my perspective it was a way of allowing people, anyone, to hear the music and to decide for themselves.

“I think that we’re lucky in the sense that if we think something is cool, or worth listening to, it is this incredible way of asking what others think, and ultimately that’s what it’s about. It’s much easier than any other format that I know. I guess we can do a Deerhoof radio station.”

Taking one step up each time but with no particular direction, Deerhoof is just a constant in broken-brained brilliance.

“We are definitely in an enviable position. People aren’t expecting anything specific from us. We could do absolutely anything...”

LCD's sound symptoms: misses home, doesn't listen to new music, creates the best album of 2007

2007-12-12T09:50:00.001-08:00

James Murphy is exhausted. Bouts of flu flood his skull as his body starts to give up to a mammoth comedown after the LCD Soundsystem lynchpin recently made his way back across the Atlantic following another batch of dates anywhere between Ormskirk and Osaka. Sifting though records in a rare spot of downtime before LCD embarked on a jaunt round South America – a tour that had its fair share of complications – it’s not long since we last spoke to the Brooklyn beatnik in May (link). But off the back of the release of ‘45:33’, the joint jaunt with Arcade Fire, usual duties for DFA and the rounded round of applause the cripplingly brilliant Sound Of Silver has now received, there seemed plenty left to discuss.

- - -

Since DiS last spoke to you, Sound of Silver has been almost universally lauded. Have you been taken aback by quite how well it has gone down?

It was somewhat of a surprise but I don’t really think too much about that. Reviews have typically been good for DFA in general, historically, and I’ve always received positive feedback from releases. So I guess I hadn’t given it that much thought. I think we’ve been spoilt with praise, though.

The album was recorded well over a year ago. Does it stand up and represent what you aspired to release as a record?

Definitely, I’m very proud of it and very pleased. It’s the record I wanted to make so I cannot, and don’t have, any regrets about it.

Do you feel the record, in general, represents a territory that you will continue to come back to, or have you covered a certain base now and look to change tack?

I don’t know. Right now I want to do other things because we’ve been on tour for so long. I want to make some dance 12”s and stay home. Part of the funny thing with being the artist I am is that I get to do remixes and stuff that helps get a lot out of my system. So I keep thinking every time I finish a record that the next record is going to be all centred around a load of dance music, but then get the opportunity to make a bunch of remixes in the kind of down-time and I get that out of my system. But it’s hard to say. Right now I want to get back to work on making music.

Do you think that the relative freedom you have with your various roles is important to you keeping a fresh head?

Yes and no, I think it’s both. On one hand it allows me to keep changing what I’m doing and I don’t feel boxed in or pinned down too much, but then on the other hand being so busy and touring so much takes away a lot of the opportunities I have to do the things I’d like to and just weird ideas I think I’d like to do on a whim.

Though there was a relatively quick turnaround between the debut and Sound of Silver, do you perceive your remixing and production duties for DFA as ever being a distraction from the focus on LCD?

No, not at all. If anything there is too much time between releases for me. I don’t like the modern way of putting out an album every two years or three years. I would rather make a record a year; I just wouldn’t want to tour. People used to make records every year, or two records in a year. The Beatles did twelve albums in six years and it just seems people made more music with more momentum, whereas now it seems like you make a record and you become a salesman for an extensive period of time.

It seems you don’t have the most positive outlook on touring? Is it something you could foresee turning your nose up at in the future?

I enjoy playing live and I actually enjoy – well, don’t mind – the travelling. I get sick a lot and it’s stressful, but I like the people in my band and I like travelling with them. We’re good at it and have a fun time; it’s just more about what it takes me away from. I miss my wife and I miss my dog and I miss my house and I miss my studio and being able to work on other people’s music. I don’t get as much flexibility with spontaneous ideas. I’m not designed particularly well for that.

Presumably this has a good deal to do with being away from New York. You seem to really identify with the city, particularly with regards to that central notion of ‘home’. Would you say it plays a specific role in your songwriting?

New York’s importance for me is massive, it’s monumentally important and I don’t think I could live anywhere else. I grew up 45 minutes out [of town] and became a person there, but have lived in New York since I was 19 in the later ‘80s. It’s a very special place for me and even though I’m bored of it I’m not bored of it. It played a big role in the last record. Not so much with ‘New York I Love You’, because that is a love song that isn’t not meant to be so literal, but the city plays a huge role in everything I do and I genuinely love it. It’s a big deal to me.

Your jaunts away from the city have been pretty extensive though. Can we expect a James Murphy travel book in the near future?

It would go head-to-head with…

Lonely Planet?

[guffaw-splutter-cough]. I think I’d make a travel book on hotels. I’ve stayed in enough hotels this year to know.

Are there particular places that you’ve enjoyed taking the record to?

Going to Poland this year was pretty great. We really wanted to do that and knew we had to do a few back flips to get there, but that was pretty amazing because I had never been there. Japan, again because I just like going there. My wife and I go there regularly no matter what, tour or no tour, and have spent a couple of Christmases there. We have a lot of friends out there and it’s a very different place for us, if just because it’s pretty homely compared with most of the other parts of the globe we end up in. It’s familiar and not so alien.

- - -
Video: 'North American Scum'

- - -

The recent joint tour with Arcade Fire in the US presumably placed you in front of an audience that perhaps would have not have necessarily gone out their way to see you otherwise?

Yeah, it was amazing. We didn’t get any bigger crowds than we’d get at a festival and it wasn’t a radical departure if that makes any sense, but playing to different people was fun. It was good to be the opening band. We haven’t done that in a while so that was enjoyable. It didn’t change the pressure at all but just changed the tone, if that makes in sense. But it was super enjoyable.

Presumably, in the time since you wrote Sound of Silver, new ideas have started to sprout up? Has your approach to writing changed over the last year?

No… I don’t know. Not so much. I don’t really know until I get down to it and I don’t get down to it until I get down to it, if that makes any sense. I write songs every day, so it’s a matter of when I start recording really. I’m in the middle of doing a remix and I’m producing some other stuff and I’m working on the Shit Robots record and working on things now that I haven’t had the chance to engage with recently.

So is it difficult to gage a point where the stages of thought start because of these transitions between projects?

Yeah, it’s difficult to know where my mind is going in terms of the next record. I might use a lot of energy on one of Markus’s (Lambkin, Shit Robots) records and feel like I wanted to do something very, very different, or I might get a head of stream in a direction and keep going. At the moment I feel like I’m just picking up from where I left the album. The album was a strange experience anyway because right in the middle of it I did ‘45:33’, left that, and felt really upset just finishing the album and now having to the b-sides and get ready to tour and do videos which really frustrated me because I felt really engaged in the studio. I felt that I had a lot of energy and that I could make three more albums in that scenario.

Do you feel most content in the studio, behind the engineering decks, then?

No, I’m definitely at my most miserable. It’s really disheartening at times. It’s the highest risk thing. Live was the highest risk thing after I had made just a couple of 12”s, because it was just terrifying. But now it has shifted back and being in the, which I think also has a lot to do with the huge reward that comes off the back of the terror of it. Because it’s pretty quiet, it’s a different type of terror than a flasher movie fright.

Do you feel the current mainstream music scene suits you more than ever?

It does and it doesn’t; it depends on where you are. I think to a certain degree it’s more accepting.

But presumably it’s very different territory than when the debut record came out?

I’m not sure. I don’t really notice. I pay attention to what’s going on in the DFA office and then outside; it’s not much more than what’s going on with big, huge things like Kanye versus 50 Cent, I guess. It still feels like I’m a non-person in that world. I feel that when it comes to new music I’m so distanced that I feel staggeringly objective. It’s one of the reasons that when we started DFA we focused on New York because it was all I could really wrap my head around.

Though you seem to admit that touring has cut you off somewhat, having been nominated as one of DrownedinSound’s Albums of the Year (and the editorial winner!), we wondered what were your favourite records of the year.

Oh wow, awesome. That’s wonderful. That’s fantastic. I never know how to react to such things other than, “it’s great”. I feel so funny about it. I don’t know about my favourite records. I haven’t spent long enough listening to albums this year’s released because I’ve been on tour and just haven’t been able to.

But you’re eternally laid off as this huge muso…

But I spend all my time listening to disco records for DJing. I just sit at home and listen to those records for what is, effectively, my job, whereas I haven’t particularly had the chance to listen to people’s albums. I recently got La Folie by The Stranglers which I’ve been listening to. I tend to read the same books three times, four times, and listen to a lot of the same records. I really don’t have my finger on my pulse for everything. I like to listen to things a long time to understand it which, sadly, cuts out a lot of music. It used to that you listened to a record to understand it, because you loved it, and then listened to radio too because it wasn’t insufferable crap and find things a different way. But now the radio is full of insufferable crap and unless I get a chance to sit with a record I’ll usually be completely oblivious to what most bands sound like.

- - - Crap, as it happens James. Sound Of Silver is the DiS album of 2007 based on editorial arguments and slagging matches; where it rates in this year’s readers vote can be seen when that top ten of 2007 runs on Friday, December 14. Check it’s review here and our full list of 2007’s greatest albums here.

Ghostface Killah - Big Doe Rehab (Def Jam)

2007-12-12T09:48:00.000-08:00

There was always something gently deranged about their antics beforehand, but who knows what the water got dosed with when Ghostface Killah and MF DOOM hooked up with Madlib for the ever-elusive Swift And Changeable, because ever since then the pair sure have seemed strange.

Though S&C remains unreleased, after pairing up with Ghostface for a good batch of tracks on 2006’s imperious Fishscale, MF’s mind seems to have since wandered and while Ghostface and DOOM have always erred on the side of insanity (see cover artwork: crowns, dollars and hanging mammaries born from an apparently panic-stricken dream of GF’s), DOOM’s recent decline and absence from the production roster for Big Doe Rehab is notable. Ghostface has also seemed suitably broken-brained recently, with the release of a Ghostface doll that exclaims “Remember when I long-dicked you and broke your ovary” a decent showcase of his unattractive tendency to flirt with misogyny and close to being as bizarre as GFK online poker and his peculiar penchant for Clark's Wallabees. “Don't put me in no mental clinics” protests Ghostface on this outing. No promises, eh?

Away from 8 Diagrams’s drifting tendencies and guffy John Frusciante riffs, you can see why Ghostface was aggrieved when it was announced that Wu-Tang were due to release their first record for six years on the same date of release as …Rehab. GFK’s output has been an increasingly distant venture from the Staten Island collective and where production credits were endlessly attributed to RZA in the stages where each of the nine core members began to break off for their own solo pursuits, Ghostface has pursued other avenues, away from his old flatmate RZA’s domineering shadow. Sure, as with the ‘all Wu in for a sing-song’ of ‘9 Milli Bros.’ provided on Fishscale, there’s regular references and hands held with the cohorts – especially Raekwon – but it’s increasingly evident that Ghost relishes the opportunity to step out on his own, distant from the Wu fanfare, dubiously stating “First off yo, you ain’t my peeps, I know we’re from the same town and shit but we ain’t that deep” on ‘I’ll Die For You’.

Ghostface’s renown seems strange when you consider he was a reasonably bit-part player until he showed his worth on Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx (1995), before appearing in his Ironman guise - one employed to detail his struggle with diabetes - an outing the following year for his debut. From there each record has trumped its preceding effort, with Fishscale last year detailing crack wrap smuggling services with a soul-sampling panache. Critics lauded its brilliance as Ghostface started to cement his unlikely status as Wu’s newfound centrepiece.

Far less immediate and imposing than Fishscale, …Rehab is far closer to 2001’s Supreme Clientele; still with the focus on the ever-present soul samples, but without the relentless litter of potent hooks its predecessor threw up. ‘Toney Sigel a.k.a. The Barrell Brother’‘White Linen’ as some overblown skit paying his dues or as a sideways snipe at hip-hop’s Evian-quaffing elite sliding shoulders with Robin Williams, Norah Jones and Lenny Kravitz, as Ghost and Shawn Wigs knock out a welcome for the infamous Californian three-way of wenches – Hilton, Lohan and Spears – with the suggestion there’s no snatches on display (“no more free looks, you’ve got to put in work to get a glimpse”). Though incessant sexism regularly rears up with Ghostface, where he was previously guilty of endlessly using the tired put-down of “faggot”, he’s recently toned down this ‘unfortunate habit’. opens with riffs darting with a familiar gusto as Ghostface and Beanie Sigel declare how 'real' they still are, when in truth Ghostface’s unhinged brilliance is about as far from real as it comes. That’s why it’s difficult to pin down GF’s straight-faced perspective - it's possible to either take

But largely, …Rehab fails to hit the spot as relentlessly as it did on the last few outings. Away from the pangs of brutality ‘Walk Around’ summarises as an unremittingly bleak tale of the vomit-spitting aftermath from a debutante’s store shooting, highlights range from ‘We Celebrate’’s intoxicating drones and quick-tongued remarks and Christette Michael’s rasping vocal on curtain-closer ’Slow Down’. But these moments are far less regular than Ghostface’s last few ventures have offered up as ...Rehab begs for a RZA or DOOM to oversee events.

Open the inlay and laundering and laundry seem to merge as one as Ghostface and affiliates wash $100 bills and roll them out in flour. Whatever metaphor’s being played out it seems safe to say the Staten Island statesman is not of sound mind and though never quite reaching previous remarkable peaks scaled, Big Doe Rehab is another valuable insight into the skewed world of Ghostface away from Wu’s taming Shaolin stylings.

7/10

Cowtown - Pine Cone Express (Golden Lab/Chinchilla/On The Bone)

2007-12-12T09:47:00.000-08:00

Cowtown are the soundtrack to your downfall, a haunting descent into a psychotic trench with four cretins rubbing salt on your wounds and breaking your already depleted spirits.

Slowly though, this plight gains a comfort, cider to numb the pain of the weeping sores and gallons of soft drink down your gullet to place you in a state of sugar-soaked derangement. As this idle bliss takes hold Pine Cone Express gains a compulsive quality as its frenetically spiralling waves of no-wave lap at your decaying mind.

The most obvious points of comparison for the Leeds-based quartet’s debut record come from Cowtown’s similarly ludicrous peers; ‘I’m In Your House Part 1’ opens events with Munch Munch’s toddler-baiting stomp, the curtailing sub-Deerhoof sprawl of Buttonhead as ‘Kitty Runs Away From Garlic’ runs rampant and the incessant diseased surf-punk of Agaskodo Teliverek on ‘Crab Pamphlet’. All unnecessary spiel - describing Cowtown accurately is about as feasible as herding cats.

Though ‘Slice Of Ketchup’ harps with Devo’s new-wave riot, occasionally it’s all taken a little too far as ‘Power Ballad’ pushes Cowtown to sweep their hair back and make like Simon Le Bon. Half the point, but half a headache; never far from sounding like inept musak as ‘Mr Pear Sandwich Man’ runs round in circles as it tries to find a wall to claw itself out the pit its dug.

Released on three different formats on three different labels, Cowtown will confuse. ‘I’m In Your House Part 2’ flouts itself again, a contentedly numb-skulled close. You wouldn’t want them in your house: they’d leave their slow-jawed crisp mastication with crumbs in every corner, crayons on the floor and urinate on your sofa as they slept. But from the comfortable distance of the stereo, away from their spreading of germs, they’re a distant delight.

Succinct: a relentlessly refreshing sugar-soaked high.

7/10

The Teenagers - Starlett Johansson (Merok)

2007-11-20T10:36:00.000-08:00

Soft-palmed salivating oiks The Teenagers tested the patience with ‘Homecoming’ (“I fucked my American cunt, I love my English romance”), as it lost itself in a wet-panted fever that indulged their seemingly nympho tendencies more in the style of The Bloodhound Gang than the lecherous Parisian cool of Serge Gainsbourg. But as they went for your crotch there was something enticing about their cack-handed (cock-handed?) approach. Adolescent lust floods the skull again in this offering as visions of a fist wrapping around Josh Hartnett's lunken chops flare up after catching a glace of him locking jaws with diminutive siren Scarlett Johansson.

With future material being produced by Gordon Raphael, ‘Starlett Johansson’ snatches with the two-note garage of Is This It and a delirious, alco-pop fuelled Euro-pop chorus pining after Johansson. As they attempt to rationalise the salty tears spilt, peppering the track with allusions to horse whispering and getting lost in Tokyo, their sensuous native tongue resembles more of a maladroit Danish cleft-palate. A formula seems to be developing when the slow-burning ‘Full Flava’ rears up and for all the brooding allure there is a hysterical infantilism to it. You can imagine them gathered round, erections in gym shorts, guffawing at the mention of ‘cunnilingus’. Rather than make off with your girlfriend, it leaves you more worried that they’ll just molest your younger sister.

Problem is, as this dose of paedo-pop spirals off, it’s easy enough to envisage grovelling back to them hoping for sloppy seconds. But for the moment, at least, an empty bed seems far more appealing than this awkward romp.

odd nosdam - Level Live Wires (anticon.)

2007-11-20T10:35:00.000-08:00

On.

Away from the relentless stream of hyperbole that has left lapping tongues spilling saliva all over Burial’s return with Untrue’s dose of destitute dubstep, David P. Madson, emancipated from previous cLOUDDEAD duties, under his Odd Nosdam moniker, returns with another bout of leftfield electronic drone.

Of all the inappropriate tags pegged to Odd Nosdam’s collar, a ‘collage’ seems most befitting, drawing on the woven intricacies which Madson works from (even cLOUDDEAD’s seminal debut record was the stock of 10” releases the act had released bundled up), as bleak beats loop to form a deadened ambience not far from the empty womb of Eno’s Music For Airports.

Shifting on spasmic tangents, Level Live Wires skips carelessly through guises, as ‘Kill Tone’Rounds as it chimes with the same melancholic come-down piano hook, recycled throughout. It later returns as ‘The Kill Tone Two’ with former cLOUDEAD cohort why? (Yoni Wolf) providing the same deranged rhymes of yesteryear, breaking in with standard nonsensical surrealism (“Good luck is a dead duck / in each hand a duck neck, in each fist / I wrote this ocean at the ocean / hope you hear it in the spirit of St. Nick”) over TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimbe’s somewhat understated contribution. gets outed in two different forms, held together with something of lost loop from Four Tet’s

Elsewhere, as the slow-building ‘Fat Hooks’ drones contentedly over Hood’s Chris Adams and ‘Up In Flames’'s stuttering dub lines flare up against ‘Burner’'s clumsy mechanical churn, it’s the polite jarring of influences that gives the record such a beguiling bleakness.

Rather than the sinister drones of 2005’s Burner, Level Live Wires focuses more on a delirious, often unnerving, sense of atmosphere that is largely indebted to Boards Of Canada’s Geogaddi. Instead of peaks and troughs it is far more subtly aloof, entrenched, away from any inappropriate grandiose, entangled in a shoegaze sprawl as long breaks between tracks leave the record pining for attentions.

Initially underwhelming, as samples and tape loops are pieced together, Level Live WiresDonuts and Person Pitch, keeps you hooked to these patchwork pieces. retains that same eternally unfamiliar tone that, as with

Off.

8/10

Correcto - Joni (Domino)

2007-11-20T10:34:00.000-08:00

Being from Glasgow and a self-proclaimed “art school punk band” rendered the chances of Postcard Records and the self-effacing ‘Sound of Young Scotland’ getting a mention as a fairly safe bet, but, representing something of a missing link between the deranged neo-pop of Orange Juice and the majestic austerity of Josef K, this is a far from inappropriate association to draw to Correcto.

‘Joni’, though, is far from a derivative reiteration from the makeshift quartet and is just as indebted to The Wedding Present’s David Gedge’s dreary melancholy, writhing with the same reserved bemusement as lynchpin Danny Saunders declares his undying love with the deadpan absurd exclamation that “I would eat a fish eye, to have you by my side”.

The sort of infectious pop song where choruses and verses confuse into one, ‘Joni’’s retiring pop brilliance is difficult not to appreciate.

Jay-Z - American Gangster (Roc-a-Fella)

2007-11-20T10:33:00.002-08:00

If ever a warning to musicians not to bother with the façade of some self-important mock-retirement existed, Shawn Carter is it. When Jay-Z declared his retirement off the back of The Black Album in 2003, it was about as accomplished a conclusion to a career as one could hope for, with fanfare sounding as Carter sloped off to the confines of his Roc-A-Fella empire, beau in arm, safe in satisfaction of his co-ownership of beauty line Carol’s Daughter.

Carter returned to the fold all but immediately after the announcement. But rather than a glut of inspiration, his comeback was marked by the dubious R. Kelly collaboration Unfinished Business, a heinous, limp-cocked cash-cow pieced together from unreleased material to promote the pair’s joint touring venture that was about as sexless as Dane Bowers skulking around a nightclub clutching a palm of date-rape tabs. Then, presumably nonplussed by Danger Mouse’s failing to cash in on another passing streak of inspiration, Carter decided cobbling together his own take on The Grey Album made sound entrepreneurial sense, teaming up with Mike Shinoda and his squadron of Linkin Park buffoons for Collision Course, a bloated rap-rock wet dream before his critically-damned solo pursuit with Kingdom Come (feat. Chris “thanks dad” Martin) bombed last year. As a result interest has waned somewhat; recent efforts seeming more like products just as in need of a market pitch as Rocawear’s range of lingerie or luxury hand soaps than a chance to showcase a virtuoso’s unabashed brilliance. And so, surely American Gangster, a ‘concept’ record inspired by the film of the same name, would further mark this decline?

It certainly starts that way with the introduction track alone bearing a volley of banal soundbites (“Your gangster is not defined by how low your jeans fall by your waist but more by how genes stand over his expectations”; “if you believe in Jay-Z then you, too, can be a gangster”). Directed by Ridley Scott, the film itself picks up on Harlem dealer Frank Lucas as Jay picks parallels, reflecting upon the pushing pastures of his youth and how he could have faced a similar downfall to that of Lucas, convicted in 1976 of smuggling loads from Vietnam using soldiers’ coffins. As Jay pleads “Please don’t compare me to rappers / compare me to trappers / I’m more Frank Lucas than Ludacris / and Luda’s my dude, I'm not trying to diss”‘No Hook’, it just seems like a man unashamedly distant from the leftfield innovation that has distinguished a clutch of hip-hop records in 2007. on the suitably-titled

The opening batch of tracks are dishearteningly tame as ‘Pray’ chimes like an overblown skit with his esteemed other half Beyoncé blathering some gospel nonsense over the top. Then the mild-mannered soul of ‘American Dreamin’’, taking an utterly uninspired route of sampling Marvin Gaye’s ‘Soon I’ll Be Loving You’, follows suit by refusing to go anywhere as it spirals in a vacuum of inspiration. Even when Lil Wayne joins in he seems disorientated, as his deranged rasp is slowed in the tepid, stutter-to-fade Beastie Boys-pilfering ‘Hello Brooklyn 2.0’.

But just when the record seems to be dragging its heels trying to make an impression, ‘Roc Boys (And The Winner Is…)’ kicks in, brass rasping, and denotes a change in tack. Rather than the forced grandeur of the first half of the record, Jay finds his feet with a track befitting his beguiling, slow-tongued flow, rhymes lapping compulsively over Beyoncé, Cassie and Kanye West background grunts on the album's finest three. Elsewhere, Pharrell weighs in with a pair of minimalist hip-pop highlights, as ‘I Know’ and ‘Blue Magic’ showcase the same slow-burning, back-to-basics brilliance that marked out Clipse’s Hell Hath No Fury.

The jury’s still out on whether Carter would rather be releasing a range of vintage monocles through Rocawear and be hailed as an entrepreneurial deity than release another record of genuine ingenuity, but that fails to denote that American Gangster is as consistent a record as the Def Jam CEO has produced since his short-lived retirement. Where recently it had been his downfall, it is some of the collaborations on this record that really stand out as Jay leans on contributions from Bilal, Beanie Sigel and even old sparring partner Nas for the intoxicating ‘Success’. Patchy, perhaps, but there's plenty over the course of American Gangster to suggest that, even if sullied by a lack of prolificacy, at least the Brooklyn beatnik is keeping the right company again.

6/10

The Pyramids - The Pyramids (Domino)

2007-11-20T10:33:00.001-08:00

After sessions for Derdang Derdang came to a close, Archie Bronson Outfit’s The Cardinal (Sam Windett) and Arp (Mark Cleveland) were left with an insatiable desire to spin out, with whetted tongue unsatisfied. In absence of Dorian Hobday from the usual roster, The Pyramids‘Pyramidy’'s scything psych introduction and rarely lets up as this eponymous release descends into a relentless tirade of squalid brilliance. were formed, an act who, with the stark insistence of The Monks, let Archie Bronson Outfit’s psychedelic tendencies rear up. As a barren air raid siren pine opens events a methodical drum beats against

Recorded in a converted barn below dusty beams in the Berkshire countryside, amid The Cardinal’s cries of “Hunch Your Body!” the record sounds with a rural detachment, deranged with mild-mannered madness, as ale soaks the skull and quells a hollow-hearted heartbreak. Harping with its usual delirium-induced bawl Windett’s vocal delivery is unsettlingly on edge as the disorientating ‘White Disc Of Sun’ cuts in with the pent up vigour of ABO’s previous lust-laden ventures.

More so than with Derdang, The Pyramids is a bleak outing, austere in its approach as ‘Piblokoto’ echoes hysterically with nihilistic shrieks. Interspersed with the calming instrumental ‘Guitar Star’ things are immediately dragged back up by the collar as ‘A Gala In The Harbour Of Your Heart’ pants with a raucous insistence, as the “play one, write one, give it to Head” approach to recording pays dividends.

Rarely with a let up, this is both the making and undoing of The Pyramids. While not far from the usual Archie Bronson outing it lacks the dexterity and craft that Derdang Derdang used to soundtrack its yearning glands as more a persistently lecherous grope than a snide touching up. But rather than the usual dregs from the barrel such projects tend to showcase this is far from tawdry ABO spill-over. As bones are melt down for kicks as ‘Glue You’ closes with psychopathic tendencies on show, The Pyramids is a satisfying pinch of the arse and fist to the gut.

8/10

Vampire Weekend - Mansard Roof (XL)

2007-11-20T10:31:00.000-08:00

Describing yourselves as “Upper West Side Soweto” isn’t the best way to amiably introduce yourselves, but, for all their bombardiering flaws, Vampire Weekend’s debut AA release of ‘Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa’/‘A-Punk’ had a certain charm. Rather than distance their preppy stature, the Brooklyn quartet played up to it, overtly MOR but with darting Congolese riffs that would leave Andy Kershaw in fits positioned awkwardly over Ezra Koenig’s earnest croon, calling out like The Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser collapsed in a deckchair, tipsy on vermouth, with Graceland pining in the ears.

“I see a mansard roof through the trees,” exclaims an enraptured Koenig as he gazes round as if on a day out from the institution, picking geraniums and wavering with the beauty of the world outside. Whilst utterly unconvincing there is something unwholesomely satisfying about it all, but far from the ‘afro-pop’ hyperbole. Instead, as it starts to spiral with lightweight Disney delirium it is as indebted to the same gurning jive Jack Peñate treads as the guilty pleasures Yeasayer so precariously grabbed at to avail on All Hour Cymbals.

Unnervingly gratifying mundane schlop.

Animal Collective - London Astoria (01/11/2007)

2007-11-11T09:51:00.000-08:00

And so, the circus rolls back into town.

Animal Collective performances have always been frustrating, often beguilingly so, but of late it’s veered towards notoriously awkward. Though the act have always distanced the analogies that are constantly drawn between them and childhood, the Brooklyn collective’s most recent London performance – at the Coronet in July – saw them making like children, as they rushed like petulant jackanapes to hold up a painting to mother while the paint slid off the page, as tendencies to hastily showcase their latest material reared up as the anticipated airing of Strawberry Jam was swept aside.

For all the arms aloft in disarray as Strawberry Jam saw the act turn their backs on the minimalist noise-folk that marked out their initial recordings, it remains under different guises. Dainty opener ‘Dancer’, with Avery Tare lulling nonsensically, for all its chiming electronics shares many parallels with the act’s early incarnation, only shifted onto a different plateau. Rapturously received perhaps, but earlier material, including ever-manic renditions of ‘Who Could Win A Rabbit’ and ‘Banshee Beat’, seem increasingly eclipsed by pastures new.

Again with Deakin absent, the act pick at Sung Tongs and Feels in equal measures, as well as the newly realised tracks, including the deranged hullabaloo of ‘Walk Around With You’. But it is …Jam material that receives the utmost attention. As heads shake with loose-necked vigour to a hectic rendition of ‘Chores’, ‘Derek’ parps with uneasy delirium and ‘Peacebone’“a blow out does not mean I’ll have a good night” as the elbows jar to find space in the downsized venue. But it is ‘Fireworks’ that splinters off most vividly. As stuttering tape loops lap compulsively, the track opens and is held, teetering to and fro, mutating into ‘Essplode’ and back before exploding into life. Elsewhere, Panda Bear’s ‘Song For Ariel’ is fittingly incorporated as it sifts into new track ‘Bear Hug’ and underlines the way this act work: comfortable around each others’ separate ventures, free of pretension. befittingly calls out that

With such a focus on retaining a momentum throughout, with such subtleties in the transition between tracks carrying the set and drawing away from the erroneous notions of any improvisation, an encore seems unnecessary. Moments later this is not the case as the plaintive ‘No More Running’ and demented jabbering of ‘Leaf House’ leaping around compulsively as gurning jaws are left agape.

The circus is never quite as good as you expect it to be, returning home clutching a bag containing a comatose goldfish and a novelty key ring. This feeling of disappointment has often been left when Animal Collective came to town, but, this evening, the circus came good.

9/10

“No Wands”: David Shrigley dissects Worried Noodles

2007-10-26T10:33:00.000-07:00

Diseased minds increasingly are drawn to the work of David Shrigley. Whether morality checks (“the disabled lad wants you to buy him a wheelchair with the money that you won at the horse race”) or simply sculptures of decaying molars, his artwork picks up on human failings with a softly demented approach, love and death embroiled with panic attacks in the supermarket and running from seagulls.

Shrigley’s renown has predominantly come from the scrawled illustrations that have long adorned magazine page corners, but the Glasgow-based artist has increasingly crept in from the sidelines towards the music industry, recently designing twelve alternative covers for Deerhoof’s Friend Opportunityreview) and directing videos for Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billie. In 2005, Shrigley released a record entitled Worried Noodles. The sign of a man trying to breach the walls of pop? Not quite. It had one flaw – there was no record, simply an empty sleeve with a 48-page inlay of lyrics and drawings. Shrigley’s explanation? “I didn’t make a record. I couldn’t be bothered to make a record. It would have been too difficult. It was easier not to make a record.” (

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Who I Am And What I Want
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Pan forward to late 2007 and Worried Noodles now resembles a 39-pronged behemoth featuring one of the finest line-ups of alternative acts going. How did this happen? Shrigley begins: “If you’re sitting comfortably, I’ll tell you the story...”

“I met (the people from) Tomlab at a show in Köln a few years ago, and they asked if I wanted to do a t-shirt for their label. I did that, and then they asked me if I would do a record cover for one of their bands. I never got round to that until this year when I did a cover for Deerhoof. Either way, prior to that I think they had got a bit impatient for me to do this cover, so they suggested that we make this publication that was just going to be a record cover without a record in it and they imagined that it would be some kind of conceptual conceit to have an empty dust sleeve in it. I started doing it and it didn’t seem quite seem enough, so I ended up writing a song book to go in it. For the most part these didn’t have any musical structure and instead, I guess, it was a bit like concrete poetry and the formal aspect of the text and the way it was presented on the page. So it was an imaginary record in a way. Then, I suppose inevitably, the record label suggested we did a proper recording of it and invite bands to record songs based on these lyrics.”

Was this ever meant to be the case?

“Not really. I certainly didn’t have that in mind when I wrote the lyrics and had imagined it would just be a book. It seemed a nice idea, though, and initially we thought we could produce just a single vinyl without a cover and it could be like a companion piece for the original. But everyone got a bit carried away and we ended up using 39 artists.”

Released on German label Tomlab (many of whose roster appear on the compilation), Worried Noodles now takes on a different guise as a traditional record with music as TV On The Radio gabble away to a sweet potato, Les Georges Leningrad reason with a pimp and David Byrne sweetly croons his offering, each act interpreting the accompanying songbook’s content from the original incarnation of the 'record' into their own warped masterpieces. Shrigley’s initial concept is knocked to its knees amid the hustle-bustle of acts clambering to grasp onto a piece of the artist to chew on. Most of these appropriately choose to regurgitate their mouthful of his work by peppering such nonsense with appropriately darting hooks and curtailing riffs. Others, however, took more unusual paths.

“I don’t really have any favourites. I have to say I like them all because I do feel some kind of ownership over them all in that I wrote the lyrics for them all, but I think the most surprising one was the Grizzly Bear track, where there was probably the biggest polarity between the lyrical starting point and the end result. I wouldn’t have imagined that one could write that kind of song based on that set of lyrics. The great aspect was receiving an mp3 every week or so over several months and just kept appearing in my inbox. It was quite upsetting when it was over.”

As the record cuts from industrial techno to orchestral melancholy, bent and misshapen, Shrigley’s absurdist character is embedded within the record. This seems to have caused the artist some discomfort. “Because they’re my lyrics it was like someone pretending to be me almost, which is an uncomfortable thing.” So, do you think the acts have encapsulated you, the centrepiece? “Not sure really. I suppose my ego points at the fact I am the starting point but in terms of the actual music the lyrics are only a small part of it and I suppose that is the theme of the record, the unifying raison d’être for the compilation."

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Grizzly Bear - ‘Blackcurrant Jam’ (excerpt)
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The release of the record was celebrated with a show promoted by Upset! The Rhythm at London’s Scala on October 14, with Hot Chip, Simon Bookish, Max Tundra and a host of other acts performing. Shying away from the limelight, prior to the performance, Shrigley suggested he wasn’t too keen to get to involved with the festivities.

“I’m hoping that I don’t have to do anything formal on stage.” No appearances in a cape? “Nor a top hat. No wands. I did some drawings that will be projected on the screens to introduce all the acts, so that’s my participation. I don’t think I’ll be up on the stage to sing songs, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

Each act comes and goes and, as Psapp pelt the audience with signed toy cats and the evening makes away with £1,000 for Amnesty, is quite some success that underlines Shrigley’s current appeal.

With the attention that has been lavished upon his work recently, though, is there a danger of overexposure?

“Err… Yes, probably. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about that though. I suppose to say no to some things, but I don’t know. My criteria is that as long as what I am doing is good then it’s fine to do it. As long as I’m having a good time and I feel what I am doing is interesting and not shite then that’s good and I’m going to continue. I supposed there is a fashion aspect to what I am doing, and perhaps I will go out of fashion at some point. But, again, there’s not a lot I can really do about that so I might as well just… Oh wait, an ambulance is going past.”

Conversation drifts onto talk of his new book, Ants Have Sex In Your Beer. Nonplussed with an American publisher's attempts to alter the title to warn that Ants ARE Having Sex In Your Beer, Shrigley dug his heels in. “I never worry too much with how I fit in. The good things about exhibitions rather than doing a book or anything that is published is you can do whatever you want as a fine artist in a museum. You can do whatever you want and not be denied the opportunity to do things in the exhibition context.”

And so, exposed to all, whether boxed away in a corner beside an article on must-have hair gels or top ten genocidal atrocities or the deranged musings of a man held aloft and showcased in the comfort of an exhibition space, David Shrigley remains a beguiling prospect.

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Blur - Good Song
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Worried Noodles is out now on Tomlab. Further links below.

WORRIED NOODLES|DAVID SHRIGLEY

YACHT - I Believe In You. Your Magic Is Real (ERR)

2007-10-26T10:28:00.000-07:00

In a cosy cocoon all of his own, away from any limitations his pairing in The Blow may have imposed, Jona Bechtolt sits comfortably numbskulled as YACHT, wrapped in his own perverse world. After joining forces with Portland balladeer Khaela Maricich for a short spell, I Believe In You. Your Magic Is Real sees the pop minstrel return to his usual solo sugar-coated jarring pop nonsense.

We've been heads-down and drowned in a barrel of warped electronic pop ventures this year, slowly eroding amid Dan Deacon and Videohippos’ seizure-inducing shenanigans and jaws dislodged by the majestic leap towards such a territory Strawberry Jam marked. Though this is terrain YACHT has long trodden, I Believe In You… seems to find the beatnik more befuddled and desperate than ever to recapture waning attentions.

As ever, it’s a mixed bag. Every project Bechtolt has ever embraced has had pop undercurrents, distorted as accessible hooks are undone by Bechtolt’s agitated production. But for every track that hacks away at Bechtolt’s trademark jabber, with the Eats Tapes collaboration on the mutating techno of ‘It’s All The Same’ paying particular dividends, there is the deranged ‘We’re Always Waiting’ with its incessant, jackanory delivery of “We. Want. All. That. Stuff / All that stuff that cost too much” resembling Mika’s knuckle-gnawing bleat.

As an unquestionably proven beatsmith, harking back to YACHT’s 2004 release of Super Warren MMIV, it is the instrumental-focused moments that are the finest here: ‘So Post ‘Em All’ makes out like Chad Hugo tampering with a Person Pitch offcut and stands out as far more remarkable than the incessant pop-posing of the ‘Miss You’-pilfering ‘See A Penny (Pick It Up)’. Maricich’s impact on YACHT is plainly marked, with the backing vocals that Clare Lewis provides on many of the tracks charting a familiar realm, though whether this is a positive influence on the record is difficult one to call.

As the first release on Tomlab lynchpin Jan Lankisch’s independent venture with ERR, I Believe You... is fairly free of the pretense such idle-minded eclecticism tends to showcase but seems somewhat clumsily cobbled together, culminating in the calamitous Ivor Cutler-filching curtain-closer ‘Women Of The World’ moments after the manic ‘Your Magic Is Real’. With a decent dose of the bedroom-bred laptop dynamism that has earned YACHT such an appeal, I Believe In You. Your Magic Is Real continues previous form as a beguilingly claustrophobic mess.

7/10

Dirty Projectors - London Cargo (15/10/2007)

2007-10-26T10:27:00.000-07:00

Withdrawn but not quite detached, Dave Longstreth’s vacant stare and awkward stage presence act as a somewhat immediate signal of what to expect from Dirty Projectors. The act’s most recent release, Rise Above, finds Longstreth rekindling the Black Flag affections of his youth, re-imagining Damaged having found an empty cassette case of the record at his parents' home. Structures remain but are deformed at the joints as Longstreth spits out the urgent punk that once sat in his skull as his own dislocated interpretation.

Conceptually Rise Above is brilliant, prompting flack from ’Flag afficiandos for warping Damaged out of shape and garnering attentions that have often eluded the act. However, as with previous ventures, Dirty Projectors can regularly be a struggle to involve yourself in. Every track shifts through phases as a seeming extension of Longstreth’s mind taking on other tangents. Despite this drifting approach, under the open stall of Cargo Longstreth’s wavering vocal and flitting song structures compulsively hold the attentions that they regularly struggle to keep hold of on record.

Through the wide array of influences the Brooklyn cohort incorporate, amid Brian Mcomber’s constantly transitional percussion, the avant-garde jazz leanings of the act come to the forefront, and although compositions are far from freeform, tracks splinter non-commitally. Longstreth’s quaking tone recalls Edwyn Collins’ melodramatic delivery, but also points a fat finger at Pere Ubu’s David Thomas, reverberating with the same demented resonance as violent staccato guitar laps underneath. Every Dirty Projectors track begins with the same mild-mannered introduction as riffs politely find their feet and tread on toes until they all seep into each other to hit a confident stride in their absurd pop posturing.

Despite the distinct differences between Rise Above and previous EP New Attitude, material from both features prominently this evening, with the set contentedly picking at both. Despite the often disposable roster that shifts round Longstreth since Dirty Projectors started in 2002, each member of the current ensemble provides an effective counterpoint against the act’s centrepiece performer, Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian both combining harmoniously as a pair of Eleanor Friedbergers.

Closing with the title track from Rise Above reaffirms that all too often material can come across unconvincingly as Longstreth occasionally struggles to hone the range he works on. But this meandering habit is half the appeal of Dirty Projectors. Though Henry Rollins never spouted the lines “We are tired of your abuse / Try and stop us it’s no use” with such whimsical earnestness, its recomposition remains peculiarly potent as pop bent out of fashion.

Deliriously set adrift, but not quite set apart.

‘Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie’
‘New New Attitude’
‘Fucked For Life’
‘Thirsty And Miserable’
‘Depression’
‘Imagine It’
‘Rise Above’

7/10

Von Südenfed - 'The Rhinohead' / 'Slow Down Ronnie' (Domino)

2007-10-26T10:23:00.000-07:00

”This is a story based in the present time. The present time as you watch it now. The present time of fling your ear. The present time of snooker no longer on TV. This was a vicious man who had to change. He had to change his environment to play pool, which, incidentally, I used to do for £10 a day. Hei!”

Mangled minds pan to Mark E. Smith, with his usual slow-tongued slur snatching over the trials and tribulations of Ronnie O’Sullivan’s turbulent career as Von Südenfed’s lumbering limbs reach out to embrace The Rocket on ‘Slow Down Ronnie’. It’s all reasonable enough, yet dribbles along until the XTRMNTR-aping chorus romps in. Compared to the accompanying track on this 12” and the unhinged warp that Tromatic Reflexxions sits inside, though, it all seems fairly timid and uninspired.

Somewhat misguidedly labelled as Northern Soul, ‘The Rhinohead’ shakes with a familiar tone. But the song is just as much Mouse On Mars generals Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner referencing their own brand of leftfield house under a new guise as anything else.

Rather obviously, one of the key differences between The Fall’s Reformation TLC and Von Sudenfed’s Tromatic Reflexxions is Smith. But where on The Fall’s recent long-player his deranged drawl sounded chafed and aloof amid its hollow production, this collaboration has seen The Fall lynchpin with a newfound bawl, deliriously delivering his nonsensical lines. So used to the centre-stage, jabbering away, he seems unusually content in taking a step back behind Toma and St. Werner.

The Pilooski remix of ‘The Rhinohead’ tailors the industrial dirge into a track of true dancefloor ingenuity, filling the original’s blunt lapses with atmospheric undercurrents with a mule's hoof to the jaw around the three minute mark that would move even the most cement-headed of bitter-lipped revellers.

Extra Golden - Hera Ma Nono (Thrill Jockey)

2007-10-26T10:21:00.001-07:00

Ever since Paul Simon decided to bombardier his flailing ego round the world’s barrios, making a dart for any marimba or panpipe that was going spare, noses have tended to quickly turn from the sort of foundations that Extra Golden are built upon.

Formed after Ian Eagleson, lynchpin of DC alt outfit Golden, met Orchestra Extra Solar Africa’s Otieno Jagwasi in 2000 after venturing out to Kenya to complete a doctorate in ethnomusicology, Extra Golden soon built up an appetite for bouts of benga in place of rock bombast. But when it takes Beirut’s Zach Condon, A Hawk And A Hacksaw’s Jeremy Barnes and moustached arsehole Eugene Hutz to bring a significant reception to traditional gypsy music outside the Balkans purely because some western bumpkins decided to straddle the genre, scepticism is rife with such musical gallivanting. And so, even after their debut Ok-Oyot System in 2006, Extra Golden still seems to require some sense of caution for any post-colonial tendencies.

Following lead vocalist Jagwasi’s untimely death from liver failure in 2005, Eagleson, having obtained a proper distribution of Ok-Oyot…, returned to Nairobi with fellow Golden associate Alex Minoff to produce Hera Ma Nono, later recording the album in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains. With it difficult to do justice to the engrossing tales that accompany the act, Extra Golden fortunately provide a record that steps deeper into the issues that its predecessor occasionally only clumsily fumbled around.

In spite of the language barriers - the bulk of the record is sung in Luo - within eight bars of ‘Jakolando’ everything that makes Extra Golden so absorbing is on show. Many of the topics allow an immediate sense of connection despite the alien tongue. Sung by Onyando Jagwasi, brother of the late singer, his voice resonates with a hollow melancholy that sits bewilderingly over the buoyant track that backs him. Elsewhere, Opiyo Bilongo takes over lead vocal duties and provides the same timbre, sitting awkwardly between deliriously disturbed and in absolute ecstasy, cut up and confessional on ‘I Miss You’. ‘Obama’ pays its respects to the aspiring presidential candidate Barack, having helped arrange visas for the act to perform in Chicago, and, as with most of the tracks on the record, is a lengthy composition with Minoff’s spidery riffs and Onyango Wuod Omari’s comfortably complicated percussion shifting through stages without ever dragging it all out.

Hera Ma Nono still possesses an often awkward transition between the jarring Kenyan and North American influences, but this also essentially provides Extra Golden with their character. Though certain tedious aspects seep in from the sides and threaten to envelop it all, with ‘Night Runners’ and ‘Street Parade’ struggling to battle off being coated by a layer of laboured art-school world music, the seams are sewn far tighter than before. As the record closes and the title-track fades out, any loitering suspicion that this would be mediocre pedestrian drivel is dispelled, leaving the sense of a beguiling passing parade.

Label Focus: Big Dada

2007-10-26T10:18:00.000-07:00

After ten years it’s time for some suitable celebrations.

Well Deep, released this week, compiles some of the finest moments from Big Dada’s back catalogue with cLOUDDEAD sat beside Roots Manuva and MF Doom bickering with Ty. It only goes to show that the label is as relevant as ever.

Born out of a frustration over acts going unappreciated elsewhere, the label began in 1997 as an off-shoot of leftfield independent label Ninja Tune, and swiftly cemented itself as a force in its own right. DiS spoke to Big Dada's founding father Will Ashon about how the label has advanced, Hoovering Mike Ladd's mess from Manuva's flat, and MF Doom being more of Franzen than a Salinger nowadays.

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Fancy giving a vague plotted history of Big Dada?

In 1996 we had a stupid idea and then convinced Ninja Tune it was a good idea. 1997 saw us release three singles (Alpha Prhyme, Asylum, New Flesh For Old) and it went from there, until this year when released the Well Deep compilation. You see, I could go into considerably more history but the truth is it would bore you to death. Running a label day-to-day is an office job and, really, the story of the time the artwork was late or when our French PR e-mailed because they hadn't received enough stock is not going to fascinate. The best 'vaguely plotted history' is Well Deep itself. Although, once again, you could have put that compilation together in ten different ways and it still would not really do credit to the artists who have been involved with the label.

What were the motivations behind starting the label?

The same as it always is: to release good music which seemed to be being missed or ignored by already-existing labels. I think that's the reason most people go into it, isn't it? Unless it's to do coke and try to get off with other people's groupies. I think those people don't run labels for a decade, though. They just go to work for a major. I guess there was an arrogance there as well - a sense that it could be done better than it was being done. Luckily I've had that beaten out of me.

How do you feel the label has changed over the last ten years?

It's got bigger and a bit more businesslike. But it's pretty much unchanged in most ways. For the first six or seven years it was just me, then Etienne Tron (now of Radio Clit) came and worked for me for a couple of years, then in 2005 I went part time to spend more time writing obscure fiction and Jamie Collinson took over as label manager. And obviously we get a huge amount of help, support and hard work from the people at Ninja, which has been a constant. It still has the same backs-against-the-wall feel to it. It's still a fight.

How important do you think having Ninja Tune as a blueprint was?

Having their expertise was very helpful. I knew nothing about the music industry or the physical process of manufacturing a record. Or anything else, come to think of it... And whatever people might say, sometimes it's better just to be told rather than 'finding out on the job', as you waste thousands of pounds.

Cadence Weapon - 'Sharks' (from Breaking Kayfabe)

From reading recent coverage of the label surrounding the anniversary, some of the most enjoyable releases have been the UK artists. What do you feel have been the standout releases you've been involved with?

I couldn't pick just one. I've always loved working with Mike Ladd because, as well as being super-talented, he's very funny. My favourite tour was when he came over with Fred Ones and Rob Sonic and they used Roots Manuva's flat while he stayed at his girlfriend’s and I got to Hoover up afterward. The glamour count has never been higher.

I really enjoyed the Black Whole Styles 'tour' in 1998 - me driving Roots Manuva, Juice Aleem and EBU around to a handful of tiny dates. I have really fond memories of that.

I like being drunk and suddenly getting all emotional at live shows - Ty is always good for that.

Wiley was great fun - never knowing if he'd show up. Mind you, Jamie Collinson was directly responsible at that time, so I could afford to laugh.

MF Doom was funny, too - long patches of silence and then a scrubby CD-R with a marker pen scrawl on it coming through the post. He's the JD Salinger of underground hip-hop. Or, at least he was. I think he's the Jonathan Franzen of underground hip-hop now.

Do you think the UK hip-hop scene gets the credit it deserves?

I don't know how much it deserves, so it's hard to judge it. I think UK black music gets a pretty raw deal, if that's a similar thing. Having said that, I think UK hip-hop gets a reasonably good critical response in the print press. It just doesn't sell very well. Mind you, if it's a choice between that and doing a painfully shit routine on the MOBO awards I know which I'd choose...

How influential do you feel Roots Manuva's involvement with the label has been? Much of the press surrounding your celebrations have circulated around the man.

It's important to have a figurehead artist, I guess. And, in a world where the artistic success of any creative project is judged by its commercial success, it's important to have an artist who is commercially successful.

Rodney, I think, is a really good example of the maverick spirit we value. He's always done everything completely his own way and has been successful without compromise. I think he should be a figurehead to a lot of artists... He should be as cherished as Jarvis Cocker, Robert Wyatt, Lee Perry and all. But then again, so should most of our artists.

Roots Manuva - 'Colossal Insight' (from Awfully Deep) What role do you feel Big Dada performs for acts? As a platform, or a home for artists?

I'm not sure I understand the question. We try to encourage them to make the best records they can and then we try to sell them as hard as we can. I'm not sure whether that's a platform or a home. I guess it varies from artist to artist. As best we can we try to give them what they want. Except for the Lear Jet. They have to buy that themselves.

I guess the truth is that when we had fewer artists it was more like a home, whereas now it's more like a platform. But it really does depend more on the artist than on us. It's such an abstract question that I'm seeing shapes. It's most like a dodecahedron rendered in the four dimensions of space and time.

How do you see the role of record labels changing in the next few years? Has the move into the digital age been a good or bad thing for Big Dada?

I don't know. We're an old-fashioned record label. I'm not interested in the digital age in and of itself, only in good music. I find the current media hysteria over the Radiohead download scam utterly laughable. The actions of multi-millionaires should never be held up as a social barometer - their wealth insulates them from having to behave like the rest of us do. If I read another piece about "a new paradigm for the music business" I will cave my head in with a brick.

What I will say is that technological change has driven how we create, record, package and sell music for the last 100 years, but I'm not sure it's ever been predictable how technological changes will impact or even which technological changes will impact.

And how do you feel you fit in? Where would you like to see the label in another ten years?

We don't fit in. That's why we attract the artists we do. In ten years we'll either have gone out of business or we still won't fit in. The music business is bursting with idiots. It's important for everyone to remember that, because some of them are very plausible.

cLOUDEAD - 'Sound of a Handshake' (Live) - - -

Well Deep is out now on double CD and DVD. More Big Dada information can be found at their website, here.

Join in the merrymaking on November 16 at London Electrowerkz where Roots Manuva, Cadence Weapon, Wiley, Mike Ladd, Infinite Lifez, Juice Aleem, Xrabit, Speech, Diplo, Spank Rock(DJ) + more perform. Tickets HERE.

Thurston Moore, Barrabarracuda, Kevin Shields, Men Who Can't Love - Thrash Sabbatical (Deathbomb Arc)

2007-10-15T07:50:00.000-07:00

Densely does it. As elaborative goes, Deathbomb Arc have pulled out the stops here. Sat on doorsteps basking in its own hyper-colour majesty, Thrash Sabbatical has imposed itself upon you even before a cart has even been laid down on this raucous LP/2x7” collection of noise mongering, housed in an awkward cardboard box designed by LA outfit Not Not Fun. Thurston Moore pairs up and holds hands with three different LA noise acts with Eva Aguila’s confusingly monikered Kevin Shields, the boisterous tag team making up Men Who Can’t Love, and the girl-gang yobbery of Barrabarracuda all content to hold out a mitt.

After Trees Outside The Academy opened up insecurities, Thrash Sabbatical sees Thurston Moore return back to brat as sonic landscapes of noise are gnawed away at by cacophonous assaults of jerking electronics. Heads may turn at the fact that this is Moore showcasing his inward indulgences but for those that can cut through the shitstream of noise and through to the heart of ‘Creamsikkle’ lie vicious waves of electronic noise pining for attention as brutal bouts of vacuous noise chime like brick on brittle bones. It resonates with the same hollow vigour that HEALTH recently embroiled for their signature hardcore and the explosive experimentalism of Black Dice’s dance-orientated avant-garde but still firmly sat in his usual sandpit of distortion.

Ever wanted to stick your head in a volcano? Don’t bother. Where Moore provides one curtailing track on his side of the 12”, Men Who Cannot Love - made up of various artists from the LA district - offer up six. Innocently opening with Solitary Hunter’s harmonious lo-fi folk, such modesty soon gives way as magma floods eardrums as Impregnable’s ‘When Your Nights Get A Little Colder’ erupts like a natural disaster sifting through the cranium. Entertaining showcase and all but as plates slowly turn and move through the motions it remains pretty static. While MWCL are obiovusly not bereft of ideas it’s that one fails to impose itself over another. As attentions wane Privy Seals eponymous effort peters out with the last spits of molten granite, minds scolded but in tact.

As Thurston changes tack and offers up the unassuming noise-folk of ‘Petite Bone’, Barrabarracuda put you back in the school playground. Clambering up from the cut knees Men Who Cannot Love knocked you down onto, the incessant chant of “You are such a jerk” is spat out as ‘Stone Cold Steve Austin at the Cold Stone Creamery’ descends into a tear-battling belittling. Made up of individuals from various equally dysfunctional acts (Child Pornography, Pochahaunted) Barrabarracuda make with the oikish riot grrl posing of fellow LA cohorts Mika Miko and the noise-pop frolics of Deerhoof playing with half-rotten equipment.

LA noise merchant Kevin Shields (not of any relation to the MBV statesman) is joined by Gang Wizard’s Amy Vecchione for her contribution in the unfathomably boneless no-wave of ‘Paved Fury’ and ‘Motor Hands’. Neither particularly overwhelm and, ending rather abruptly, are gone before the industrial scrawl has really makes an impact. Given we’re struggling to see where Deathbomb are seeing the “angelic harmonies for a tension that evokes pure joy”Cavity Fever for Kevin Shields in full unabashed swing. Sat on the other side of the 7” is another Moore effort in ‘Unzipped’, churning methodically and recognisable as an incarnation of ‘Noise Among Friends’ from Moore’s most recent record that fails to stand up on its own. As the centrepiece to it all Moore’s efforts, as engaging as they are unlistenable, drift with a lack of focus, more idle-minded cast-offs than a structure to base things round, which is disappointing given the general care that has obviously gone into the release. perhaps, instead, try out the equally grating but far more imposing

Thrash Sabbatical is a sour mouthful that will sit bitter on most tongues. It’s not without charms but with only occasional short-fused glimpses of inspiration this is unlikely to yield much of an appeal outside the clambering hands of noise aficionados. Rather, a nicely packaged headache.

For more on Deathbomb Arc click HERE.

DiScover: The Pyramids (04/10/2007)

2007-10-05T08:54:00.001-07:00

Fancy playing away whilst your partner's out of town? Head to the country whilst Archie Bronson isn't looking for a dirty weekend frolicking by the hay bails. Away from prying eyes are The Pyramids - potty-mouthed vocalist Sam 'The Bishop' Windett and stick-smith Mark 'Arp' Cleveland, both of Archie Bronson Outfit renown - waiting out in the barn, open-armed and wide-legged.

This whirlwind side-project, unleashed ahead of the next ABO record, is an opportunity to expel some demons and take some chances after a year touring Derdang Derdang. DiS spoke to Mr Cleveland, who suggests The Pyramids has been quite some learning curve for the duo...

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Can you let us in on this new venture with The Pyramids? There are obvious parallels to be made, but in what respects do Archie Bronson and The Pyramids share similarities, or don’t?
Well, Sam and I made a record that doesn’t have Dorian (Hobday – the third member of ABO) on it, so we called it something else. The thought for it came after we got back from Nashville where we made Derdang a couple years ago now, and we were all working a bit and Dor was off at work and Sam and I just nailed out a load of songs in a day and thought how crazy it was that we wouldn’t do anything with them for ages. So, we thought that we should start another outlet, another band; something we can be to get material out as. It took about a year to get that happening, in terms of us getting into the studio.

Were the tracks that feature on the self-titled debut record a long time coming?
Not at all. The idea was that we were going to record those songs and we had a week, a week off, and then another week to record. We then reconvened with Head for the second week, and it turned out we had gone off the trail – the stuff we had recorded in the first week were older songs, and apart from ‘Festoons’ and ‘Glue You’ everything on the album was done in the second week of recording. ‘Hunch Your Body, Love Somebody’ and ‘White Disc Of Sun’ were written and recorded ten minutes later because of the way we had set up the studio: play one end, write a song, give it to Head, time to have a cup of tea and ask him to press record.

The studio you produced the record in, it was a barn you helped convert, right?
Yes, but it was really Head who worked on it, who produced the album with us. He set up his gear down one end and it was just a really basic set-up with a 16-track desk. Right in the depths of the Berkshire countryside.

Video: 'Hunch Your Body, Love Somebody'

How do you feel The Pyramids differs in terms of what you have previously offered?
I think it is probably a bit more straight-ahead and a bit more psyche. I guess we just wanted to make, not just a garage record, but a record that sounded as fresh as it possibly could be. That is slightly different to a lot of what we have done with The Archies. Though some of Derdang was like that, in that we finished off some ideas whilst recording, the whole of The Pyramids was pretty much brand new and something we haven’t really done before. It can either be disastrous doing that, or it can work and, well, we had a fair few disaster songs that didn’t make it. But it was a invigorating way to record.

Is it refreshing in that sense to return to point one, because this is quite a low-key release compared to the fanfare Derdang received?
It’s really refreshing. I guess that is part of it as well, because we had been recording together as Archie Bronson for a long time and it was fun to just have something which we didn’t have any thought about other than just wanting to make a record.

Are you planning to tour as The Pyramids live at all, or is it more just something that documents a glut of creativity in the studio?
Mainly the latter, but I think we’ll do a few shows because it seems it would be too fun not to. But we’re not going to tour it loads or anything – we’re going to get on and make another Archie record and get busy with that. But we’ll definitely do a few shows for it before New Year.

With regards to new Archie Bronson material – was The Pyramids a separate entity and opportunity to take a chance, or just as much a feeder to future Archie material as anything else?
I don’t think, musically, it will feed ideas, but mentally it has freed us up just a bit because we had been touring the Derdang record for so long, and songs do get a bit stale. There’s no doubt about that. So, just to be able to come out and record some new songs and this whole record that I am getting to know as I listen to it is a refreshing way to go into making another Archie record; it has given our mojo back somewhat. Just sorting out the wheres and whens has helped everything take shape, and in that sense The Pyramids is a good lesson for us in terms of going into recording with maybe just an idea of what we want but just letting the record make itself. That instead of producing something too particular, because albums can take their own life when you start recording them, so that’s something we definitely want to take to the next Archie record. We’ve a bit more room for experimentation.

- - -

'Hunch Your Body, Love Somebody' is out October 8 and The Pyramids follows on November 5, both through Domino.

Want more? Yes. Get Pyramidy.

Battles On Reflection

2007-10-05T08:51:00.001-07:00

Clambering around awkwardly, casually shifting tones, MirroredEP C/B EP in 2006 showcased the grounds on which Battles were working, but few expected the frenetic brilliance that Mirrored provided as a record of genuine leftfield ingenuity: scattered shards of techno, jazz, math-rock and anything that goes embedded in passing feet. After a year rasping away nonsensically on tour with the stellar cast of Ian Williams, John Stanier and Dave Konopka, we spoke to Tyondai Braxton to see how Battles have been dealing with the acclaim that they have garnered and the act is heading to next... is something of a chameleon, unclassifiable but utterly distinct. The domestic release of - - -

Since we last spoke to you – about a month before Mirrored was released – the record was starting to pick up some decent press, but are you surprised with quite how well the record was received?
You know, on one hand you make something and you cannot believe another person likes it, period, let alone two other people, but at the same time when you have made something… I kind of consider myself a member of the audience, too, and though I may have a different perspective if I like it, I am crazy enough to think others may like it. So it’s a mixture of the two and I am very happy that people have responded to it. It also reminds me that maybe there is more room for this music out there than presumed.

Does Mirrored still represent what you aspired to release as a record?
Yes. In a way the goal was simple – just to release a good record – but we had little idea what the record would sound like until we finished. As much as I can take credit for I will; in the parts that I can’t it’s not for me to say. We made the record but we didn’t really know what we had until we had recorded, and as time goes by I start to understand our record more.

In that sense is there anything that you would have done differently with the record, or are you fairly content with the way it ended up?
The perfectionist side of me would say that was that time with Battles, and the next record will be a document in the same way.

A refreshing element for many has been that material from the EPs has featured quite heavily in your recent sets alongside newer material. What relation does the material share and was there ever a temptation to put tracks from the EPs on Mirrored?
You know, I think that there is a way to progress as a band, which doesn’t mean abandoning where you’re from but it means growing from there. So it’s not like the new material is rejecting the old material, but I think when you see the live sets, as you were saying, we kind of mix and match just to show that there is a correlation between the two. For this tour we have come up with a set that comes up very minimally. We may add on a song or two at the end, but for the most part for the past month we’ve been doing the same set because it’s not enough just to have it as a dynamic set as far as the way that it flows – the technical aspects of what we set up from song to song had to be kept in mind too. So it’s really hard to just say, "We’ll just throw a new song in here", without having practised the transition between the two. Transition in this band is very important and in a lot of ways takes the most practise – as far as being able to go from one song to another – so in a way with this set order we’ve really mastered the transitions. Having said that it would be nice to switch up our set soon, just to alter it all and have a change.

'Tonto'

How is new material as an act coming along, if at all?
It’s been going well. It’s just like with the EPs where we toured those songs to death and changed a lot of it just to keep it progressing. ‘Tras’ is like any other song: once the skeletal parts are played over and over again, after a while you want to exaggerate things and freak it a little. As far as new material, we are not a band that can write on tour. Our songs, by nature, are not elaborate because there are a lot of parts going on but because we really sit with the music and find ways for it to expand itself. You cannot really do that in a forced way, especially on tour.

Has your writing process changed over the years you have been together?
I think it has become more comfortable and more confident. As a band we’ve become closer and we understand the way we individually work and understand each other’s strengths and interests. It’s still a total battle in ways because we’re very different people and in a way that’s one of the strengths of this band. But overall I would say we were a lot more comfortable as a band now, and that is reflected in the way that we write and the way our music comes across.

Do you feel there is some sort of trajectory you are working on as an act? Is there a focus to change tangent, or to retain a similar focus?
I have some ideas with what I would like to do, and those things are starting to brew - and I imagine the other guys think the same way too - but it will be natural and also experimental, just like this record.

With all your various individual pursuits – this week alone we’ve listened to John featuring on the new Prefuse 73 record and Ian on the Giraffe Running record – how does that dynamic function within the band?
At the moment we’re in such a Battles mode it is literally a 25-hour-a-day job. After this I am going to finish off my solo record, which is about half done; I had to stop working on that as Battles left for tour. So, probably by the end of the year I will have finished that up and have that out. John, with Tomahawk, has just released a new record and hasn’t been able to get away as much from Battles, but I imagine that after this year we will all settle into other projects a little bit, and then come back to Battles.

With the success that Battles have had, is the act now seen as the most important aspect to most of your careers?
I guess you could say that. Literally, Battles is more important than my solo record or Tomahawk at this point, so that translates into working more and I am sure this will continue. But we want to be able to survive making our own music so will not just be doing Battles.

With the current members that make up Battles having these other musical pursuits, can you ever foresee altering the line-up?
I don’t think so. The music of the band is something of an extension of our personalities and this band wouldn’t be this band without these members. Having said that I think this band is very willing to collaborate with people in the future, so we’ll see what happens with that. But as far as the core of the group changing at all goes, I cannot see that happening.

Are you comfortable performing to the extensive audience you now have?
You know, I give the audience more credit. I am not just saying this just because of this band, because there are plenty of bands that are doing something equally as unconventional that is valid, but I think the audience deserves more credit because I am not so shocked that people like music that is not the same formula and, in a way, a lot of people are excited and love us or hate us because we’ve tried to find our own way, and as a result people respond to that. I respond to that when I see a group – if there is some effort, and they’re on a path to somewhere interesting, then I will stand by them. Your opinion is your opinion, but a lot of these acts are really serious and making really interesting contributions, and for every quality of an act that you may not be into you can look at it like that. But the other side is looking at what is being contributed, and a lot of these guys are awesome.

'Hi/Lo' (Dublin 07/2006) ---

Battles play UK:

October
10 Bristol Trinity Centre
11 London Koko
17 Manchester Academy 2
18 Edinburgh Liquid Rooms
19 Newcastle Stage 2

'Tonto' EP is out October 22 through Warp.

Magik Markers - BOSS (Ecstatic Peace)

2007-10-03T06:35:00.001-07:00

Right door, wrong person. Though introduced in with the standard pining boiling-point shriek Magik Markers have come to embroil themselves in, BOSS is not the bastard you expect to be met by. Petulantly turned noses have dropped and their previously autonomous existence - from the unassuming CD-R distribution of material to their reclusive underground routine - has opened up. Following the departure of bassist Leah Quimby, the Connecticut noise merchants put on an uncharacteristic performance riddled with poignant half-cut confessions that verge close to convention seeping in to their familiarly deformed avant-garde brutality as nine blunt bullet blows.

One of the most striking aspects to BOSS is that, rather than any apparent thematic structures or ideological conceptualisations, the constantly shifting tone of the record makes out like Magik Markers showcasing a rounded pop sensibility. These, though, are far from pop songs. Effortlessly shifting from detuned effusive excess (‘Pat Garrett’) to sullen New York nihilism (‘Body Rot’), tracks are no longer as coated in the no-wave scrawl of past ventures as Elisa Ambrogio’s stark vocal contribution comes to the forefront. With open wounds on show, Pete Nolan’s clumsily thumbed piano on ‘Empty Bottles’ is befitting of Ambrogio's tortured pep talk. Though there is something of the flailing, self-absorbed college poet about Ambrogio (see recent performances with Six Organs Of Admittance) when she descends into rambling "secular Pentecost" discourse, making out like Patti Smith on ‘Last Of Lemach Line’, as she wraps her tongue round couplets like “I left my stink like a mink’s dead gland / All over your mouth, all over your hand”, all is forgotten. Where ‘Four’ skits along somewhat unenthusiastically it is Ambrogio's detached and lecherous performance that provides the act a newfound zeal. As with Thurston Moore’s Trees Outside The Academy, these noiseniks have managed to detach the discordance previously so central to their sound to leave an open account of what lies beneath, with only ‘Circle’ coming to resemble the ditch I Trust My Guitar, etc. dug and garnered their initial acclaim.

Though both their most open and most accessible record, it’s difficult to declare BOSS as Magik Markers at their peak; in a way half the mystique to the act was shifting through the thick fog of distortion that veiled material. But, though produced by Lee Ranaldo, hand-picked by Thurston Moore and Ambrogio’s direct vocal markedly akin to that of Kim Gordon’s, there is a sense that the duo are moving out from the domineering shadow Sonic Youth have cast over them for so long. Reincarnated from its previously hollow guise on 2006's Road Pussy, ‘Bad Dream/Hartford's Beat Suite’ underlines that rather than a different side to Magik Markers it is more the duo just taking a different tact to their usual noise assault. Out of their awkwardly lodged groundings, BOSS distances any worries that this was Magik Markers copping out to embrace the convention they previously seemed to shy from and, as ‘Circle’ plays out with a sparse resonance and the demanding of the "chords of America", they return to the margins.

8/10

M.I.A. - Jimmy (XL)

2007-10-03T06:31:00.001-07:00

And so AR Rahman’s influence further delves into the common conscience. But where the Bollywood producer’s spiralling symphonies have so often been subjected to hack-job interpretations - from gland-in-hand pop muppets through to Gang Gang Dance’s voyeuristic over-complication (Rawwar) - as ‘Jimmy’ shifts from Maya Arulpragasam’s sultry soft-tongued introduction to its splintering hook it seems M.I.A. knows how to pay her dues.

One of the most defining aspects that Kala marks over its predecessor, Arular, is its increasingly flippant childlike raucousness, where Jonathan Richman samples sit contentedly next to Afrikan Boy bragging his flagging of immigration laws. ‘Jimmy’ finds M.I.A. playing Bollywood princess for the day, regurgitating Jimmy Aja’s cacophonous original of ‘82 and filling out its hollow staccato with typically nonsensical political subversiveness.

Though far from the PLO-pulling punches of renown, urging a genocidal jaunt in your opening verse alludes to why chart success continues to elude M.I.A. “When you go Rwanda, Congo / Take me on your genocide tour / Take me on a truck to Darfur?/ Take me where you would go.” The audacity of it all, so lacking in a chart rife with mouthwash-swilling dishwater, is refreshing and, for all the boundaries merged, ‘Jimmy’ is a pop juggernaut.

VIDI:

9/10