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piano magic - part-monster
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piano magic is a rather complex group of complex individuals. i’m talking about their mixed english-french origins, various side projects as outlets for their artistic flow and, as piano magic, constant exploration along the lines of shoegaze, electronica, ambient, folk, ghost-rock, coldwave and other made-up words, resulting in a beguilingly mysteriously beautiful catalogue few other groups have.
produced by guy fixsen of laika, part-monster probably gets closest to the menacing drive the band’s live shows have, approaching their favourite subjects, the love/hate affair with england and glen johnson’s inclination towards heartfelt outspoken lying about himself in his lyrics, together with his arrid humour.
bonus! list of bands this album has something to do with: textile ranch, klima, future conditional, laika, the pixies, my bloody valentine, the breeders, stereolab, moonshake, slowdive, chapterhouse, moose, revolver, joy zipper, lush, the smiths, joy division, new order, morrissey, the bitter springs, dead can dance, durutti column etc.
nouvelle vague - late night tales
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i usually try not to double feature artists, the point of this blog being to let you readers discover more on your own (yeah, you 3 over there). but i’ll let this one pass on a technicality, since it is a compilation of sorts. when it comes to mixtapes, the usual metaphor talks about (road) trips, at least to me. naturally/musically it’s about motion and less about static things such as destination or starting point.
this one begins exactly as you would expect it to, featuring the much awaited cover of “come on eileen”, then seamlessly passes through the mirror and gets quite comfortable there. as another review managed to put it so spot-on, this is probably how acid house would’ve sounded, had it been born in a parisian basement. to be taken with a spoonfull of smoke.
and the mandatory video to go along:
edit - crying over pros for no reason
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and finahlly some more computer agony, all in the name of music. not exactly the latest release but since mr. edward ma (aka edit) hasn’t graced us with a follow-up, restricting himself to pulling mash-up mixes out of his hat, it’ll do just fine. to be honest, it looks like a tough act to follow and i’m guessing it could stir up in an artist the occasional fear of not keeping up to par.
opinionated rants aside, edit crams up in a track more ideas than others in half an album. there are the convoluted and contorted machinery beats, avec light hip-hop influences, but also some delightful underlying harmonies and melodies. in a way, it reminds me a bit of boards of canada. even if the sound is not near similar, they both have that ability to make tunes that get stuck between your ears, filling your head until you feel the need to start sighing and go look for a sunset to fall in love with.
the colour - between earth and sky
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it has come to my attention that i’ve been posting to much “rock” stuff lately, so here’s some more of it. the colour’s singer seems to be the bastard child of robert smith and a young robert plant (it’s legal in canada), which is why some people like to gossip about them being too influenced by certain bands from that era. i’d say good genes.
and if you watch the video, which doesn’t necessarily feature their best song, you’ll see why so many people start yelling about mick jagger and whatnot. controversy aside, influence is not the same as copying and the album is one nicely put together piece of catchy energetic indie with a classic rock sound, or something. anyway, their next album release should be quite interesting.
calla - strength in numbers
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this album got me from the first track. calla debuted some 10 years ago on what is for me the epitomemimmy of high-brow, undergroundish, elitist mother of all labels, sub rosa. since then time has passed, a bassist moved on, another stayed and they integrated their experimental tantrums in a more subtle way, into what could be now plainly called indie. in a way, it explores the darker sides of the much too “bubblegummy” new wave, with the half whispered - half sung lyrics and hair raising gloomy voice of lead singer aurelio valle. he might also be one of the main reasons why you should think of nick cave while listening to this.
james - pleased to meet you
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better than sex.
maserati - inventions for the new season
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maserati’s new lp, after a 4 year pause, is one of those records for which i’d actually want to try and write something nice that would hopefully make you, the occasional stumbler upon this humble blog, download and give it a good listen. well, since i’ve postponed it long enough, the whole internal build-up has reached a level where it can’t possibly meet the expectations so i’ll just keep it simple. staying true to their math/post-rock essence, together with the addition of super-drummer jerry fuchs last year, they have embraced more psychedelic nuances, to the point of getting themselves called “pink floyd for hipsters” with added synths and bongos… and yeah, it’s about syd barret era pink floyd. the new album is due to be released this spring on trl, home of mono, explosions in the sky or eluvium, and be sure to check out the video below, made by adam fuchs from adult swim.
scone - maze
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a scone is an excellent tea companion, and this sweetly named project is the brainchild of three guys better known as the two funckarma brothers and one kettel. their debut release is following the productive trend of internet collabs, which in my book sure beats e-mail chess, actually being made between 2003 and 2005. the funckens seem to go back stylistically to their quench period, with less abstracted noodling and more melody, as for kettel, he brings the lush, the jazz and the gentle. a perfect match resulting in a warm and dreamy, big-eyed sound still packing some superb beats and taking you places.
jesu - conqueror
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jesu began as justin broadrick’s one-man project, developing into a massive trio about 3 years ago. they’ve been going through some stylistic changes and gathered a rather opinionated fan base in progress and if i wanted to blow things out of proportion i could call it almost a genesis effect, but in a positive way. it all started with a drone-doom, post-metal kind of flavor and since their previous release they accentuated the experimental, slowed things down and started gazing at their shoes a lot… comparisons with my bloody valentine were quick to follow, so don’t expect doom-metal roars at half the tempo.
in case you were wondering, the name has no religious connotations, their personal esthetic dismisses capitalization, and some say this rejection of the importance brought by proper nouns keeps with the nihilistic themes of the music. you guessed it, it’s not the kind of thing to make you feel happy, warm inside or any of those other things. but it sure gets you beautifully melancholic and makes you enjoy the cold outside in a very unique way.
quinoline yellow - colour index 47005
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quinoline yellow delivers his second and his label’s third audio release in the form of a 30 minute, 6 track ep. this release includes a 10ml glass vial of diluted quinoline yellow which lives within the clear spine of the jewel case (do not drink).
quinoline yellow is (also) the name adopted by luke williams, a london-based electronic artist. quinoline yellow is (also) a synthetic greenish yellow dye used in the food industry with the industrial reference name colour index 47005 or e104. quinoline yellow is an advocate of the pure synthesis approach, similarly to bola. quinoline yellow consists of multiple components that show a large difference in their partition coefficients, ranging from 0.03 to 3.3 in the solvent system tert.-butyl methyl ether (mtbe)-1-butanol-acetonitrile-aqueous 0.1 m trifluoroacetic acid (tfa). quinoline yellow has a similar feel to autechre without the detachment or aphex twin minus the occasional arrogance. quinoline yellow contains at most 0.3% combined ether extracts and also comes in a granular form. totally charming, take a sip, it only causes inflammation.
thanks to psalmplasma for help in providing this release.
team doyobi - the kphanapic fragments
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i’m not a big fan of “these 2 first tracks are, like… more ambiental cause they run for over 15 minutes each, and then this next track goes bleep-bloop a lot, and then…” reviews. what i am happy about is that skam records finally seems to have risen from its long slumber and started to put out stuff that’s true in spirit to the skam roots which have marked my childhood. trust me, it wasn’t as bad as it sounds, although it would explain some things… anyway, what’s also cool is that these guys who live in manchester/uk and respectively sendai/jp managed to cough up a record that’s sensibly more consistent than their previous. makes you wonder if in the future won’t we all end up communicating a lot more through computer thingies and much less in real life situations. that sure would be weird. so, have some nice holidays and set aside the carols for the beautiful sounds of virtual circuitry agonies and luscious bit crunching.
panda bear & excepter - split 12”
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this ep seems to have stirred a bit of mouth-flapping even if only for the first track, by animal collective’s panda bear, and rightfully so. it starts off with some african sounding beats and somewhere midway switches off to a dub bassline-supported almost psychedelic rock with distant muted lyrics which kind of resemble gong. as for excepter, whom i admit i hadn’t heard of before, if you go about searching on the interweb and blogs, you’ll come across such hilarious terms as “post-moancore”, people bashing them for their use of hats onstage and some weird crap about how they are engineered to erase cultural distinctions through polarized confusion. in my book that’s good enough reason to give them a listen. and as the honest new breed of experimentalia this is, both tracks are over 12 minutes… can’t wait for the new panda bear album.
hard drive crash
sucks.
will be back.
or, in contemp pop culture lingo, “enemies rejoice now”.
coffin dancer - pax romana
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a bit of a late jump on the haloween bandwagon for me with this record, and that name up there should be all the necessary and very vague connection needed. coffin dancer are a bunch of members of tyranny of shaw and stop this fall who describe their style on myspace as experimental / psychedelic / hardcore. besides the hardcore / doom oriented occasional vocals, i’d say it’s more like post-rock (for references see isis, red sparowes or the earlier evpatoria report here). on a sidenote, pax romana was the relatively long period of peace experienced by the roman empire, sometimes forcefully maintained and not quite free of internal political unrest. i don’t really know if they meant it in this way but it might be a good analogy for the post-rock genre, with both its tense calmness and energetic outbursts.
machinedrum & ie.merg - cached
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first of all “cached” isn’t exactly an album, it’s a battle dj lp. um, a battle dj lp is the kind of thing battle djs use for battles, naturally. so you could say it’s not a record, it’s a weapon. yeah, scary. anyway, it’s full of ~3 minute beats by machinedrum and scratch/juggle “sentences” by ie.merg. travis stewart a.k.a. machinedrum is one of the artists that helped launch merck records and one of the cool glitchy hip hop weirdos kicking it alongside with prefuse 73, gescom or push button objects. on the other hand, battle dj (doh) ie.merg is 5 times dmc world champion and 10 times national champion so that about wraps it up about him. this works as a listening-to-at-home album too because the beats are really good and the scratches are also a lot of fun, and if you happen to be a dj (yeah right) go and buy the motherfucker, it’s something else.
saroos - saroos
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saroos‘ self-titled is a debut with serious references as the two members are florian zimmer, also the keyboard player of jersey and christoph brandner of lali puna drumming fame, not the hockey player mind you (yes, i googled). since the current direction in music is of an eclectic, multifarious and heterogeneous persuasion or whatever you want to call it, in order to get a decent album that doesn’t bore the crap out of me, the guys should make all that patchwork of styles sound listenable and quite not awkward. but hey, as i said, they have some experience in combining shoegazing electronics with post-rock and micro-scratching hip hop, and doing that well. plus, i guess the alias collab should please anticon geeks as well. have fun with it.
nam june paik - suite (212)
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nam june paik is to some extent the father of video art and “suite (212)” is his personal “new york sketchbook”, a collage presenting multiple facets of the city’s media landscape and its role in shaping this very media and information industries. an amazing little piece of document. it begins with “the selling of new york” where paik gets political and critiques the corporations, includes street interviews, a tour of the lower east side with allen ginsberg, intercut japanese commercials for american products and even a discussion with who other than marshall mcluhan, timeless, in spite of the fact that it’s more about tv as a new medium, well, back in ‘75.
sawako - omnibus
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community library’s theme is “community-without-geography” and, inspired by that, sawako compiled for this work a bunch of material donated by her international collaborators, polmo polpo, tu’m, yuichiro fujimoto and hypo being some of these guys. at under 20 minutes, the result is an ethereal little thing, flickering by as a nice example of that asian modesty and in accordance with the japanese sound art community’s “quiet is the new loud” philosophy. i’ll just forget about the overused haruki murakami references but definitely need to mention that sawako’s myspace used to have the sweetest bio: broken processor + bug or hub or hug + or just a little girl.
