Audio Journal: 18/10/2013 - !!!, The Orb

!!! Thr!!!er

If I was to look at what album I've listened to most over the past six months it will undoubtedly turn out to be Thr!!!er by !!! (you pronounce it chk-chk-chk). Thr!!!er was released on Warp, once the pre-eminent home of UK electronic music, but now much more interested in more eclectic concerns.

I didn't go out of my way to buy this. My family and I were in holiday in New York and we stopped in at Other Music to pick up some CDs that we'd been contemplating buying but hadn't gotten around to. In fact, it had been a while since Mrs S. or I had splurged on buying music, it was chucking it down with rain outside and the staff in the shop were so friendly that we just kept picking stuff up. It was like this last year, and also when we were there in 2005 (apart from the rain). I bought Banks by Interpol's Paul Banks, the debut Chelsea Light Moving album and a second-hand Cabaret Voltaire CD, while Mrs S. loaded up on all sorts of stuff, including the !!! album.

$100 odd dollars and another downpour later, we were sat in our hotel room trying to dry off before contemplating going out for dinner, eating soggy cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery in the Village and a sandwich from Peanut Butter & Company, and Mrs S. put Thr!!!er on. I was hooked from the opening snare hit on 'Even When The Water's Cold' and from that moment on it's been the soundtrack to many a car journey, commute to work or stay in a hotel for work.

I'm not sure totally sure why it's captivated me so. I saw the band live once supporting the Chili Peppers and they didn't exactly excite much, but there's something about the sleek disco-punk-funk on Thr!!!er that has made it a firm favourite. Mrs S tells me that this proves she has better taste than me; I concede she's probably right.

The only thing that's taken the edge of this new-found interest in this band was a recent Daytrotter session which was less slick and more sloppy, but otherwise, if it was possible to wear out a CD like people used to wreck LPs, I'd probably need a new copy now.

Listen to an Anthony Naples remix of the hedonistic and strangely wistful 'Californyeah' from the forthcoming remix EP here and below.

This week I found myself listening to 'Blue Room' by The Orb for the first time in probably ten years. I wasn't a fan of this when it first came out but intrigued me on some level (the weird 'performance' on Top Of The Pops where Alex Paterson and Kris Weston just played chess, the fact that the full length version lasted a proggy forty minutes) and shortly after its release I found myself drawn to ambient music as part of a push to try and find some means of calm in my life. I was a stressed-out teenager with all sorts of angst, and ambient music seemed to overcome that.

The Orb 'Blue Room'

I distinctly remember buying The Orb's U.F.Orb (which includes 'Blue Room') the day before my father went into hospital for an operation in 1993, and I found myself listening to it over and over in the car in Warwick Hospital car park the next day while waiting for him to come out of theatre. Later I'd turn to Brian Eno's The Shutov Assembly whenever I wanted some form of meditative state to wash over me, but for a long time it was U.F.Orb, and 'Blue Room' in particular, that usually did the trick.

Listening to it now, its forty-minute duration seems over far too quick and it remains absorbing enough across its length to never feel anything other than deeply engaging for the mind.

Audio Journal: 11/10/2013 - X Factor, Erasure, Young Knives, Ejecta

Against my will, it seems that my attempts to avoid ever watching ITV's X Factor have roundly failed, and so it has become the new weekend routine to find myself half-watching however many hours of auditions, emotional wannabes failing to get a break and oddballs who never had a chance in the first place.

The last episode I watched was, I will admit, mildly diverting, but not because of the music. Definitely not. No, in that one Gary Barlow and Olly Murs were attempting to whittle Barlow's team down, and they were doing so on the roof of a building in New York (by my estimates I'd say somewhere in Chelsea) with lots of views of beautiful skylines. So, diverting, yes, but only because I was trying to work out which buildings I recognised.

What did occur to me was that like strands of music, reality shows have their own unique vernacular. Here are some of my personal favourites, often to be heard spilling from the mouths of contestants:

• 'I've got to take it to another level.'
• 'It's an emotional roller coaster.'
• 'She's had a long journey to get here.' (To my abject horror, my eldest daughter actually used this one last week when I was being especially disparaging toward one weeping contestant.)
• 'My whole life depends on it.'

Erasure Snow Globe

On to more interesting things. This week I completed my usual round of reviews for Clash. To use another hackneyed reality show phrase, this month's assignment included a real 'dream come true' in that I was able to review the new Erasure album. This is the first time I've been able to listen to a new album from my favourite band ahead of its release, so it was a bit of a treat for me. It has also meant that I've been in a very festive mood all week, since Vince Clarke and Andy Bell's new offering - Snow Globe - is a Christmas album. It really is a lovely record, and as well as some nice versions of standards, the duo offer up some of their best things they've written together in a long time. Put it on your Christmas list.

Young Knives Sick Octave

The other album I covered this month is Sick Octave, album number four from Young Knives. For this album the trio took themselves off into a disused airbase and experimented with computers, synths, gas canisters and sheet metal to produce something that sounds like it was transplanted from the post-punk hinterlands of the early Eighties. 'Something Awful' from Sick Octave, a track that is anything but awful, can be listened to here and below.

Finally, this week I was sent the debut album from Ejecta, a duo of Neon Indian's Leanne Macomber and Joel Ford from Tigercity. Dominae (Happy Death) isn't out until December and so I shouldn't say too much now, but suffice to say that this New York duo have nailed a downbeat strain of rather lovely electronic pop full of ethereal singing and appropriately vintage synths. Listen to track 'Jeremiah' here and below.

Audio Journal: 04/10/2013 - Julien Beau, Linea Aspera

It's quite a nice problem to have: as a consequence of my writings for Documentary Evidence, I tend to find that once a week someone will send me some music to listen to in the hope that I'll write a review. With Documentary Evidence focussing on Mute, a lot of whose roster produced electronic music of one form or another, the labels and artists that contact me tend to also be electronic in nature. Two recent additions to the inbox were from the Aposiopèse and Weyrd Son Records labels, both of whom were promoting reissues of little-known or ignored releases that deserve a bit more attention.

Julien Beau's Reflet (Aposiopèse) was originally released in 2009 and has been expanded for a new CD-R edition of just sixty copies with several new pieces. Beau hails from Bordeaux where he studied electroacoustic composition, as reflected on the seven tracks of quiet, contemplative sound design presented here. Traditional electroacoustic music, or musique concrète as it is also known, was pioneered in France in the Fifties and Sixties by Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, and could be viewed as a natural antecedent of the sampling that is commonplace today; technology being what it was back then, musique concrète compositions were generally achieved using recorded tape loops of either traditional instruments or just general sound, which would then be layered and manipulated into compositions.

Absorbing though it might well be, Beau's collection of scratchy sounds, fluff-on-stylus glitches, snatches of quotidian cafe conversations, splintered piano motifs and randomised synth notes does feel a little too studied, like a dry classroom realisation of what musique concrete should sound like rather than evoking something altogether more challenging. The only departure from a template built up from concrete-by-numbers sounds comes when Beau's sonic palette is augmented by woodwind and brass interventions, whereupon his pieces take on a hue of modern composition rather than the assembled collages of sound sources.

Like all the best synth acts in history, Linea Aspera are a duo. Alison Lewis and Ryan Ambridge hail from London and Linea Aspera II, the three track EP that was released on 12" vinyl and download earlier this week by Weyrd Son Records, was originally released as a cassette. Across three distinct tracks they manage to throw in detached punked-up female voices, pulsing 1981 drum machines and all manner of grainy noise and electronic nastiness.

People don't make music like this any longer; by which I mean the dark electronic stuff that rose out of punk in the late Seventies through industrial units like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and many others. Factory Floor, who just delivered their debut album for James 'LCD Soundsystem' Murphy's DFA label are seen as the heirs to that post-punk electronic fusion throne, but Linea Aspera sound like they really should have existed thirty-two years ago. 'Vultures' may be the most authentic, impressive, understated piece of noisy synth pop I've heard in a long time. I'd go so far as to say it's so Mute it hurts, right down to the edgy siren sound on 'Royal Straight' that sounds like it was lifted directly from Fad Gadget's seminal 'Back To Nature'. Their EP can be streamed here and below.