Saturday 7 December 2013

Audio Journal: 07/12/2013 - Christmas songs, Dave Brubeck, Boxcutter, Physical Therapy, Robert Koch

A few weeks back I was tasked with 'sorting out the Christmas songs'. This made for a novel opportunity to be relatively useful in the run up to Christmas; normally, my sole duties consist of fetching in the decorations, helping unpack them, and then putting the empty boxes back again. The request followed the complete wiping of Mrs S's iPod earlier in the year and the slow and tedious process of rebuilding her library again. As with most things - proposing to her, recognising that our cat was seriously ill, any household chore I'm handed - I prevaricated for ages and only completed the task at the weekend, more or less at the same time as the tree was being put up.

We have, it seems, some 260 Christmas songs. These range from what might be regarded as pop staples - Jona Lewie's 'Stop The Cavalry', Wham!'s 'Last Christmas' and so on - some classical and choral things that sound atmospheric and festive but which often get bypassed in favour of more accessible fare, a few lesser well known things by Badly Drawn Boy and Summer Camp, a bit of Rat Pack, Phil Spector's excellent Christmas album, some hymnal Johnny Cash stuff, a glamtastic Showaddywaddy song purloined from my parents' vinyl collection and even a Joey Ramone track. Over time I've added things like The McGarrigle Christmas Hour - a true family affair of Kate and Anna McGarrigle and their sundry offspring, including Rufus and Martha Wainwright and family friends like Teddy Thompson - but my dour Josh T. Pearson contributions seemed to get permanently deleted from her library when it became corrupted, much to her relief.


In spite of that vast library, Christmas listening tends to start with a ritual playing of Blue Christmas, a Mojo covermount CD featuring slightly less optimistic songs from James Brown, Ed Harcourt, Flaming Lips, Otis Redding and many others. It's intentionally a world away from the cheeriness of most Christmas songs, and I think we elect to listen to this at the start of festivities to deliberately steer clear of the season's commercialism-masquerading-as-joy; or maybe because we like to make our own family traditions at this time of year.

This year, in a moment of sentimentality toward Christmas, I decided that I really wanted to find an album of Christmas songs performed in a jazz style. Despite having spent a lot of this year furthering my interest in jazz, I'm still a bit lost in the genre, and it proved to be the case with this search for a Christmas album that there's an awful lot of dross around. In the end, I settled on an album of lovely piano jazz by the late Dave Brubeck.

I knew I was on safe ground with Brubeck; though I detested it in my youth, 'Take Five', the 1959 track he is best known for, has become a piece that I listen to a lot these days. I even have an album on which Brubeck performs 'Some Day My Prince Will Come' from Disney's Snow White, and I felt reasonably assured that him turning his pianist hands to a suite of Christmas songs would be of a high standard, and that's exactly how it turned out to be. One reviewer on Amazon described it as being perfect for nights in front of the fire with a mug of cocoa; I neither have a fireplace nor do I like cocoa, but I completely get where he was coming from, and I can't begin to describe it better myself.


So that all feels terribly grown up and mature. Although I seem to have consumed a lot more Christmas tunes so early in December than is good for me, I've spent the rest of the time listening to various electronica releases that have been fervently landing in my inbox in recent weeks.

Physical Therapy's Non-Drowsy is one such release. A free seven-track EP, the release jump-cuts between a mutant strain of classic piano house and a deconstructed variant of late Eighties percussive acid techno. Listen to the urgent standout track 'Coffee' from the EP here or below.



Another electronica release I've been enjoying is Boxcutter's Gnosis EP. Boxcutter has previously released stuff on Mike Paradinas's Planet Mu imprint, and this release does include moments of frenetic bass wobbles and percussive wackiness that befits a lot of what that label has become known for. That's balanced out by some absorbing ambient passages replete with sky-scouring prog guitar, drawing parallels with some of Krautrock's less motorik moments, as well as some spine-tingling synth hooks along the way.

Also in my eardrums has been Unpaved by Robert Koch, an EP soundtrack to accompany a film by Lukas Feigelfeld. This is my first exposure to Koch's work, and it reveals itself on this release to be a carefully-structured micro-score with ambient reference points and some rather lovely piano. An extract from the film of the same name can be viewed here or below.