Audio Journal : 01/02/2011

Vinyl Corner



Richard Youngs Atlas Of Hearts (Apollolaan Recordings LP, 2010)

The Dorset-based Apollolaan label issued their first vinyl release in December 2010, on the day of the Solstice. Previous Apollolaan releases have been made available as highly limited CD-Rs in hand-made packaging, and Richard Youngs' Atlas Of Hearts marks something of a departure, though the hallmarks are still there – an oil painting by Matthew Shaw adorns the sleeve, which was designed by Brian Lavelle, whose collaboration with Alistair Crosbie and Andrew Paine as Space Weather I covered a few weeks back. Lavelle has also collaborated with Youngs in the past.

Youngs is a looming presence on the Glasgow experimental music scene, with output ranging from acoustic guitar work through to the abstract electronic hinterlands, often created with other figures in the fertile territories in which he operates. One such collaborator, some of whose work provides a good reference point to Atlas Of Hearts, is the outsider songsmith Jandek, upon whom a similar level of underground cult mystique can be assigned.

Releasing this on the Solstice seems appropriate given the seven Youngs songs on this LP. There is a firm, simple spirituality and delicate references to nature crop up consistently in the lyrics and titles. I want to call this 'folk' music but somehow that doesn't seem enough. All I know is that its layers of guitar – mostly gently strummed or plucked but occasionally delivered backwards ('What Day Is This Day') or with stuttering, restrained distortion ('Heart In Open Space') – and overlapping vocal interweavings are absorbing and uplifting by turns. Sporadic use of subtle electronics, such as on the hypnotically sparse 'Joy Ride', augment the atmosphere perfectly.

Tracks like the opener 'Haze I' further highlight the blending together of guitar, unfathomable vocals and lightly-deployed electronics; the guitars have a detuned quality, a wobbly sound with the odd mistake left in. One of the most captivating songs is also the shortest – 'Sussex Pond' clocks in at just a minute but with its introspective guitar and mysterious vocal the song is a useful distillation of the rest of the album.

This was my first Richard Youngs album and, despite having read about him a fair bit over the years, I still didn't know what to expect. I also still have no idea if this is indicative of his usual style; further investigation is therefore clearly necessary.

Audio Journal : 19/12/2010

What's not to like? Take five compositions by John Carpenter for his quintet of cult psychological horror films – Escape From New York, Escape From LA, Assault On Precinct 13, Halloween and The Thing – and let two French electronic music wizards (Étienne Jaumet and Cosmic Neman, aka Zombie Zombie, named after a 1984 ZX Spectrum game) re-record the tracks with a contemporary edge. Well, I say 'contemporary'. Electronic music has had a tendency to always try and sound like the golden age of analogue synthesis, and this EP has a tendency to sound simultaneously retro and bang up to date as a consequence.

The point is that these soundtracks were good to start with. Carpenter wrote and performed most of his scores himself, or with collaborators – The Thing was a collaboration between him and no less a luminary than Ennio Morricone. Zombie Zombie add beats and other signal flourishes that simply add to the drama of the originals. The main theme from Halloween still makes you hold your breath in anxious fear-induced excitement, but a track like 'The Bank Robbery' (from Escape From New York) is given an urgent beat and frantic synth breakdown at the very end, making it ideal for minimalist dance floors; like a remix of the Airwolf theme tune, only with more drama. The Escape From LA main theme becomes an hard-edged, industrial jack-booted synth-fest, not unlike Deutsch Amerikanisch Freundschaft circa 'Sex Unter Wasser' or Nitzer Ebb circa 'Let Your Body Learn', a sort of cinematic Electronic Body Music as that genre became known. Fans of Carpenter and electronic music generally should definitely look out for this.

Two highly limited edition CD-Rs, in hand-made packaging, from the Apollolaan label fell on my doorstep in the last week. The first, a 3", single-track CD-R from Space Weather (Alistair Crosbie, who has graced this blog before, on electric guitar; Brian Lavelle on electronics and Andrew Paine on bass) is entitled The Weather's Maiden. It was an edition of 100 and is now all sold out. This is a release that sounds markedly different at different volumes; at low volumes it sounds like a bleak, distant sonic landscape of hissing radio waves and transmissions from some frozen, desolate, abandoned world. For some reason it sounded to me like a soundtrack to the film Hardware, a British film from 1990 that painted a very bleak picture of the future, wherein savage death robots were unleashed on the populace to control the population growth. Listened to at louder volumes reveals other aspects of this sonic stew; heavily-processed, looped guitars (I think) dominate the background and deep bass tones and drones offset the spiralling, whining electronics. It is something constantly shifting, rarely static, and could have extended far longer than the fifteen minutes we have been gifted here.

The other Apollolaan release was Peter Delaney's live set from Amsterdam's VPRO festival in May 2009. This 5" CD-R is again an edition of 100 and comes in a cardboard Muji CD sleeve adorned with the white outlines of houses. I had never heard of Delaney before being sent this. He is an Irish singer-songwriter whose songs are frankly a delight for the ears. These are delicately-rendered acoustic folk ballads, occasionally dark and mysterious and evoking the vastness of the sea; but mostly these songs are uplifting affirming in nature. Delaney's perfect live set proves him to be an accomplished lyricist and his guitar playing is intricate and finely-wrought, gentle and enveloping, his voice having remarkable range and a subtle emotional intensity.



There is much that I could say about this, but to write further wouldn't ever come close to doing these songs justice. So I will just say that I honestly don't think I've ever heard a more beguiling record in my life. Higher praise than that I honestly can't find. There are a few copies left at apollolaan.co.uk; you would be wise to buy one quick.

Audio Journal : 07/06/2010

Last year I offered a brief review of Alistair Crosbie's The Last Days Of Summer, describing it as being 'quite honestly one of the most serenely beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard. Constructed entirely of heavily-processed layers of guitars recalling Robert Fripp's Soundscapes series or Stars Of The Lid, the track approaches a kind of icy classicism whilst maintaining an air of ethereal stasis. Anyone interested in hearing how guitars can be made to sound is urged to get their ears around this release.' High praise indeed.

This week I completed a major interview with Crosbie, an experimental musician based in Glasgow, whose works are released as CD-Rs in beautiful, hand-made sleeves, via his own Lefthand Pressings imprint.

In April, Crosbie released no less than four new albums – musicforawakening, Scarlett Dies, All Suns Must Set (Prelude To Wanderlight Falls) and a collection of previously unreleased works melded together across two discs, Cinders. The music contained in these four hand-crafted and beautifully-packaged releases range from the ethereal and uplifting processed guitar of Scarlett Dies, the deep bass tones of All Suns Must Set, to the eclectic Cinders, containing fragments of everything from icy piano works to spoken word passages to poetry to pulsing electronica.

The interview can be found over at my Documentary Evidence website. Some excerpts of Crosbie's work, as well as some exclusive downloads can be found at his Bandcamp page.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 07/12/2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure by San Francisco electronica purveyors Matmos was, upon its release, a new yardstick in the electronica genre. Along with Matthew Herbert with the sounds he culled from his kitchen, Matmos took the notion of sampling to a new level. In the not-too-distant past sampling was merely the art of stealing a section from a song or snatching movie dialogue and then re-contextualising those snatches of sound together in another song. With A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure, Matmos took the bulk of their samples from a non-traditional, and potentially macabre, area – operating theatres and cosmetic surgeries – and then turned those sounds into rhythms over which other, more derivative electronic passages were laid.

The concept makes for queasy listening if you imagine the kinds of things they feasibly could have captured (there was some talk of a bone saw being recorded, as well as a liposuction procedure); on record it's mercifully impossible to deduce the sources of most of the sounds within the palette of the clattering electronica beats and skittish percussion that has informed this genre of music since Autechre, Aphex Twin and all those other early Warp acts deprogrammed their drum machines in the early 1990s. That and the prevalence of detailed 'real life' surgical programmes on TV these days somewhat inures you to Matmos's ideas. That said, if you ignore the fabled source of some of the sounds, A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure remains as good an introduction to leftfield electronica as there is.

Matmos subsequently collaborated with Björk, an artist who has done more than most to bring the outer reaches of music into her and her fans' orbit. For those who believe the Björk phenomenon started with oh-so-irritating 'It's Oh So Quiet' and ended with a punch up in an airport, Medúlla will have come and gone without a trace. It is an album where vocals, or more precisely vocal sounds, achieve a prominence thanks to much sampling of Björk's voice and the conversion of those sounds into beats and otherworldly percussion. It's a genuinely inventive album, highlighting just how comfortable Björk is taking her music way out there, but it can occasionally become cloying and over-long. If you can't stand Björk's unique singing, this is not an album for you.

Over-long is a charge that could never be levied at Alistair Crosbie's one-track The Last Days Of Summer, which even at twelve minutes is far, far too brief. Crosbie self-releases music on his own Lefthand Pressings label, and in the case of The Last Days Of Summer this was released as a 3” CD-R in a handmade sleeve back in the summer of this year. The track is quite honestly one of the most serenely beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard. Constructed entirely of heavily-processed layers of guitars recalling Robert Fripp's Soundscapes series or Stars Of The Lid, the track approaches a kind of icy classicism whilst maintaining an air of ethereal stasis. Anyone interested in hearing how guitars can be made to sound is urged to get their ears around this release. Copies can be obtained from Alistair's blog.

In 2002 my mothballed Nominal Musics label released – in similar lo-fi style – Songs From The Shelley, the complete recorded output of Fungal Noise, a band of school-friends centred around Haywards Heath and the song writing axis of vocalist Patrick 'Pod' O'Donnell and guitarist Neil Cullimore. Their songs had a youthful exuberance informed by bands from the Stourbridge scene like The Wonderstuff and Ned's Atomic Dustbin and often the archness of Blur. Fungal Noise recorded several strong demos between 1993 and 1996 and I thought their songs were really good, blessed with the sorts of spiky guitars and wry, cynical and often highly abstract lyrics that only a bunch of hip school kids could have conceived of. I came across the tracks on my hard drive last week, and they haven't lost any of their adolescent kick. Nominal Musics is on the back-burner until 2010, but you can email me at info at nominalmusics dot co dot uk for details on how to get a copy – go here for a comprehensive biography of the band and more information on Songs From The Shelley. To find out more about the Nominal Musics project, point yourself here.



Interview with Simon Nelson (SixtyFiveMiles)

Last week I caught up with Simon Nelson, whose band SixtyFiveMiles released their début mini-album Finnish Tango via Cherry Red earlier this year. Check out their MySpace and my review of the mini-album.

MJASmith : So why the name SixtyFiveMiles?

Simon Nelson : It's the distance between Elton in Cambridgeshire and Atherstone in Warwickshire. I live in Elton, and the other guys live in Atherstone. We rehearse there too.

MJAS : What's a Finnish Tango?

SN : I've travelled regularly to Helsinki in the last three years. Between work commitments I ended up writing the lyrics to a few of the tunes. I was also very much inspired by the ballroom dancing clubs in the city where women ask men to dance on Tuesday evenings – if you dance three times you have to wed.

MJAS : How did SixtyFiveMiles come about?

SN : Ash Woodward, who plays guitar, and Neil Gordon, who plays bass, have been in bands for years – I joined them in May 2008. We got to know Ryan Vann, who plays drums, through the musical grapevine in the West Midlands.

MJAS : Who do you see as your biggest influences?

SN : My personal influences include The Byrds, The Who, The Beatles, Dylan, Television, The Undertones, The Pistols, The Waterboys, The Las – your usual guitary stuff basically.

MJAS : How did you come to release Finnish Tango through Cherry Red?

SN : Cherry Red approached us in June – they also they put out The Best Of The Milltown Brothers [Simon was the guitarist and song writer in the band] but I also feel proud to be associated with a venerable British indie like this.

MJAS : Where can fans see you live?

SN : We've got gigs coming up at the Derby Arms in Colne (Lancashire) on 12th December, the Dublin Castle in Camden on 21st January, and the Kasbah in Coventry on 22nd January.

MJAS : How do your songs tend to come about?

SN : I tend to write songs on the acoustic guitar before taking them to the band for orchestration. I pick up a lot of my lyrical ideas from travel experiences and personal relationship dramas.

MJAS : What's next for the band?

SN : We are aiming to release a three-track EP in the New Year. We've just shot a video to support this.