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 by MJA Smith : 19/10/2009

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

Though perhaps not as radical or aurally challenging as some of their earliest work, Einstürzende Neubauten’s Ende Neu (1996) still finds the Berliners hammering away at steel, deploying compressors and all manner of junkyard mechanics to produce their highly individual artistic sound. Frontman, vocalist and guitarist Blixa Bargeld, more recently departed of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds, holds the lot together with vocal deliveries that transcend the German language’s supposed lyrical limitations, and on the highly un-Neubuaten string-soaked tracks with Meret Becker, shows that the gradual progression of Nick Cave’s writing while Bargeld was on board – from Old Testament fervour to romantic wonder – was not wasted on Blixa‘s own writing. Nevertheless, despite those stretching tracks, my favourite tracks are ‘Installation No.1’, with its vocal of ‘Disobey / It’s a law’ and the frantic, dystopian opener ‘Was Ist Ist’.

When I was a subscriber to The Wire magazine – a music magazine, not a monthly publication based on the cult US TV crime drama – they would rave about the elusive, illusory character Jandek, a prolific artist reclusively skulking on the fringes of alternative music. His music was always on my list to sample at some point, but I simply never got around to it. This week, UbuWeb, the go-to site for all things alternative, sent round a link to a blog containing 31 Jandek albums, from the early 1980s through to Skirting The Edge, released this year on Jandek’s own Corwood Industries label. I figured the latter would be a suitable entry point to his music. Essentially, Skirting The Edge is four tracks of vocal musings over incandescent acoustic guitar, with a bleak tone throughout. ITunes labelled it as ‘lo fi’ when I added it to my library, which is probably right, given its raw production aesthetic.

On to slightly more accessible things, this week I downloaded the eponymous debut from The Little Death, or, more appropriately, The Little Death (NYC) as there are apparently two bands with that name in existence. It’s tempting to describe the band as Moby’s low key side-project, as he is indeed a core member, providing guitars across their debut album. In truth, The Little Death is principally a vehicle for vocalist Laura Dawn, who has appeared live with Moby and contributed vocals to at least one of his albums. The overall sound is one of soulful blues, as filtered through a bunch of musicians living in New York. Gutsy female vocalists aren’t ordinarily my thing, but on this album I’ve found it pretty engaging. My favourite songs are the upbeat tracks ‘Mean Woman’, ‘Hurricane’ and ‘Love Or A Gun’.

From the blues I moved effortlessly to ambient electronica, as crafted by Sheffield’s Richard H. Kirk, founder member of Cabaret Voltaire, one of the bands – like Neubauten – who were grouped together under the banner ‘industrial’. Virtual State (1993) was released on Warp Records and contains lots of trademark Kirk elements – burbling synths, African percussion and distorted samples of speech covertly culled from radio frequencies. This was an album I used to stick on whilst at university to aid concentration while doing my coursework, and consequently hearing it again this week left me feeling rather queasy as I recollected hours spent poring over balance sheets and econometric calculations.



In response to the BBC’s Synth Britannia documentary, it would be all too easy at this juncture to prattle on about all the bands that I like from the synth-pop era, but I won’t. I was castigated by a reader a couple of weeks back for the admission that Erasure remain my favourite band, so let’s not even go there. Instead, in deference to the influence of the humble synth on popular music, I’ll mention a single released about fifteen years ago by Node – U2 / Depeche Mode / PJ Harvey producer Flood and Suede producer Ed Buller and a couple of others – called ’Terminus’ which saw the duo setting up massive modular synths on the concourse of Paddington Station. One can only imagine the reaction of travellers heading to the South West upon hearing the sounds the duo coaxed from their monolithic walls of dials, switches and cabling, but no doubt it was as similarly divisive as when Kraftwerk’s ‘The Model’ first graced the charts.