Audio Journal: 22/09/2013 - Gary Numan, John Lennon McCullagh, FTSE, Metamono

FTSE (Sam Manville)

Last week I was asked if I wanted to contribute to this month's New Wave section for next month's Clash magazine. This basically involves writing a 350-word piece on some hot new up and coming band or artist. I wrote one a couple of months ago on the band Benin City so I thought I'd throw my hat in.

However, writing about new bands is, at least for me, a challenge. As this blog will attest, I spend most of my time listening to stuff that's, if not old, then something I'm passionate about in some way or know something about. For Clash this month I wrote a piece on the new Gary Numan album, which is a good case in point. I may not have followed Numan's career that closely, but 'Cars' is definitely a major influence on being in love with electronic music - as a five-year-old kid I distinctly recall watching him perform that on the Old Grey Whistle Test with my father, either when I was on my way to bed or because I couldn't sleep and had come back into the lounge. Irrespective, something about that song crept into my consciousness and the seed for my love of electronic music was planted. So with that prior impact in mind, I was really pleased to be writing about Splinters, his new, good, and very bleak album. I was less confident writing about ex-Creation Records svengali Alan McGee's new signing, the fifteen year old troubador (and audaciously-named) John Lennon McCullagh; however, McCullagh's debut album is massively inspired by Bob Dylan, right down to the protest themes, folksy guitars and harmonicas, and I know enough about Dylan to have nailed that review without breaking too much of a sweat.

But the New Wave piece did inspire a certain element of panic. After agreeing to do it, the editor sent through a list of bands and asked which I'd like to cover. I looked down the list and didn't recognise any of them. I had no press release to refer to, no music to listen to, and while I could have done a cursory Google search to find a YouTube clip or streamed track, I simply didn't have the time to do that. The deadline was keen and so I glanced at the list and picked the one name that grabbed me - FTSE. The reason I chose that, for those who really know me, was probably self-evident: I may act like what I do every day is listen to and write about music, but the reality is I work for a big bank in the City of London, and that's what pays the bills. So I saw the name FTSE, laughed inwardly at the cross-reference between my day job and this article and then found myself interviewing FTSE's Sam Manville for the piece.

FTSE make music that leans heavily into soul, R&B, hip-hop and drum 'n' bass - none of which are typical concerns of mine - but those influences are linked together by electronics that eschew the sheen and polish of most mainstream pop through Manville's interest in sounds that just aren't perfect, perhaps are a bit hissy or wonky, creating dark interstitial moments that disrupt his otherwise commercial sound. Though he was tight-lipped on his influences, one that crept out was David Byrne - you can imagine that any doubt I had about writing about some young gun dissipated at that point - who he singled out precisely because Byrne doesn't possess what anyone could describe as a 'perfect' voice. Manville is about to release his second EP and he's clearly going places. Here's 'St Tropez' from that EP. (Click here for those on email.)

Returning to electronic music, this week I've been listening to music created using analogue synths, those great beasts that were less instruments and more science kits, involving lots of knobs, filters, patch cables and a lab coat to make sounds from scratch. A lot of my listening has been taken up with the debut album from Metamono, which this trio will release in October. You can read a bit more here and you can listen to the track 'Linger Langour' from With The Compliments Of Nuclear Physics on that link.

Audio Journal: 30/08/2013 - David Byrne & St. Vincent, MuteResponse

David Byrne & St. Vincent, The Roundhouse 27/08/2013
Source and copyright: Rachel Lipsitz for Clash

One recurring artist throughout the history of my Audio Journal blog has been former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, who I even went so far as to say I had something of an 'artistic crush' on, a comment that I'm still reluctant to retract.

Byrne was in London earlier this week for a one-off show at the Roundhouse with St. Vincent (Annie Clark), with whom he recorded the brass-soaked Love This Giant released by 4AD last year. Despite a couple of previous attempts on my part to catch Byrne in concert, for one reason or another it's never happened. The closest I've come to seeing him in the flesh was last year at the Curzon cinema in Chelsea where he and Matthew Herbert engaged in an earnest debate about the health of what we used to call the music industry; prior to that it was a live video-link chat with Paul Morley from Brixton to accompany a screening of his Ride, Rise, Roar tour documentary, which I watched in a tiny room at Leicester Square's Odeon. Finally getting to see him singing this week was therefore something that I was starting to believe was never going to happen.

I was fortunate enough to review the Roundhouse show for Clash. My review, accompanied by some rather excellent photos from Rachel Lipsitz, can be found here. Byrne and Clark have released a free EP to accompany their tour, featuring some live tracks (including the Talking Heads classic 'Road To Nowhere'), remixes and an unreleased song from the Love This Giant sessions. The Brass Tactics EP can be downloaded below in exchange for your email address.

A few posts back I mentioned that listening to Byrne's conversation with Matthew Herbert had inspired me to start a project called MuteResponse in tribute to the influence of my favourite record label (Mute) and to celebrate ten years of writing my Documentary Evidence website.

MuteResponse will take the form of a twenty-two track double download compilation and will be released in the Autumn. Earlier this week I premiered the first track from the album, which will feature a number of artists similarly inspired by Mute's legacy. 'Clues In The Rain' by Rupert Lally and Espen J. Jörgensen - the first track that I received for inclusion on the project after a campaign for contributions - can be heard below, or head here if you're reading this on email. The full tracklist for MuteResponse will be announced soon.

Audio Journal: 23/08/2013 - The Islanders, Flöör, Karnezis / Lally / Jörgensen, Autechre

Aside from writing about a couple of upcoming new releases on the consistently interesting Touch label (Diluvial by Bruce Gilbert & BAW, Monstrance by Mika Vainio & Joachim Nordwall), trying desperately to like the new 12" from Mark Fell, the music highlight of the week was watching a performance of The Islanders at Underbelly, part of a month-long run for the Edinburgh Fringe.

Billed as a lo-fi musical, The Islanders is performed by Amy Mason, enigmatic Art Brut frontman Eddie Argos and folk musician Jim Moray. Mason talks, detailing intensely personal recollections from when she and Argos were a couple in the Nineties; in between her monologues Argos does the talking to music thing that have made Art Brut a relatively unique proposition over the past decade; Argos's recollections of the same relationship are frequently vastly different from his ex-girlfriend's, which would be far more amusing if it wasn't highlighting how disjointed they were as a couple. The climax and trigger for what would become the start of the end of their relationship was an ill-fated trip to the Isle of Wight which informs the title of this artsy show. A more complete overview of The Islanders that I've written can be found here.

The Islanders poster. Source: MJASmith

A couple of weeks ago my Swiss-based musician friend Rupert Lally tipped me off about his new project Flöör with singer and guitarist Camilla Matthias. The duo's debut single 'Waiting For The Summer To Fall' was released today and can be streamed below. You can read my thoughts on the single (and, somewhat improbably I admit, Disney's Teen Beach Movie, which has rarely been off our DVD player this summer) over on Documentary Evidence.

Over the last year or so, Lally has been locked into a productive musical union with Norwegian documentary film-maker and collector / creator of sounds Espen J. Jörgensen. The duo have released a whole stack of albums, concluding their partnership with This Is Art which will be released later this year. Preceding that, the duo will release 'Greece @ Peace', a short single with Greek bouzouki master Lakis Karnezis. As with all of Lally's collaborations, 'Greece @ Peace' was a distance project, Lally taking environmental sounds that Jörgensen had recorded (in this case from a trip to a Greek island in 2009), moulding those into atmospheres before adding synths and Karnezis's bouzouki. For a ninety second track, the results are profoundly stirring and haunting. My Documentary Evidence site snagged an exclusive of the video that Jörgensen created for the song, which I've included again below. For those on email, you'll have to head here.

This week my vinyl collection was gently pruned with the sales of two vintage 12" singles from Rob Brown and Sean Booth, better known as Warp electronica stalwarts Autechre. I bought 'Garbage' and 'Anvil Vapre' back when they were released in 1995, during a period where I was buying any experimental electronica records I could lay my hands on. Autechre, like their label mate Aphex Twin, have produced some of the most consistently odd and arresting pieces of electronica for nigh on 25 years, taking modish elements (with these two it was drum and bass predominantly) and deconstructing the rhythms and sounds to make something that feels like a freakish relative of whatever they were listening to at the time. It's a formula that's never failed yet.

Audio Journal: 18/08/2013

There are many reasons to look forward to Fridays, but in the past six months I've found another reason: Jonny Trunk's 50p Friday emails.

Jonny runs the archival Trunk label, which remasters and reissues albums that their original labels don't feel there's a demand for any longer. Often issued as beautiful vinyl repressings, Trunk has become the place to go for unusual obscurities, forgotten soundtracks and much more. Back in February, Trunk reissued a single by The BBC Radiophonic Workshop as a download for a mere 20p and since then Jonny has been hand-picking an album from the label's back catalogue and offering it up as a download for a mere 50p. Over the past six months he's offered Louis and Bebe Barron's early electronic soundtrack to Forbidden Planet, albums from Peter Cooke, the Herbie Mann record I wrote about recently, cool bossa nova from Charlie Rouse, wonky jazz from Raymond Scott and primitive computer music - it's mindbendingly diverse stuff.

Sadly Jonny's taken a holiday this week and so there was nothing on offer on Friday, but if you want a means of comprehensively expanding your knowledge of music in these austere times, Trunk is the place to head. Navigate to the 50p Friday menu link on Trunk's website to fill your ears with great tunes you'd never think to listen to for less than the price of packet of crisps.

The past week I was tipped off about an album of covers of predominantly Eighties pop tracks by an Australian unit called Parralox. Recovery tackles classics from Erasure, Madonna, Pet Shop Boys, The Cure, Front 242, Depeche Mode and many others. My full review can be found over on Documentary Evidence here, but suffice to say it's probably the best electronic pop album I've heard for a long time.

Dave Fleet, who works under the alias Laica and who I wrote about ages ago (click here for that post) has a number of new projects in the can. Not content with lining up the Environs project for Alrealon, he's contributed to my upcoming MuteResponse project, is realising tracks inspired by my short story The Engineer and today let me know about another project, this time an EP for the Phatic Musk label. A short teaser for his latest dystopian soundtrack hit YouTube today – check it out below or hit here if you're reading on email.

Finally, I was recently sent a new track from Iggy & The German Kids which is presently doing great things on German radio. The mastermind behind this great, towering pop electronic moment is Ignacio, who I also wrote about way back in the early days of this blog. The Lynchian suburban nightmare video for 'So Hard' can be reached below, or for those reading this on email, click here to watch over at YouTube.

Audio Journal: 12/08/2013 - Sounding The Body Electric

Sounding The Body Electric (Calvert 22, 2013)
Source: MJASmith

On Friday my friend Dan and I visited Sounding The Body Electric: Experiments In Art And Music In Eastern Europe 1957 - 1984 at Calvert 22 Foundation in Shoreditch. The exhibition focusses on the development of electronic music, often for experimental film and adventurous radio programming, in Eastern Europe.

The exhibition consists of audio excerpts, video footage and examples of mind-boggling graphic scores that looked more like waveform descriptions in some cases and less formalised Damien Hirst coloured dots in others.

The photo above is of a series of vinyl records turned into an artwork covering a large area of wall, each LP subjected to a specific treatment, process or design.

Sounding The Body Electric: Experiments In Art And Music In Eastern Europe 1957 - 1984 runs until 25 August 2013. More information can be found here.

An accompanying 2xCD collection of excerpts from audio works included in the exhibition was released by the Bólt label.

Audio Journal: 07/08/2013

Three things occupied my adventures in music last week.

The first was watching two documentaries broadcast on Sky Arts in the last year - one about Robert Moog's development of his genre-defining synthesizer, and another about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Both highlighted a visionary spirit that feels like it's been lost with the successive democratisations of electronic sound over the past thirty years, first with the development of digital synths and then with software synthesis. Moog synths required the user to literally engineer a sound using an array of knobs, filters and the like, whereas the Radiophonic Workshop's methods pre-dated synths completely, pitch-shifting basic oscillators by painstakingly recording to tape, cutting said tapes into loops and layering the results into dizzyingly creative soundworks. The most famous Radiophonic Workshop composition was the original theme to Doctor Who, but few who listen back to that today would appreciate just how complex it was to create.

Moog DVD (2004)

One of the most interesting things I took away from Moog was Bob decrying the moves toward bedroom electronica that means anyone with a basic laptop and free software can create passable music. His synths, he explained, were designed to be played live. If the number of settings on a Mini-Moog look hard to control in a live setting, watching footage of Keith Emerson conjuring complex clusters of frantic melodies out of a vast modular system - literally the synthesizer equivalent of a telephone exchange with cables connected, spaghetti like between hundreds of inputs and outputs - justified Bob's claim. I may not yet have embraced prog, but Emerson's frightening mastery of this unwieldy beast did at least make me appreciate that we have indeed lost something in laptop electronica's global takeover. As I write, I've just filed a review of Berlin-based electronic artist James Welch's debut album under the moniker Seams, one of my two assignments for Clash this month. The accompanying press release has us believe that Welch has created the album with a nod to his live sets, but I'm not sure Bob Moog would have necessary appreciated the dry sound Welch has delivered on Quarters.

The second concern last week was jazz. With the house to myself for most of the week while my wife and kids were away, I found myself consuming jazz voraciously, starting with flutist Herbie Mann's 1962 performance at the Village Gate in Greenwich Village, New York and concluding with Stan Getz's set at the nearby Café Au Go-Go some two years later. Sadly, like most of NYC's most historic music venues from yesteryear, neither venue is there today, even if the Village remains more or less untouched by real estate development. In between Mann's deep introspective take on George and Ira Gershwin's 'It Ain't Necessarily So' and Getz's bossa nova set with Astrud Gilberto ('Girl From Ipanema', their most famous collaboration, was not part of the set), I watched Bruce Weber's documentary on West Coast trumpeter Chet Baker, Let's Get Lost. The film was made in 1988, just before Baker fell out of a window in Amsterdam, trumpet still in hand, silencing a fifty-odd year career in music. The contrast between Baker the slick young gun and the weathered junkie shown in his twilight moments was frightening, but appearances can clearly be deceptive - on the footage of Baker singing and playing trumpet on what would prove to be his final trip around the globe, he still very much had his chops intact, still capable of delivering standards with a casual vibrancy that characterised his career.

Herbie Mann At The Village Gate (1962)

The final musical concern last week was a lengthy piece I wrote on the overlooked post-punk unit Rema-Rema, notable for including future Adam & The Ants guitarist Marco Pirroni in their ranks and also for setting a quality standard for Ivo Watts-Russell, who released the bands's solitary 12" Wheel In The Roses on his 4AD label, one of the most important British independent labels. My archive piece benefited from the insight and recollections of the band's vocalist Gary Asquith, who I've been interviewing about his various musical projects since last year. Asquith gave me a heap of images, flyers and posters from 1978 / 79 when Rema-Rema were active, making this one of the articles I've enjoyed writing the most over the past ten years. The piece can be found here.

Rema-Rema Wheel In The Roses flyer

Audio Journal: 24/07/2013 - Clash album reviews

TYTHE 'And Also With You'

As part of my ongoing occasional work for Clash, I was recently asked to review four debut albums for their website.

Benin City are named after a Nigerian state capital city and their music represents an ambitious blend of everything from dubstep through to sonorous brass recalling the arrangements of Burt Bacharach. Their debut album Fires In The Park was released at the start of July. My review can be found here, and a feature I wrote on the band will be published in the next physical issue of the magazine, due to hit newstands in early August. That issue also finds me reviewing the reissue of All Hail West Texas by The Mountain Goats.

Half Moon Run's Dark Eyes is an audaciously polished first album from this Canadian unit, and this is a band that have a stadium-filling career ahead of them if they knuckle down and work hard enough. My review of Dark Eyes can be found here.

Producer Julian Peck operates under the alias TYTHE and his first album And Also With You is one of the freshest things I've heard this year, referencing the sort of eclecticism that characterised the Balearic scene at the end of the Eighties. Every year I alight upon an album that becomes a sort of informal 'summer album' that I listen to over and over until the air turns cooler. And Also With You is probably that album for summer 2013 for me. My review is here.

Having long been enjoying a love affair with New York, I jumped at the chance to cover the debut album from Scott & Charlene's Wedding - the brainchild of Aussie frontman Craig Dermody, Any Port In A Storm recounts his disenchantment and homesickness at having moved to NYC from Melbourne. Man up Dermody and quit your whining! I would give my right arm to have the chance to live in New York! You can read a more balanced assessment here.