Audio Journal : 26/07/2010

Okay, things have become a little safe around here. I do this with music. When I feel like I've strayed too far into what I'd describe as 'polite' music, I feel the need to listen to something more adventurous to reset things.

So I listened to a rip someone blogged of the 1993 Harry Pussy 12" 'In An Emergency You Can Shit On A Puerto Rican Whore' (well, writing that will flush out whether my parents are still reading this). Listening to eight of these nine tracks feel like flossing your ears with barbed wire – it's chaotic, messy with over-distorted guitars bludgeoning all else into submission; words can be heard but not deciphered; frantic not-quite-riffs dominate. Then there's the final track; in anyone else's mitts the unlikely punk-fuzz cover of Kraftwerk's 'Showroom Dummies' would sound nightmarish, but compared to the other tracks it sounds positively gentle. In the lyrics to 'Showroom Dummies', the plastic models in the shop window come alive and break the glass in order to escape; Harry Pussy's version is the sound of them grinding the glass under their feet as they step onto the pavement, leaving shards and deep scratches embedded in their plastic feet.

Duly reset, 'In An Emergency...' was followed up with a CD I bought in Falmouth's excellent Jam by Loren Connors (formerly Loren Mazzacane Connors) and Jim O'Rourke. Two Nice Catholic Boys captures duo performances by the two guitarists from European dates in 1997, and consists of three vaguely-monikered tracks ('Paris', 'Or Maybe Koln', 'Definitely Not Koln'). Connors and O'Rourke are titans of the experimental music field (both composed and improvised) and the interplay between them here is quite special. Judicious use of feedback and reverb prevents this from becoming some sort of axe-wielding standoff, and there are brief flashes of staccato rhythm. This was released on the excellent Family Vineyard label from New York. Somewhere in a record box I have a solo guitar album by sometime contributor to The Wire magazine Alan Licht (YMCA), also released on the label; one for another week.

Sticking with the distorted guitar / noise theme, Lou Reed's Metal Machine Trio (or MM3) released a double CD of live dates in LA two years ago and I totally missed it. The trio is intended to draw out the 'spirit' of Reed's Metal Machine Music, released in 1975. Metal Machine Music is a love-it-or-hate-it album consisting of electronically-processed guitar and synth and is mostly ear-shredding noise of the extremest order. At the time of its release Reed was quoted as saying that it was recorded to honour a final album contract obligation.



Since then its reputation has grown among the experimental music fraternity, during which renaissance Reed appears to have changed his stance, claiming it was a calculated piece of sonic artistry all along. He has subsequently performed the piece with Berlin chamber orchestra Zeitkratzer, and MM3 is an extension of the relatively free jazz / improvised atmosphere the original Metal Machine Music evokes. The Creation Of The Universe, despite its slightly over-confident title, is subtle improvisation, mostly; occasional brooding distorted guitar rises up menacingly from the more low-key sections, often heralding passages of fuzzy noise and skronking sounds reminiscent of James Chance from Ulrich Krieger (who also forms part of the Text Of Light trio with Alan Licht and Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo). There are chord changes in some sections that had me scratching my head wondering where I recognised them from and then I sussed it – they're the same as final section of The Velvet Underground's 'I'm Sticking With You'. The third member of this free rock trio is Seth Calhoun, billed as providing 'live processing and continuum fingerboard'. Nice.

Others: Sleigh Bells 'Infinity Guitars' (big distorted beats and loud , stuttering, guitar interruptions with shouty female vocals; me like); Screaming Females 'I Don't Mind It' (New Jersey trio do girl-fronted melodic Buzzcocks-esque punk - only marred by needless riffing at the end); The Silver Pesos 'Regresando' (free single from this LA band – dreamy ambient electro-pop with latin flourishes, plus an excellent Youth-esque remix); Best Coast 'Boyfriend' (hazy, Spector-esque boy-girl duo pop; beguiling); Anamanaguchi 'Airbrushed' (zany Yo-Gabba-Gabba-style synth goofiness from New York).

Audio Journal : 17/07/2010

Back at the end of June, Bret Easton Ellis posted on Twitter thus: 'High Violet by The National is the best record I've heard in a year. It's the only thing I've listened to on the Imperial Bedrooms tour.' Consequently, since reading that I haven't been able to disassociate the album from the latest novel by the former literature enfant terrible with this, the fifth LP from Brooklyn five-piece The National.



The mood of High Violet has been likened to the grey, rain-soaked tones of Joy Division. While their music does have an undeniably dense, dark-hued atmosphere, High Violet's aspirations are far wider than Ian Curtis's (ultimately terminal) negativity; a wider sonic palette also broadens the mood. It's closest cousin, to these ears, appears to be the Interpol of third album Our Love To Admire. My favourite tracks are the appropriately-named 'Sorrow' and the motorik 'Afraid Of Everyone', but the whole affair is gloriously bleak.

I've listened to this album repeatedly over the past month; I know it's not healthy to do so, as I found to my detriment with the aforementioned Our Love To Admire. 'Introspection must be sampled in small doses' should be the health warning on such albums. But it does also seem to suit the trademarked air of paranoid detachment of Imperial Bedrooms.

Throughout our holiday in Cornwall, one album that we kept falling back on – especially when the sun came out – was the self-titled début by The Drums; its shimmery surf-pop seemed the logical soundtrack, but I've already waxed lyrical about that LP and don't plan to do so again. The other recent purchase that got heavily played while we were away was the self-titled album by San Diego's The Soft Pack. The Californian four-piece were previously known as The Muslims, and not unsurprisingly were encouraged to change their name.

I'm not sure where to place this LP. No single style seems to prevail, but there is more than a passing resemblance to some of the punky archness of Jonathan Richman and his Modern Lovers, especially in the trio of faster-paced tracks – 'Pull Out', 'Parasite' and 'Faithman'. Those tracks also have a whiff of lo-fi producer Steve 'Big Black' Albini circa his derided (and band-separating) work with Rosa Mota. So, art-punk-grunge anyone? Well worth checking out.

For the journey down to Cornwall we bought some audio books for the kids rather than have them sat in front of DVDs. One of these was the Theodore Geisel – Dr. Seuss – classic Green Eggs And Ham, ably read by Adrian Edmondson, which had us all in stitches thanks to his comic voices and Seuss's rhymes. There's a line in an old Lunachicks song about that book, so I'll be heading loftward to dig that album out in due course.

Others: Kid Savant 'Drawn And Quartered' (electro-infused shoegazer pop, not unlike The XX); The XX 'Islands' (electro-infused shoegazer pop, not unlike Kid Savant); The Foals 'Miami' (like an Avalanches remix of Robert Smith jamming with Happy Mondays); Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse featuring Julian Casablancas 'Little Girl' (in which The Strokes front-man sings over a jangly imaginary soundtrack to a kidnap chase through smoky Parisian pavement cafés); Male Bonding 'Weird Feelings' (shouty grunge pop with Sixties flashes on Sub Pop); Crystal Fighters 'In The Summer' (imagine PWEI soundtracking Manga classic Akira).

It's good to be back.

Audio Journal : 28.06.2010

This was going to be about the Kings Of Leon concert we just went to at Hyde Park, but all I can say is the following, and I apologise for the lack of descriptive adjectives. Oh, and everyone was wearing a tedious uniform of either Bench or A&F / Hollister t-shirts and Ray Ban's.

The Features were great, and that band should be far more successful than they've been.

The Whigs were also great and we'll definitely be investigating their back catalogue.

The Drums, whose album I wrote about last week, were also great. I especially liked the way singer Jonathan Pierce disdainfully left the stage, flinging his mic away as he did so.

The Black Keys were, you guessed it, great. Effortlessly cool, the anguished drummer in this heavy fuzzed-up blues duo looks like he's in pain every time he hits a drum. He also looks a little like Philip Glass.

And Kings Of Leon were great too. The new songs were great. The Pixies cover was great. The old songs were great. 'Sex On Fire' was horrible, but the A&F / Hollister t-shirts and Ray Ban's-wearing fourth-album fans loved it.

So, in summary, it was great.

Audio Journal : 21/06/2010

I didn't want to like The Drums, I really didn't. The band, residents of trendy Brooklyn and forming part of the rich, unending seam of bands emerging thence, sounded to me like a pick 'n mix blend of the Eighties bands I remember. On the first two songs I heard – 'I Felt Stupid' and 'Best Friend' – I thought I heard a vocalist, Jonathan Pierce, doing a sterling Marc Almond impression while duetting with New Order's backing tapes. The prevalence of high bass melodies just made the New Order comparisons even more obvious. Why, I thought to myself, would I want to listen to this, when I could just dust down my Soft Cell and New Order CDs instead?

Then I saw them performing a version of 'Best Friend' on the insipid Friday Night With Jonathan Ross show, and they were all big quiffs, turn-ups and irony, Pierce's vocal setting being notched up to 'camp', and I thought they were taking the piss. Even the line 'You're my best friend / But then you died' seemed to lose some of its Morrissey-esque drama. And the band name? Surely a joke given that drums are the one element hardly prominent in their sound.

But the 'idea', or the concept of The Drums as a great band remained, not least because I tend to be a sucker for most NY-area bands. And so, when I found out they'd be supporting Kings Of Leon when we see them at Hyde Park next week, and with their début album just released, I thought I'd give them a second chance. I'm glad I did.

The Drums is a polished début (but then again, these days, all débuts are pretty well polished) and the poppy New Wave style is carried well across the album's thirteen tracks. Ignoring 'Best Friend', which, although a good song, is a bit too instant, the album is uniformly perfect; a perfect, summery vibe which can only come from the States – our dour British electro and post-punk indie bands rarely sound this joyous – and the mood only drops with the curiously Killers-esque ballad 'Down By The Water' (by way of a reminder, I don't like The Killers; sorry). 'We Tried' has a bassline just a few notes short of Joy Division's motorik 'Digital'. There's a song about surfing (ahem, 'Let's Go Surfing') which appears to include the lines 'Obama / I wanna go surfing' complete with Beach Boys-style harmonies, natch. There's songs about walking round New York ('I Need Fun In My Life') which will always get a thumbs up from me, and a plaintive, poppy, piece about mismatched expectations ('Book Of Stories'). As débuts go, its remarkably self-assured, straddling a sonic rawness with confident yet subtly-deployed electronic embellishments. And it may sound it, but it's not throwaway; beneath a sheen of apparent optimism, most songs seem to contain disappointment, self-doubt and negativity in spades.

Comparisons are the lowest form of review, and I should know because I do it all the time, but if you contrast The Drums with say, The Bravery – who also purportedly wore the Brit / synth influence with pride until they were rumbled as pretenders – they do seem a whole lot more authentic and earnest than some of the other bands emerging today. I stand wholly corrected.

Audio Journal : 14/06/2010

This is the first in a series of reviews of what I like to call 'summer albums', albums which evoke – for me at least – the warmth and optimism of the summer months.

New Order's Technique is one such album. Generally regarded as being among the seminal Manchester band's best albums, Technique was recorded in the acid haze of the nascent Balearic sound; always comfortable with hedonism, the eclectic Balearic mix of pre-baggy indie, electro-infused rock and early acid house which was played in Ibizan nightclubs provided the inspiration for Technique.

Not that you'd know it. Aside from a general sunny vibe (mostly) evident across the album, Technique is actually one of New Order's most 'rock' albums since Movement, their confused post-Ian Curtis debut. One exception is the opener, 'Fine Time', which nicks a jacking acid house rhythm and throws the sonic kitchen sink at it – computerised voices, Hooky's bass melodies, tinkly xylophone riffs and even bleating sheep noises right at the end; it has Hooky intoning scarily that the object of the song is 'too young' and that said person has 'love technique'. It's positively pervy if you ask me, and overall the track - like many at the time - has too many disparate ideas running through it. I sometimes skip it to be honest. Far better is the late-Eighties club-friendly sound and endearing melancholia of 'Mr Disco' (so long as you can stomach Pet Shop Boys-style orchestral stabs).

Elsewhere, jangly guitar riffs, classic Hooky bass melodies and some of Bernard Sumner's best heartfelt lyrics abound. The best tracks, for me, would be the guitar pop of 'All The Way', 'Love Less' and 'Run'. For many years my personal favourite was 'Vanishing Point', an austere electronic pop gem infused with a thudding 4/4 beat.

Technique brings to mind some strong memories for me – listening to the album in my friend Steve's red Polo with another friend, Jon, on the way to work social events during the particularly sticky summer of 1993; sticking the CD on ahead of going to Clacton for a boozy day with Neil after we'd finished the slog of our second year exams at Essex University in 1996. It's just one of those albums, and it will always get heavy play by me during the summer months.

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 : 31/05/2010

Work from home playlist

Two unusual things about today – one, I worked from home and two, I had the house to myself. Here was today's work from home playlist, three albums selected at random to help me concentrate and be more productive.

The Orb Live '93

I first got into The Orb about a year after they released U.F.Orb. Before that I didn't really get the point of ambient music and I also thought The Orb in particular were just a huge joke. Their 'performance' of a hugely compressed single version of 'Blue Room' on Top Of The Pops saw the duo of Dr. Alex Paterson and Kris 'Thrash' Weston sitting either side of a chess board bathed in blue light, and I just didn't get it. Later I realised that there was humour inherent in their chill out music – that's what happens when you work with Jimmy Cauty from The KLF – but it wasn't meant to be a joke.

By 1993 however, I'd just finished my GCSEs, a lot of family stuff was kicking off, mild teenage angst was developing and I needed to find some way of calming down. U.F.Orb was the antidote. I bought it on cassette the day before my father went into hospital for an operation, and spent the entire length of his op sat in the family car listening to the album. It spawned an ongoing love of textural ambient music, but nothing – even some of The Orb's later output – ever came close to hearing that album for the first time.

The only thing that topped that album was seeing The Orb live at Warwick Arts Centre in 1995 with a school friend. It was an incredible evening, though possibly not as incredible as the people stoned out of their nuts found it. I genuinely regarded that concert as my musical coming of age, much more affecting in many ways than any of the usual landmark life events that ensued.

The problem is that I don't remember much about that night beyond the fact that in the post-concert DJ set I shook Dr. Alex Paterson's hand and gave him a massive thumbs up. The closest I can get is this 1993 live compilation which draws together tracks from various performances, including a seminal 'Tower Of Dub' – ex-PiL bassist Jah Wobble's low-slung dub rhythm pushed to levels that I recollect when played 'live' (by way of a sampled loop) back at Warwick Arts Centre made me think my chest was going to cave in.

Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works 85 – 92

Hooked on ambient music as I became in 1993 after purchasing U.F.Orb, it didn't take long before this album fell into my mits. Aphex Twin, by the time of this collection on the Belgian R&S label, was already established as a electronica enigma, a musical auteur who claimed not to have heard any of the music that his music was compared to; he made music in his shed, in Cornwall which at the time wasn't exactly regarded as a techno centre.

Richard D James, Aphex's given name, had a particularly unique take on the ambient genre. In few cases on Selected Ambient Works do you find the wispy, pulsing electronica which characterised vast swathes of this particular substrata of electronic music. Instead you get heavily reverb-ed slowed-down 'ardcore beats, icy synth lines and Willy Wonka samples. It prefaces the Warp label's fascination with clanging distorted beats and provides the bridge between the likes of Autechre with the industrial music of Cabaret Voltaire; not that James would have claimed to have consciously known this.

Warp released Selected Ambient Works II a few years later; it had no track names, just images reflecting each of the tracks. I borrowed it from the library the same day as I borrowed Brian Eno's The Shutov Assembly. I remember thinking that both albums sounded pretty much the same.

David Bowie Christiane F. - Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo



I had never considered buying Bowie until I read Christopher Sandford's Loving The Alien biography at University in the mid-Nineties. I don't think I've ever elected to read about an artist before actually having any of their music, but something about the book in the campus's branch of Waterstone's caught my eye and I decided I'd give it a go.

What emerged was an attraction to Bowie's 'Berlin' period – the trio of albums Low, Heroes and Lodger – which were produced by Bowie and Eno while the erstwhile David Jones was a resident in the city. I think it was an interest in Berlin as a cultural influence, and the influence of Low on Joy Division, more so than Eno's engagement, that hooked me in to that trio of albums. I bought the trio of albums over a period of a couple of years after reading that book and initially found them confusing, challenging listening experiences. In a bizarre way I didn't feel like I was entitled to listen to Bowie; I didn't understand his vernacular.

Since then I've moved either side of the Berlin period, specifically the Velvets-influenced Ziggy albums, but it's to the Berlin albums that I always return. This soundtrack album effectively works as a greatest hits of the period, drawing together album tracks and sundry oddities; the best of these is '“Helden”', a German version of the mighty '”Heroes”', in my opinion one of the most uplifting songs ever recorded.