Julianna Barwick 2

Almost forgot about this, which was the best of the Reckoner remixes a few years back...



Her new album's out now, via asthmatic kitty...

Julianna Barwick

Julianna Barwick Live at the Empty Bottle 2010

Julianna Barwick - "The Magic Place"

This is brilliant, haunting stuff...

inner-view with Julianna here...

Hong Kong In The 60s = Mad Men ?

Quick disclaimer: this is based on only about 3 tracks I've heard. The album itself could derail all of this...

Again, this is something I'm just not sure about. I like it. I mistrust it. It's beautiful but echoic, a mental echo of a Phantasy...

(the title suggests they know it, but I'm not sure if this makes me like them more or less)

...it's imitating sound and it's a great imitation: the soft burr, the perfect Mad Men glass clinks, the predictably heart-melting beauty; you can't see the joins and you wouldn't to - the joins would creak loudly, would call bullshit on the 60s... this is music of a time when men were men and women were grateful...

Now, I like Mad Men, watch it (in every sense of the word) religiously but it's the perversion that I like. It too is a lot dishonest but the style and the psychosexual dribbling appeals... It seems to exist solely to allow us to simultaneously sneer and indulge; how funny we (God, they) were, with their sexism and their racism and their funny little ways...

I feel a little the same way about Hong Kong In The 60s except that it seems to be pretending to find sweetness in it's sources; the resonances here are Razorcuts twee, Flatmates twee, Vaselines twee... i.e. lovely, sweet, gentle, empty... music for our 16 year old selves

Contrast with, say, Momus, who attempts similar tricks, off and on, with added (sweet) malevolence and much more honesty. Much more commentary?

Warren Ellis is quoted as saying it's “a charming summoning with a weird sheen of degraded international glamour” and that's a good starting point for discussion, except that it doesn't feel degraded to me. I think I'd like the degradation.

The band's name is perhaps revealing: my parents were in Hong Kong in the 60s and the casual, soon to be supperannuated, sexism (not that soon) was endemic and regarded as a cultural resource... the girls can't just sing sweetly, they must sing sweetly; they can't just wear pretty dresses and headbands, they must wear them, their hair must be... the world was like that but it seems Hong Kong was particularly like that: East and West meeting and dragging the best and worst of both worlds... a constant of the past and the present, a forward lancing unreal jet-age trail that derives from the Mad Men of the 60s and finds itself, 50 years later, as reality, as the heart and brain-melting echo of a past that wasn't.

I'm going to keep listening. I like it. I'm not sure of it. It's-

Hong Kong In The 60s - You Can Take A Heart But You Cannot Make It Beat*

As a Thought Experiment, extrapolate the title of this track: is this a meta-commentary? I kind of hope so.

Woebot Chunks

Really enjoying Woebot's new album Chunks; it really doesn't sound like anything else. Unless... well, the scope of it is impressive, the soundfield not really used like this before; the psychedelic soul slips through, the 70s proto-metal slabs and 80s licks are not smeared over as in the rapidly decreasing circles of the Ferraro et al contingent; you can hear the groove, just about to start, even if sometimes it's halted in it's tracks, re-aligned and then started all over again.

Boomkat'll tell you that Steinski and Position Normal might be a reference point (don't hear Dr John though) and while the, er, Bailiff's are knocking on the door I think this is misleading*, as is the idea that this is 'refreshingly un-earnest' when I'm pretty convinced it's exactly the opposite; this seems very earnest, seems to wear it's heart on it's sleeve...

(INSERT ORANGE AMP JOKE HERE)

It's important to be earnest, I think. Don't find the lack refreshing at all.

It is groovy, occasionally very groovy... the track I posted here, Argos, with it's yelps and Hair Metal slutiness is representative, but only cumulatively; the album gets to that state of Sly perfection but the journey is perhaps more interesting; lots of the other tracks sound like someone attempting to find their way towards that state of pure, sexualised groove and thumping bliss...

...which makes the track sequencing on the LP even more interesting; Argos comes at the start of the B side... as if Woebot is setting out his stall and then letting it unwind through all the antecedents, counterfactual histories, future shocks etc

I hear aspects of early 90s jungle in here... just in the edits... it doesn't sound like jungle... bits remind me obscurely of Quiet Sun, an underrated slice of prog weirdness... there's even a slight dash of a more relaxed, les hyper, Shangaan Electro too in one of the tracks, which ends up sounding not unlike the way I thought Vampire Weekend might sound before I'd heard them, when everyone was bigging up the African appropriations, rather than their C86 appropriations...

If The Osmonds had really gone for their Crazy Horses track/tack, started stealing from other Funkadelicates as well as Zeppelin and then all got laryngitis before they started to add their vocal parts...

I like the way that the whole album is clearly based on joy as an emotion, especially at a time when lots of people are increasingly turning towards the dark; this is the flipside to Raime, the light cousin; using Soul, Funk and ecstatic Zeppelins in place of Goth and Tech... it's a bold move and one that pays off big time...

It's an unsettling and smart album and it really makes sense as an album - it even makes sense to have it on vinyl because you really ought to flip it over, that seems an integral part of the experience.

You. Need. To. Flip.



*Boonkat is always misleading. They've mislead me so many times I'm thinking about leaving them for Chelsea...

Shazzala

AQUA NEBULA OSCILLATOR "Lost in Space" by MArco Laguna Films from shazzula on Vimeo.

There's buckets of this stuff around these days but... C'mon; everyone loves witches, don't they? That cute little nose wrinkle on Bewitched? Those crazed old hags in Clash Of The Titans? That naked girl you once thought you saw in the woods behind The Carpenters Arms, Chilthorne Domer...

And the Shazzala line/brand/nebula has a nifty line in gig posters...

Italian lowbudget sleazeeee:



Incredible String Band directed by Russ Meyer:



Sub Cremaster Fetish-set Dark Crystal-Meth Dreams:

Demdike Mafia Or Tim Hecker's Ravedeath

...well, I was half-joking when I talked about the post below feeling like revolutionary suicide but there's something definitely odd in the air... Anonymous commentators (in the blog equivalent of being in talking heads being heavy shadow with a modulated voice) and, even more worrying, several people via email said they didn't want to be associated with their views* but, yes, they'd experienced the same feelings re the Demdike boys...

Weird. And, just to check, I've been replaying a lot of Demdike Stare on my way to work and bits of it I've started to really like... scene and setting, or just me being a contrary sonofabitch? Bit of both I think...

Anyway, by way of contrast, here's someone I've always thought was somehow more than the sum of it's parts - Tim Hecker has a new album out today, a Valentine's special, and it just so happens it's got the best title of the year: Ravedeath 1972...

Here's a sample...




*this strikes me as entirely odd... sort of bad faith writ large in the blogosphere... is it even possible not to be associated with your views? I mean, I can see not wanting to run up to someone and say 'You're shit, mate' but, in the context of the internet, views are people aren't they? What else do we have if not a personal view? What the hell is happening here? Is the interconnectivity of the net (or maybe the real world) finally eating itself?

Demdike Stare Are Just... Okay, Aren't They?

I keep looking. I like the covers, I like the music, the video projections. I like the idea but...

I can't seem to see what other people see about Demdike Stare. It's just... okay, isn't it? It's turning into a Shibboleth.

I mean, it's hard not to like this kind of thing, especially with all the pulsing nakedness:



But, I dunno, I'm creeped out in a different way; can't escape the feeling that I'm being manipulated somehow. It's really hard to define. It seems so calculated.



It's like it's checking boxes, boxes that I like but... the emotional aspect is missing for me. I haven't seen them live, maybe it'll make more sense then, maybe I need some fungal accessories, or maybe at the bottom of a k-hole I'd find illumination but, right now, I feel about them the same way I feel about, say, Love Actually: it presses buttons that I'm not sure I want pressed - it's sad that Emma Thompson just gets the Joni Mitchell CD, I'm happy that Colin Firth has found love, I'm vaguely understanding of that guy from Teachers being in love with his best friends missus but...

Does no one else feel like this? Seems like lots of people (everyone?), whose opinions and taste I value, love these guys - Demdike Stare have been elevated to the status of untouchables (cf some of the Ghost Box stuff) and I just don't see it. And when there's no visuals to distract...



I dunno... I've bought quite a few of their releases, mostly because each one seems to get a better review than the last and I want to like them so much that I end up thinking: this one will be the one, this one will sound like people say it sounds, this one will dig straight into my ZNS and I'll get it but then I put it on and... Nothing. It's like some kind of cruel joke, the Emperor's New Clothing for the new generation...

I need someone, anyone, to write an article counter to the prevailing opinion. I'm gonna go mad. The consensus is crushing. It's making me suspicious; it feels (ironically) like a Witch Hunt. Like even writing this (if anyone reads this fucking thing anymore) might be an act of revolutionary suicide. I'm dreading the time when I'm at one of their gigs and the whole crowd is going with them and I'm standing there, thinking about going outside for a cigarette...


UPDATE: I should have mention that, as well as asking for anyone who agrees with me, I am interested in anyone who disagrees... disagreement gets more done, I think....

Brkng Cnvtn

via Breaking Convention via Strange Attractor

w/music by the dronescapedelicans Ragnarok, amongst others

Hans Bellmer Ate My Hamster

Can't place the music, sure I know it...

This has the perhaps dubious distinction of making Hans Bellmer's dolls even more illicit and unsettling; scary and incomplete, like the dolls themselves and with more than a whiff of Bataille about it...

Also like the look of (haven't heard the sound yet) of the Sexual Cough Syrup for Black Swan mixtape up at Sailormouth (beautiful looking site by the way)

Cher's Gaze Of The Other

From the disco-tastic, Sophie Ellis Bextor-baiting days of 1979... Cher reinvents herself as a Flesh Gordon extra for this album cover... the music is light discofunk and can't hope to match the lunatic genius of the album art...

Whenever I think about Sartre's gaze of the other, I think about this and shudder.

The Bran Flakes Revisited

In the early days of the blogs, I got a lot of innocent, spazz-dancing fun out of these guys and then kinda forgot about them. In the meantime, slightly less psychotic successors like The Go Team have been Mercury nominated and hosts of bright-eyed, (Kate)Bush(y)-tailed sonic clusterers, appropriators and sludge-fiends have come and gone, beat-digging the life out of every genre imaginable.

But there's something just.... further out about The Bran Flakes. They seem resistant to categorisation (contrast those artists - they know who they are - who seem resistant to not being categorised, lest they miss out on being included in the latest Pontone mix or something) and lost in the music itself... I'm pretty sure The Bran Flakes started off being ironic but have now found themselves trapped/immersed into a kind of Rainbow Hole, a soundworld where nothing can escape, where the teeniest hint of hipster funk is pulled apart by rabid toys and where the only sex is the sex-o-lettes.

And if this stuff is all sampled then fuck knows where they dug these beats up...

The Bran Flakes are as unselfconsciously odd as anything Drag or Witch or whatever. This music which makes me want to go score some Crystal Meth in double-quick time. Now, where's that guy in the Chelsea tracksuit...

Snowy Red

Further to my previous post...



This could be featuring on Altered Zones, coming out of Brooklyn etc. And might be. I'm not sure i trust anything of the internet now. The shock of Milli Vanilli runs deep. And now...

This is laid back to the point of falling, the machines keeping time but only just... Not heard Snowy Red mentioned too often as a reference/source for the new minimal (chill) wavists but...

I like the dancing on the video too, though it reminds me of a (to be unnamed) mate dancing to The Mission's Butterfly On A Wheel circa 1990...

Led Er Est

Led Er Est - PS 18 (Mannequin MNQ 012 split Ancien Régime)

It's getting harder to distinguish the original early 80s synth poppers from the newbies; the odd fatter drum, slightly elongated synth-tail, a micro-squelsh off centre...and now the old synthwavers are getting reissued (I'm assuming blogs like >Mutant Sounds< are generally responsible - wonder if any credit gets shoved their way?) it's gonna get even more messy:

"Is this new? Don't look like that...New new, I mean... i can see it's still in the packaging but... No, I know it's Futurist but... For fuck's sake: I'm just asking if the band are around now... Yeah... No, not reformed, actually around... it's a simple enough question... I mean is it Retro? I mean... Eh? Don't fucking raise your eyebrows to me... I know it's Futurist, but that isn't what I was asking..."

How To Dive Well

How To Dress Well : "Suicide Dream 1"

I've been undecided about How To Dress Well, but this little mindmeld of vision and music has a definite grace... it's maybe a bit (i.e. less than a tad) literal, given the watery nature of How To Dress Well's music, but I think it's somehow better for it...

...and it feels heartfelt; you get the sense that Tom Krell is influenced by his, er, influences at a very deep level; this isn't appropriation or casual sideways-glancing irony, the R&B flicks (not really evident here) are from someone who really felt their pull and is perhaps due to be a dominant strain in a long line of 'indie' (shudder along with me) artists influenced less by The Velvet Underground, Can, Stooges axis than by the half-heard glitches, tics and tickles of prime-Beef Timbaland and Blackout era Britney...

There's a mix by Tom via The Wire:

How To Dress Well Mix

Woebot Goes Pop

Woebot: Argos from Matthew Ingram on Vimeo.

Don't imagine this will need much interweb promotion but Woebot goes a bit Dangermouse on this track, this little slice of Funkadelica; all subsex yows, gentle guitar licking, bass slaps and shimmer...even a slight Hair Metal slutiness about the drums and guitar interplay. He might not appreciate it (he might love it) but there's a hint of, gulp, Primal Scream about the eyes here...

For the record, I'm not a Primal hater, quite like the gruff little guy's drawl through americana, have even considered getting my 'rocks' off, at one point in time, when the lights were flashing, when synapses were snapping, when hot girls in cowboy hats were bouncing off the walls...

Primal Scream were also tough-looking guys; we tried to steal their rider once and dthey chased us right out the Festival. Looking behind, you tell a glasgae bolga was not far away from their minds...

Oh, the flips and fancies of the internet... I'd like to see where he's going with this... or where everyone's going with it...

It seems bold to go clean and musical in amongst the fluorescent grey sludge of yawnology, hypnodiscogs etc.

Richard Youngs

Listening a lot to Richard Youngs at the moment; he captures the cold perfectly.

Other than a Wire article a few years back and some end of year placings for The Naive Shaman, he doesn't seem to feature on the radar much, or else drops off, or else slides off, becomes deliberately invisible and revels in sunburned and ridiculous wealth ("Richard Youngs, you say? Oh Aye; you'll find him at the edge of the Loch, painting the fish with gold leaf and making little paper boats out of money...") and really doesn't want to be seen*.

Maybe the music is a byline/byproduct of his work as a Copper Magnate, Blood Diamond Seller? Maybe he's not even one person, the releases lurch sideways - he might be a fiction suit, for all I know... a collective noun for hundreds of struggling guitar-pickers...

Whatever, he's a mostly genius, I think.



*just finished reading Christopher Priest's The Glamour