Shinjuku Thief

Just found some of this guys stuff again. Shinjuku Thief seemed a little under-appreciated in the day... no way for this kind of stuff to get out into the light much, aside from the MFTEQ angle and the odd other fanzine you picked up from Berwick Street or wherever...

But this sounds like it really fits into the Boomkat now...





Gonna have to start digging again into the archives...

Ekoplekz - Intrusive Incidentalz Vol 1

Okay, (non) pop psychoanalysis time again. Can't resist. I listen to an Ekoplekz release and these things just keep flooding.

I'm really sorry / not sorry at all.

When Memowrekz was nominated for The Uranus Music Prize 2011, I joked on twitter that it was the pop album on that list... well, this brooding, black stutter of a record is Nick aka Ekoplekz's response. This isn't pop. This makes a Mouse out of Maus.

The title is revealing: throwaway and heartfelt, this is certainly intrusive (this is not ambient, except in the sense of enveloping) and it is a little incidental*, a little sketchy in both senses of the word (cf everything else by Ekoplekz) but there's more to it than that. There's something else here. This is Nick unleashing his noise horde and the title might almost be read as a minor apology, a little note to the many fans out there that says: don't worry, this isn't the real Ekoplekz album, this is a sidetrack, an open note, a few preliminary dashes,

I can remember Coil, the pressure of following Love's Secret Domain crushing them, releasing the Black Light District album; Aphex Twin scurrying into evermore oblique identities and eyewinks; Global Communications doing the same...

This is conjecture, of course. I know Nick pretty well but I haven't spoken to him about this. I could be way off mark, it might even be offensive, though it's definitely not intended in that way. Maybe he doesn't give a shit or feel any kind of pressure but something makes me think that my pop comment pulled at a few wires that were already sticking out... this feels like a deliberate attempt to destabilise, to show us that we haven't got Ekoplekz yet... maybe he's worried that those scary hauntological folks will adopt him against his will like a Madonna child...

...and wrestling works well as a metaphor for how this album sounds as well. This is a suffocatingly intense album, leavened only the relatively short track times. It's maybe not as suffocatingly intense as say this little monster but it's still a great credit to PunchDrunk that they are releasing LPs as uncompromising as this one (and their earlier 12" was also a lot more difficult than the Memowrekz stuff or the earlier tapes/CDrs).

A couple of tracks (mine's a white label, I don't know which track is which) sound like a human kidnap victim struggling inside a deep metal coffin, just audible, almost giving up on ever being rescued; some of the rest sound like electronic instruments being scraped across the floor, followed by a Copicat. On one track, the levels flip all over the place, causing a minor neuro-headache as I tried to follow. Throbbing Gristle's 2nd Annual Report is also referenced extensively here and in some of my favourite tracks there's a groove of real, degraded menace and a definite feel of being recorded on a condenser mic somewhere across the room...

There's one track which is lighter than the others and I wonder if this'll be the next Ekoplekz direction**. This one could almost be something off Aphex's second album; loops rolling and slipping off one another, slowly sliding in and out of phase... and it's especially interesting, I think, that the next track sawtooths these gentle melodies off at the neck... a vicious assault, worthy of Maldoror.

If you liked the previous Ekoplekz releases you'll probably like this one too, unless you haven't really been listening too closely; the signature sounds are all there, just a little more corroded, even less beat driven and definitely murkier and more difficult than its predecessors (which are now definitely pop by comparison). There's still the odd beautiful, simple, melody in here but this time they aren't foregrounded and are forced to struggle their way to the surface. Sometimes they don't get there. I like that.

((((((((( NOTE: I've just re-read my first Ekoplekz review (may be the first Ekoplekz review! I'm an early adopter) and I've already mentioned a lot of the stuff I've been on about here; this is just like a bigger, slightly uglier cousin, a cousin attacked by viruses in utero... )))))))))

Finally...

The cover tells you a lot about whether you want this or not. Look at it, decide at that moment. You won't be disappointed, either way.

*incidental, of course, also relates to emerging Sea Devils and Silurians and the kind of screeches they documented on The Stone Tape

**this won't happen; the next release will be noisier still, will be powerelectronics via Suicide organdrawlsssssss

Sunlore / Heartland Review (The Hardly remix)

These two LPs came to me via Tequila Sunrise and Cream of Turner but really via Freq... (the proper review is here - this one has ugly appendages)

...And they came with the coolest hand-made LP sleeves I’ve seen in ages. Beautiful, odd designs.

The Sunlore sleeve is a psyched wig-out of paint and scratches and burns, looking not unlike one of the shotgun paintings of William S Burroughs if he'd found himself knee deep in Max Ernst smears (you can see it being made on the label website).



The Heart Land sleeve is perhaps a riff on Throbbing Gristle’s original sleeve for Second Annual Report, consisting of a wrist-thick gatefold slab of industrial card and a label that should be attached to one of those TPS reports that Lumbergh was always trying to get Peter to attach in Office Space.



And if the sleeves are idiosyncratic, so is the music. Sunlore’s explorations sound like explorations, as if they will be songs sometime in the near future but haven’t quite evolved yet.

I haven’t decided yet whether this approach really works in the way they intended it to but there’s certainly enough interesting stuff here to make you dig deeper, to listen harder. Or maybe... No, there's definitely stuff in here, scratching to get out...

At times they sound a little like some of the early albums by Volcano The Bear before they went, ahem, pop with Classic Erasmus Fusion (Ok, they never went pop, they couldn't pop out if someone kidnapped their grandchildren) and they use a similarly odd blend of instruments and non-instruments: toys, pianos, organ drones, broken keyboards, bruised guitars...

These fragments sound like they’ll eventually get to some pretty intense places but right now they’re just winding up in style...

the music wants to be more music.. it wants musical progeny... musical babies....

Heart Land play with drones and cycles, but abandon formal structure for abstraction and fluxHeart Land play a similar field (I think it’s the same people) though theirs is a muddier approach, a denser vision, almost a shadow of the twinkling Sunlore album. Jung would listen to these two albums and smile. Heart Land play with drones and cycles, but abandon formal structure for abstraction and flux. Genres flip in and out of the mix; slight hints of jazz (This Heat style jazz i.e. notjazz which may be jazz - I don't really understand jazz) and psychedelia and folk and Dada. Tzara would have liked this, would have jigged in a robot costume, or dressed like a moat. He'd have skipped in stage to the detuned bells and Sapir-Whorf errors with a grin that could've smuggled aubergines...

Not quite beguiling yet but you’ll want to hear more.

Both albums are remarkably economical; a lot of artists would have half the tracks and simply extend the motif, hoping to bludgeon their way through repetition and familiarity. They know who they are. We could all name three bands on two hands.

But... neither of these collectives seem to want to fall into that commercial trap; the tracks end if anything a little too quickly, giving the impression of a low boredom threshold, or a lack of tape. These releases electrify the sheer oddness of the attention-defecit approach and the gamble associated with taking this route; people will not like these LPs simply because there's not enough repetition...

These albums are sighs; expect bellows in the future.

Keep watching. This label is a thrilling anti-capital conceit in this awful age of austerity. Reward and applaud these guys, even if the music isn't quite your thing. Buying some of these albums is a revolutionary act and this is said from the dull-sensed, detached and disinterested opinion of someone who didn't have to pay for them at all, who sucked them all up on the heavy and ever-open coffers of the mighty Freq...

MemoryHouse - The Years Or... PRESS:RELEASE

via here

Memoryhouse

((((...an amended and reconfigured press release))))

To avoid doing a Hari, the actual Press Release is in bold, as befits it's worth, its status, its totemic power.

A name, an art, a slice of Canadian now presented as memory of then... Evan Abeele (composer) and Denise Nouvion (vocals), hail from Toronto, which...

1) has a secret subway stop

2) stands in for New York (in films like.... add list, with snark) which was where I saw them play and where I bought their Lately single from a lovely earnest guy on the merch stall at The Mercury Lounge

Their music blends the contemporary with the forgotten, the traditional and the technological, the visual and the aural, within the sonographic landscape of pop.

It might... but this is a Press Release, and I'm starting to zero in on the:

1) PRESSING - which of course gives us urgency, agency, earnest persistence, insistence as well as the obvious record and cider presses

and the

2) RELEASING - which gives us removal of bondage, of confinement, of life... or calls into question our callous use of almost-language ("I'm afraid I'm going to have to let you go...") or maybe implies loss (good or bad) or even catharsis



via here

So, with an eye on words:

AXIS 1: Blending contemporary with forgotten - calls into question the Memory of Memoryhouse of course but may simply be a causal reflection of the name rather than a stimulus for it. The contemporary is actually slightly missing from their work in my ears, which is one of the reasons I like them, think they stand ever so slightly apart from their (yes) contemporaries... forgotten I'm willing to go with since this is the key to the difference... sometimes they sound like the bands that have been forgotten, that have names but don't keep cropping up in press releases... they sound like music that was around late 80s, early 90s and was even listened to then but has since fallen away, hasn't inspired the same adoration and hasn't appeared in Press Releases...

I'm thinking of bands like Whipping Boy. Not Whipping Boy; they sound nothing like Whipping Boy.

AXIS 2: The traditional and the technological - now this one is odd; I'm pretty sure that technological is kinda traditional now, especially with all the retro/downgrading that people are eager to promote these days:

100% analogue!: No digital post-processing: Thick vinyl: Released on Superferric cassette only: Any pops and glitches are entirely intentional/unintentional

So I'm not really sure their PR company has thought that one through...

AXIS 3: the visual and the aural - this is an interesting one and often mentioned but in my experience the two generally compete rather than blend (i'm no natural synaesthete). Certainly, the visual won on the night I saw them, the dreaminess of the visuals trumped the slightly less dreamy music, which is definitely slurrier on record...

Did I mention? They have a record out soon. And it's really good.



On September 12, 2011 Sub Pop Records will release a fully re-recorded, remixed and re-mastered version of The Years, adding two new tracks entitled “Modern, Normal” and “Quiet America.”

I was listening to it and tweeted "dreamlogical & immersive; like a dead slow drive at 4AM through unfamilar country" and I think that holds; that is what's its like (my Twitter self and my Blog self often disagree, we're different beasts) but I feel I should clarify:

a) dreamlogical because it doesn't ebb or flow, it's edited into a slowburn, no ragged edges... the situation/people/location/characters change? no problem, dreamlogic smoothes things over... the edits between scenes are too sharp? no worries, our casually causal little minds will simply condense and assimilate...

b) immersive because it's so visual... you can't help but swim in imagery (so much so, that sometimes you forget you're listening).... it's thick, you could swim in it... of course, you might not want to....

c) when I meant dead slow, I mean dead slow... i mean the kind of driving we used to do

Oh, I know you often don't jump to those old blusters so here's what I'm getting at:

We were somewhere around Sutton Bingham Reservoir on the edge of the Somerset/Dorset desert when the drugs began to take hold.

It's 2 AM. We're driving maybe 3 miles an hour, crammed into Rs hopelessly fucked 1978 Mercedes Benz, the lights all blown so it seems like we're just floating, like the car isn't even there. We're heading towards a usual druggy haunt, the deserted ruin of a Chapel Perilous on the edge of the water.

Which more or less brings me to:

AXIS 4 (WHICH IS NOT AN AXIS AT ALL): Within the sonographic landscape of pop - which implies that Memoryhouse are attempting to delve inside pop (the landscape I'll let go, poetry needs some space), to find an imprint, to go beyond the naive realist view that the body is simply the body (read: the canon is simply the canon, the art is the art, the music is the music) and to discover the constituent parts, the whirrings, the beating hearts and valves...

now, this could be nothing (IT COULDN'T BE) and I'm not exactly hearing that kind of in-depth exploration so far in their music...

THE TERM BETTER SUITS SOME OF THE RECENT JAMES FERRARO RELEASES ACTUALLY

...but the intention is honourable and maybe makes sense of the affinity I feel these guys have with David Lynch... they could soundtrack his movies and their music would benefit from his direction since he is almost unique in the ability to use sound and vision on (more or less) equal footing and so they wouldn't find themselves swamped by imagery... like his films, they deal in simple, but multi-layered, realities... they weave complex story lines out of simple patterns and echoes...

Someone sent me a black and white photograph of someone in a bunny suit riding a motorbike.