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Kemper Norton - Carn & Collision

Kemper Norton – Carn

http://kempernorton.bandcamp.com


Kemper Norton – Collision / Detection v6

www.frontandfollow.com


It makes sense to review these together, since whatever the actual chronology of these songs, one begat another. They are linked to each other by a strange umbilicus, a slurry wurm of flesh. The self-released Carn shows us the Coilish side of Kemper’s sound; the voices here are muttered, liminal, lurking around in the dark. One track in and the loops are occasionally intersected with electronic scribbles and then leavened with added orchestral drone and beautiful hums. This all makes a perfect kind of sense if you imagine this is as a direct extension of the attempt at Folk on Coil’s Solstice releases. ‘Dorcus’ is a premonition of the Collision/Detection EP, a song I first heard when Kemper sang it live at an Exotic Pylon event. It wavers beautifully as much now as it did then, when it was perhaps the highlight of the set, and set him on a trajectory towards…

…the Collision/Detection release. There’s two tracks here – ‘Him’ and ‘Her’ – that exactly reconfigure Kemper Norton to a place where he was always headed. The voice comes out, reminding me a little of Woebot’s recent vocal incursions. Buy both of these releases and you’ll see what I mean. One bleeds into the other. They are not twins; one is the father, the other is the son.

Many of the previous EPs had their genesis in the drones/jazzdrums/flutery of the mid-period Four Tet albums (‘Colour the ocean pink’ on the Carn EP is an exemplar of this, even if the rest of the EP isn’t). They rattled away in different directions, for sure, but Hebden remained a silent spectre, just visible in the margins. The older EPs were headed towards a kind of unique Folk work but they seemed reluctant to really embrace it, to allow the tunes to speak for themselves. The songs were in there but hidden amongst the smoked bracken, deep in the wud.. As such, the old EPs were brilliant, often innovative, and occasionally magically unhinged but they didn’t feel quite so Kemper as this set. Here the songs sing, almost unhindered by the dark roots and clanking behind them. The music is there to allow the songs to rise to the surface, even if the Spirits are still flying around them. He lets his inner Unthank in and he pulls this daunting task off magnificently. I hope he keeps on this track; he’s the best person doing this kind of thing at the moment.

Jenny Hval - Blood Flight

Why now? (I've been actually asked this) This is when I'm listening to it.

There are so many of these...Scandinavian things... great drips of beauty (occasionally uglybeautiful) that seem to be ripped from their landscape... All that Finnish freefolk, the gurt Popsweeps from Sweden...

And, perversely, a lot of it sounds perfect as a soundtrack to Murakami's 1Q94, since they both share world where Little People might be pulling at the seams.

I feel like I've just come into the middle of my own conversation. Sorry about that.

Alexander Tucker - Third Mouth

Well, you knew this was coming. Dorwytch hinted (OK, explained) that Alexander Tucker was moving closer and closer towards a kind of English pastoralism and now he’s got to Third Mouth, where the drones and buzzes move still further away from the longer forms of his early albums and head towards smaller, yet exquisitely designed, packages of psychedelic folk. This is like someone’s swallowed Rob Young’s Electric Eden, spent a few long nights reassembling the component parts (alongside a few glasses of wormwood and mead ) and then regurgitated the lot as a fully formed corn dolly. This is a good thing.

There’s places where he’s definitely got a touch of the Vashti Bunions (“A Dried Seahorse”), where it’s 1967 eternal and the fingerpicking and cello trails keep the caravans (and Caravan’s) moving. “Rh.” is meant to be electronics only piece though I keep hearing descending cello notes and heavily filtered drums alongside the drones – it reminds me of a friend who went a little crazy by listening, non-stop, for 48hrs to Bach’s pieces for unaccompanied cello.

I say a little crazy, I mean batshit mental.

He ate several posters of Ian Botham right off his wall. And a fair amount of wallpaper too. He never explained why.

This is not to say that there's craaaazy scrapings here; there's much that is plaintive, meditative, twilight leaning: the tinkles of baby keyboards on “The Glass Axe,” the early (is that a unicorn?) T- Rexisms of “Third Mouth”... and these gently picked figures blend well with the other stuff, the Celtic drones and jaws harpings of “Andromeon,” for instance. In fact, the latter reminds me a little of much-ignored medieval ambient Front Line Assembly side project Will, only without the booming kettle drums.

C'mon. Will. You remember them. They had kinda gabber girl hair and round glasses and long leather coats and played big booming sonatas of the kind of thing that got people a little nervous and convinced that they might be Nazis. Will. You remember. They were good.

It seems unfortunately likely that Alexander Tucker will more or less be ignored again, despite making the best undiscovered 1967 psychfolkrock album you’ll hear all year. You can't help but feel that if he were instead a band and had an associated army of imagery alongside that people would find it easier to get on with; maybe find it easier to buy a t-shirt, write in on their army surplus satchel (Do people still do that? Yes, I saw two people with those kind of scrawled bags in my class this morning. I even saw The Cure written on one of the bags, which made me smile). But none of this changes the fact that Alexander Tucker’s made the album you want those albums in Electric Eden to sound like, an album that’s worthy of much more attention than it’ll get. It's a gentle masterpiece.

I have no idea what Alexander Tucker looks like. After a consistent run of increasingly great albums, I really should. He's building up such a head of steam, such a body of work, that lots of people should know what he looks like.

But...

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

Joanna Newsom's Loose Limbs

In interviews, Joanna Newsom seems refreshingly down-to-earth (not normally a trait I admire, as it happens but perhaps more essential for her music than it is for her) but it's the choice of photos that is more revealing. The photo above is the exemplar, I think: a mix of sex and angularity; an awkwardness of poise that was certainly absent from the photos in the CD booklet of Have One On Me, which for a moment turned her into an indiescent nymph, an artfully splayed Balthus chick, a woman of these times...





Contrast the Medievalism of Ys...



the folk innocence of The Milk Eyed Mender...



And there's something else that appears when you start looking at the album covers - she really is emerging. Almost hidden in the mix of symbols on the front of The Milk Eyed Mender* then turned into an actual artform on Ys (perhaps as a response to those who couldn't let the music do the talking - we loved her music yes, but we loved her more and this perhaps made her rightfully uncomfortable) and then onto Have One On Me, where there's a kind of 'ah fuck it' shrug and a dash towards sex, albeit still through a slightly otherworldy, 1920s Anais Nin erotica gauze...

*even in the publicity photos she's hidden slightly, or hiding...



But back to what I wanted to say, which is maybe lost now and that's related to the first picture; the way those arms are slightly misaligned, slightly Masonic, oddness paired with sweetness - Out Of The Strong, Came Forth Sweetness - which in turn is paired with an oddly jarring homeliness... crochet sex, homespun drop-necks, a sex position with the addition of some vague time-keeping (is she looking at an invisible watch while we're, you know, while we're... Oh God. Why can't I see that watch? Why is she time-keeping now...?)

Joanna Newsom playing with the latent (fuck it, manifest) male horror of timeliness and sex (too soon, too late, too much)? It's obvious isn't it? I mean, if we're not supposed to take this from that photo, then what are we supposed to take?

Is this just me?

Oh.

Fuck.

Back to the football, I think.

For what it's worth Have One On Me is mostly excellent I think. I'm keeping with it. I like the tales she's spinning. It's a grower, definitely. It's a sing-a-long.

English Heretic

"We listened, sideways up, by the star-dogged moon...."

The Wyrd Tales album by the eccentric English Heretic stable is keeping train journeys sane at the moment; it's an odd, almost startling, piece of evil whimsy; taking Hauntology at it's literal word, seeing nasty faeries and ancient rites everywhere. It's similar in places to Moon Wiring Club but with the hip hop replaced by shiny little tambourine shakes and processed churns. I like the fact that despite the very explicit occult leanings, it doesn't always go where you expect it to - the music is often freakishly upbeat and, well, happy as a naked butcher, pretending to be a witch. No Lustmord demons here; this is savagery before the sun goes down, while it's still filtering through the trees, making leaves into fractals. And I like that it's unafraid to be silly. This is the Devil's work, no doubt, but it's also music for the devil worshippers who are worrying whether their robes are truly colorfast...

And it makes the trawl through Pewsey a delicate, occult experience...

Recommended. Though I'm not so keen on the accompanying book, or at least the stories in it. Still, a box of some delight.


From The Wytch Machine...

Joanna Newsom's Florid Organums

There's been a few changes...



The leaked songs seem less faerie than before, less otherness but there's a triple CD out there, waiting for release - so, there could be excess around the corner. I hope so, because, while I like these songs, Good Intentions Paving Company seems to bring her more into line with the likes of Regina Spektor et al and she's always stood apart from the others; fidgeted awkwardly, spectacularly, quietly in the corners. The other released track is a return to The Milk Eyed Me(a)nderings which should have pleased those disappointed at the tough lines of Ys. Beautiful stuff, nonetheless.

The cover art tells a story, I think. A good story.



Me, while I don't listen that much to Ys compared to the Milk Eyed Mender, I liked having to let it's awkwardness through. It made you work at it and it seemed medieval in more than just cover art and harp garnish... I guess from here I was expecting a second sideways glance towards deeper medieval musics, a florid organum of multi-tracked voices or a spin off into the dark side, adding a slice of (new) english heretic (more about them later) to the mix... more Dee, more Dee, more Dee.... maybe a touch of Lovecraft.

Someone's got to spin some Lovecraft loops well; there's so much crap, bumper-sticker uncool around

In other news, the Oneohtrix Point Never backlash begins... old New Age kicks back

Favourite Album Of Noughties V.2

Well, I've osciallated wildly; flipped back and forward, found myself caught in several ontological traps of my own making: attempts at out-cooling or under-cooling the others, attempts at de-anxietizing or contextualising, at attempting to avoid the obvious and the unheimlich... I've had a number of ideas floating to the service since Gutter's post, each with their own reason, each seemingly prosaic or flabby or otherwise distasteful. The more I think about it, the more this choice seems really like something to send out. Something that might make people click their teeth or eye-roll. A tremendous pressure, building behind the eyes, forcing me to change my mind over and over and over until, finally, I go with the rather predictable (for anyone that reads any of this):



Yeah, I know. Coil again.

It's quite possible that Love's Secret Domain (or here) was my favourite album of the 90s and Horse Rotovator my favourite of the 80s (though I might have chosen The Cure).

But Coil it is and will be. The way the major Coil releases magic mirror my own state of musical mind (Mmmm) is uncanny:

The 80s semi-Goth phase (a half-hearted Goth? Surely that's not Goth enough... I was a Goth afraid of black, replacing it instead with a massive jumper that made me look like a Fly Agaric), Western Lands, Maldoror, Pasolini obsessions through to the...

90s Acid Kid phase (kid becoming less appropriate as the decade wore on) where the only symptom of schizophrenia was delusions of grandeur and everything was seen through the psilotripitarka'd gauze of Glastonbury Festival mushroom socks, trance, Fraser Clarke ("Give us back our treeeees!") and..., well, you get the picture.

And so to the (now) unquestioned album of the noughties: the Moon's Milk compilation of the Equinox EPs. It works better as an album, I think ; it slips between tracks and moods as seamlessly as the British seasons. Moon's Milk evoked the crackling (cf: A Book Of Idiot Dreams) and the twig snapping lycanthropy of my childhood at a time when I was just arriving back in the West Country after 10 years of being away.

Moon's Milk is also apposite because it has a vague folkiness to it; in fact I think it'll stand in years to come as a direction for British Folk music that never quite came off, perhaps akin to the Comus album or the imaginary EPs series of folk classics (Gyre and Joanna Newsom's Duck With Two Backs) or even to my oft quoted (by me) rufflings about the missed Acid House opportunities suggested by Jack The Tab album (also here).

Coil - Amethyst Deceivers

As the decade wore on I found myself getting more and more into folk in all it's various forms - The Sunburned Hands, Ice Bird Spiral, Kemilliaset Ystavat, Devendra Banhart, the Time-Lag contingent, Joanna Newsom (who was Kemper Norton, who outfolked lots of people and will outfolk others in the times to come) - and any album choice needs to reflect this gentle, subtle calming of the psychedelic ways.

Here there be swirls:

Coil - U Pel

Moon's Milk also seems home-made somehow and this has been another theme for my musical decade; the regrowth of folk-art and CDR culture, the return of absolute effort into making musical artefacts; funny that when lots of commentators are talking about the death of CDs and musica as tangible object, my experience of the noughties has been one where the product has often been central; I play Moon's Milk on my iPod yeah but it exists only as a package, within the artwork, even down to the hidden track which presupposes that the CD is somewhere, left running. Lots of little musics existed in beautiful forms with spectacular and necessary artwork. The margins flourished.

So, the music itself. Well, drones rise, electronics nestle up against acoustics, voices rise and fall; this is not just where folk might have gone but also where classical music might end up. It works as a tidal album much better than the on the surface more river orientated Astral Disaster and allows just the right amount of dissonance to creep around the edges of all the beautiful songforms. There's long and short songs. Fat and thin ones. It's a dangerous record too: a breath either way and it's a pretentious, portentous nonsense of a record. Moments of great beauty and slivers of ugliness.

There's even a Christmas song.

Coil - Christmas Is Now Drawing Near

Of Coil's other big releases this decade, The Music To Play In The Dark series had their moments of divine clarity but don't get played right through that often while the hugely anticipated The Ape of Naples felt like a letdown. Moon's Milk took a few breaths to get into but have stayed with me. There's not a month gone by when i haven't played it right the way through and there's very few albums which I can honestly say that about.

The Hare And The Moon

The little ipod that runs my alarm clock - sets the tone for the day etc - keeps shuffling onto tracks from this album; my favourite sludgey, Wicker Man, experimental folk album of the year so far.



It's almost straight folk (at least compared to the Sunburned, American beardy weirdys, Four Tet, Music To Play In The Dark folk tangents ) but there's weird bits around all the edges and in all the corners... odd TV soundbites (Children Of The Stones? I'd have to check), Death In June drumming, frazzled guitar lines, odd angles... but all done with a lightness of touch uncommon in these fields... there's a hint of humour in amongst the sex and violence and a cackling, belladonna sense of darkness and light...

Unlike many claimants, this really could have been an alternative soundtrack to The Wicker Man...

Jandek Kind Of Day...

Having a Jandek kind of day. Not in a good way.

Jandek - Straight 30 seconds

Jandek - Honey