Kenneth Connor - Much Ado About Love

Presented without comment because if ever there was a song that helped us understand Wittgenstein's “That which cannot speak of, thereof we must pass over in silence” quote from the Tractatus then it's this one.

Which I guess serves as a comment.

If you're curious, the rest of the album is equal.

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.

Sun Araw Meets The Congos

Written for Freq

This seems both unlikely and likely. The kind of thing you look at initially and sort of ‘Huh?’ but then creeps up at you as you stop thinking about it and suddenly seems like an obvious decision (cf. the Julianna Barwick, Ikue Mori release on FRKWYS). Sun Araw can (almost) do no wrong in these parts but previously in collaborations I’ve always felt that the message is over-diluted. Sun Araw’s is a washed out sound, is woozy and indefinite and yet utterly singular and immersive – add others to the mix and the same sounds lose something, perhaps even seem a little forced. Sun Araw seems like it needs just the one centre, everything else needs to be fixed, like a beetle crawling in circles because it’s tied to a nail.

For this reason, I was apprehensive when Frkwys announced this was going to be their Volume 9. The Frkwys releases have been some of my favourites over the past year or so, in fact theirs are some of the only perhaps a handful of 12” records I’ve actually bought over the last year (my remaining wall-space can cope with albums, just about, but EPs and singles? Not for years). Each Frkwys release has been different but they’ve shared a core of frazzle and bliss that out-psychedelicizes (you know what I mean) almost anything else.

But this could have been a weak-point. This could have been an unlikely-likely collaboration too far. This could easily have been one of those good-intentioned, try hard attempts, a disaster which only The Congos would have walked away from with any degree of self-respect (and that’s just because The Congos seem like they could walk away from anything with their self-respect intact; they’d float away…)

It isn’t. It works. You can separate the pieces but they do fit together. It’s an alchemical adjustment. The Congos’ voices hovering above and (miraculously) within Sun Araw’s fuzzy angles (not sure which bits are M. Geddes Gangras). There’s not a great deal of variation within the tracks here but the tracks blend beautifully together. It’s hard to express how well this works; it’s felt, can’t really be conceptualised.

It’s what I imagined dub reggae might sound like before I’d actually heard any. Sometimes the whole is weirder than the parts.