#7: The Burns Unit — "Side Show" (Proper)

The word supergroup has been bandied about, but happily “Side Show” swerves the usual pitfalls of ego and bloat that the term suggests. The amount of disparate talents actually works in their favour: as each song is penned by at least two band members, it seems like the songs’ streamlined nature must have been necessary just to fit everyone in... 

i review The Burns Unit's rad debut album Side Show for Never Enough Notes.


mp3: The Burns Unit – "Send Them Kids to War"

#6: Chinese Church — "Hallowe'en 2010" (Stone Lion)

Hallowe'en is dead, long live Chinese Church!

Would you guys kill me if i coined the term "witch noise"? You would? Oh well, never mind then.

Former Glitch City man Tim J aka Wingus aka Chinese Church, now operating another label, Stone Lion, has released a 5-track web-EP "recorded, compiled and released on Hallowe'en 2010" with all samples, oscillators, effects, artwork and photos by himself.

Aptly named Hallowe'en 2010, the result is a bit like if the Scarefest rides at Alton Towers weren't set in old science research facilities or scary circuses but in a network of abandoned, haunted abattoirs. Its whispers, shrieks, howls and all-round mechanical clanking also occasionally recall the claustrophobic lost-soul squalls of the denser early Third Eye Foundation records.

"They're Driving the Hovering Castle" is probably my favourite initially, both because of the way it develops from a hissing digital thunderstorm into something both disjointedly melodic and weirdly rhythmical, but always slightly beyond the listener's grasp in both contexts. Could the title refer to "The Last Hovering Castle" by Warcloud, who Tim got me into in the first place? Or Jonathan Swift's floating tyranny Laputa? Or the Hiyao Miyazaki anime inspired by it? Maybe all or none of the above.

"Ganesh Particle Conjured from the Eternal Lattice" is also really good, sounding like a bit like a 60s radio commercial being imprisoned by an electric fence made of whistling, churning feedback, but it's all worth a look. Get the whole EP here and check for Stone Lion's other holiday release We Wish You Are Happy New Year.¹ They also have other releases which are neither holiday-themed nor downloadable, so you will have to pay Australian dollars or the equivalent thereof for them.

— Download Hallowe'en 2010

mp3: Chinese Church — "They're Driving the Hovering Castle"

¹ Title now fixed, hat tip to Ben

#5: Antoni Maiovvi — "The Thorns of Love" (Caravan, 2010)

Review of Antoni Maiovvi for Killed in Cars.

The third album by Bristol-born, Berlin-based DJ Anton Maiof under his (possibly Italo-disco informed) Antoni Maiovvi alias, The Thorns of Love claims kinship with the “overwhelming horror of the stalked… the sound of dimly lit streets where everyone is at risk”. It’s no coincidence that two of his top MySpace friends, juxtaposed next to one another, are John Carpenter and Giorgio Moroder...

More more more...

mp3: Antoni Maiovvi – "This Is the Beast"

Or stream the whole record via Soundcloud:
 
A n t o n i M a i o v v i "The Thorns Of Love" :: CVANCD003 by Multiverse

#4: Glitch Village III track-by-track (Glitch City, 2010)

The latest Glitch Village compilation, third in noisy netlabel Glitch City's on-going series, was released at Christmas the other day. Here's a brief run-through.

It starts off with Mickey Roberts' guitar-storm "blfif", all necks and fretboards contorting in angles you didn't think possible. "Donnie Dakro"^(sic) by Wandering Bear is an early highlight, overlaying a crunchy breakbeat with detached vocal snatches, string sections, oversped loops and welcome melody. (Along with the chiptune, it's probably about as melodic as the label gets.) It also reminds me that there's a sequel to "Donnie Darko" which in all likelihood no-one should watch ever but which i likely will out of morbid curiosity, o god.

The collage of cacogen's "village grinch" mixes layers of Carl Stalling-esque cartoon soundtrack, overblown 80s pop drumming, lurching carnival music, waves of ambient murk and lines of dialogue of varying sources and levels of comprehension. i think the Grinch himself pops up to explain himself at the end, but i could be wrong. Razxca's "GCvr3" is the shortest track on the comp, at only 20 seconds of rhythmic tonal pulsating. It leads abruptly into YAWE6gletshn's "XRUXIO", an organic noisefest framed by bursts of digital glitch.

eiexei takes what sounds like one or more records from the 1950s and then slices, overlaps, phases, washes and distorts the hell out of it/them for "wasps, wasps are for dinner". The extreme pitch-bending on the vocals is probably the funnest part, especially the hilarious cadenza at 4:05. The Uninterpretatives appear to be a hip-hop incarnation of Uninterpretative: no! The beat of "Me", with its insistent "kill kill kill" sample, sounds like a garage Bomb Squad, while the massively distorted vocalist somehow recalls one of those massively overcaffeinated 80s new wave types, kind of like a rap Devo or something. It's 58 seconds long and really compelling.

Aurist's "Fuck Everyone in This Room" takes the fragments of overhead conversation (sounds like someone says "L-plates" at some point) and blasts them with sharp feedback shards and, at one point, what sounds kind of like a digital kazoo. Pixlcrusher's "Zombies Ate My Lightsabers" provides the comp's first chiptune moment, and, pleasingly, employs gongs at several points throughout. "The Caves of Winter" by AxemRangers is pretty much perfectly titled, sounding like a sound installation set inside a complex of caves in, well, winter. An undercurrent of weird digital noise ebbs behind, sometimes sounding like water is dripping down the walls onto your stereo.

"up too late" by party tom takes a four-square noise pulse as its backbone and piles on pounding static and feedback like a fearsome piece of industrial machinery designed to build hangovers, with someone trapped inside. Very much the kind of party Andrew WK always claims to be at, where being covered in your own vomitus and bleeding from the head at all times are mandatory. This is followed by "B~" by Biestmilch, which turns 8-bit to noise ends through nearly four minutes of odd bleeps, stutters and squelches. Also nearly four minutes is Oh Yes, By All Means' "03:46", which is a bit like the point where plunderphonics meets schizophrenia. It's a bit like the musical equivalent of that schiz test where they play 100 different people all talking at once and if the patient still thinks they can make out discernible words, they are mentally ill. The music employed in this seems like it should be recognisable but just eludes me.

"een katti aaien" by katti, a GC artist i haven't heard before, is a smooth, saxophone-led bossa nova outing with added cowbell, and is so far removed from everything leading up to it that it acts as a hilarious, expectation-defying palate cleanser. If this was on vinyl, that'd probably be the end of the first side. The second side would then resume with tinnitustimulus' "larynx clearance", nearly 6 minutes of blooming distortion, wow, flutter and occasional bouts of screaming.

JeSSIE JACK$ON, another artist i've been hitherto unaware of, presents "JESSI JACKSON ON DRUGS", a steady drum machine pulse with a variety of instrumental speed-shifting exercises on top. i'd recommend a really weird rap crew use this as a beat. "Untitled Dedication" by Chinese Church sounds like it was recorded in a guitar shop run by demons based in the side of a mountain, tendrils of feedback yielding to pounding, overcompressed drumming. Shattermind's "Crystally Thorns" is a pretty, involved 8-bit composition. Apophallation's "infinite launcher" is well-named; most of its furious powernoise blitz sounds like it could have been recorded through a gantry-mounted microphone at Cape Canaveral.

Y9G is another unfamiliar name, and the interesting and all too brief "City by Night" creates a beguiling atmosphere through insistent, dancing micro-cut pulses of what could be a 90s techno synth pad or some kind of fairground carousel organ. It's hard to tell. i'll definitely be looking out for more by this artist. The even shorter "burundian bop" by nxfxtxex begins with some brief far-away cheering before a 28-second bludgeoning noise enema. Underrated keyboard maestro Sam White delivers a playful synth/VST-based (sorry everyone, i can't tell the trees from the electroforest in such matters) outing with a very sudden ending.

International noisers Desert Island Dicks, a frequent topic of these pages, are next, with "To Mars By Balloon" (subtitled "Rapid Journey by Airship to the Upper world"). Allegedly meant to be a Christmas record, which explains the sleighbells and sampled choir singing "Silent Night" out of phase in both English and Cantonese, it's a bombastic offering that also rides drums that sound like they were sampled from 90s heavy metal, and guitars that imitate early Mogwai. Nearly outstays its welcome, but the outro's descent into crushing static is worthwhile. i heard there was an Aurist remix floating out somewhere that's better than the original. Next, Ulla sound like they could be a feral breakneck black metal group, raised by bears, recorded in a shed, occasionally smothered by slabs of non-more-white feedback. The track is titled "L'Etranger" and actually does a pretty good job of imagining Meursault's post-shooting existential turmoil.

The concluding track is an intriguing proposition. It purports to be by DJ Ninja Love Mistake and to be a L'Homme Fatal "ultramashup" (mixed by someone called "M Si Chaud"). Given the backstory between those artists (NLM says LHF submitted tracks with stolen parts for release by his label, leading, rather ominously, to "complaints") it seems unlikely that this is as it appears, especially since NLM has since denounced it as a 'fake' track. A bizarre mix of pop, emo, 8-bit bleep and varispeed heavy metal, it nevertheless raises all the usual exciting questions about appropriation and theft in art, and, at fully ten minutes long, it'd be a pretty good showpiece at yr next Jim Jarmusch theme party.

You can get the whole compilation here.

#3: Redshape — "The Dance Paradox" (Delsin, 2009)

Seems my review of Redshape for Junkmedia is up.

Masks have a long and distinguished history in the arts, from Japanese kabuki and the Commedia dell'Arte right through to DOOM, and, um, Slipknot. The latest beau of the masked ball is techno producer Redshape, behind whose slightly unnerving red plastic visage allegedly hides a Famous Techno Producer In Disguise.

Whether this is true or not, it'd seem to be a win-win situation for the artist. If indeed it is a big-shot name, he gets to go back underground and under cover, to separate the music from the weight of reputation (with the added bonus that a lot of critics will hold back on criticising the music overly harshly, lest they are left with egg on their faces when the game's up); if it's an unknown, he gets to start a buzz most label marketing departments nowadays could only dream of, as fans and critics alike line up to explain why the mysterious figure is/isn't Carl Craig or a moonlighting Underground Resistance member...

[continues]

mp3: Redshape – "Rorschach's Game"

#2: Conceptual hip-hop goods

A couple of brief yet excellent concept-riding hip-hop projects in the spirit of John Oswald.

Straight Outta Compton (Explicit Content Only) is by Evan Roth, "an artist whose work focuses on tools of empowerment, open source and popular culture" (peace to the homie Wikipedia). He's taken NWA's classic swearing landmark Straight Outta Compton and removed everything else, leaving only the profanity. Basically just two minutes and 53 seconds of pure, distilled swearing, it's by turns hilarious, frantic, strangely poetic (the 16-second version of "8 Ball" kind of tells a story in itself), and pretty funny again.

Awesomely, each track also gets an "Explicit Content Ratio" to inform the listener the exact percentage of each song made up of swearing. (The highest percentage is reliable old "Fuck Tha Police", with 12.1% explicit content.) Perhaps the most surprising aspect for me was seeing the amount of tracks with no profanity whatsoever laid out: five whole tracks are clean, which seems almost quaint in the post-Slim Shady era.

Most outstandingly of all, it's available on vinyl.

– Get Straight Outta Compton (Explicit Content Only) from Evan's website.

mp3: NWA – "Fuck Tha Police (explicit content only)"

Next, a link from the digital version of Hip-Hop Connection (well, the only version nowadays, really). On this one, New York producer Domer of FreeIceCream twists Queen's most recognisable anthem into six distinct beats and then raps over them with fellow NY MCs Katz, illspokin, Ryan-O'Neil and Jake Lefco. The title? Yes, that'd be Bohemian Rap CD.

How could you fail to love a pun with balls as big as that? Fortunately, the concept delivers, too: the beats successfully stay varied thanks to "Bohemian Rhapsody"'s operatic-ass six-songs-in-one structure, and the rappers twist tight lines on diverse subjects from romantic breakdown to straight who-can-rhyme-harder braggadocio. Often they use Freddie M's vocals as a jumping-off point, as on the call/response chorus of "Little High/Little How" and the swaggering "So You Think You Can Spit", which co-opts Mercury's defiant "so you think you can stone me and spit in my eye?" line into a battle throwdown.

Perhaps the only drawback is that since all the MCs are on each track, you can never really tell who's saying what, but since they pretty much all keep the standard up, it's fortunately somewhat academic anyway.

– Get Bohemian Rap CD from FreeIceCream.

mp3: Bohemian Rap CD – "Little High/Little Low"

Review of a review: Pitchfork's take on RJD2's "The Colossus"

If music wants to be free, as the more share-happy quarter of modern culture would have it, then reviewers of albums can perhaps serve as benevolent jailers, emancipating artworks from the dank gaols of obscurity with the skeleton key of communication. It is with this noble purpose in mind that we should consider Patrick Sisson's recent assessment of RJD2's The Colossus album for popular internet periodical Pitchfork Media, which represents a worthy example of the role.


With a substantial 660 words in five paragraphs, Sisson assuredly achieves his goal of reviewing the most recent record by the Columbus musician. He deftly emphasises the contradictions of art through his repeated placement of opposing concepts in introductory paragraphs – independence/retrospection; ambition/repression; confidence/reticence – embodied in the snappy final description of the album as “a forward thinking look back”.

The highlight is undoubtedly the spare apostrophe in the fourth-paragraph “it’s”: a daring and provocative move sadly destined to be overlooked or, worse, interpreted as a typing error by the untrained eye. Such subtlety is characteristic of a writer from whom we can expect huge things in 2010. (8.1)

mp3: RJD2 – "A Spaceship for Now"

---

Originally written for Sanctuary.

Spodify advert reviews pt. 2

i can't really praise Strictly Kev's truly impressive six-volume Kraftwerk cover-version compendium highly enough, so i won't; instead, i will just direct you to this website and to gorge your ears on over six hours and 200 tracks' worth of interpretations sacred (Bălănescu Quartet, Big Black) and profane (Señor Coconut, P.M. Dawn). Tell 'em tomasz sent you. And then ignore them as they narrow their eyes suspiciously, muttering "who?"

In the meantime, by popular demand (waddup Dennis, Leon) here are some more reviews of adverts from the popular UK-and-some-of-Europe based streaming music service Spodify.¹

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Bryn Terfel - Bad Boys (album)
i don't think it's a controversial statement to say that, if you're an operatic bass-baritone, you've probably got quite a strong voice. So why would you need accompaniment from weedy, clicky little rim-shot drums? A wholly regrettable artefact of the need to pop-ify all music for sales, they're as crass and unnecessary as those sporadic attempts at rewriting the works of famous authors in dubious patois to appeal to some groaning and nebulous caricature of "da youf", as uncomprehending scallies metaphorically gawk blankly and throw chips at them.

Share My Playlist
A shower of awful, guffawing stage schoolers congratulate themselves on their incredible taste in music while sharing playlists both curiously short and suspiciously redolent of focus grouping. Of particular awful note is the guy who listens to disco while driving to Newcastle and goes on about how he's soooo embarrassed to listen to it. Yeh? Not embarrassed enough not to tell everyone who listens to Spodify about it, clearly.

Spodify Day Pass
BACK OFF the BLOODY MIC, man. Good lord, there are crappy little bands in garages all over this land that can fashion a satisfactory pop shield from a coathanger and a pair of tights, yet the ad from The New Online Saviour of Music Distribution™ still sounds like someone's trying to push the microphone down the voiceover guy's throat at knifepoint. Just move back a few inches, that's all it'd take. Not as badly executed as that first Suitopia ad (nor as charming), but not far behind.

Dance4life
"I went to Africa and got kicked by a giraffe!" What? i'm not going there then! No, apart from the strange angle they decided to approach this from, and the slightly quaint early 90s house in the background, this is one of the only Spodify ads that isn't mindlessly, self-trepanningly infuriating. Fair play to you, charitable camelopard assaultee.

Roberta from Spotify. i don't believe i need any particular excuse to post this.

Zizzi Italian restuarants
Apparently "the A to Z of great Italian food begins with authenticity and ends with Zizzi!" Oh yeh? So what if i wanna order abbacchio? What about the antipasti i was going to have for my aperitivo? And my friend here: he's on a special seafood alimentazione, and quite fancied his pizza laden with alice. i guess we're also screwed if we want any kind of zuppa or anything with zucchini or zucchero in it. Sod this, we're going somewhere that doesn't structure its menu by arcane alphabetical cut-off points.

(Their web advertising's faintly hilarious too: "Our restaurants are run the Italian way... Each one's a bit different in character, architecture, age and feel; think Robert De Niro with a regional accent." Great, now i'm imagining a Scouse Robert de Niro. "You talkin' to me, lid?")

Red Bull Academy
Did that woman really just abbreviate the "www" of a web address to "dub dub dub"? Eurgghh. Kill me. No wait, her.

That new dating gameshow on ITV
This advert features a typical "getting to know you" dating conversation between a man and a woman, where the guy fumbles it after a bit of complimentary small-talk by remarking that "it'll be nice to talk to someone other than my mum!" Except the part of the woman is played by about half a dozen women all speaking at once, so either that's literally what happens on the gameshow and the hapless man has to attempt to seduce all six at the same time, or the guy is enough of a blundering moron to have fallen at the exact same hurdle six different times. Whichever it is, surely Spodify listeners don't watch ITV anyway?

Christmas holiday drinking & driving
"You will now have to wait twelve seconds to get to your music again," intones a blokey, no-nonsense voice. "Imagine having to wait twelve months to get to your car again. That's what'll happen if you drink and drive this Christmas". Wow, pretty good logic! i was gonna drink and drive loads, y'know, just for fun. But i'm certainly not going to now i know there's such a clever numerological basis for avoiding it.

Sorority Row (film)
Hey, you know what'd be a great thing to run in a 20-second, audio-only slot? A film trailer! Hopefully the film is better than its marketing campaign. Doesn't sound like it, though.

¹ i only originally started calling it "Spodify" as an ineffectual form of mockery ("more like Stan Darsh!") of the software's hideous name, based on the British slang term "spod", to denote a bit of a geeky loser (and not an acronym for "spastic or disabled" as one of the more ribald UD entries tries to claim). However, i now get a good handful of people arriving after actively searching for "Spodify".

Christ knows why, but i think the most likely explanation is that the the /t/ phoneme doesn't exist in that horrible trendy Nathan Barley London hipster accent all Spodify's developers seem to have, but instead gets glossed to a /d/, which might be reasonable if you were talking to an American about "butter", etc., but just sounds utterly jarring and foolish when surrounded by what sounds like Jamie Oliver trying his hand at speed seduction, and that as a result there are people out there who honestly believe it to be spelled with a "d". Oh what a world, etc. One day i'll probably have to write a detailed blog explaining why i both love and detest Spodify at the same time.

#1: Buddy Peace — "Late Model Sedan" (Strange Famous, 2009)

Nick Budd loves American stuff. The 28-year-old Londoner's obsession with the States began with him listening to rap on a jenky radio, and his fixation soon broadened to include "the music, the films, the landscapes, the people – everything. And the cars... wood paneled sedans, Chevys, Buicks, Cadillacs, the whole deal." After serving as resident DJ for Lex Records, supplying live backing for Organised Konfusion’s Prince Po and continually honing his themed mixtapes, Budd joined up with Sage Francis’ Strange Famous Records label. On Late Model Sedan, his first full-length for SFR, Nick (or Buddy Peace to the world at large) meticulously weaves fragments of his beloved Americana into an elaborate sonic tapestry (I want to say "an American quilt", but... oh wait.)

If you listened without knowing differently, you could easily assume the composer was American himself, but it's his outsider-looking-in status that affords Buddy such a compelling vantage point. Using turntables alongside intricate MPC micro-edits, he collages snippets of speech like overheard conversations over finely-cut beats, instrumental drones, and found-sound audio vérité into a forward-looking whole...

Originally written for/published on Junkmedia, where you can read the rest.

mp3: Buddy Peace — "Austin Funeral Stress Tapes" (YSI)
mp3: Buddy Peace — "Obituary Medicine" mix (tracklist)

The failure of criticism/the success of criticism

So, my attempt to review every record that was new to me in 2009 went awry, in what was basically a really predictable way. What you really want is either about sixty hours a day, or the ability, Hiro Nakamura-style,¹ to freeze time whenever listening to music, allowing you to listen to and/or review everything ever made, but clearly neither of those is a reality yet.

And i thought about what i could turn the feature into to make it either better or more realistic, but i honestly couldn't think of anything. And so i thought i would just resolve to review every new record i heard in 2010 as well and hopelessly fail once again. "A man can't just sit around, can he?"

First up: a review of Buddy Peace's Late Model Sedan done for Junkmedia.

¹ Not that i'm particularly a Heroes fan, tho. The first season was dope, then it started to decline scarily quickly into a giant confusing mess. The plot developments seemingly made up on the spot, the "fuck-it-we'll-just-have-them-move-forward/backwards-in-time" catch-all solution to continuity issues meaning that no-one ever actually has to die (and the resulting boredom of immortality), the ever more cynical rating-grabs ("hey, Hayden Panettiere's rather attractive, isn't she? Let's have her and another girl kissing really awkwardly!") Despite all this, i have mystifyingly kept watching it until at least halfway through the nonsensical fourth season. i must really hate myself.