Re: Onesheet Could Build A Musical Nexus To Replace MySpace
Tianna Faure
Wow, can you believe I once said I was gonna do daily posts? I wish I could tell you that this summer issue (#25) is going to be the "Reviews Issue" and that I might even increase updates to, I don't know, once a week. You never know -- right now I'm getting myself psyched by listening to the new Ex-Cocaine album on Siltbreeze. It's called Esta Guerra, and two tracks in I'd say it's a definite improvement on Keep America Mellow. That was a good debut for sure, it sat there and spread out nicely, but the sundazed Dead C-meets-Allmans Montana-raga style that was budding on that album is really blossoming here, adorned with strange weeds like the Milford Graves Percussion Ensemble and the thought of a completely twee-free Tyrannosaurus Rex. When they really get the songs moving it can be easy to forget they're just a duo of electric guitar and hand drums, and side two really nails it with the long album-closer "With The With The When The One."
The Barge Recordings label put out an excellent compilation last year called Innature, and they've made a strong move with their second release too. It's a CD called Life-Sized Psychoses by a duo called The Fun Years. I knew nothing about 'em whatsoever but this thing had me within about 45 seconds, opening as it does with an exquisitely controlled aeons-wide endlessly-slowed-down sad soul music loop. I swear it just keeps going for a good 20 minutes, holding that same mood while all the oxygen slowly leaves the room and the world quietly dies. Not bad for a duo of turntable and baritone guitar. The whole piece/CD runs about 45 minutes, and even if 3/4th of the way through I'm starting to think these guys might still have a couple Tortoise albums in their collections, that first half is such a grabber that all is forgiven. (Hey, I still have one Tortoise LP in my collection, but I'm talkin' two or more here....)
I hardly ever listen to the Double Leopards and I think it's because they're too good and I'm actually a little afraid. I don't know if it's the fear that the sound will finally devour and dissolve my mind completely, or a fear that it will all come crashing down like a house of cards because after all aren't they mostly just groaning through pedals? Either way, I really didn't know what to expect when I warily put on this solo album by founding DL member Marcia Bassett, recording as Zaimph, but my first thought after the record started to sink in was, "Man, no wonder the Double Leopards are so good." These are four long soft hums of hymnal electricity, "live room recordings" from 2006, and for each track it's amazing to imagine any mere room, anywhere, ever sounding like this in real-time. It's just too mysterious and gorgeous, but yet here it is, in my room, somehow contained on 180 gram vinyl. It's called Mirage of the Other, and sure enough, I'm already a little afraid to listen to it again. Another new hymnal electric album from the same label (Gipsy Sphinx of Belgium) is Djid Hums by Bear Bones, Lay Low. It's not in the same league as the Zaimph, but not many are, and it's certainly still recommendable. It has a more 'computery' heaven-drone sound to it, not unlike Neil Campbell's recordings as Astral Social Club, with Burning Star Core/Carlos Giffoni/No Fun Productions vibes as well, especially on Side 1. Side 2 is more of a guitar maelstrom kind of thing -- real good, and if it runs a little long, it's still worth it for the space-froggy voice coda. Great cover art too on another fine 180 gram Gipsy Sphinx vinyl pressing. Bear Bones, Lay Low is one to watch, an 18 year old kid from Venezuela who moved to Belgium with his family to avoid social unrest in the wake of Chavez! Read all about it, along with due props to Tool, in this interview at Foxy Digitalis.
And sounding pretty good on the stereo right now is some heavy way-out free-rock destructo-jam action, lots of blubbering and rampaging low end with attacking drums. A single 15-minute jam. Blue Humans vibe, but coming more from the free noise tradition than the free jazz tradition. If I was in a blindfold test I might even guess this was Eloe Omoe, but I know that's not right (because that's a duo and this seems to be a trio). It's just that I'm making dinner while wife and kids are at the library, which means stereo-cranketh time is NOWETH, and this is the first thing that came up on the old CD shuffler. It's really blowing out some cobwebs, perfect for 15 minutes of house-to-myself after a stupid day at work. Of course, I might never play this thing again, but who cares? I'm not writing about all these hundreds of records so you'll buy them all and play them all in your home and/or rip them to your iPods (although that might all be cool), I'm writing about 'em to let you know WHAT'S BEING DONE OUT THERE. And what's being done right here is some variation on the basic heavy Blue Humans template by some free-thinking weirdos out there somewhere. (I still don't know who this is.) (Turns out this thing is a 3" CDR by the Western Massachusets group Grey Skull, recorded live in Providence, RI waaaaay back in October 2004, as released by Breaking World Records. I've heard a couple weird stripped-down noise-type releases from Grey Skull, but I believe this is the only time I've heard 'em play in a stand-up rock-trio style.....maybe they were indeed directly influenced by some Eloe Omoe shows.....they both live in Massachusets....or maybe they were directly influenced by, um, the history and legacy of rock music? In the world today?)
Album of the month(s) right now is Those Are Pearls That Were His Eyes, by Charles Cohen and Ed Wilcox, an edition-of-500 CD release on the Ruby Red label from Portugal, intense and quietly active electro-acoustic synth/drums duo improv by two beyond-seasoned veterans from the fringes of Philadelphia. Of course the "beeps and boops" of antique space-age synthesizer and the urban rainforest tickle of post-free post-jazz percussion have always been a match made in heaven, but I can't think of another time they been so blended as what Cohen on "Buchla Music Easel" and Wilcox on "drums and gongs" have laid to tape here. Feel free to turn it way up, because both musicians employ an uncannily sympathetic light touch throughout -- in 10 tracks and 48 minutes, the music never agitates or explodes, it only ripples and patters and somehow, at any volume in any environment, seems to remain just under the threshold. Cohen and Wilcox also played together on one of my favorite rippling/pattering under-the-threshold mutant jam albums of the 1990s, the phenomenally wrecked Bullet In2 Mesmer's Brain! (Bulb Records, 1998), by Wilcox's long-running revolving-door concern Temple of Bon Matin. There were nine people in the band for the sessions, such a rarefied space-jazz-noise unit that when the CD came out, the band had been rechristened Laser Temple of Bon Matin for that album only. Wilcox's mix is unbelievable, multiple performances layered and separated and crossfaded with dubwise boldness through tiny sonic prisms into swinging mind-sized shadow paintings. Yeah, it's been good to pull out Mesmer's again, and good to have it spurred by Cohen and Wilcox's stunning new duo music CD. (And this just in: "Well over six hours worth of Charles Cohen on the Buchla Music Easel.")
Great split LP of solo guitar from the Belgium-based Glasvocht label, with Harris Newman (from Montreal, Quebec) on the A side, and Mauro Antonio Pawlowski (from Belgium) on the B. This is my introduction to Newman, having missed his opening set at a Six Organs of Admittance show back in March 2005. During the Six Organs set, Chasny called him "the future of acoustic guitar," and now over two years later I can finally see why. First track is an instant grabber, Newman laying down an unstoppable spooky bluesy theme which he proceeds to stop, restart, lead slowly into strange dead ends, stop again for uncomfortable silences in haunted echo chambers, restart again right back into the thick of it, somehow constantly developing it for over 10 minutes while still keeping it stuck in the same place. The title, "Onset of Tourette's," hints at what's going on, as if the song is a close examination of how a motif can become a tic. The remaining two tracks are also excellent compositions, one short and bluesier, the other sounding like a slower, more focused, and way intense reprise of "Tourette's." Really, a perfect album side. The Pawlowski side makes me think of a friend of mine who was getting to know free improvisational music. He thought Derek Bailey and a few others ruled, but he could never really get deeper into the genre. "I wanna like it," I remember him saying, "but it always ends up sounding like guys playing their instruments funny." And he meant it like 'funny peculiar', I guess. I never really agreed with him, but I can't help but think about his statement when going from the experimental but deeply idiomatic music of Harris Newman to the more quirky, atonal, and decidedly non-idiomatic music of Mauro Pawlowski on the flip. The good news is Mauro seems well aware that this music is funny peculiar, because he plays short pieces (ten in all) with titles like "The Emperor's Shy Bladder," "The Paranormal Olympics Cancelled," and "The Last Living Beatle." He has a nice humming and spooky guitar tone too, not unlike Newman's, and the end result is a pleasantly surrealist style that he calls "ethnical Belgian improvisation music."
FOUR SUMMER TOURS..... 16 Bitch Pile Up and Warmer Milks, the co-stars of the Blastitude #19 cover, are both starting tours on June 12, La Otracina (great new CD on Holy Mountain) is starting one today, and the mighty Avarus is coming to the States from Finland in a couple weeks:
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