Cyclic Defrost Magazine

Sleeps In Oysters – We Kept The Memories Locked Away Like Beetles of our Childhood… (Seed Records)

Posted: 31 Jan 2009 09:35 PM CST

John Harries and Lisa Busby, a boy from Reading and a girl from Paisley, are Sleeps In Oysters. It's a name that wholly encapsulates their sound, too sweet to be termed ‘eclectic’ and too diverse to warrant the oft-abused folktronica tag.

The obvious comparisons should be dealt with first. Twitches of Psapp’s melodic alchemy and Tunng’s folk-based meanderings weave their way through the seven songs, though there isn’t a particular moment that prompts the comparison, merely the general sentiment that pervades the record. Indeed, it’s the sentimentality that is paramount, from the hand-constructed packaging which consists of paper sleeves, picture postcards and a fabric pouch, through to Busby's luscious vocal.

Like the delicately embroidered front panel, each song suggests a meticulous, loving hand has been involved in its creation. It's the ideal soundtrack to catching butterflies on a warm summer's day; a precocious warmth that you can’t help but smile along to.

Fortunately, no moment is ever too sickly to cause embarrassment - there are enough motifs acquired from the Richard D. James school of drill’n'bass, and other curious electronic remnants to assure the listener that this is decidedly left-of-centre stuff. As the album moves towards its coda, the curious noises hinted at in the first few minutes of opener ‘Moths’ Wings For Lisa’ appear again, building in intensity to become far more unusual than anyone could have expected.

For those who miss out on the 250 limited copies of the release, there is an instructional video which shows you how to make your own packaging for the album.

Asher - Landscape Studies (Room40)

Posted: 31 Jan 2009 02:14 PM CST

Through these Landscape Studies, Asher takes interest in the unique sound properties of interior spaces. Although the home or dwelling breaks from the plenum of the element, Asher doesn’t view it as simply a utopia for reflection and recollection, but as an ambiguous setting, both visible and invisible, removed and connected from the inclemencies of weather and other threats, human or otherwise. As an effectuation of this interior environment, with its own energy, warmth and gentleness of intimacy, the work is wholly successful.

The pieces are slow and relentless, drifting along like a pressurized breath system, out of which all manner of obtuse observations, scraps of notes, frazzled field recordings, and unidentifiable, reverberating noises arise, consolidating them as singular, absorbing spaces.

Inasmuch as the pieces do bleed into one another and engender a strong hypnotic state, there nonetheless remains a plurality of elements that, particularly when listened to on headphones, may often be heard shifting and communicating like masks to create a charged memory space. It is doubtlessly one of Asher’s more unified and complete efforts. In settling upon sounds of the interior, he secures a salient perspective from which to display the world, and all of the ways in which it escapes, is enlisted, and enjoyed in that valiant vestibule, the home.

Max Schaefer

Fanfare Ciorcarlia/Gypsy Queens and Kings - Hamer Hall (Arts Centre) Melbourne

Posted: 31 Jan 2009 02:22 AM CST

Okay. I can pinch myself now. And breathe a little. I’ve just witnessed one of the most amazing concerts of my life. One of the greatest live bands going around at the moment, Romanian wedding and party band Fanfare Ciorcarlia. It’s possible that the giant three tiered auditorium has never been so full, and before long we were dancing in the aisles. It began with Spanish three piece Kaloome, but then 4 Romanian men with tubas strode onto the back of the stage and blew everything apart. The first thing you notice about Fanfare Ciorcarlia is that your body is moving without your conscious control, the next is their piercing brass, the trio of trumpets cut through the music like butter, soaring free, out frenetically into the great open spaces. This is the most ecstatic music I’ve ever heard. The next thing you experience is the speed, these 11 middle aged guys are master musicians, as they effortlessly manipulate the tempo, increasing to ludicrous bpm (or is that km/ph?) . Vocalists come and go, the gorgeous Florentina Sandu, the intriguing Hungarian vocalist Mistsou, who with her unique delivery and shy stage persona was unfortunately not featured enough, The charismatic Bulgarian Johnny Iliev, who dressed in white with a cane, was just missing a bowler hat to look like he’d just walked out of A Clockwork Orange and of course Macedonian legend Gypsy Queen Esma Redzepova who added a touch of majestic class to proceedings. They played for two hours. It wasn’t enough. Gigs of the year should not be allowed to happen in January, it just makes everything else depressing.

Bob Baker Fish

Matthew Herbert Big Band - Live Hamer Hall Melbourne

Posted: 31 Jan 2009 01:15 AM CST

Tonight Matthew Herbert is a ham. He’s Buster Keaton, awkwardly stumbling swinging and grooving around, like he’s in his own silent movie, like the film’s been sped up as he twitches and whirls maniacally around, over exaggerating his hyperactive dance. But he’s not in a silent movie, he’s performing with a combination of his English Big band and Australian ring ins and the spectacle couldn’t possibly be more amazing. It’s a little touch of theatre, a bit of showmanship that combined with the classiness of the musicianship and cleverness of the arrangements elevates this performance so much higher than your regular gig going experience. It’s possible that I haven’t understood his big band experience until tonight, not only has he arranged the brass, woodwind and percussion to take the big band sound into his own idiosyncratic musical world, the rickety clipped almost percussive melodies that he is famous for, yet he also samples live and provides added digital ruffage to the mix with his sure, precocious and slightly mischievous hands.

They play mostly from their latest album, There’s Me and There’s You, with Eska Mtungwazi’s vocals throughout, utterly spellbinding, a powerhouse of range. There’s more theatre, “Tonight we are reading the Herald Sun,” offers Herbert as all the musicians hold it up and proceed do the only worthwhile thing you can do with that horrible tome of celebrity gossip and misinformation. Tear it up, the sounds evolving into “The Story, a delightful swing number with a pulsing jazz groove. For the next few songs the big band continues to pick up the bits of paper, screw them up and take pot shots at each other, creating a slightly surreal effect, particularly during the more poignant musical moments. Later Herbert and Eska wear black hoods over their heads and do their business faultlessly. Surprisingly they play The Audience, from Bodily Functions, have three encores, whilst also making us all contribute by singing a note which Herbert then samples and integrates into the music. Most importantly though they transport us to another time and place, this otherworldly realm where class and technology intersect. The experience to me was a little like Trainspotting, the jokes, the contradictions, the hamminess coming thick and fast alongside these marvelous moments of jaw dropping musical genius. They finally fished with One Life, with Herbert deconstructing the band in front of us, ordering off the brass, woodwind, percussion and bass, little by little, leaving only Eska and the pianist, and the most subdued emotional joy until Eska herself walked off, a leaving the solitary notes from the piano. I turned to the person beside me and I saw tears. It was that kind of show

-Bob Baker Fish

Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words - Lost in Reflections (Fang Bomb)

Posted: 31 Jan 2009 02:23 AM CST

Thomas Ekelund, Gothenburg based composer and sound artist, has been diagnosed with a border line personality disorder. This makes an interesting promotional blag, and quite a dirge to wade through if you have already gone through darkness in your life and seen that the only response is to transmute such domains into a form which exudes a beauty uncommon. Such is the mettle of Ekelund.

So now when I hear the layered environmental soundscape loops, drone guitar and industrial motifs in Crowded Rooms, In Empty Streets, building into a Bauhausesqe gothic melodrama, all that comes to mind is a muted ‘good on you’ for confronting such bleakness and challenge and making something of it. Indeed the very image of the panoptical self on the cover, the artist’s moniker death fixated, the comic like allusions to a vampiric world where the self is invisible, unable to be reflected.

'Most of the time I feel suspended, as if I was waiting for some great revelation of truth, a stroke of magic that will transform me into someone like you. The person you see in the mirror. A human.'

Seriously such comments suggest the emotive range of a teenage drama queen with a high degree of musical talents. Clearly I read the allusions given as too obvious expressions of psychological states and find their lack of dimension to be as amusing as the act of confrontation; transcribing and releasing could be cathartic. It puts quite a different spin of the question of what is music, and the area of music as medicine has been identified before and is generally encouraged.

Of course the domain beyond bleakness is the ground to be found. The question may be will the grandiose splendor of Himmelschreibenden Herzen be able to be apparent in a vibrant joyful version of Ekelund. If you find the beauty within the bleakness, see the extrusion of ecstatic joy in its expression in form then the assignation of bleakness is merely a formal preference or discrimination in the pejorative sense. This may seem an easy linguistic play especially in light of Ekelund's summation:

'It has taken me two years to come to terms with this album. It’s in many ways my most accessible work to date, but in other ways my most difficult and demanding. I can’t listen to it objectively. In fact I have a hard time listening to it at all.'

All that can be easily sighted here is all to apparent technical prowess of the guitar and effects, overdubs and industrial drone expression.