Cyclic Defrost Magazine

Evapori - Rehearsals For Objects (1000fussler)

Posted: 12 Apr 2009 03:59 PM PDT

rehearsals for objects

This work from Oliver Peters may be seen as an exercise in reserve and restraint: the albums three spontaneous and semi-scored pieces spare the uniqueness of the everyday objects, carefully amplified by the strategic placement and use of microphones, from reinscription in the sort of generality usually brought on by the use of computer plug-ins. Peters only employs editing procedures to wrangle fresh angles on these ordinary objects, to hide them just enough to enable the listener to find them.

Objects are often caught in miniature, all the better to enable Peters to explore both areas of chance and choice in the context of micro-sound and drone. Sounds thus flow in and out of collusion, linking and deforming slow drifts with chattering urgency and vice versa. This makes Peters come across as an acute listener, but also, and perhaps equally important, as a skilled composer, fashioning his works in a tenuous place where skill and non-skill mix and demand a sharpening of the senses from both composer and listener alike.

Max Schaefer

Cyclic Selects - Christos Tsiolkas

Posted: 12 Apr 2009 04:49 PM PDT

Billed as grunge fiction, Christos Tsiolkas’s first novel Loaded was packed with sex, drugs and music. He’s written another five books since, including his most recent The Slap, but Christos and music go deeper than low-fi rock’n'roll. “Being an adolescent at the moment of punk and post-punk music, succumbing to the aggressiveness, revolt and atonality of the music, influenced the rhythms and tones and expression of what I wanted to write,” he said, at last year’s Sydney Writers Festival. Six novels, six plays, a couple of screenplays. This is Christos’s back-story, told through disco, house, art rock and pop, folk and beats.

Donna Summer - ‘I Feel Love’/'State of Independence’

I had an older cousin who used to DJ in the seventies and who had the first collection of 12 inch singles I ever encountered. I do remember him playing us little kids the almost 20 minute long version of ‘I Love to Love You Baby,’ which had us all sniggering and jumping up and down in delight as it reached what can only be called its climax. We may not have known what an orgasm was, but we sure as fuck now knew what it sounded like. I’m not sure of exactly when I first heard ‘I Feel Love’: I do know I thought it sounded sinister, that as it kept building and building and getting more and more underneath my skin it sounded like the most evil and delicious thing I had ever heard. It used to come on the radio and I'd tremble with delight. Giorgio Moroder produced ‘I Feel Love’ and it was all about the body and the machine. In the early eighties, Summer recorded a version of Jon and Vangelis’s ‘State of Independence,’ which was all about the soul and the machine. By then the disco era was kicked up the arse by punk (to emerge even harder-better-faster-stronger in the clubs of Detroit and Chicago), a generation was being wiped away by a big disease with a little name and everyone was telling me Donna Summer was a homophobe. I didn't much care. I had the seven inch of ‘State of Independence’ and it felt like all the promise of redemption, and of the sacred, was contained within the grooves of that single. It was the best song to play after a long day's journey into night: with the emerging new dawn, it always seemed to make everything right. The monotheistic tradition that separates the soul and the body is cruel and insane. The perfect double A-side single would be ‘I Feel Love’ on one side and ‘State of Independence’ on the flip. The body and the heart would both be satisfied.

John Corigliano - Altered States (Original Soundtrack)

William Hurt is a mad scientist who experiments with peyote and LSD and becomes convinced that through hallucinagenics he can unlock the mysteries of DNA and become one with the Collective Unconscience. Directed by Ken Russell and literally one of the most bonkers things I have ever seen, Altered States the movie made a big impression on me when I was 15, but has since seemed progressively sillier every time I watch it. But I bought the soundtrack by John Corigliano and in contrast it becomes better and better every time I put it on. Atonal, sometimes symphonic and at other times purely electronic, sometimes a cacophony of noise, it proves genuinely unsettling on every listen. So why do I keep returning to it? I think there are experiences I want to take from music that are not just about joy. I want to be made to pace the room, to move beyond myself and to kick down walls and open doors and stare into danger. Which is what is the most exciting aspect of the movie, Altered States – the idea that there are substances and experiences that can lead you away from the safety and complacency of the normal and the everyday. The movie doesn’t have the courage of its convictions (or rather the director’s convictions and those of the scriptwriter were at odds) and so in the end a compromised Hollywood resolution brings the Mad Doctor back to Pleasantville, USA. Just say no to drugs. But there’s no compromise in Corigliano’s score which even at the end leaves you anxious, wired, driven. It makes you want more.

Talking Heads - Remain in Light

This is how I remember it. It is a Saturday afternoon and I’ve just had a huge fight with mum and dad, about something stupid, but it is one of those vile bilious arguments, full of rage and I walk out of the house and go to a friend's place. She’s got some speed and we take it and talk and talk for hours and she tells me she is going to a party at her boyfriend's place and I don’t want to go because his friends always give me a hard time about being a poofter so I take the train into the city instead and walk around for an hour until I pass a Victorian terrace close to the city and I hear this music pumping out of the house that sounds like dance music but isn't a dance music I have ever heard before, it sounds all jangly and agitated, a mutant bass that is inviting me into the house and I walk down the corridor into a lounge room where a group of people are dancing in a circle. They’re all a bit older than me but I don't care and they are all smiles and they invite me in and I just jump into the circle and I’m dancing. And the heat goes on, the heat goes on. I dance to the next song and to the song after that and when ‘Once in a Lifetime’ comes on – which I know, which I’ve heard on the radio – I am the happiest I can ever recall being. The music seems to be at odds with itself, chemical and organic, from all over the globe and pure distilled American energy - but it works. In the end I crash on the couch and next morning one of the women who lives there makes me coffee and while she is making the coffee she plays me ‘Listening Wind.’ We drink, we chat, in the end I say thank you, I should go, and she says maybe you should call your mum. I walk into the city and buy the album at Brashs and take it home with me and mum and dad shout at me a little bit more but I don't answer back. I just put the record on the turntable and play it again and again and again. This is how I remember it, how I discovered another world.

Heaven 17 - Penthouse and Pavement

I used to not want to be a wog and part of not wanting to be a wog was turning my back on disco and dance music which was what the wogs in Australia were into. It was a classic case of double-think, of lying to oneself, as the reality was that I used to love disco as a child and that even when denying that history to myself I would still find my feet itching to move every time I heard Nile Rodgers’ guitar or a shimmer of Giorgio Moroder synths. I wore black, I refused to see the sun and I immersed myself in the dark guitars and funereal tones of post-punk and goth. But thank the gods that post-punk and goth got their groove back and that through them I got back to music that was as much about the body as it was about the head. I recall the thrill of abandoning myself to New Order – to ‘Temptation’ and ‘Blue Monday’ – and I remember Penthouse and Pavement by Heaven 17. The whole album is like English people learning to dance, the hesitant first steps of a toddler. It was all machine, even the vocals sounded mechanical, and I don't think it is funk, not really, but it certainly wasn't rock and roll. Listening to it now the synthesisers sound ancient, tinny and crude; not from last century but the century before that. But ‘(We Don't Need) This Fascist Groove Thang’ still makes me laugh, in a good way, and the title track is pure R’n'B heaven: listening to it, getting off on it, I was glad I was a wog.

Various Artists - The House Sound of Chicago Volume III

There are two genres of music that when I listen to them I really feel the lack of my musical experience, where I am struck by the fact I am a fan, not a practitioner. The first is jazz. I don’t know why I am seduced by the music, I don't know how it works, can’t decipher the logic of it at all. I can only listen and be caught up in it when for whatever inexplicable reason it makes me start nodding my head, tapping my feet, start experiencing the small rush of joy that comes from trying to follow where the notes are heading, trying to catch the sound as it falls. Some jazz leaves me cold. Nothing stirs and I can’t even pretend an appreciation of the technical skills involved. When I don't get it, I don't get it and it might as well be any white noise around me. House music is the same. I wish I knew exactly how it worked, how a beat, a rhythm, a repetition and a sound so monochromatic can be part of some of the music I love best. When house music works for me, when all I want to do is dance, or turn the Walkman or MP3 up to its loudest and feel those rhythms course through me, then I think I am the happiest man alive. But when it doesn’t work – and because I’m not a muso, I can’t explain why – then it does just sound like blips and beeps, doof doof doof doof. My favourite house music was acid house because I loved the soar of a vocal sample across the sea of swirls and waves of sound. I wanted to hear a vocalist of talent and soul and range be equal to the music. That happens on Sterling Void’s ‘It's Alright,’ a track on this compilation, which is house and gospel and protest anthem. It’s sublime, that's what it is. My vinyl copy of this compilation is scratched to buggery but I can't let myself part with it. It reminds me too much of when I heard a music that for the first and only time sounded like I was right on time for it. I wasn’t too young, I wasn’t too old, I was right smack bang of the middle of it. I don't know how it works but when house is good, just like jazz, wherever you are listening to it you feel like you are right smack bang in the middle of it.

Tim Buckley - Greetings from LA

The first time I hear of Tim Buckley it is because of the This Mortal Coil version of ‘Song to the Siren.’ I hunt out the original and initially I am disappointed. Buckley's vocal sounds broken, sparse next to the otherworldly beauty of Liz Fraser’s voice. Sometime soon after I am in my room, listening to late night radio and a song begins to slip into the room, to invade, it makes me stop whatever I'm doing and just listen. Just stop. Listen. It is like a command. I turn up the volume and lay on the floor and the music slowly slowly is filling, seeping under my skin and coursing in my bloodstream, it is taking possession of me. I’m not even sure what the vocalist is singing, but the voice sounds pure, uncontaminated, manages something exquisite - to sound masculine and gentle all at once. The song comes to an end, but an end that seems to take an infinity to reach its conclusion, and I don’t want it to end. But it does. That was Tim Buckley’s ‘Sweet Surrender,’ the DJ announces, and I scramble to my feet and scrawl the title down on a piece of paper. She also adds that it comes from an album called Greetings from LA. Listening to it is still like listening to the best sex you've ever had.

Spiritualized - Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space

There are perfect days, there are perfect dreams, there are perfect loves and perfect lives. There are also perfect books, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, say, and perfect films. I’d stake that claim for Godard’s Contempt or Tourneur’s Out of the Past. A perfect album is Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space. Here’s why: the brilliantly uncluttered cover design, which replicates a pharmaceutical packet and indicates something of the intoxicating experience awaiting one’s first listen; the hushed female voice announcing the title track; the rock and roll swerve and swagger of ‘Come Together,’ the desperate sleazy R’n'B of ‘I Think I'm in Love,’ the sweet electro hush of ‘Stay With Me’ and ‘Broken Heart’ and the frenzy of ‘Electricity.’ The sparse design makes sense because even at its most explosive or un-contained there is a cool determination guiding this collection of tracks, which means the album never falls apart, never disappoints. I’ve put individual tracks on mixtapes I have made for friends but the best thing to do is always to give them the full album. I first heard it late one cold winter evening in London, in an HMV or a Virgin or something like that and a bored girl behind the counter put it on and I couldn’t leave the shop and I wandered around and around till it had finished and then asked, What was that? and she had a smile so big and wide and expressive on her face because I had obviously loved an album she loved and she told me and I bought it and I thought in another life she and I could have fallen in love across that counter and one day I want to write the story or the book or the film of that falling in love.

Tricky - Maxinquaye

There is a moment in the sluggish music documentary Live Forever, about nineteen-nineties Britpop, where there is a cut away from Blur and Oasis to the Bristol night and on the soundtrack we hear a tease of Portishead and I wanted the movie to ditch the lads and lager of London and remain in the Bristol shadows, with the Portishead of Dummy, the Massive Attack of Blue Lines and the Tricky of Maxinquaye. These three albums are sly and elusive – they enact a kind of alchemy that remains resistant to description or summation. It is probably impossible to convey what they once meant, how crucial they seemed, because their sound has become ubiquitous, a genre of consumer muzak called “chill-out” or “trip-hop” that sells all matter of shit and lifestyles and holidays on the Mediterranean. But at one point they sounded like the sweetest siren songs imaginable. Blue Lines is the most classical and endearing, Dummy is the most evocative and haunting, but it is Maxinquaye that is still closest to my heart. It is a druggy slow-burn of an album that can manage to undercut the macho fury of Public Enemy’s ‘Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos’ and claim it for a queerer, more feminine planet, while at the same time remaining at all times sinister, strange and seductive. ‘Ponderosa’ might just be the greatest drug song after the Velvet Underground's ‘Heroin.’ Bold and beautiful is one of the most difficult combinations to achieve in art and I think this album does it.

A Certain Ratio - ‘27 Forever (Testimonial Mix)’

I have a friend Rob who is one of the best DJs in the world. He loves music and like so many people who love music passionately his taste can be scary. His lip curls in a sneer if I dare admit to liking something he thinks crap or overrated or just plain mediocre. He left for London years ago and before he left he gave away heaps of his old vinyl. This is one I grabbed off him. It is a 12 inch, just a plain white jacket and a plain white label. I’m not sure I can defend why I love it so much. In many ways it is a standard Manchester meat-and-three-veg house track. It takes an age for the incessant beat to build and then there is a moment when the vocal sample comes in and that’s the moment that always makes me wish it was 2am and that I was on a dance floor and that the beat could just go on and on and on. I guess it reminds me of Rob, it reminds me of dancing and laughing and being with friends. I guess it reminds me that people can be passionate about music. I guess I don’t have to defend it. It is part of the soundtrack of my life and this is why it is here.

Christos Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap is available from Allen & Unwin.

In Search of the Sydney Underground feature by Alexandra Savvides

Posted: 11 Apr 2009 08:16 PM PDT

As we trundle ever further into an age where musicians, consumers, and the industry are being forced to redefine notions of music creation and distribution, there seems to be little in the way of a traditional scene that holds creators of particular types of music together.

The notion of a ’scene’ has been particularly sullied over the past few years, especially in relation to the more electronic pockets of music in Sydney and surrounds. The proliferation of the so-called “fluoro crowd” and its associated performers has done much to distance many artists and fans alike from using the term scene to describe their shared experiences.

So, the terminology itself presents a problem; it seems to separate its creators from their audience, while the term’s use in its vernacular form is a particularly derogatory remark - they don’t call them scenesters for nothing. For all intents and purposes, the term as outlined by Peterson and Bennett in their work Music Scenes seems to provide the least loaded definition: a situation or location where the production, performance and reception of popular music is constructed.

If we take the next step forward, this situation is not so much created through choice, but rather the lack of choice; the neo-electronic space in Sydney has emerged because of what doesn’t exist as much as what does. This is not a scene in the manner which we’re used to seeing it, from literature and from our own experiences - no raves in Sydney Park for starters. There is no set uniform, no collective experience for those who were only just scraping together their record collections in the mid-1990s, when the Sydney scene was arguably most active.

Currently, even the type of music that these artists are creating, ostensibly in the same style, shares little in common apart from the geographical location in which it was created. Gathering spaces are few and far between. Since the demise of the Frigid club night in 2006 (the birthplace of this very magazine), only a couple of regular nights have popped up with a loyal following - CDR, Headroom, and Void at various locations.

Venues are a little more plentiful, such as Serial Space, St Petersburg and Bohemian Grove, but by their very nature they are home to a diverse assortment of performances, not exclusively electronic music variants. There are so many sounds being created that it is impossible to cover all genres, all versions of what really should be included in this discussion. Just as an example, there are incredibly important pockets of dubstep, particularly in Sydney, that deserve another article entirely dedicated to them.

Of all those nights previously mentioned, CDR, held at Hermann’s Bar on Sydney University’s Newtown campus, is the most interesting, designed to be a collaborative experience for producers and listeners alike. The format has changed little since its inception in Sydney in 2006. The first hour consists of a talk by an influential producer, followed by a showcase of songs from international producers, and then finally, local music makers are invited to drop in a CD of their latest work, whether finished or still in production, for playback on the sound system. It’s a situation where producers can bypass the usually restrictive policies of getting their music played in clubs, and where they can actually meet other musicians and creative people they may have only heard about. Plus, there’s the all-important self-criticism and self-praise, when, as the night progresses, they have the chance to hear their own sounds on rumbling speakers with the bass turned up. Over the relatively short period of time between 2006 and now, the participants at CDR have steadily grown - be they audience or producer - and influential speakers from around the country and abroad have congregated on the evening.

Lorna Clarkson, along with Mark Pritchard, Simon Hindle and Sofie Loizou, established the Sydney CDR night after the example set in London by original creators Tony Nwachukwu (Attica Blues) and Gavin Alexander. Clarkson sought to create a place for producers and music lovers to meet and listen to new work in a supportive setting, yet sees her role as merely facilitating CDR’s audience. “I had long been aware that there existed a disconnection between the music makers that I knew. There were lots of people making music but I rarely heard that music on radio or in clubs. Also, no-one was aware of what each other were doing. I saw CDR as a way to bridge some of these gaps.”

Intriguingly, over the course of the past few years CDR has seen a convergence of sounds - most certainly more dubstep and beats oriented - which Clarkson puts down to the nature of the evening. “Obviously, we are not out to shape or influence anyone directly but the night, by its nature, is a sharing of ideas so I am sure that some of the regulars have been influenced in some way - if not stylistically, then by different production techniques and sounds used by the other artists.”

“We have noticed a lot of electronica and dubstep coming through, but we are keen to not have the night become genre specific. It’s difficult to know how to encourage music makers and fans of other styles to come along, but one way is through our invited guests. I have always found inspiration in hearing other people’s stories, so, when appropriate, I invite a respected artist or industry person down to CDR to be interviewed so that they can impart specific knowledge and share their experience and perspective with the rest. No matter what genre of music these guests are involved with, there is always someone who comes up to me afterwards saying, ‘I don’t usually listen to that sort of music but…’ and goes on to relate that they got something important out of listening to his/her story.”

In conjunction with physical meetings like CDR, the intervention of the internet has had a lot to do with collaboration, in acquiring contacts and securing live dates. Adrian Elmer, from local group Telafonica, and a music reviewer for Cyclic Defrost, likes how the internet has bridged many of the gaps he had experienced in finding gigs and like-minded musicians in the 1990s. “In terms of working with other bands, all of our favourite gigs so far have been ones where we’ve put the line-ups together ourselves. This has generally been through finding people on MySpace that we like the sound of, and asking them if they’d like to play. All of those, so far, have been great and we’ve got to know them in real life as a result. But, without the internet, most of those would not have happened.”

So, this concept of a ’scene’ - at least in the traditional sense - appears to be redundant. Many musicians interviewed for this article mentioned the emergence of a new method of music making as an impetus for this change. Indeed, Telafonica’s experiences ring true for a number of other artists. “There is a larger scene of bands mixing electronics, and more regular rock styles,” says Elmer. “While we are probably at the electronic end of that spectrum, having that live aspect has meant we’ve played lots of gigs alongside bands like Underlapper, Seekae, Parades, Karoshi, and The Dead Sea, and have felt like we fit in there. Maybe it’s because we’re not purely electronic/dance oriented so we haven’t looked for the scene that is, but for us, we feel like the scene mixing electronics and more traditional modes is more exciting and where we are at.”

Ivan Vizintin from the group Ghoul expresses a similar sentiment. “There’s a big DIY electronica/noise scene in Sydney that doesn’t get enough attention. Bands like Castings, Moonmilk, Alps of New South Wales, Naked on the Vague… all great bands that are a bit too left-of-field for some people. It’s a shame, because there are hundreds of young kids that lap up all that Pitchfork/Stereogum hype of US experimental acts, when they could just look in their backyard and find exactly the same stuff. The same scene that they dig over there is thriving under their noses.”

This brings up yet another issue pertinent to any discussion of a geographically based scene, particularly in Australia - the worth of local producers and local musicians when compared to what is coming out of the rest of the world. Clarkson is adamant about this particular point, and sees CDR as breaking down some of the issues relating to the cultural cringe. “I hope more than anything that CDR is a place of encouraging new ideas and new sounds. I’m tired of people looking to Berlin or London, hoping to find a music community that is inclusive and supportive. This idea that Australian music is somehow not as worthy on the international stage is complete bollocks, but until people start getting behind each other it will remain this way. For me the great thing about CDR is that it is a level playing field and everyone there has their ears wide open.”

Martyn Palmer, who records under the name Broken Chip, is located on the periphery, producing music from his home in the Blue Mountains. He says that regardless of the internet and radio, information still takes time to trickle down to him. Like many others, Palmer’s notion of the ’scene’ seems to be still entrenched in the mid-90s aesthetic. “I really don’t know how strong it is at the moment and what’s going on everyday and where it’s headed… as for locations and venues, I’m not really sure where they are. I know of one place up in Medlow Bath called Akemi that has had a number of experimental performers play shows, and I’ve played in a great venue in St Peters called St Petersburg.”

Amidst the fracas between space, performance and collaboration, the humble bedroom producer might feel slightly ill at ease. The distinction between programmed (electronic) elements and live performance is an entire discussion in itself - so where does that leave producers and bands without a physical space to congregate? Palmer comments, “I’ve not really collaborated with many people. If you count doing remixing as a collaboration then it’s been word of mouth I guess. I’ve done three remixes so far and they have all been for local Sydney groups: Underlapper, Comatone and Telafonica. I have been approached by all of them in person. The remixes are done then uploaded to a server or posted back to them.”

Closer to the city’s centre, Ghoul’s methodology is similar to the way in which other electronic musicians and bands are forging collaborative relationships. Though most of the interchange occurs online, via e-mail and exchanging files, Vizintin hints that there is still the opportunity for meeting at shared gigs and through word-of-mouth. “Sometimes we get lucky and are asked to play at a show or jam with our friends, which is always a great deal of fun. Seekae are very good friends and jamming in the same room with them is a real treat. Completely different and refreshing dynamic. They’re very open to throwing ideas around and we all love sharing. They’re our first port of call if something needs to be critiqued.”

Like Ghoul, Telafonica have had collaborative experiences with people whose music they found online. “[We've] asked if they’d like to exchange remixes with us. They’ve mostly been more than happy to and we’ve had some excellent music come from all around the world as a result.”

So while the ’scene’, in the way it has been shaped by preconception or collective memory, is all but gone, this new wave of music makers have created something new. It’s a neo-electronic collection of artists who have a traceable history (though they may not be aware of it), and as a result have evolved into a different form. It is collaborative; reduced to ones and zeros floating around the internet; forged through handshakes; nurtured by listening to music over speakers in a bar and it can even be strengthened through sitting in bedrooms tapping out melodies on equipment old and new with no company apart from the birds sitting outside the window.

It seems then, that there is at least one commonality shared by these producers, musicians, performers and facilitators: the love of what they do. Clarkson sums it up perfectly: “We have had Theo Parrish and Flying Lotus playing their beats alongside Monk Fly and Lauren Horton - house next to hip hop next to electronic dub next to folk. It is this broad appreciation and openness that keeps me going as a non-producing music lover. While the music geekiness exists at CDR, this night is for people into music. Without us - what would be the point?”