Thursday, July 30, 2009

Cyclic Defrost Magazine

Cyclic Defrost Magazine

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Swoop Swoop – Factory And Porch Songs (Metal Postcard CDR )

Posted: 30 Jul 2009 02:29 PM PDT

Finding any information on this release is proving to be almost impossible for me. And I also get the feeling that this is exactly as it should be. The artist formerly known as Streaky Jake only released his last album, Somewhere In The Shadows, four months ago. That release was a laidback, folkish affair, embellished with production frills by Alex from o||o. This is possibly a collection of outtakes from those sessions as it has the same overall mood but, is, if anything, even more stripped back. The only vague reference to this release I can find anywhere is this allusion from a Myspace blog entry – “also coming soon my label metal postcard is going to do a ltd ed release lo fi cdr – with some new songs” and a possible title on the Metal Postcard blog. Whatever, it’s the music we’re mostly interested in here, just expect to do a bit of work to track down a copy.

And track down a copy would ultimately be my advice, as this is a great collection of tracks. Mostly, it’s Sean Gorman on his own with a nylon string guitar, a steel string acoustic guitar, or piano and his own plaintive voice. The first couple of tracks, ‘Easy’ and ‘Your Blood Is In My Blood’ hints at a musician willfully exploiting a basic skill level, strumming well but unextraordinarily on his guitar. Folk with punk ideals – anyone can do it. But then ‘Like Nothing At All’ breaks the mistique. It certainly isn’t shredding, but the fingerpicking is spot on, the movement around individual strings to create melodies out of the chord structures could only have been played by an artist in control of their instrument. And it’s really beautiful. Between the first handful of tracks are loud clicks, like the sound of the tape recorder being turned on and off, adding to the mood of immediacy. A cover of Dylan’s ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit uses just rustic piano and voice to turn the song into pure funereal melancholy. The latter 5 or 6 tracks of the album feature fuller instrumentation, though generally with the same collection of instruments plus the addition of drums, leading me to believe these are the offcasts from from Somewhere In The Shadows while the album’s sparser, earlier tracks are the demos that never got past that stage. But then that suggestion sells the tracks short. Not a single track across the 50 minutes feels throwaway or unworthy of release.

This is a seriously mysterious release, but this fact simply adds to its allure. It’s been seeping under my skin for a number of days now, and I keep finding myself wanting to come back for more and more. Yep – go to the bother of tracking it down.

Adrian Elmer

Staff Benda Bilili – Tres Tres Fort (Crammed/ Planet Company)

Posted: 30 Jul 2009 06:24 AM PDT

Backstories are important in World Music, in contextualising the often alien sounds for western ears, and at the very least offering another handle for the listener to grab onto. The general rule is the more exotic better, the freedom fighter past on Tinariwen, Tartit’s formation in a Mauritanian refugee camp, Konono No 1’s ingenuity. But all of this pales into comparison when confronted with Staff Benda Bilili, who are a group of paraplegic street musicians who live around the zoological gardens of Kinchasa (Democratic Republic of Congo). They’ve made these wheelchair/ tricycles that they cruise around in and their instruments aside from their guitars are handmade in Congo, including I guess the plastic chair that one of the percussionists uses in lieu of drums. The album was recorded outdoors in the zoo gardens, though overdubs were done indoors in someone’s lounge-room, with one Vincent Kenis (Tartit/ Konono No 1) at the helm.

So does the music even matter after all of this?

Well yes, their sounds are drawn from the rhumba, which has been so prevalent in the Congo over the years, though they also take on other influences such as a scattered kind of funk, and there’s that Congo sound that we’ve heard recently with Konono No 1, a kind of skewed half distorted sound of electronics pushed a little too far the wrong way. This time it seems to come from the homemade Santonge, a guitar string tensed between a tin can and a bow, which produces some of the illest sounding wrong guitar solos you’ve ever heard. They’re exponents of that Afro Rhumba sound, with vocal call and response melodies, African percussion and the Latin melodies played out over these long pieces that could just go on forever. Curiously considering their social circumstances, often sleeping rough, their songs are about hope about African pride and unity, a plea to parents to vaccinate their children for polio – a song from someone who understands the consequences of not having it done, and also of hope no mater your social circumstances. They’re firmly entrenched within the homeless community and you can hear the hope and melancholy in their music. For Western ears, it’s easy to become captivated and entranced in the gorgeous upbeat rhythms, yet you get the sense for many homeless and disenfranchised from Kinshasa’s media and government messages, Staff Benda Bilili provide a vital social function where it matters most – on the street.

Bob Baker Fish

Paranoid Entity – 4Closure (Paranoid Foundation)

Posted: 30 Jul 2009 06:24 AM PDT

The idea of a dictaphone recorded improv session between bored housemates doesn’t sound particularly exciting, however there is something kind’ve haphazard and lacking in pretension that makes 4Closure somewhat charming. Everything has been treated in waves of delay and reverb (I’m assuming in post), so it’s difficult to tell what exactly what’s going on, however this provides a dreamy hypnotic quality over the 26 minute EP. Two of the housemates play guitar, another two make sounds with whatever household implements come to hand. Occasionally someone mutters something indecipherable or laughs, and it all just collapses into itself, kind’ve nonsensical and muddy and sweet.

Bob Baker Fish

Joachim Kuhn – Out of The Desert (ACT/ Planet Company)

Posted: 30 Jul 2009 06:23 AM PDT

For your uber hip musician, whether the discipline is jazz, experimental, rock, or all of the above, it’s almost become a right of passage, traveling to Morocco to jam with with the desert musicians. The Master Musicians of Joujouka have hosted everyone from Brian Jones to Ornette Coleman and Talvin Singh in their time to mixed success, though a few people have also left the mountains behind and headed down the coast in search of the incredible Gnawa trance musicians.

Perhaps it was a previous tussle with Ornette that planted the seed for Kuhn to decide in his 60’s to seek out the Saharan Berber musicians. He’s accompanied on the trip by Spanish percussionist Ramon Lopez and Moroccan singer and Guembri player Majid Bekkas, the trio whom had previously recorded the 2006 album Kalimba together.

Out of the Desert was recorded in the capital Rabat, in a studio, though one piece, Seawalk, was recorded in the Hotel Palms in Erfoud, which is right on the edge of the massive dunes of the Sahara. In Rabat they brought in some of those incredible Gnawa musicians and you can hear their hypnotic metronomic castanets rattling through the majority of the pieces here. There is a real fusion here. Kuhn doesn’t alter his playing, or get all avant garde plink plonking along to the rickety percussion. Rather he builds these themes, a few note runs and expands, dancing around them, improvising, before returning to them triumphantly later. It’s very much a recipe he has used repeatedly in various jazz ensembles in the past and it is incredibly effective. He also makes way for Bekkas’ throaty vocals, which again are used sparingly yet to great effect. Curiously Lopez’s percussion which includes tabla and kit, often together manages to merge seamlessly with the Moroccan accompaniment.

Ultimately though despite thumb piano, hand drums, incredible vocals (from Bekkas and some of the guest musicians) , all manner of shakers and rattles and the various Moroccan instrumentation, Out of the Desert is a jazz album. It’s best exemplified by the seven and a half minute Sandia where for the first three minutes Kuhn isn’t sighted, instead it sounds like traditional Gnawa music, call and response chanting over the castanets and this amazing traditional sounding bass instrument. But then the piano comes in, with Kuhn improvising and we’ve returned to this curious netherworld in between both worlds, and we’re left with some of the most evocative and interesting jazz you will hear in a long time.

Bob Baker Fish

Charbel Rouhana & The Beirut Oriental Ensemble – Handmade (Forward/ Select Audio Visual)

Posted: 30 Jul 2009 06:22 AM PDT

Charbel Rouhana is one of Lebanon’s most renowned exponents of the Middle Eastern oud, yet he is also an academic who has developed a new approach to the ancient instrument. His sound evokes traditions yet when combined with his Oriental Ensemble, with bass, percussion, violins and bouzok, we’re left with some of the most interesting neo classical instrumental music you could ever hope to hear. At times it verges on some kind of Asian/ Middle Eastern chamber music, at others it has this light flowing feel, apparently as a conscious counterpoint to some of the disturbances Lebanon has been experiencing of late. Recorded live over the course of four consequtive days, it almost feels like deveotional music, such is the heartfelt nature of the playing and the incredible musicianship.

Bob Baker Fish

Various Artists – Machinefabriek and Soccer Committee Redrawn (self-released))

Posted: 29 Jul 2009 09:52 PM PDT

redrawn1

A vast and daunting collection, ‘Redrawn’ consists of 20 remixes by as many artists of pieces from last year’s ‘Drawn’, a collaboration between minimalist songstress Soccer Committee (Mariska Baars) and electronic producer Machinefabriek (Rutger Zuydervelt). The original set was a gorgeous synthesis of analogue song and digital process, with Zuydervelt particularly commendable in his restraint; this was not merely another crackly, drifiting Machinefabriek release (as welcome as they are). With ‘Redrawn’ they’ve assembled a strong cast, and the results are predictably impressive, however the unity which was such an endearing feature of the original has been unavoidably, and intentionally, lost in translation.

With such a range of artists on board, approaches taken here span as broad a divide as that between Zuydervelt and Baars. So we see versions as stripped-back and earnest as Goldmund’s and Squares on Both Sides’s, vocals foregrounded amid bare arrangements of few acoustic instruments, to the abstract constructions of Steinbruchel and Lawrence English, where the original struggles to be heard through layers of Machinefabriek-esque drone. Middle-ground approaches include Taylor Deupree’s, who allows traces of Baars’s voice to creep through howling winds and sine webs, and Tori, Reiko and Namio Kudo’s, who cleave the voice in two, leaving one to whisper in the background, the other to mumble up front, while shivering pads mix with birdsong. Highlights include Gary Smith’s version of ‘Solo Guitar into a Duo’, where faint pings of guitar battle against waves of Jeck-like static, the pings building into sharp blades which slice the fog like a razor; in ‘Very Well Drawn, Re-edited’, Francisco Lopez destroys all trace of song with terrifying subbass rumbles and disorienting doppler whoomps; and North Sea’s ‘Di O Day’, where the original appears refracted through the hiss of radio, and the distance of some mythic North Sea voyage. All of the pieces on ‘Redrawn’ offer effective, rewarding takes on the source material, yet the album’s 80 minutes are best absorbed in multiple sessions, in order to take it all in.

Joshua Meggitt

at 6:15 PM