Sunday, August 2, 2009

Cyclic Defrost Magazine

Cyclic Defrost Magazine

Link to Cyclic Defrost

Various Artists – Beirut Good Vibes Vol.1 (Forward/ Select Audio Visual)

Posted: 02 Aug 2009 06:00 AM PDT

This compilation goes to great pains to point out that it’s not a dance cd. It sure as hell looks like one, with its Beirut by night cover, yet as it promises it’s more about introducing a cool laidback atmosphere than getting your booty shaking to innocuous techno. I imagine these are some of the artists on Lebanese label Forward Music who are attempting to champion some of the more interesting musical practices in the city. It’s considered an acoustic collection however there are electric guitars and key’s and synths, however all the pieces exude the kind of late night cool the album is trying to project. The album begins with some devotional sounding wailing, as if to conform to expectations, however Ziad Ahmadieh & Fun Jan Shai quickly move on after a couple of minutes adding a bit of jazzy housy percussion, with a gentle strum of an oud, which on paper sounds terrible, but in reality offers an incredibly and evocative opening. It’s a signal to leave your expectations at the door as we’re dealing with all manner of influences, many exuding the late night lounge feel. Sylistically there is little to tie it particularly to Beirut, as the influences seems to come from everywhere, there’s the jazz based chanteuse, though the majority of the pieces are instrumental. curiously they use the more traditonal instrments sparingly, if at all. This is modern Beirut music, looking towards the future, not trading on traditions.

Heirs – Alchera (Exo)

Posted: 02 Aug 2009 05:59 AM PDT

This album has one of the most evil spookiest looking cover this writer has ever seen. It screams at you that what you are about to receive is terrifying doom core, scary, bleak and wrong. So it comes as some surprise to get instrumental post rock in the vein of Mono, perhaps a tad darker, with building crescendos that touches upon the darkness, though not the weirdness of Khante, without ever really finding a home there. It’s highly repetitive these melodies repeat over and over and the noisy barnacles attach themselves, increasing in volume and texture until a searing guitar line sweeps across the horizon. It comes from Melbourne, from members of sludge doom dudes Whitehorse, and Love Like…Electrocution and they parade their Swans and Godflesh influences proudly, however the quartet don’t share the same dangerous brutality, seeming more intent on wallowing inside the dark melodies before slowly building things up, at times touching upon an industrial roar. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Heirs isn’t their bluster or aggression, it’s their willingness to be at times soft and gentle, to build slowly, to give themselves both time and space to get to their destination, yet also take different routes to get there.

Bob Baker Fish

Yawning Sons – Ceremony to the Sunset (Lexicon Devil)

Posted: 02 Aug 2009 05:58 AM PDT

Yawning Sons really does feel like the next logical step for Gary Arce who is carving out an increasingly interesting niche on the outer edges of the stoner rock genre. Arce’s music is not about the bottom end boom of Sabbath riffs, rather it’s about the desert twang, about dreamy mesmirising improvised guitar that sweeps out majestically across the wide open spaces. With Yawning Man, Ten East and Dark Tooth Encounter he has continued to craft this highly emotive and evocative guitar based instrumental music with these incredibly expressive riffs that possess a dreamy languid feel. This project sees him hopping a plane and hooking up with English outfit Sons of Alpha Centauri. At first he was to merely produce their album, yet after they had a jam they discovered a unique common ground that was too good to pass up. It’s more of a softer gentler album than any of his aforementioned projects, though it does share some dreamy links with Dark Tooth Encounter. Perhaps the biggest departure is the presence of vocals on three of the seven tracks courtesy of Desert Sessions legends Mario Lalli (Fatso Jetson) and Scott Redder (Kyuss), also from Wendy Rae Flower (Mark Lanegan Band/ Unkle), who’s turn on the opener Ghostship – Deadwater takes it into the territory of UK Indie shoegazer’s Lush. This is part of the joy of Ceremony to the Sunset, the softer edges and lush textures drift effortlessly from atmospheric film soundtrack territory to psych rock. It’s an album that just flows over you, an escape, almost a mystery, where once it’s finished it’s almost impossible to recall what exactly just happened.

Bob Baker Fish

Infinite Decimals – 6.2831853071794… (CDR)

Posted: 02 Aug 2009 03:17 AM PDT

infinite-decimels
After a brief myspace exchange with Melbournian Don Rogers from Infinite Decimals, this CDR arrived in my mailbox. Don Rodgers works with Barnaby Oliver (ex-Venus Ray) on a dueling guitars bass/lead minimal improv affair. When all is said and done Rogers lays the bass ground for Oliver's compositional and improvisational skills. It is described as "two people in an existential moment", if that is meant to mean anything beyond two people alive and interacting, I care not, in the phenomenological sense.

Beyond such quibbling it is a straight one piece of improvisation between two guitars creates a certain sense of tension and epic atmosphere which is only too evident of the history of indie rock. The search for the epic to replace the mundane is a crisis apparent to all who encounter the phenomenon in our own lives. That we all don't resort to turgid lengthy angst is kudos for those avoiding these tendencies.

Innerversitysound

Frank Rothkamm – Frank Genius Is Star Struck (Flux)

Posted: 02 Aug 2009 01:33 AM PDT

Frank Rothkamm

German-born and now Los Angeles-based, electronic producer Frank Rothkamm provided engineering and rhythmic synthesis to the likes of the Hardkiss Brothers and DJ Spooky as well as working on a wide range of commercial soundtracks until 2005, when he decided to concentrate completely on his own solo artist productions under both his given name and as alter ego Frank Genius. Since then, he’s released a dizzying quantity of music, with this latest effort on LA-based Flux representing his tenth artist album in total. Designed to act as a ‘digital cantata set in San Francisco in the years AD 1990-1991′, the 14 tracks collected here see Rothkamm for the most part applying a pranksterish plunderphonic pop mash-up approach to the dancefloor, with extrovert moments such as ‘La Vie’ and ‘Black In The Sky’ roughly cutting up female vocal phrases over a massed backdrop of drum samples that takes its cue equally from contemporary electro and early nineties C&C Music Factory-style hip-house.

The hypnotically rolling ‘Q’ sees Rothkamm taking things considerably deeper with a slide into jacking Chicago house and looped tribal vocal samples that calls to mind Kevin Saunderson, while the icily robotic ‘Roll X Tones’ sits somewhere closer to some meeting point between Cybotron and DMX Krew, with some additional unexpected psyche-rock vocal and guitar elements tossed in to tweak proceedings further into leftfield. It’s certainly for the most part impressive stuff that sees Rothkamm rocking the dancefloor whilst packing tongue firmly in cheek, but unfortunately some of the more abstracted segue tracks here, such as ‘Vast’s sudden crash into nightmarishly treated atonal strings and ‘Ascending Megablast’s insane drummer heavy metal mash-up section contribute to what’s occasionally a bit of a jarring listening experience.

at 5:28 PM