Effects pedals tweaker Adam Forkner, a.k.a. White Rainbow, has a lot going on for a relatively new artist. Besides touring Europe and supporting Deerhunter, dude also fist bumps Pauly Shore (see the Possibly Relevant links below). But what’s probably most relevant is that his new body of work for Kranky, New Clouds, is a funky, technicolor, rainbows-and-gumdrops psychedelic score for modern dance. Four songs, 60ish minutes long, and genre ambiguous, New Clouds is a beautiful and driving aural jaunt that, at the sake of sounding like a cheesedick, you just sorta get lost in. This is good vibes head music for folks who’s got, what Bad Brains called, that P.M.A. This album got my day started this morning.
I’ve tossed around the label “ambient music for people who don’t like ambient music” more than once, but it’s undeniably a good label for White Rainbow. There are no lyrics or verse/chorus actions (as you would expect from music often reviewed on this blog), but there’s lots of melody, lots of lush instrumentation, lots of texture, intricate rhythm, vague vocal chants, and a tension-and-release dynamic that makes New Clouds almost pop-oriented at times. If you haven’t peeped ol’ Rainbow yet, think of him as a shoegazey version of Growing that spent more time in the woods meditating, collecting cool threads, and partaking in the good peyote. And like Growing, who spent time frightening the Hot Chip fans on a supporting string of dates, White Rainbow also opens for a group infinitely inferior to him (Yacht… bleh) on a southeastern Asia vision quest. But hey, I can jive with whatever spreads his krautrock forest gospel.
New Clouds is a beautiful record, and surprisingly upbeat. Use it to get your day started. Or use it as the centerpiece in bong-rippin’ activities. New Clouds goes both ways. And it just dropped this week on Kranky. Go see about it.
As a prodigal son of Burlington, Vermont, home to Ben & Jerry’s and *yaaaawn* Phish, it’s a goddamned miracle that Greg Davis isn’t churning out some rehashed hippie shit. On the contrary, Kranky’s Greg Davis is a student of a happier, warmer school of ambient music. Sublimely optimistic and viscerally beautiful, the just-released Mutually Arising, his first full length in seven years, is the summertime evening response to Tim Hecker’s and Keith Fullerton Whitman’s icier dronescapes.
As with most work in the modern classical/minimalist/drone genre, the album is meant to be enjoyed as a whole. However, the excerpt below should demonstrate what I’m talking about. “Hall of Pure Bliss” is just that – a canticle adoring the opening to a portal, or the soundtrack to sprouting flowers. Truly beautiful stuff.
Mutually Arising just dropped this week courtesy of Kranky.
For fans of: Stars of the Lid, Tim Hecker, Labradford
Recently, I opened a Tumblr account (kenny-bloggins.tumblr.com if’n yownta follow me) to post photos, graphic design work, and various sharable media. Whilst dickin’ around late last night, I tried to find an old website of mine hosted on the now-outdated University of Kentucky student server, since it had a lot of rad photographs of mine to upload on my new Tumblr page. Said website also featured a lot of various writing I had done during my freshman year in college, including an analytical piece I wrote for one of my English classes. I decided to keyword this paper to try to locate the old website. To my astonishment, I found that a number of different people – on websites, in other college papers, and even on Wikipedia – had cited this piece I wrote back in 2003 called Brainwashing, Misanthropy, and Society: an Analysis of Boards of Canada’s Geogaddi.
I wanted to publish this piece on the blog to share with you all, as well as to give the piece a more official source. You see, concerning the latter point, the paper is attributed to my nickname when I was 18, the name that appears on the title of the website – Mikey P Diddy. Yeah, that’s rather embarrassing. And since I wrote it when I was 18, the writing is certainly a very different style than how I write now. Evidently, I was a rather pretentious tool at that age that was too good to use phrases such as, I dunno, “dickin’ around” (again, note that I was evidently a pretentious tool known to his bros as Mikey P Diddy… Christ, that’s downright horrible).
Unfortunately, I don’t have the works cited page available. Roughly half the observations were mine, and half were various interpretations found in discussions on the old boardsofcanada.com message board. Otherwise, the good ol’ Encyclopedia Britannica was utilized. Again, this is a college paper, so I don’t expect a lot of folks to be terribly intrigued. But if you are, the full text and relevant Boards of Canada MP3s (your reward for reading, I suppose) are here for your perusal after the jump.
The latest offering from Los Angeles based Nudge (not to be confused with The Nuge), As Good As Gone, is a slow-burning, beautiful record. As a quick introduction, Nudge is Paul Dickow of Strategy, Honey Owens, best known for her contributions to Jackie O Motherfucker (whom you know and love if you’re reading this blog), and Brian Foote, best known as the rad dude at Kranky who hooks me (and, consequently, you the reader) up with interviews and promo albums.
While the subterranean groove and minor key construction on As Good As Gone evoke a more haunting, nighttime-appropriate flavor, there’s also a visceral optimism that runs underneath the record’s seven songs like groundwater. Perhaps it’s the playfulness between genres and moods, or the freewheeling construction of the songs… or perhaps not all noise/post rock/freak psych kids like to make nihilistic records.
The opener “Harmo” makes a most unusual, extensive use of harmonica you’re likely to hear anytime soon, setting the stage for a delightfully disjointed psychedelic IDM canticle, ending in widely sweeping whispering vocals that blow through your headphones like sandstorms. “Two Hands” operates as sparse stoner rock – fluid, emphatic bass lines set the anchor for ride-heavy drumming, swirling wah guitar, and melodic, ominous vocals. “Burns Blue” cultivates the latter, spookier repertoire of Roky Erickson circa “May the Circle Remain Unbroken,” proving once again the importance of space in a song – sometimes it’s what you don’t play that cultivates the most expansive soundscape. Closer “Dawn Comes Light” is the type of gorgeous ethereal chant shanty in the vein of Jessica Bailiff, Charalambides, and Fontanelle that made Kranky famous.
Nudge’s As Good As Gone lies as a cross-section between ambient, electronic, psychedelic, and (loosely speaking) pop, and handles all approaches with panache. It’s good stuff. As Good As Gone drops on September 7 courtesy of Kranky. (Preorder)
For fans of: Cloudland Canyon, Flying Saucer Attack, Indian Jewelry
Bay Area drone architect Gregg Kowalsky is one of Kranky’s newest offerings. Of course, Kranky is one of maybe four labels wherein if the skewed rectangle logo is present on any given album’s spine, said record will probably be blazin’. Kowalsky’s Tape Chants is no different.
While I enjoy ambient music, there are very few ambient artists I can truly cheer for outside Christian Fennesz and William Basinski. However, Kowalsky, who holds a masters in electronic music performance and recording, is one of them. The potent alien oscillator tone that opens “Vi-Vii” makes your eyes dart about the room, provoking you to think someone else is present. Sound interesting to you? It should, I love that feeling. And like Basinski, Kowalsky has an affinity for tape loops. For live performances, Kowalsky uses between six and ten cassette recorders and commercial stereo units scattered about the perimeter of the performance space. The amplitudes of the individual tape players are adjusted, and Gregg walks around the space listening to the overall mix, acting as a true sound alchemist. As he describes himself “the live set fits somewhere between sound installation and performance.” Many of the tapes from these live installations make up his sophomore release.
Sure, to an extent, Kowalski makes academic music. But you don’t have to be a music academic to find the timbre, tonality, and serendipitous deameanor of tape loop performance completely engaging. Kowalski craftily cultivates a sort of breathing organism in his fascinating thick analog stew – creating ambient music to get excited about.
Tape Chants is available now courtesy of the good bros and broettes at Kranky. Greg is also hitting the road this week, so peep his MySpace page for the latest date confirmations.
For whatever reason, I still find Merriweather Post Pavilion really hit-or-miss. Miss the weird shit, I guess. As such, I tend to revert back to Danse Manitee for my Animal Collective fix, as well as their many side projects that had varying degrees of interest. One of the more overlooked releases was the record cut between Panda Bear and his best bro Scott Mou. The project was dubbed Jane. Scott and Noah worked at New York’s Other Music and recorded music together at the former’s apartment. They released a couple of albums, but Berserker was the only one with any distribution (since it jumped on the Paw Tracks catalog, obviously).
Berserker was released in the spring of 2005, between Noah’s Young Prayer and Person Pitch. You certainly hear some embryonic forms of what was to come – warped ambient textures over fractured, booty bass heavy beats. Jane resembles an almost primordial Person Pitch… on lots of psychedelics. Mou was a professional club DJ at the time, and they both considered Jane to be a “dance” project, as indicated on Noah’s description of Bersker via Paw Tracks:
We both really liked dance music and dance music from the very beginning and I mean stomps and shouts and claps and stuff like that. Of course we like all kinds of other stuff too, but it’s the dance that gets us going on Jane. We played once at the Animal Collective practice space, but found it much more pleasant to play at Scotty’s home in Greenpoint where he had his mixer and simple microphones and we would drink brews and talk about all kinds of things and then play. I would usually sing about stuff I was thinking about that day and Scotty would move with it, playing jams and it would all kind of pour out. We liked all the mechanical robo dance jams from Detroit and Chicago and Germany but we wanted to do something with less 0’s and 1’s and more souls.
Despite what he says, I would invite you to try to boogie down to this record. Take video and send it to kb [at] thedecibeltolls [dot] com so I can lol, por favor. But then again, I suppose “Slipping Away” does start to get pretty funky past the six-minute mark.
Anyway, Berserker isn’t for everyone, but if you slept on this release and/or miss the odd electronic explorations of Animal Collective’s pre-Sung Tongs material, the songs below are not to be missed. Moreover, it’s interesting to hear this album in relation to Panda Bear’s musical trajectory, especially since it was recorded during the transition between the acoustic-friendly Young Prayer/Sung Tongs era and the sample-saturated, dub-informed Person Pitch/Strawberry Jam period. In retrospect, it seems that Mou had a greater influence on Noah than anyone gives him credit for.
Jane’s Berserker is available through Paw Tracks. You should buy it so you can enjoy the Grateful Dead skulls on the back over.
A couple of posts ago, I said that Louisville was not hoppin’ in the awesome show department so far this year, and they needed to step up their game (like the Cards should have two weeks ago, but that’s another story). And what do ya know, all ages art space Skull Alley decided to step the fuck up! Democracy in action, ya’llz. This makes up for the recently announced, totally bummer Forecastle lineup (two nights of Widespread Panic is two too many nights, ya heard?).
Russian Circles, Sweet Cobra, Lichens, Mountain Asleep
Skull Alley (1017 E. Broadway)
Thursday, April 30
7 p.m. – $10
All Ages
And the rest of the tour:
WED APR 22 – Grand Rapids MI, Mix Tape Cafe
THU APR 23 – Indianapolis IN, Radio Radio
FRI APR 24 – Detroit MI, Magic Stick
SAT APR 25 – Cleveland OH, Grog Shop
SUN APR 26 – Baltimore MD, The Ottobar
MON APR 27 – Hoboken NJ, Maxwell’s
TUE APR 28 – Philadelphia PA, First Unitarian Church
WED APR 29 – Pittsburgh PA, Smiling Moose
THU APR 30 – Louisville KY, Skull Alley
FRI MAY 1 – Chicago IL, The Bottom Lounge
SAT MAY 2 – Milwaukee WI, Cactus Club
SUN MAY 3 – Minneapolis MN, Triple Rock
Big day at the blog office. We’ve heard two amazing records just today, which is amazing considering that all three of us are total haters – the new Lotus Plaza, and this mysterious offering from a massive cluster of trans-Atlantic musicians called Flowers of Hell.
I don’t care if no one told these guys that it’s not the late ’90s anymore and post rock is no longer en vogue and/or what the kids are listening to these days. Fuck the kids. The Flowers of Hell’s Come Hell or High Water is one of the sickest, most moving collection of songs I’ve heard in some time, and is unequivocally the first great album of 2009.
Actually, that’s not fair. Flowers of Hell are not exactly post rock in the strictest sense. Sure, the music is instrumental and tends to gravitate toward tension-and-release compositions. Make no mistake, though, there’s a fresh, revelatory element in their sound. I saw someone describe the record as “classical music for shoegazers,” and I have to agree.
“Opus 66″ opens the record right, taking a few pages out of the Do Make Say Think book, cultivating a crescendo that you could only measure in axehandles. All the ingredients for chamber rock is here – strings, piano, lots of reverb, tremolo-saturated guitar, et al. Where Flowers of Hell carve their niche, though, is the incorporation of electronic flourishes and psychedelic boogie reminiscent of Spiritualized’s mid-career work. This makes sense, as good ol’ Sonic Boom performs on the album – not to mention members of British Sea Power, Bat For Lashes, Broken Social Scene, John Cale’s touring band, The Earlies, Guided By Voices, The Clientele, Do Make Say Think, The Hidden Cameras, The Ecstasy Of Saint Theresa, Tindersticks, The Early Years, and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. To add to the general radar blip this group exudes, band member and producer Greg Jarvis is a synaesthetic. Something to the effect of 3% of the world’s population has this gift: “The composing, recording, arranging, and mixing of Come Hell Or High Water was done largely by following timbre-to-shape synaesthetic visions. Synaesthesia is a neurological phenomenon where two senses are intermingled… With timbre-to-shape synaesthesia, sounds involuntarily trigger a translucent visual layer of moving shapes which follow a consistent audio-visual language. ‘I see sounds,’ explains Jarvis, ‘When I hear sounds, I see each timbre in front of me as shapes that follow patterns, often gliding, pulsing, and swirling with the rhythm and timing interlocking them all. Each timbre behaves differently, and that’s the main reason we’ve got such a variety of instruments on this album.’”
“The Inovcation” adopts a tribal rhythm with vintage electronic pings and pulses in the vein of the BBC Radiophone Workshop. “The Strength of String” is pure cinematic score – the foreboding mood of Morricone, but with a lot more melodic quality. “Bleumschen” ropes in a Faust/Neu motorik meets Loop-style fuzz sludge climax that totally slays me. Well-placed moments of dissonance (i.e. “Forest of Noise”) are peppered throughout the record as well, helping to establishing an overall experience as jarring as it is pleasant. The minimal beauty of Mogwai’s EP+2 is stretched across a full band canvas on album closer “Occasional Tears.” Considering the amount of musicians involved – 16 total – expect to hear a little bit of everything, including but not limited to: chamber pop, post rock, space, ambient, drone, and heavy fuckin’ metal. Basically, you’re an asshole if you don’t like Come Hell or High Water.
And zounds! Czech this video. The 8mm projections in this live performance really add the visual ambience that I wish more artists offer. I think this was recorded from their opening set for My Bloody Valentine. I might be wrong. Either way, my evening would’ve been a lot of better if the Flowers opened for MBV’s Chicago show instead of that shitty-ass Hopewell band.
Not to sound lame, but The Flowers of Hell offer everything I, personally, enjoy in my music. Fuck guitar solos, fuck wankery – make your music sound awesome. Sure, it’s nothing that you haven’t heard before, but Flowers of Hell offer the lush soundscapes, thick melodies, panned psychedelia known in the state of California to cause brain melting, and movements that, I would say, are rather triumphant.
Come Hell or High Water is out April 6 in Canada/The UK. Can’t tell if it will be available in the states or not, but you can grip it here.
Lotus Plaza is the solo outing of Deerhunter guitarist Lockett Pundt, and yes, it does sound like band mate Bradford Cox’s project Atlas Sound, but Pundt’s balmy atmosphere on The Floodlight Collective stands in direct opposition to Cox’s self-described fall/winter sound. Pundt, having been the inspiration for many of Deerhunter’s tender moments, proves to be wholly capable of producing his own brand of sedate nostalgia.
Keeping with the sock hopping doo-wop debuted on Microcastle, these ten tracks further explore the ambient tidings that narrated half of Cryptograms. We can hear Pundt drawing influence from Kompakt’s Pop Ambient series, especially through the evaporating synths and muffled incantations of tracks like “Antoine” or “These Years”. In addition to knowing when to pull the plug, these songs ascend their modest structures because of their spirited delivery that inhabits each layered track, saving them from turning stagnant. In truth, out of all Deerhunter related material, The Floodlight Collective is the most natural fit for Kranky Records thus far.
While these hazy reveries are the bedrock of the album, the standout moments are the ones with some kick to it. The blissful charmer “Quicksand” borrows the playful chaos and choral singing of Person Pitch and glues it to some over-exposed surf rock, creating an elevated garage rock hymn. Another highlight, the kraut-rock carousel “A Threaded Needle”, sounds like Neu! if they were Sunday drivin’ in the countryside instead of tearing up the Autobahn.
To our dismay, these cuts with a strong sense of identity out shadow the ones in a quandary. It can be difficult to seamlessly move from the bold tracks to the less confident ones like “What Grows?”, which evokes b-side Weird Era Cont., and without a full band, comes off sounding a bit irresolute. Floodlight Collective is fleeting, and hard to grab a hold of, but at the same time it is undoubtedly accessible, charming, and engrossing. If Brian Eno’s original intent for ambient music was for it to “accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular,” then Pundt’s debut effort is a success. There’s enough going on in the mix to warrant multiple headphone listens, but it gels together so effortlessly that it can serve as perfect background music as well.
The Floodlight Collective is available now on Kranky.
Tim Hecker is not nearly as celebrated as he ought to be, though this notion presents quite a dilemma. His influence stretches far and wide – you hear him in everything from ambient-minded Boards of Canada and Fennesz to pop-oriented M83 (before they sucked it) and Manitoba, to artists that blend the two extremes like Broadcast and Pram. Hecker’s vision and innovation is remarkable, but many of his interpreters have, in some ways, released superior material to him. It parallels the auto industry in a sense – Hecker is the GM to BoC’s Toyota, ya know? That’s certainly a bummer. To this end, Hecker may have realized that some of his more ambient wandering might benefit from a little pruning. Thus, An Imaginary Country.
Out on Kranky on March 10, An Imaginary Country is one of Hecker’s more concise works. However, the sound doesn’t deviate too much – Panopticon-sized swells of warm electronic architecture and lots of spacious, slow-burning textures. “Utropics” ropes in a rather fluid, shoegazey sound a la the Goslings (though less evil). “Currents of Electrostasy” features the aquatic, pinging electronic static hums with an Atomic Age twist that make Ghost Box releases fascinating to listen to. “The Inner Shore” hones in on the subtle melodic beauty that made Hecker’s previous project Jetone so remarkable to the IDM crowd (minus the rhythm, of course). However, very little sticks out beyond these aforementioned movements.
Though Hecker’s recordings are always a mysterious embryonic journey, I think he’s overdue to take back his tradmark sound and expand it into new sonic territories. There’s no doubt how exciting it would be. But An Imaginary Country is all old-hat, save for a slight but possibly insincere sense of urgency. Boreds of Canada indeed.
