The Decibel Tolls » math rock

Motion Turns It On

Kenny Bloggins — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:52:08 +0000

I don’t need to make a clever title involving this band’s name, as Motion Turns It On is already a complete sentence. The full package right there. Thanks, guys!

So, the music. If you’ve been pining for the sound of classic Chicago or Louisville math/post rock, Motion Turns It On (by way of Texas) may be your go-to guy. Be advised though (and here is where they draw their line in the sand), they hit hard. The typical snakey guitar lines you’d hear in, say, Don Caballero is replaced with insane fuzz and sci-fi sounds reminiscent of Raymond Scott. Motion Turns It On is some of the finest tape echo-heavy ADHD garage prog I’ve heard since Hella. Get behind it.

“Moyedi” is about four songs in one, and you’ll dig on it hard. The group’s forthcoming Kaleidoscopic Equinox drops February 16, courtesy of Chocolate Lab. Additionally, you can see the dudes’ web space over here.

For fans of: Cheer Accident, Battles, U.S. Maple

MP3 :::
Motion Turns It On – Moyedi

Destination Tokyo, Indeed

Kenny Bloggins — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:07:38 +0000

These chicks window shopping for guitars happen to belong to a sick new collective known as Nisennenmondai. Well, they’re not new new. They formed ten years ago. But they’re new to us, and their sound is definitely a delightful breath of fresh air.

Nisennenmondai is a three-piece hypnotic post rock group led by three (incidentally attractive) young Japenese women… so it seems a lot of geeks’ prayers were answered, no? But enough with the superficial facets, Sayaka Himeno, Yuri Zaikawa, and Masako Takada have serious chops. Somewhere between no wave, kraut, and funky math rock, strattling the median between Faust and Don Caballero, lies Nisennenmondai. But, and this is important, Nisennenmondai do not sound exactly like any of the aforementioned – they’re still brining something decidedly fresh to the table. Their debut Destination Tokyo was recorded in the fall of 2007, but thanks to megafans like Gang Gang Dance, Battles, No Age, and Hella, the groups is getting their jams released domestically, as well as a lot of exposure.

With full motorik rhythm in tow and mesmeric, snaky, twiling guitar melodies flying gently above the surface, this is serious get shit done music. Pipe the title track through your headphone technology and go for a jog.

Nisennenmondai is on MySpazz of course, and Destination Tokyo is available now via Smalltown Supersound.

For fans of: Battles, Ciccone Youth, This Heat, Faust

MP3 :::
Nisennenmondai – Mirrorball
Nisennenmondai – Destination Tokyo

The House That Slint Built (Perhaps)

Kenny Bloggins — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 16:22:12 +0000

When you take the LSAT, many of the questions you answer require you to make inferences and deductions based only what’s on paper, essentially asking you to forget any outside knowledge or understanding you have. Let’s take that approach with Slint’s Spiderland. If you knew nothing else about the group or their seminal album, you wouldn’t have a lot to go by outside the strange bobbing heads staring through your soul on the front. From the music, you could glean the group had interests or training in jazz, classical, psych, punk, and noise, and had a weird thing with pirates and insects. From the imagery and album inset, all you would know about the context of Spiderland is that they had Palace Brother Will Oldham go swimming with them one day at the Utica Quarry in southern Indiana (and took pictures), the band prefers you listen to this on vinyl (as stated on the CD and cassette copies), and they were no longer interested in mumbling narratives by themselves. The latter is what seems most interesting to a lot of people. That makes sense considering the band melted down either during or shortly after Spiderland’s release and the fact that, other than the track titles, it’s the only real, tangible information included on the album cover.

interested female vocalists write
1864 douglas blvd. louisville, ky 40205

My apartment is about a seven to ten minute bike ride from this address. It was a nice Saturday afternoon, I was listening to the Slint EP, and thought, what the hell? Let’s go on a vision quest to find the Slint house!

I rode my bike south down Bardstown Road, the main strip in The Highlands neighborhood in Louisville. The Highlands is our gentrifying but not yet douchey young, creative neighborhood on the city’s near east side. The neighborhood is an odd but awesome pastiche of densely packed two-story homes, apartment buildings, historic mansions, and Victorian architecture meshed with hundreds of eclectic local shops, restaurants, and clubs. As far as the meeting of music and aesthetics, you hear the industrial despair of Manchester in Joy Division, or the foggy flower power haze of San Francisco in Moby Grape, or the western-tinged reverb of Austin in the 13th Floor Elevators, or the… well, you get the idea. The Highlands, and the majority of this side of Louisville, is a really lovely and scenic place - not the type of milieu you’d expect scary-ass Slint to emerge from.

As you leave the heart of the Highlands (where massive music haven ear X-tacy lies), you reach an area called the Douglass Loop. The Loop is an island of shops and businesses inside three intersecting streets. Until 1947, this used to be a streetcar station where the Bardstown line trains would loop around and change direction – kinda like The Loop in Chicago, but smaller of course. And at the terminus of the Douglass Loop is, indeed, Douglass Boulevard (notice the Slintsters misspelled it).

Heading east down Douglass Blvd., I realize I’ve never been down this street before, and it’s decidedly more suburban, and remarkably arboreal, than the majority of the Highlands. Since The Highlands, by and large, has not changed a whole lot visually since the ’60s and early ’70s, the street was probably fairly similar during Slint’s late ’80s/early ’90s residence. Douglass mostly consists of larger family homes spread further out with really well maintained lawns. Kids are playing wiffle ball and eating ice cream and shit – a pretty pleasant place no matter how you slice it.

After two blocks, I found it on the left hand side: 1864 Douglass Blvd.

[Note: If you live at this address, came across this article, and are totally weirded out by it, send me a message and I'll remove the photos.]

I didn’t stay too long, just enough to inconspicuously snaps a few shots. I didn’t want to be all creepy like – roaming around the perimeter of a home taking photos and looking generally suspicious. And then… I biked back toward my end of the neighborhood. There wasn’t much to see, save for the sweet enclosed patio on the east side of the home. It looks like an addition, so Slint might not have enjoyed the luxury of an enclosed patio. Perhaps this was the origin of the despair found in “Don, Aman.”

The house is quite large, looked to be four bedrooms or so, with a living room, basement, dining room – everything you’d expect in a nice single family home. And it certainly didn’t seem like the type of place a band would squat. Maybe they did – there were four of them, right? But the home was just too nice to believe that a group of artsy raggamuffin dudes could afford the rent on a place like that. Maybe it’s Pajo’s dad’s house, I dunno. I didn’t ring the doorbell to check.

I’m not sure what I was expecting to find, really. Perhaps some the sort of strange fulfillment Elvis fans get from visiting Graceland. All in all, the locale was pretty anticlimactic. However, you could look at this as a testament to how insular Slint was. They didn’t sound like anyone else at the time (or today no less), didn’t take cues from outside influences, and managed to cultivate creepy, desolate, foreboding soundscapes amid rather picturesque aesthetics.

Then again, maybe they were much happier people than their music suggested. Douglass seems a rather cheerful place. Dave’s serious cheese there on the right-hand side demonstrates that you can separate business from pleasure.

As an added bonus, enjoy this bootleg of a March 1989 performance by Slint, wherein you hear the embryonic forms of Spiderland.

Battles – “Tonto” and “Bad Trails” Live

Kenny Bloggins — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 18:05:03 +0000

Interestingly enough, I had the pleasure of seeing both Battles and Don Caballero play within a few months of each other last year at the ol’ music venue I used to help book and promote. This is significant as guitarist Ian Williams (pictured above, courtesy of Radio Free Chicago) brought his non-soloing fingertap riffage to Don Cab for years before Battles, and conventional lore suggests that the disbanding of the original Don Caballero lineup was not pretty. So the venue’s other talent buyer and I joked that Battles might have been supremely bummed if they knew we were playing the field with two of our favorite math rockers. If they read this blog, I guess they know now. Me and my big mouth.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen Battles yet, you can get a quick sample of their live show with the recently released (albeit on the other side of the world) EP Lives.

I love Battles, because I love prog rock. People who pan prog rock but also like Battles need to reexamine their opinions on music. Battles are as close to prog as they are to the often-dropped math rock tag (sans some of the corny theatrics, of course). This was reaffirmed for me during their performance with Caribou I saw at the Metro in Chicago last November. They widen the sonic space even more live, replacing the glitchiness of Mirrored with cascading swells of thick, aquatic, warm, analog astral plane journeys. They are compositionally tight and otherworldly live, just like the best proggers were. Not only do Battles sound like the music that would be pipped into the antennae of the Martian army in Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan, but they dress the part of an extraterrestrial army by sporting nothing but the most immaculately ironed, matching, crisp white collar shirts. That, combined with the bizarre six-foot cymbal ex-Helmet drummer John Stainer crushes and Tyondai Braxton’s “throw your hands in the air” dance he does behind mountains of samplers, creates a visually strange and captivating show without reliance on video or light visuals.

Battles Lives features a taste of what you can expect of the group live. So far, Lives is only available in Japan and is not economically priced. I’m sure it will see domestic release sometime in the not-so-distant future, so in the meantime, enjoy a couple of my favorites from the EP to tide you over. I’m not posting the whole Lives EP though, because this blog is for sampling, remember. Keepin’ it real, keepin’ it legal.

MP3 :::
Battles – Bad Trails (Live)
Battles – Tonto (Live)