The Franciscan Hobbies - 'Walls Are Stuck' (Music Fellowship)

Sometime around 2005 I blinked and when my eyelids came back up, there was a ton of music being made that sounded not unlike the Franciscan Hobbies, a large ensemble connected to that small collective of bands in the Bay Area vicinity known as Jewelled Antler. Glenn Donaldson and Loren Chasse are both credited here and I'm not sure exactly how involved they were - full leaders, perhaps, or just bit players - but the sound of the Hobbies comes from the same open, melodic air that other Jewelled Antler bands (such as the Child Readers, Thuja, and the Blithe Sons) occupied. In fact, if you played any of those bands to me I'd struggle to tell them apart, but I suspect the musicians in these groups, which largely overlapped, wouldn't feel differently. The band names just become another form of organising the sound-image, just like the album name and titles of the songs, maybe? Anyway, Walls Are Stuck is an all-instrumental play-around in this soundworld, driven by largely acoustic instrumentation and lo-fi recording technologies. There are electroacoustic elements but only in the sense of a dictaphone tape warp (on 'Empty Hands', which is a lovely bit of concrete, using a decayed violin riff, which dissipates before wearing out its welcome) or delicate keyboard tinkles, dancing over the pulse (the sublime 'The Happy Burial'). There's usually some tape hiss or room vibe in the background, the sound of people walking around, instruments being picked up and put down, and an outdoor feel for very much of it. It's what I think of as the Jewelled Antler sound, one that has largely faded as the more pop-orientated projects of theirs (Skygreen Leopards, the Lovebirds) have become more serious, but one that I have a soft spot for because these are incredibly beautiful records to lose oneself in. The jams are obviously jamming, but when you listen to a track like 'Asmodeus', where different stringed instruments are plucked and bowed, the interplay is tentative and egoless, building up a common sculpture that is calming but not simple. Over in the UK at the same time, the Vibracathedral Orchestra was making a real clatter, similar in many ways (harmonic overtones, no central riff or show of musicianship, a sense of wonder) but still somewhat more attenuated towards a common pulse. The Franciscan Hobbies reject the easy groove and elevate the texture to the forefront. The result is lovely, and welcoming.

Flying Saucer Attack - 'Further' (Drag City)

Right about now feels like the time that Dave Pearce's music is due for a comeback, not that he ever went away, or became unfashionable. He just became less prolific, and seems a million miles away from any sort of music scene politics these days, still making music how he wants and releasing it now and then (the last being the Instrumentals 2015 record which I have not heard yet). I remember reading about Flying Saucer Attack in zines and other pre-Internet media in the early 90s; reading one particular publication, the name of which I can't remember, it seemed (to me) that FSA were aggressive sci-fi space-rock, as they were reviewed alongside more punk-orientated material. My teenage mind couldn't handle that type of diversity yet, because when I finally got around to hearing them (these were the days where one had to struggle to actually hear the things one read about, especially on a high schoolers budget) I was disappointed; it sounded too abstract, too empty to me. Of course that changed later on, once I started to investigate minimalism and drone, and to make my own music which wasn't a million miles away form this sound. Further is probably now the record of theirs I appreciate the most, as it feels like the best balance between all of FSA's various tendencies (folk song vs drone piece, harmony vs dissonance, lo-fi vs hi-fi). Owning it on CD gives it a glassy shimmer, and on a track like 'For Silence', which moves between all of these tendencies, I can only imagine how it must sound coming from vinyl's dynamic range. Acoustic guitars are dominant, and there's quite a lot of arpeggiated picking, making this more obviously folk-based than I was ready for as a teenager. Listening now, I can really hear the saturation in British traditional music, even if 'To The Shore' sounds more like Labradford than Shirley Collins. This reinvention of British folk form was something else totally lost on me not just as a youngster, but later when I discovered and really fell in love with FSA; it's only now that I really feel this is truly the next step in a lineage. Rachel from (the wonderful) Movietone was still a core part of the band here and her voice on 'Still Point' creates a spooky ambience that most directly recalls the strong tonality of the British female voice; that the song is drenched in delay and reverb doesn't inhibit this comparison, but if anything amplifies it. This is music that can be taken in peripherally, as a semi-ambient bouquet of suggestions, or full-on direct into the centre of one's skull. 'In the Light of Time' and 'She is the Daylight' function perhaps as the two anchors of this record, both built around Pearce's earnest voice, over delayed arpeggios, the mildest percussive elements (just tapping the guitar body, I think) and then the bright light tones that drift overtop, like the album artwork rendered into sound. This music has aged very, very well, and the close connection I feel to my physical body when listening to it separates it from that which is based in trends or the cultural context of the time. It's easy to lose oneself in this record, and somehow it feels short even though it's 'proper album length'. 

Fathmount - '6-string Renderings' (New American Folk Hero)

I still have a CD player! It's just that, see, I moved, and when I got to my new place my CD collection sat in boxes in the closet for a few months until I finally constructed some sort of shelf for them. And now they sit here again, but are flanked by a bunch of things in front of the shelves, which is the nice bonus that I don't have to look at them (cause who wants to look at CD spines in 2015, amirite?) but also means I often forget I have them, and thus this Elbow Cinderblock Glass Mastered Constructor Bags universe I've been chipping away at over the years gets neglected. Picking up where we left off, we being me of course, I/us find this jewelcased CDr by Fathmount, who is apparently someone named Wilson Lee. I found this out with Google, see, which has little else to say about Fathmount. But the title give you a hint of what's inside; it's electroacoustic improvisation, built around hammered string, and recorded in a close-mic'd manner for some high spritzy parts and in an ambient room vibe for the deep lows and low-mids. The five tracks all have names like 'Rendering acoustics' and 'Rendering Feedbacks', and the tendency is towards the building of a personal soundworld rather than any flashy showoff guitar techniques or clever editing. 'Rendering Acoustics' has very irritating interruptions in the vibe, some cheap DOD-fuzz, and a plodding monotony that, despite the language I used in this very sentence, is pretty great. 'Rendering Feedbacks' is a dense wall of electroacoustic buzz, with some screaming electronics (or, I guess, feedbacks) gesturing towards an overcast night sky. It's a bit of Birchville Cat Hostel. 'Rendering Pitches' has a staticky assonance around its various tones, and then 'Rendering Layers' comes crashing in like a teenage fuzz guitar symphony - it's a series of power chords played with 4-track line-in majesty, and it could be a demo from the grunge years, eventually attaining a buildup of overtones and making it resemble a minimalist composition. The closer, 'Render harmonics', is pretty much what it says; it's not completely clear what the difference is between 'rendering' music and simply 'playing' it, but the overintellectualisation of Fathmount really ends there. The harmonics are nice and irregularly spaced, making this feel akin to a pastoral, environmental experience as opposed to some rigid, mathematical exercise. Most of the pieces on this disc outstay their welcome, and there was such a glut of string-based electroacoustic drone people from this time people that it's hard to make this really stand out. But it's relatively controlled, and makes nice work with the amateurish home-recording tools that were so commonplace.