Dragibus - 'Tutti Frutti' (Autobus)

I think this is the only recording from the 'children's music' genre, though Dragibus are a pretty demented form of music for children. Three French people, one dressed as a penguin, doing broken-sounding pop songs for kids - why do I have this? I think I met one of these people once, and was enamoured at the fact they travelled to schools and did Sun City Girls covers for kids. I remember there being such a cover on this CD, but I must have imagined it. But we do get Moondog's 'Pygmy Pig' and if H'Art Songs weren't for children what would be? It's a bit hard to get through this disc in one sitting though the vocals are bright, the arrangements quirky, and odd sounds pop in whenever it threatens to get monotonous. At times the singing sounds like Shonen Knife doing 60s ye-ye covers, but that sounds like a derogatory comparison and I don't mean it that way at all. This may be one of those bands that is more fun to be in than to listen to, but the choice of material is decent (it's about half originals and half covers from what I can tell, and has any other band ever presented a Television Personalities song to schools of French youngsters before?) and I am reminded of that recent Portlandia sketch about children's bands (which was funny!).  If I had kids of my own (and I don't, too busy listening to records!) I'd school them on this, for sure. You're never too young to start speaking French, right? 

Cerberus Shoal - 'Chaiming the Knoblessone' (North East Indie)

Here we take a step from the realm of post-rock into the outer spheres of whatthefuck. Chaming the Knoblessone is 7 tracks in almost 80 minutes, in two suites of 3 songs with 'A Paranoid Home Companion' as the self-styled intermission. This is five years past Homb and we can hear that the band has clearly been immersed in Beefheart, the Residents, bad sci-fi and probably some primitive musics as well. The instrumentation isn't strikingly different - there's still a hi-fi studio rock basis to everything, though we get a bit more radios, static and electronics than before. Musically it's still largely centered around guitars, drums, and breathy-windy things (in which I include the accordion which drives 'Mrs. Shakespeare Torso'). The guitars are more trebly though; the voices escape the trappings of chanting by getting into weird, contorted/affected sillyness, and there's a huge prog construction to everything (these are long, long songs). Vocally, though, there's just way more of them - I'd guess all band members contribute voices, and there's a heavy emphasis on narration (particularly 'Companion' and 'Story #12 from the Invisible Mountain Archive'). The opening cut 'Apatrides' sets the tone, with Ralph/Residents-style vocal layers over the bending guitars and deconstructed rhythms. The flowing spiritual earth mother vibe almost seems like a joke here, and there's lots of elements of humour. 'Paranoid Home Companion' is certainly the obvious place to look for yuks, though I actually found it easiest to tune out this long conversation with an electronic/robotic voice (though I liked the gameshow-style interlocutor). 'Story #12' talks about assholes and poop, which definitely undercuts the feeling that Cerberus Shoal might take themselves too seriously, but the affect is just so hard to figure out. What are they trying to do? The only real comparison I can make is 'Billy the Mountain' by Zappa and the Mothers, though I don't know why I have to compare it to anything. 'Ouch: Sinti, Roma, Zigeuner; The Names of Gypsy' is based around a call and response 'Ouch!' thing, though it does build up into quite a maelstrom by the end. I guess 'The Names of Gypsy' is the second half, a minor key dirge that, along with 'Sole of Foot of Man', is the most traditional songwriting here (which looks ahead to Big Blood, Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin's next band). 'Scaly Beast vs Toy Piano', the 12 minute closer, has lots of said piano which I really like, and then the same array of manic language insanity that starts to feel commonplace by this point in the disc. The toy sound is great though and by the end there's a real sense of everybody pulling apart from everybody else as it lumbers along that makes it one of the more rewarding moments on Chaiming (if you are able to tune out the voices). This is one example of a CD digipak really being a beautiful object in its own - though of course I would prefer Kinsella and Karl Greenwald's art in a large double LP format. There's a foldout poster with more words and watercolours (if you haven't had enough language after 80 minutes) and it's a lovely vision, even if it's mostly esoteric and unintelligible. The use of a nice recording studio ensures a thick sheen on every minute of these Cerberus Shoal records, which makes it all feel even more strange and artificial. (As if the robot voice isn't enough). It's funny how a predominantly acoustic-based artist (that accentuates their music with lots of small miniature instruments, a la Art Ensemble of Chicago) still manages to feel digital. Scott Colburn had a hand in this (and even played some guitar), so you get that level of professionalism, and no trace of raggedness. Some of the dynamic rushes are quite trance-inducing, even if they are buried behind a rock song (or a talking robot). I'm sure I could spend hours and hours digging into the ideas on here and probably find a well-constructed narrative about the dissolution of humanity, straight outta Phil K Dick. But this is Cerberus Shoal, a band who if I had to describe in one word it would be 'confounding' (sorry, you didn't get 'eclectic', guys and gals).

Pierre Bastien - 'Mecanoid' (Rephlex)

Bastien's got some major cred (I believe he plays on Berrocal's Paralleles which we'll get to, shortly) and here in 2001 he's built robots to jam with him. Perhaps he's so difficult to work with that he's driven away all human collaborators? (A feeling I can certainly understand). Well if you imagine this as a French post-prog audio Mystery Science Theater 3000 then you'll get the picture, except maybe Joel and his robots are all dressed up in lounge singer gear. The clicks and thumps played by the robots are regularly spaced, of course, and despite the wooly organic textural elements to their sound, it's undeniably machine-created. Bastien himself plays trumpets and pianos and African instruments I've never heard of, so you can't really say it's all thump-thump repetition, but it does feel like extended lock grooves that somehow change and shift while staying locked, if that makes any sense (it doesn't). This CD has always interested me because it's so clean, almost shiny, sounding like some novelty cabaret-electronica experiment except with everything sucked out of the middle. I admit the novelty of robots is what sucked me in but there's something wonderfully retro about this, like the whole idea of voluntarily engaging with semi-obsolete technology. Not that robotics is obsolete at all but there's certainly more practical and easy ways to create loops and sounds like this today - so it's more like a willing desire to use these techniques, like choosing 8mm film in 2009 or whatever. Which I'm totally down with, but I must admit that about 75% through this disc I start to get somewhat bored. Despite different rhythms and instrumentation it starts to get pretty samey, so maybe ten tracks of robots playing low key dance vibes is 4 more than I need.