John Fahey - 'America' (Takoma/Fantasy)

At the deepest point of my Fahey interest (1999-2001, roughly) I was convinced beyond any doubt that America was his masterpiece - though I must say that I hadn't heard them all, and still haven't. This was due largely to a friend uncovering a vinyl copy; he dubbed it to a tape, and during a long afternoon drive across central Pennsylvania we listened to it while trying to stay awake and the synergy was magic - the long sweeping guitarscapes were a perfect complement to the dim light of I-80, with rolling hills in the distance that seemed to write their own elegies. I immediately ordered this CD, which strangely expanded and contracted the LP at the same time. A lot of additional material was added - the first nine tracks, in fact - but one of the LP tracks was shortened to fit the fascistic 75 minute runtime of a compact disc. But it's great in both formats; I can't, at this point, imagine America without the beautiful 11-minute 'Dalhart, Texas, 1967' or the incredible version of 'Amazing Grace' (the best these ears have ever heard, with piercing shards of guitar cutting through the nonbelievers like machine gun fire). And neither were on the original LP. When we finally get around to it, I'm taken back to that drive and the transformative power of music (or whatever cliché you prefer) is in full effect. America is built around two 15- minute tracks, 'Mark 1:15' and 'The Voice of the Turtle', and the longer formats are where Fahey shines the most (although the former, I believe, is the truncated one). These pieces take their time to build, and especially in the case of 'Voice of the Turtle', represent probably the fullest evidence of his guitar genius. The shorter tracks are also great though - 'Dvorak' is celebratory and when looking at the strange, primitive artwork ('The destruction of Takoma Park, Maryland') while listening to it, it feels spooky. This is no longer necessarily my favourite album of his - I would probably take the wistful longing of Days Have Gone By, or just decline to pick one - but it's a formidable entry into American music. The title seems to acknowledge this, and while it's easy to inject a whole lot of context into your work by titling it 'America' (I'm looking at you, Baudrillard), it's fitting for the self-made man he was. I'm always drawn to the way mid-century American artists dealt with space, to me one of the fundamental issues of American culture - and the long format improvicompositions here breathe in and exhale, like a William Carlos Williams poem. The title track itself (left off the original issue!) is perhaps the most impressionistic part of the album, with a resonant high-register introduction before the resounding, aggressive strides of the main theme kick in. It's easy to think of this as the whole 200-year history compressed into a 7 minute instrumental guitar piece and I'll succumb to that analysis. Though it's lacking any musique concrete experimentation or weirder elements, this is Fahey's magnum opus for sure, and it's been recently reissued in full on vinyl so I'll probably make the conversion soon - which is the first time it's ever all been together, even if only two minutes are missing here.

Double Leopards - 'Savage Summer Sun' (Hospital)

When we last left Double Leopards it was with Halve Maen; fast-forward a couple years and we get this digitised slice of two live performances, filling the CD's 73 minutes and being relentless in its deep, rumbling drones. Here, we can see the progression of the band as a collective unit, where four humans create an abstract sound-world. They weren't the first to do it, nor were they the last, but they hit on something unique and personal during the mid-00s which is commendable (despite spawning legions of imitators, which isn't their fault). The first track begins with a wall of low frequencies, during which we start to hear screaming, free-jazz styled noodling emerge over a slow, military-like rhythm. It's still subdued by the density that fills the midrange spectrum,  which gradually allows a razor-sharp counter-drone to fight against it. Movement is slow, and change almost imperceptible, but there's a brash charging forward felt here - I would even call it 'energy'. It's not an obvious melting of like-minded improvisers but rather distinct personalities, united in some goal, though of course the unconventional instrumentation (I am guessing lots of processed voice, homemade synthesisers  and keyboards) means this could all be the work of a single person.  And then the second track begins with a full-on assault, with layers suggesting water, metal, and ruptured velocity. It's anti-meditative drone music, yet horizontal enough to be based on some minimalist heritage. It's a live performance and the rough edges are present; some percussion comes and goes but resembles a fumbling in the rumbling; not a bad thing, and this instability presses against the endless cycles. And when it ends, it's the silence that is savage. Thus we bid Double Leopards farewell, though I swore I had more recordings by them -- whatever happened to my vinyl copy of A Hole is True?

DENT - 'Stimmung' (Magnetic)

I have already confessed my love for Camper Van Beethoven earlier in these annals, but we have yet to investigate the weird side projects that I also love. Don't worry, we'll have our dalliance with Monks of Doom eventually, and just a warning - Meridian is gonna get the Golden Cinderblock Award. But what about the lesser-known offshoots? Sadly, I don't have any Hieronymous Firebrain records apart from some old dubbed tapes, but shit, what I wouldn't give to hear 'Waning Crescent Love Spit' right now! (Thanks, Bandcamp, for making this possible). DENT is J. Segel and V. Krummenacher, and a cadre of friends, all under silly pseudonyms like 'Stands-Naked-In-Moonlight' and 'MC Salmon'. DENT is where these guys let loose and make weird, improvisatory music with an experimental edge, except it's not that wild -- there's an organic, instrumental quality to almost everything here. The vocals are largely extemporized and when the porny guitar leads (a tendency evident in later Monks of Doom records, for sure) take over, it's undercut by the babbling vocals and music-box overdubs ('April Fools' and the opening track 'Make Me 1 w/everything' are great examples of this). Stimmung, which has nothing to do with the Stockhausen work, as far as I can tell, was a strange record for me to listen to when I was 16. I enjoyed the songforms most of all - the subtle pop hooks, the almost-too-far excursions into dance and hip-hop forms, and most of all the mystique. My deep love of all things Camper Van Beethoven certainly helped, and the spirit of irreverence remains throughout this even if the ha-ha is absent. The epic jam here is 'Manchester Mystery House', a long techno-influenced maximalist overture, but my pick is 'Some Grey Clouds', an eerie, discordant experiment that lets the space take over - a sea of isolated vocal snippets and tentative string plucks, with a tidal ebb and flow beneath. Sure, Stimmung is tossed-off, but after listening to it now for the first time in a decade, I'm enjoying it far more than I would have ever imagined. There's a tension between the more lyrical, Krummenacher-driven tunes ('Paris? New Mexico' is a wonderful psych-folk jam, reminding me a bit of CVB's 'Form Another Stone' from II & III) and the (I assume) Segel-drievn freakouts. There's an untitled bonus track, because everyone putting out their own CDs in the mid-90s was obsessed with this possibility, and it's the most straight-ahead folksong imaginable (even against 'Won't You', which has a Holy Modal Rounders-style warp to it), a rant about then-California governor Pete Wilson. Dated as it may be now, it's a voice of countercultural protest that needed to go somewhere, though I understand why they left it off the track listing. At just over an hour, Stimmung slightly wears out its welcome, but it's interesting to wonder why these musicians feel so free here and not as free on their other Magnetic-label projects. It's not like the goof quotient is shocking or uncommercial; but then something makes this out of step with indie music of 1995, indeed. 

The Dead C - "Trapdoor Fucking Exit' (Siltbreeze)

When Michael Morley groans 'Hell has come, hell has come' in 'Power' (which appears on this disc twice, in original and extra-crispy form) he makes a convincing argument. Trapdoor Fucking Exit actually begins with 'Heaven', then leads (descends?) into 'Hell is Now Love', a slightly more spacious, nervous version of 'Love'. This is a odds-and-sods semi-album built around the 'Helen Said This' 12", which we already addressed in the Underbite blog. But that's a hell of a centrepiece, even if it's split up and fragmented with weird sexual stompers like 'Bone' and and the non-Latin version of 'Bury' wrapped around them. The whole disc clocks in at 69 minutes, and maybe this is the best introduction to the Dead C, though far from their "best" album. There's some true classics here, such as the aforementioned 'Power', another take on 'Sky', and the "acoustico" triptych at the end of  'Power', 'Bone' and 'Mighty', where the Dead C show off how beautiful their banshee squeals can sound in an acoustic setting. (Though these acoustic guitars sound like they are coursing with electricity, and the absence of Robbie Yeats is really felt.) It's a trick they only employ this one time and it's great they don't overuse it (the acoustic-y stuff on the DR503 era not counting). 'Bury (Refutatio Omnium Haeresium)' remains as epic as the first time we listened to it, particularly when it ascends to a beauteous plateau at the end. There's a lot of details here across the length of this disc. 'Mighty' ends with a playful call and response guitar jam, with guest/4th member Chris Heazlewood (who plays on about half of these tracks). 'Helen' retains it's grandeur even in the coarse, digital form of the compact disc; the crawling ebb and flow at the end, arpeggiated and shimmery, remains one of the Dead C's finest moments. This sense of horizontal motion, also present in 'Krossed' (though under duress there) is something I love about open-form music. The ambience that the band has at this point, which stays uniform throughout this whole disc even though the sessions were recorded at different times in 1989/1990. Which I guess means that this should have come before Harsh 70s Reality, though I'm pretty sure it was released after. Maybe this is an error in my chronology, in which case, whoops, sorry.

Circulatory System (Cloud Recordings)

It's been a decade since this CD came out, which makes the Olivia Tremor Control feel like eons ago. And while I was utterly buried in Olivia-worship around 1999, by 2001 this was more of a surprise than anything. The Olivias allegedly split due to Bill Doss/Will Hart tension, so Circulatory System became Will's showcase featuring most of the rest of the band. Practically this meant a more cohesive unit, with less overt Lennon/McCartney gestures; aesthetically this also meant a slightly darker, more introspective record that lacks the balance of, say, Black Foliage. The Olivia dreams - the unrealised motion pictures, the tape hiss ambience of the Black Swan Network - all get pulled back so the Circulatory System can focus on the album itself. This is an hour long and it came out relatively quickly after the dissolution of OTC, so you know Hart had a lot of these songs in the bag. I particularly remember seeing the Olivias play 'Inside Blasts' the last time I saw them and being somewhat blown away by it. Interestingly enough, it took 8 years for the followup record, Signal Morning, which I still haven't heard. The lo-fi recording technique that was so charming on Dusk at Cubist Castle is probably my biggest complaint with Circulatory System. It's almost like they had mastered their sound by then, and therefore weren't experimenting as much with recording techniques. Everything sounds fine, but it all sorta sounds the same. This might also be somewhat due to Hart's songwriting, which favours the subtle shifts more than the bombastic pop uppercuts. This record was lovingly assembled and the details are everywhere. There's tiny clarinet peeps, piano runs, accordions and organs to flesh out the midrange - it doesn't feel like guitar-driven pop music at all. Eric Harris (the main drummer) has a light jazzy style and it rolls along without any of the songs imploding under their own density. When they turn on the drone, like with the raga-like 'A Peek', it's quite impressive. But why I loved the two Olivia Tremor Control records is that they had these long, deranged side threes - 'Green Typewriters', for example - where they did pile on all of the layers and noise they held back from the other songs. The density is simultaneously the best and worst thing about Circulatory System. It's a great record, surely, and I always considered Hart far more interesting of a songwriter than Doss, but to go back to the Lennon/McCartney parallel, there's a reason you have two songwriters. It's not just balance but it's perspective; Circulatory System is far more of an introspective record. While neither songwriter will win prizes for their lyrics, Hart's are certainly more interpretive. Songs like 'Illusion' retain that simple elegance and acoustic strum that I loved about 'Marking Time'. And that's why I feel like a dick by ultimately finding something slightly disappointing about Circulatory System (though I don't think I realised this disappointment until, possibly, right now). What would have happened if this was the first band, and they later joined forces to create Olivia Tremor Control? I can't help but constantly draw these comparisons because the teenage me loved the ambition and over-the-top artifice of OTC, and that's definitely missing. Of course, you'll notice that here, like many times in these pages, my comments about the music are based far more on me -- on my feelings at the time this music impacted me -- than the music itself. But I'm afraid that's part of what music is, and to argue otherwise would silly. It will be a few years before I get to the Os, but I've made my feelings about the Olivia Tremor Control clear here. To discover a band, at 16, that brought together a seemingly impossible merging of experimentation with killer pop songs, was life-changing; the fact that they looked poised to take over the world with their rampant ideas and ambition made it even better. Of course this dovetailed with my own discovery of musique concrete, minimalism, experimental synthesisers and lo-fi recording techniques, so it felt at times more like a partnership in evolution than just a band I loved. And getting to meet and know the guys was great too ... so of course in my twenties, Circulatory System can't offer that same magic, even if now I listen to it and recognise a work of total genius. Remember, I too wanted to take over the world and start bands that would be equal, if not surpass, their ambition. By 2001 I think the Circulatory System was just focused on making an awesome record, which they did, and my own transparent dreams had died (aka, reality set in). So it's taken me this long to realise that I'm associating Circulatory System with that narrowing of my eyes; but I don't hold it responsible.

Cerberus Shoal - 'Bastion of Itchy Preeves' (North East Indie)

With excesses in check, this is the Cerberus Shoal record I was waiting for, quite literally for years. The live band that I saw in 2000 or 2001 was a really mystical, strange creation that somehow touched on things antiquated and historic, yet was obviously innovative and forward thinking. And while this was released after Chaiming, they started recording it in 2001 and just took ages to finish it. Bastion of Itchy Preeves is another 70+ minute disc, but this time it's split over ten songs. There's a strong reliance on xylophones or steel drums, making tracks like 'Bogart the Change' resemble a mutant Talking Heads. Flutes and recorders are so integrated into their sound at this point that it's barely noticeable - just part of that whole Cerberus Shoal thing, y'know? And vocally, there's some beautiful, haunting harmonies - the chant of 'Baby Gal' with it's sharply over-enunciated inbreaths is pure Edward Gorey. The songs tend to open up more, and they aren't afraid to build up thick drones and occasionally erupt, but there's less of a need to have thunderous post-rock structures behind everything. And the humour is far more restrained which can be a good or a bad thing depending on your personal take. 'Grandsire' opens things up with a thick rolling blanket of pure tonal bliss, a strong post-Homb step towards melodic convergence. There's sample voices, processed through damaged electronics, but only as icing on the cake - the core of all of these songs is the notes, rhythms and voices generated by very human hands. I think my enjoyment of Itchy Preeves is somehow set by the artwork, a monochromatic modification of a TV schedule -- it conveys something antediluvian, but clearly contemporary - a true hodgepodge of sensory juxtaposition which is probably the best way to describe Cerberus Shoal. But I go into this disc with a certain mentality that's much more austere than the technicolour Chaiming. I mean, there's still elements of Chaiming's goofy, art-rock cocktail here. It's most notable on 'Tekel Upharsin', I think. That track builds up around around a repetitive, circular bassline, with notes slipping around on their intonation in a way that somehow reminds me of uber-primitive synth work. Over this various ethnic stringed instruments pluck out a melody, along with accordion and violin, and then group singing that's like a mentally insane village party, but without any trace of Wicker Man-style tones. It feels a bit like being stuck in a chicken coop at parts. A lot of Itchy Preeves falls into neo-prog territory, though the band is far more focused on textural exploration than displaying chops or composing complex song structures. The closing track, 'A Head No Bigger Than a Man's Cloud', takes on a Cocteau-like atmosphere with it's undecipherable, breathy vocals, and a twee music box dances overtop of the things. It's almost distracting from the gentle tide that lies underneath, making this a lovely finale.

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).

Camberwell Now - 'All's Well' (ReR)

Camberwell Now, what a band, what a moment in music, but what little splash they made! This CD, long sought-after by yours truly before it was finally reissued, compiles everything they recorded during their brief (1984-1986) existence. Now, here's a bias to lay up-front: I'm a massive This Heat fan, and I look to Charles Hayward as a magical musical force that did a lot for my own artistic and critical development. This Heat/Camberwell Now brought together a lot of concerns for me at just the right time in my life (my early 20's!). In the musical arena, they brought together ruthless sound experimentation with mindblowing musical chops - the balance is always perfect, as for every dazzling Hayward drum run comes some incredible use of musique concrete techniques. And lyrically, Hayward showed me that you can bridge fiery, political expression with poetry and the personal - I'd say that I now follow the "everything is political" philosophy, which is a great deal inspired by This Heat. So Camberwell Now was the somewhat more obscure followup band, whose lone LP The Ghost Trade I luckily scored from eBay about ten years ago, but whose other records remained unobtainable. The Meridian EP, which comprises the first 4 tracks of All's Well, is an open, tuneful Camberwell Now, and maybe the furthest removed from This Heat's post-punk caterwauls. The nautical theme is overabundant and years before all those midwestern indie rock bands started writing songs about boats, it's funny to hear Charles Hayward's approach. The trio format of This Heat, with Stephen Rickard on the tapes, is retained; what's different is that there's a more central rhythm, yet less rock structure here. It seems to emanate more directly from the intelligent 70s prog scene that Hayward came out of, but I think more of Rock Bottom than the Quiet Sun LP. Coming in the midst of Thatcherism, these songs about decaying empire and the exploitation of natural resources seem prescient, if not overtly obvious. A bit of digging under the surface is good, and the way these rhythms emerge it feels like waves, gently rocking. The instrumental 'Resplash' is where we get Camberwell Now starting to really amp things up. It gets a bit 'S.P.Q.R' at points, but puts on the brakes at just the right moments, building up massive caches of tension. It's the first really astounding track in a disc that's full of them, and it's like rock music has taken a major step forward. A bonus track, 'Daddy Needs a Throne', is inserted after Meridian, before Ghost Trade and clearly coming from the same sessions. This is when we start to really feel the manic, bass-driven rock of Camberwell Now's middle period. The song, in only 3 and a half minutes, somehow manages to address the difficulty of maintaining a working class family structure, while exploding in a cacophony of furious voices and electricity. But it's almost a teaser for 'Working Nights,' the leadoff cut from The Ghost Trade, which I'm glad to have on CD because my vinyl copy is practically worn through. This is the definitive Camberwell Now song, which is crazy because the first time I heard it I thought it reminded me of New Order! There is something lively and dancey here that This Heat never had, but it's so fucking intense and fast and magical and the bassline is like a choker necklace on your brain. I don't even know what else to stay here, but I know the LP will get listened to soon on Vinyl Underbite, so I'll save it for there. 'Sitcom' follows , assessing the state of progress in mid 80's Britain, and then the beautiful, understated 'Wheat Futures' closes out side 1. Except this is a CD, so we don't have to flip anything! 'Wheat Futures' is one of those songs where Hayward is singing/droning/intoning deeply and passionately, accompanied at first by an electric erhu and some keyboards, and it slowly builds to a slow series of musical thoughts, with a repetitive autoharp line to centre it. This is still somehow punk rock to me, but it's also folk and experimental and anything and everything. Hayward probably never plays drums as minimally as at the end of 'Wheat Futures', yet it's still folding in on itself in rhythmic complexity. 'Speculative Fiction', with it's cut-up vocalisings and electro-beat, at first sounds like the great sellout, but is actually an upright stride towards Valhalla. While still frantic, it's slow enough to breathe, with lots of studio/Rickard tricks, such as layers of bells and whistles, echoing drum fills, and nooks and crannies jumping out at all points. By the end it's a swirling maelstrom of the original electroclash hook and Haywards layered Ya-ya-yas. And then 'Ghost Lantern', whose lyrics aren't printed in the booklet for some reason yet this track continues The Ghost Trade's reliance on Trefor Goronwy's manic basslines and frantic guitar chops, with Hayward's crisp yet explosive drumming. And then 'The Ghost Trade', the 12 minute behemoth that ends the album of the same name. The first four minutes are a midtempo song, an indictment of global capitalism, post-Fordism and conspicous consumption. And then a slow xylophone line emerges from the keyboard smog and a plodding, instrumental coda takes us to the end. It's as beautiful as everything else here, which is to say it's also tense and strange and unusual. And then, the Greenfingers 12" to close out the disc! The title track is an explosive meditation on rural malaise, with punchy saxophones and a rock-solid beat that makes me violently tap my foot off the bottom of my desk when I listen to it. It feels a bit more fruity than what came before, perhaps a feeling carried on in 'Mystery of the Fence'. At this point, the band has expanded to a four-piece, with Maria Lamburn adding the sax, piccolo and viola. The textures are slightly more plastic, but it's 1986 after all - it's got that digital sheen on things, despite Lamburn's organic grounding. Goronwy's own tune, "Know How" comes next, which is a real 180 turn. His earnest, bright voice sounds like he should be in Tears for Fears, and the simple, minimal lyrics are much more commercially rooted than Hayward's use of language. There's a nice pulse behind everything, and I've come to really like this song over time. It's a weird sort of ending for the Camberwell Now, though I guess that would actually be the 35 second 'Element Unknown' which actually ends the disc. I realise this has been one of the longer and more passionate entries in the Constructor Bags to date, but I guess that's why I love music - because it gets me excited, inspired and totally fuckin' pumped! The booklet includes lyrics and a rather technical description of the tape switchboard, written by Rickard. I know that this is all that there is, but I still can't help myself from pining for some more deluxe edition (vinyl!) in the future.

Peter Brötzmann/Die Like a Dog Quartet - 'Little Birds Have Fast Harts No. 1' (FMP)

This might speak more to my current state of free jazz enjoyment in 2010 but my favourite aspect of this Die Like A Dog marathon (67 minutes!) is the presence of one Toshinori Kondo, a trumpeter who quite frequently employs digital effects on his sound. What this does is provide a balance to the meat n' fire blowing of Brötzmann and the great, yet earthy rhythm section of William Parker and Hamid Drake. The first track is 43 minutes long and it started with Brötzmann exuberantly and/or aggressively bleating away before the band bursts in. Over the course of the whole movement it's hard to really focus as a casual listener, but I guess you aren't supposed to listen to this stuff casually. Kondo's extended vamps are certainly what stands out, being saturated in delay and flange, yet still fleeting and light. It's not like the affected trumpet sounds of Spaceheads, but used more as an accent. Sometimes he flares up and the processing distorts a bit and it has the feeling of sunlight on a freshly Windexed pane, with a minute glimpse of a rainbow refraction. Now, this band is a tribute to Albert Ayler, certainly not the first but there's nothing wrong with that. Ayler's influence on Brötzmann is profound, in terms of wide vibrato and emotive soul-baring thrusting. Kondo works as the Don Ayler, I guess. There aren't any identifiable Albert licks here, but 'Part 2' begins with the sort of melodic wandering that you'd hear in Ayler's Michael Sampson band era, though it quickly erupts into a ball of free not unlike what track 1 sounded like. This is an incredibly long time to spend in a fairly similar musical mode. The band plays, everyone is free, and at points there are solos. It's free jazz as it was in 1997, which is to say an awesome thing to behold and not bad to listen to either. Hamid Drake is an amazing master of rhythm but almost an odd choice for an Ayler-inspired band, as his drumming is much more centered than Sunny Murray (who I would think of as the 'definitive' Albert Ayler drummer, if there is such a thing). He's played with Parker for so long that they have a really natural interaction, and Parker's wild thudding provides a thundering belly over which Drake can dance. When I saw Die Like a Dog live, which I'm guessing was a few years after this, Kondo was gone and Roy Campbell was in his place. I was disappointed on finding this out, though Campbell proved to be a much more emotional player, and his passion was an adequate substitute for Kondo's trickery. The furious nature of the band means that and more deep listening elecroacoustic jazz experimentation is gonna get lost in the shuffle. Don't get me wrong, things do slow down at times -- just not for long. The second piece is a bit more subdued than the first, with a very sparse improvised melodic bit that does have some processed noteless blowing from Kondo, and an odd phasing effect - but it's too little too late. Kondo is a fascinating musician, but I can't stop thinking this isn't the right venue for him. Though Albert Ayler would certianly have been curious to explore electronic experimentation had he lived - I am convinced of that, for whatever reason. The primitive and folky aspects of Ayler's music, which emerge for me more and more as the reason, are probably better tributed in the Art Ensemble's 'Lebert Aaly', or from a tribute group not yet formed. I realise I've always filed this under Brötzmann, following the artist name on the spine, rather than the front of the CD which would put this under 'D'. It also says 'Composed by Peter Brötzmann' which sounds like a bit of credit-claiming cause if this isn't majorly group improvised, then I dunno what is.

Boards of Canada - 'Music Has the Right to Children' (Matador/Warp/Skam)

I could go on and on about this CD but everyone else already has, so I'll give you my personal take. It's always something special when there is some newly mined "genre" that is popular and along comes somebody who just totally melts everything else around it. This record did that, and I can compared it maybe to what This Heat did to the post-punk field with Deceit or maybe even Dylan in some way. In this case, the genre was the whole 'IDM' thing, which never clicked with me (despite all of the clicks in it). But Music Has the Right to Children sure resonated with me back in '98 or whenever this came out. Perhaps that's because it came, for me, at a time when I was looking to expand my horizons a bit, and I was no longer afraid of the world of electronica. It sure helps that it sounds like all of the music I listened to anyway back then, except recorded better and with electronic beats. I still find some of the more overtly dancey beats, particularly the ones at the beginning of the album like on 'Telephasic Workshop', a bit harder to digest. What I really love is what I call that 'classic' Boards of Canada sound - the way a steady, midtempo rhythm will just come in like the sun rising over a mountaintop ('Aquarius', perhaps). But their perfectionism is totally welcome - it touched on the guitar-futurism I admired about My Bloody Valentine, embraced the same warm aesthetics that I found to be missing from just about everything else in their genre, and most importantly (in retrospect) a real style of mythmaking that magnifies the artistry of the music. I mean, let's look at the cover - a beautifully monochromatic image, simultaneously warm and cool, and weathered just as the music is. Faces blurred out; creepy yes, but moreso I'd say 'enigmatic'. And there's so many little details in the way the songs will change direction - one channel will get more distant, an electric piano note will be able to ring out longer - it's obsessive sound creation for sure. There's actually quite a lot of melodic noodling here ('Turquoise Hexagon Sun') though maybe 'noodling' is the wrong word for these guys. When voices are sampled, which they are quite a lot here, it's so tasteful you barely even notice. Geogaddi didn't do it for me but I used to work with a dude who swore by it, and to be fair there was no way it could have slayed me as much as this record did. It simultaneously opened up a door to a whole soundworld, and then closed said door by being so satisfying I had little interest in the other giants of their peer group. Though I loved Campfire Headphase more than most, so I can see myself falling in love with Geogaddi one belated day. I think Boards of Canada are best experienced on vinyl, and probably with headphones; therefore it's somewhat paradoxical that I'm listening to them on CD through bookshelf speakers. I can draw a straight line between Terry Riley, AR Kane, most of the early Kranky records roster, and this. But that's confining; they wiggle around and draw many retro-cultural images that I didn't even fully understand until I lived in Scotland myself.

Black Swan Network - 'The Late Music volume 1' (Camera Obscura)

For those of us who loved the turn of the Millenium because the Olivia Tremor Control serenaded us through some of the highest and lowest points, the Black Swan Network recordings exist as a weird afterthought. Appreciated at the time, yes, but a bit forgotten. I remember the "split" with OTC being the high point, but since the membership is essentially identical it's just a choice in styles. And listening to The Late Music volume 1, Camera Obscura's 61-minute release of OTC sound experiments, I'm left feeling both enamored by the sound collage construction and a bit surprised at how amateurish it sounds. You can hear the residue of cheap delay/reverb boxes and layers of 4-track narcolepsy. Clarinets, strings and horns poke little jabs into the soundsoup but rarely get the chance to scream. Track 4 is a cello improvisation saturated with tape manipulations and other electronic effects, and it stands out as the high point - a bit of LAFMS-styled fuckery. Ten years ago (which is probably the last time I listened to this) I was struck by how intense and focused it was - two qualities I don't hear at all now. A quick assessment would be that it sounds like all of the parts of the Olivias records that aren't the pop songs but that isn't completely true because there's an economy to those interludes that isn't as constraining when they have an hour to mix it up. Despite the low-budget feel, the layered tape hiss and pause button edits are a beautiful aesthetic that stuck with me for all of this time. The more raging, thick sections aren't what I like; it's more the hints, the distant echoing bells and smoggy cloud formations that paint the best images. Late night music? Maybe that's the intention, or maybe 'late' means 'dead' as in 'the late Marlon Brando' but I stuck this on first thing in the morning and found it still had some ability to transport me.

Jean-Jacques Birgé / Francis Gorgé / Shiroc - 'défense de' (Mio)

Bring on the space juice! This intensely visionary work was recorded in 1975 and it resembles little else in the sound universe. You can hear some hints of similarity, particularly with other French weirdness like Berrocal's early records, and some jammy synth jazz, but this is some of the weirdest shit you'll find this side of Sun Ra. There's a sense of free jazz in how's it played, and some Krautlike echo, but I'm really not doing it justice by comparing it to antecedents. Shiroc is the drummer and his style is wonderfully fluid, with long runs that dance all over the stereo field like a wild buffalo. I write all this in reference to the original album (tracks 1-4) and the bonus tracks that take this CD to the remainder of its 75 minutes. The second disc included here is not under review, because it is a DVD and thus outside of the scope of this blog. Also, I'm copping out on trying to tackle the insane amount of content packed into the DVD - in addition to Birgé's film La Nuit du Phoque (which, if I remember correctly, has oodles of male nudity in it), there are over six hours of audio material comprising every session that Birgé and Gorgé ever played together. So, this is a hell of a bargain and a pretty "essential" component of a record collection that looks NWW-listward for its cornerstones (though, I hate when people say any sound recording is 'essential' since you don't need it to live and breathe). But the album itself is what created the legend around this music, if you can call anything that a microscopic community of music fans cared about "legendary". I'm sure the original vinyl goes for shitloads now so thanks to Mio for making it available again - and while I don't like CDs, this is a nicer way to have it than a MutantSounds .rar file. The breaths here are gorgeous though - sometimes pure sound exploration and sometimes focused on the act of human beings interacting with each other. This is definitely from the school of "get some studio time and take in as many instruments as possible", but back when this was a novel idea and there was really something to say through the process. There are a million sound-generating devices at play but it doesn't sound spoiled. There are two other guys who play here, one of whom was later involved in Urban Sax, and they seem to thicken things without overloading anything. French outsider music, which I often call "prog" because, even if it sounds nothing like Crimson, is definitely progressive -- it has a sense of time that is uniquely its own. I don't understand completely what makes something sound French vs. Italian vs. German vs. British - I wonder how much these constructs are cultural. Would I say the same thing about this if I took a blind taste test? I think I would, at least with material from the great decade of the 1970s; with today's melting pots I don't know that I'd be up to the challenge. Here I guess I'd probably see a connection to art brut, and all that stuff, but maybe that's just my limited knowledge of 20th century art movements creeping into my sense of perception. Anyway, I can't say much else here besides: get this.

Biota - 'Half a True Day' (Recommended)

It's been about a month away, which we can blame on travel + the yuletide season -- but also on the sheer difficulty of reviewing yet another Biota album. This one is only 69 minutes long, but it's also pretty much instrumental, eliminating those beautiful pop songs that occasionally slice through the layers. I'll reiterate that I do like Biota, enough to own three really long CDs despite a "I hate CDs" philosophy; but maybe I have to question my sanity sometimes. This is the most recent, coming out in 2008 I think. The standard tropes are there -- intense studio processing, zany effects, and a melting pot of melodic structures. But this time, the overly affected percussion is gone - we (mostly) hear a drum kit as a drum kit should sound. And drummer Larry Wilson actually has a pretty great style. It's scrappy, and start-stop, and it vibes well with the backwards-processed sounds. Half a True Day is a great title cause it feels like it takes half of a day to listen to it. There are a few moments of true alien beauty - 'Another Name' being one of them. These parts often conform to fairly traditional harmonic pleasure, in terms of instrumentation and atmosphere, but with something slightly off. The adventurous side is pretty impressive, and probably what drew me to Biota in the first place -- 'Silent Grove' gets into a real mudslide of animal skulls, abandoned duffle bags, and curving tunnels. After I got about halfway through this, I think I realised it was my favorite Biota release. I miss the songs, but the voices are still here and it feels more cohesive -- instead of intelligible lyrics, the vocals are part of the group sound, another instrument. Sure, without the obvious songs to break things up, Biota can be a bit more troublesome to take. This is a monolithic album, and I can't let myself sink into it enough to sense any development over the past decade. But it feels focused, which is something I wouldn't say about the other two. I think the CD format dares you to take one track and isolate it and listen to it alone a few times, but we all lack the patience to do this. There are parts where I get sick of the accordion or the xylophone, but there's also parts where it's both astoundingly chaotic and astoundingly controlled, and those instruments help to create the gel. And the artwork is a notch above the last two discs, though still very steeped in digital rendering and pastel pantones. Age and scenario probably means that these guys 'n gals have long-missed their chance for 15 minutes in the spotlight, but that's what make hidden pleasures so pleasureable.

Biota - 'Invisible Map' (Recommended)

The artwork to 2001's followup to Object Holder reminds me somewhat of playing an old 320x200 game like Doom or Castle Wolfenstein 3-D. The music, well, it's actually a great deal clearer than Object Holder's mess. The same elements are there - deconstructed folk melodies driven by acoustic guitar and accordion, sweet female vocals popping up now and then, and chaotic, effected percussion. But there's just a tad bit more space between these elements, allowing a bit of light to shine through. I still find this an almost unbearable listen to manage in one sitting: 37 tracks, 76 minutes. Yow. These guys n' gals sure make the most of the CD format. The booklet is thick too, with page after page of digital artwork. The lead vocalist has changed to Genevieve Heistek, though she sounds a lot like the last one, and there's still only about six tracks with lyrics. The folk melodies are amplified a bit but now you can hear the details much more. The chaos under the melody of 'Port' is spastic, yet constrained, and it has a nice sound of prog-blueballs. I usually get sick of accordion when I listen to Biota, but 'Landless' is mixtape-perfect: His Name is Alive dipped in a Gallic marinade and hung out to dry with a swarm of aggressive insects. It's unfortunately just a bit too short. And in the lengthy instrumental middle of this record (20 tracks, in fact) we get a lot of styles. 'Sleeping Car' is made up of difficult intervals, sounding cold, Eastern and oblique yet bouncy and fun. 'Snake Out' is practically ecstatic, though still with effected drumming and spazzy acoustic strums everywhere. When the accordion returns, its a bit disappointing, but I am listening to my second 70+ minute Biota CD in a row. There's some real neoclassicisms here, which have made me rethink my standard line on Biota. Because, I like this band - I own three of their CDs plus the Mnemonists stuff, and generally think they're somewhat underrecognised, particuarly since song-based deconstruction has gotten some steam lately. But I've always been slightly hesistant to fully commit to Biota, because I thought they were too eclectic. Yeah, check it - I mean, I have (I think) diverse taste in music, and I think it's great if you can merge influences from 20th century classical, folk music, prog rock, pop, etc. I used to think that Biota were merging too many sounds and this is why I never could really click with them - they sound more like an encylopedia than a group of musicians expressing themselves through art. But listening now, I realise that's not so much the case. What really hurts Biota is that I don't think they conceptualise a 'record' the same way that I do - as a standalone canvas that can be used for various forms of expression, etc. The rules and format of that canvas may be unfortunately predetermined through a variety of nasty precedents, such as 60s rock music, economics, etc. -- but it still exists. And this is a record - perhaps I would enjoy them live more. Biota, I think, sees the CD as being a 75-80 minute receptacle for their recordings and thus they dump everything they can on there, not really thinking about how the listening experience plays out on the other end. For example, there are some lovely, delicate moments in the middle of this album - spooky piano textures, breathing silences, creeping strings, etc. The problem is, I don't even notice them because we're talking about tracks that are somewhere in the mid-20's out of 37 short pieces. I think someone could probably craft an entire release around a few of these tracks; it's all presentation, you know? But Biota, they just shove them in there among all the chum and deconstructed pop jams, so the impact is somewhat lessened. I think if this was 2 35-minute albums I listened to separately, I would 'hear' the music much more than I do now, because around track 17 I just started to glaze over it. Even if I listened to 2 35-minute albums back to back, I think I would hear them better. Because it's presentation; it's the canvas that really matters but the frame is important too. So there is my beef and that also explains why I'm going to say little about the second half of this record, apart from the parts with singing which stand out, especially 'Words Disappear' which is awesome. Because I wasn't really listening, due to the above mentioned philosophical disagreement. And also, enough is enough with putting effects on the drums!

Biota - 'Object Holder' (RéR)

In the mid-90s, no one could hear your screams. The musical side of the (now relegated to art duty) Mnemonists created this dense 70 minute mess of a prog/avant-pop album -- at a time when the rest of us were busy listening to the Smoking Popes. But it's no more comprehensible to me in 2009. Biota have an eclectic sound but I can reduce it to two elements: accordion and delay-affected percussion. Everything else is perfectly nice, but if you wanna know what makes Biota sound like Biota (and not like, say, Animal Collective), its those two elements. The squeezebox makes everything sound like European busking music to me, and it's hard to believe these people were in the American southwest. There are explicitly folk parts, like 'Idea for a Wagon', but those are the moments that actually bore me a bit. Sorry guys, but I'm raised on liking my folk music to be as raw and gritty as possible, and there's just too many rack effects here. But effects are the name of the game, often building everything into an unintelligible chaos. The opening cut, 'Bumpreader', is about 9 minutes of everything you can get from the album, like an overhead view before zooming in for deeper inspection. There's confusing arrays of horns, acoustics, and studio fuckery to mix everything into a deep soup. This is a highly compositional approach to music, as strong melodies and chord changes are emphatic, though the presentation is somewhat obfuscated. But once Susanne Lewis starts singing, about seven tracks in with 'Reckoning falls', it takes a future-pop angle. While Biota have no problem recording their drums through chorus and delay, or recording their flügelhorn through shit-tons of reverb, they leave her voice coherently articulate. This works though - they understand the pop knife that has to cut through the sac of effects - and a strange beauty rings out on these songs. The downside is that I tend to privilege these pop tunes over the instrumental jams, which make up most of the disc. The lyrics are abstract yet evocative - sometimes about Uri Geller ('Reckoning falls') and sometimes the description of a surreal journey ('Private wire'). 'Signal's vocal part follows a tinny acoustic-electric guitar riff, the real sound of adult-alternative radio except the resulting monolith is too weird to stand a chance. There are a few placid piano instrumentals that seem to break the record into three parts, of which the third part's songs are all written by Chris Cutler. 'Coat' is an almost wonderfully sing-song melody about borrowing a coat, with fluttering percussion underneath that is distracting. The theatre of the everyday, but with flanger on the drums! 'The Trunk' closes things out with a fairly aggro moment and then there's an unlabeled bonus track -- as if the first 23 weren't enough! -- and to be honest, I don't know that I ever made it this far before. The artwork is as awkwardly out-of-place as the music, being drenched in psychedelic pastels, computer generated art, and the general vibe of early 90s Residents CD-ROM experiments. Yet the sounds within are 'interesting', occasionaly fascinating, and thus this has a space on my shelves.

Bablicon - 'The cat that was a dog, a flat inside a fog' (Misra)

For their final album (the swansong as the Rock establishment calls it) Bablicon are showing their compositional skills. Gone, mostly, are the haywire improv freakouts and the studio dubbery; we're left with a very organic collection of 16 tracks with lots of different instruments and varying personnel. Gone, mostly, is the excitement too. What's left is a too-long mess that is stretched thin; I could be even harsher and say "boring" and "inconsistent". The first half of this double album is The cat that was a dog but there's very little to thrill. The opening track mirrors Orange Tapered Moon's opening track at least in the sense of there being intelligible singing, though this is a much more mellow moonlight jazz number that is certainly inoffensive but hardly incendiary. The Duke Ellington fixation begins here and stays throughout this half of the CD, which would definitely have worked better as two single albums. 'Travelling' is a very lengthy piece constructed around some lovely piano runs but it adds up to nothing more than Muzak to me. The highlight of this half (and maybe the whole CD) is the lengthy 'Saumur/Paris/Teatowels' which has some tape manipulations and a strange, low-level murmuring that reminds me of Graham Lambkin and the Shadow Ring's recent output. It eventually falls into the jazzrockjam that would most identifiably be the 'Bablicon sound', but I liked the murky part best! The second half, A flat inside a fog, is an improvement, as the quirkier stuff is crammed here. 'Distant Morfonger' just sounds like a track for progheads but has some weird electronic gurgling under melodica, which flows into 'Arcdurwish' which continues the electronics before melting into a circular mess of sampled geese, tapes and spazzy drumming. Things at least get a bit loose here but it's too little, too late. Much of 'Bahamut' is unremarkable and 'AEther' takes the spazzy theramin playing from their first album and sets it against another piano ballad (albeit a bleak one). The compositional side goes into overdrive on 'Aphe hall' and 'Atlas' Cousin' with a full orchestral score; it resembles Varèse's work and is pretty excellent, but it just doesn't belong. Everything and the kitchen sink, huh? The drummer (who's the guy from Neutral Milk Hotel) lays out a "fuzz organ' solo track which is at least a bit of dirt and grit like this record needs, but it just feels like filler. 'Pigeon of Doom' is a title given to songs by bands like Bablicon and not bands like Motorhead; the vaguely Monty Python humour spills into the song itself which has some moaning vocals but is otherwise unremarkable. It all ends with 'An Odd Pear', another excursion into fake jazz-trio 'maturity'. I realise I may sound pretty damn harsh but this record feels especially difficult to enjoy because of its length and because it comes as a huge disappointment against the awesomeness that was their second album. So the stars maybe only aligned once over Chicago, for these three; at least we'll always have that 35 minutes and we can ignore these 65.

Albert Ayler - 'Live in Greenwich Village: The Complete Impulse Recordings' (Impulse!)

The other piece of the puzzle is here - longer, unedited and more orchestrated material from the 1966 band heard on the Lörrach/Paris 1966 LP. This time the recordings come from Albert's side of the big pond, though the Dutch violinist Michael Sampson is still present. Also present on some tracks are Joel Freedman (cello), Henry Grimes, Alan Silva, George Steele and Sunny Murray; the personnel changes across the two long compact discs but the energy and resonance never drops a beat. This is the great celebratory music of the American experience, here allowed to extend to 10, 12, even 16 minute pieces. The Ayler brothers remain front and center - I would even go as far to say that Don has near-equal footing with Albert on these discs - though there's some incredible string work and the drumming is the most full-on and upfront of any Murray or Harris recordings we've heard so far in this blog. The second track of the first disc, 'Truth is Marching In', is one of those bold, masterful cuts that I would rank among the best in Ayler's entire discography (though we still haven't really digested the Holy Ghost box, which is exempt from this blog). Every single superlative you can lay on what makes this music great - the incorporation of folk/spiritual forms, bold melodic gestures, exuberant energy, amazing interactions, a heavy focus on timbre and resonance, a lockstep understanding of drama and tempo - can be heard in the 12:42 of 'Truth is Marching In'. To be fair, all of disc 1 is energetic and explosive, with long tracks that stretch out the melodic motifs and repeat them ad infinitum, but also extend and meditate upon them. Oh yeah, there's also a nice -- pardon me, breathtaking -- ballad at the end of disc 1 with nice Fats Waller-style piano runs ("probably" by Cal Cobbs, Jr. who I think was the dude that played harpsichord on Love Cry?) and Ayler showing just how deep the wavering tone can dip (it's enough to touch your soul). It's called 'Angels'. So disc two starts with 'For John Coltrane' who had died shortly before this improvisation. It's somber, as expected, with the cello and double basses (meaning two of them) somewhat indistinguishable from another but working perfectly with Sampson's classical background. Albert is on alto and the track is quite a bit different from anything else he ever recorded because of this. Now because I've listened to these so many times, the digipak is pretty battered and disc 2 skips quite a bit, rendering 'Spiritual Rebirth' and 'Infinite Spirit' near-unlistenable. But the skips work out for 'Omega is the Alpha' , by which point John Philip Sousa's been thrown into a blender with Robert Johnson, Stephen Foster, and Bessie Smith; what comes out is chopped up even further. Repetition, repetition, repetition - 'Light in Darkness' features every musician playing the same lines (or thereabouts), falling in and out of sync with each other and sketching 100 years of celebration and sadness in the space between the notes. Timbres shift, adjustments are made. The beat goes on and on, the strings and plucked and bowed, and the brass continues to bleat. This music is eternal.

Atman - 'Tradition' (Drunken Fish)

"Featuring Anna Nacher", whose vocals are all over this thing, this Atman album buzzes and howls through the dark Polish woods, years before Dead Raven Choir. Where renmant ghosts of Nazi tanks still remain, melting voices from the spiritworld blend with rampant ethnoacoustics. There's a Hendrix cover and a bunch of crazed shoutingYELPINGmuttering, lotsa instruments you don't know the names of, and a general woodland vibe. Sixty-three minutes of it, too! But like future band the Magic Carpathians, that forest atmosphere is taken into a recording studio and all the tricks are in place. There's a funky electric bass, some synths, and a general layer of gloss over everything. This pagan approach to psychedelic music, with the rock all sucked out, surely influenced all those bands in Finland that came along later. Except that while those bands used lo-fi hiss to make their sound more otherwordly, distant, etc., Atman seem cool with the idea that music can actually be well-recorded; thus if you are so inclined (and have nice high-quality speakers or headphones and stereo audio equipment) you can really lose yourself in the joy of recorded instruments. The pure, inherent psychedelia of a reverberating string is on display here, though layered and with madcap vocals threatening to distract. The whole "other" aspect of the Polish language gives Tradition an air of exoticism to this native-English speaker, though maybe they're just singing about girls, fast food and cars. Ten years ago, when I got this CD, it was like discovering a new world of insane atmospheres, and from my ancestral homeland as well! But listening now, it feels less impressive; maybe because I've got another decade of hearing similar sounds, some predating Tradition by 20 years or more. But maybe I've just moved further into my own; the pagan thing carries nothing exotic anymore, I've been to Poland now, and my tastes have moved away from crazy folk-based psych. And maybe I demand something a bit more concise now; 63 minutes is a lot of Atman, where 40 might have sufficed. But not to be hard on this - as I haven't listened to this for a few years it was a pretty nice flashback.

Arbete och Fritid (MNW)

This is self-titled so I think it's the first Arbete and Fritid record, but I can't read the lengthy booklet, which is in Swedish. This is what you get if you mix traditional Scandinavian folk music with a good deal of acid - a group of guys sawing away at the classics, sometimes approximating traditional tangents and other times picking up the ball left off by their fellow countrymen The Parson Sound. Things start off sensibly enough, with a few folky tunes performed with an amped up string section. It has that feudal quality I love in the Third Ear Band, but there's a somewhat more jazzy feel and a bit of whatever Kurt Weill is, too. But enough of referencing other artists - let's talk about Arbete and Fritid. When 'Petrokemi Det Kan Man Inte Bada I' kicks in, its a heavy groove that stays locked into itself, but still lets the sax solos out to play. And from this point on, things start to get weird. The strings, so happy to stick to to classics on the first half, begin to bubble and fester as if possessed. Yeah, I feel a bit of malevolence, but maybe it's just an evil smile spread across five Swedish faces. They don't vocalise on every song but when they do you might get growling, earthy bravado or shriking giggling gasping experimentation. Even the delicate sections feel somewhat uncompromising. You've probably never heard a recorder played with such gusto before, and it's recorded pretty well - so much that when the audience applauds at the end of 'Pols Efter steffe Henningsgård, Brekken' it's a bit of a shock. As a bonus track (I think), you get a 20 minute jam entitled 'Ostpusten - Västpusten' which I'm going to guess means something about east and west. It's weird when a bonus track is 1/3 of the disc running time, but I guess this blog is about the CD format to some extent. This begins with a weighty string piece that breathes in and out, hanging in the ear like a giant distended stomach even during passages that are thick with movement. Percussion creeps in, and soon it's an all-out jam that rolls like an ocean wave. There's something hedonistic about this track; there's a bunch of melodies pulling at each other, but it keeps flowing with a perverse passion. By the end it's shifted a few more times and there's some more applause to close out the disc.

American Analog Set - 'Through the 90s: Singles and Beyond' (Emperor Jones)

AmAnSet's final release for Emperor Jones has the slight feel of something you might release into a tissue, though I'm not sure why this is. The material is high quality enough - when it appeared on the 7" format, it worked really well, especially on songs like 'Diana Slowburner II' and 'Magnificent Seventies'. This is a long compilation that chops up the original chronology no doubt in an attempt to make it feel more like an 'album'. But instead of a Slip n Slide of Analog Set fun, it can't avoid sounding like an odds and ends collection (which, to be fair, it is). That early Fun of Watching Fireworks feel is a flaming stone away from the band's last few records, and it gets its last gasp. The organ-driven tension drives ahead with the tap-tap whirr, especially on songs like 'On My Way'. If the 'sounds the same' phenomenon was more applicable to the earlier material, compiling all of these tracks together really makes it apparent. The cover photo is a bit of a departure too, though a very visually enticing (almost candy-like) rollerskate pile it is. If I knew how to program the cheap portable Discman I use as a CD player I could try putting these tracks back in sequence and thus pretend I'm listening to all the AmAnSet 7"s I don't actually have; maybe that would feel a bit more cohesive. I gotta mention the rejected jingle 'Dr. Pepper' (as I sampled the beverage just yesterday) though I think they were lucky because it's way better as The Golden Band's 'The Wait' (for a time, probably my single favorite AmAnSet song, though now I give that award to 'Aaron and Maria'). I just love using the abbreviation AmAnSet but this is probably the last time as I dont have anything else to review by them here.