Rewound 7

The October 2007 installment of my Rewound column from igloomag.com


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Helios :: Ayres (Type, CD)

Something is seriously wrong with the state of music when even the chill-out room becomes a bummer. Perhaps I'm dating myself here (do they even have chill-out rooms anymore?), but it was the one place where everything would be calm, no matter how oppressive or sweaty things were in the dance room. Hence the name of the refuge, the sound of a new genre, the classic (and still damn fine) KLF record. With Unomia and Eingya, the two previous works released by Keith Kenniff (aka Helios and the more classically-oriented Goldmund), it seemed like downtempo, chill-out electronic music was getting a much needed melodic shot in the arm, a new soundtrack. Anticipation, for this writer at least, was high when Ayres was announced. And the result? Total betrayal. This is a lazy attempt at writing songs when Kenniff's strengths were always in crafting tracks. And yes there is a serious difference. Each of the six tracks here "features" Kenniff's voice, an instrument best left silent, its fey whispering coo more suited to local bands covering early Belle and Sebastian songs than the tepid "beats" and hazy electronics of "A Rising Wind" or "Woods and Gives Away." "Soft Collared Neck," the track most reminiscent of Kenniff's work as Goldmund, would have worked as a Goldmund track, with a lilting piano line (but aren't all Goldmund piano lines "lilting" ?). Here though, a whispered monologue with a tiny hint of melody complains about something indistinct, probably a break-up, just ruins what would have been a nice piano and reverb track. And in perhaps the most egregious example of lame cover material, Kenniff picks that hoary chestnut "In Heaven" from Eraserhead. Even goths stopped covering this years ago. In a way, Ayres is interesting, in that over its 27 minutes, a once-promising artist completely self-destructs and ruins any goodwill built up in an audience. And while I'm all for a nice little schadenfreude every now and then, this one hurts. There is no pleasure to be gained even in tearing this record apart, there were so many bad decisions made and wrong directions taken here.

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Starchaser Network :: s/t (Tarot Productions, CD)

Something isn't right here. Actually a lot isn't right with Starchaser Network. First, the vocals, which trys to match the staccato delivery of Gary Numan with the raunch and sex of Thrill Kill Kult's Frankie Nardiello. Hear this disaster on "Patricia Whackers." Not working. Second, the look, which approximates Megadeth's Dave Mustaine and Suicide's Alan Vega's love child. There's three versions of this idea on the inside flap of the album. Nope, not working. Third, the music, Kraftwerk and Nitzer Ebb with guitars. Sorry fellas, it just does not work when you do it. Others might be more successful with any of these formulas, but Starchaser chooses to emphasize exactly the wrong elements each and every time. On "New York U Know," a passable slab of pulsing dancefloor EBM, vocalist Proscriptor (an alias?) channels Clock DVA's Adi Newton (this is a good thing), but only to chant "breakdown" and spout BS like "the skyline is so high" and, nonsensically, "state of mind." See, it makes no sense. Nothing on this album makes any sense, none of it sounds complete, and none of it sounds like anyone who would provide an honest opinion of the music within was given a chance to listen to this album before it was released. Press materials for this album describe it as "the perfect soundtrack to a pornographic movie or a NASA documentary." That really doesn't leave much else to say, except to point out just how stupid that sounds, even for press-release gibberish. This is the low point of 2007.

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Doofgoblin / A Drop In Silence :: Split EP (s/r, CD)

I really used to love glitch. I mean totally. I bought into the idea that the future of music lay in microscopic sound, and Oval's compact disc manipulations. Around the time of Clicks and Cuts 3, I realized that glitch is a dead-end genre, its ultimate conclusion being found in the silence of absolute noise. If we draw glitch's arc as beginning in isolationist ambient and ending with Autechre's Untilted, we see the problem. It is "boring." It communicates displeasure both with itself and with the listener. I mean seriously. Does anyone really enjoy listening to glitch besides for their own intellectual fulfillment? This is not a genre designed to give pleasure. If no-fun is your thing, then more power to you, my head isn't in that place anymore and glitch isn't my thing anymore.

Doofgoblin, aka John Gulino, has been praised on this site for previous efforts, and to other ears, his contributions to this split cd may be considered groundbreaking. But for me, the fractured minor-key Autechre-isms of "Stoop", "Starling", and especially "Keeer" simply do not pass muster anymore. Pick any track from LP5. That's what Doofgoblin sounds like. And again, for some, that's fantastic. I recognize the work that went into creating these tracks, and I appreciate the difficult path chosen by Gulino's muse for him to follow. But I've grown out of glitch, and don't need to spend my time with yet another second-rate Booth & Brown disciple. A Drop In Silence mine similar territory with their half of this cd, pushing the Booth/Brown preset button a whole bunch of times, but with better results. ADIS are a little more up-tempo, a little more conventional, more Tri Repetae than Draft 7:30. The playful melodics and nimble percussives of "Fuzzy Thought" would make that track a fine contribution to tracks that should have come out on Warp in 1997. "Gristle Edge" updates the classic industrial dance of 1988 Chicago, with machine-gun blastbeats and an atmosphere of intense malaise. "Stop Down", the closer, interrogates the IDM sound from the turn of the millennium with skittering beats and KAOSS-pad synth manipulations. The four ADOS tracks that close this split are the better part of the pairing. Would that they had done a full-length instead.

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Robert Vincs :: Devic Kingdom (Extreme, CD)

Saxophone and Fairlight Synthesizer proponent Robert Vincs expands on the fourth-world ambient music pioneered by Brian Eno and Jon Hassell with "Devic Kingdom". Recorded at various sacred sites in Australia's Victorian Highlands in one take, Vincs captures a sense of meditation and transcendence in each track. Just where Vincs fits in the saxophone hierarchy I'm not really sure (who knows where anyone really fits, post-Coltrane, anyway?), but his fluid technique could easily bridge the gap between classic Film Noir soundtracks and world music. "Avatar" expresses this genre mashup perfectly, with a lively sax improvisation over what sounds like mutated didgeridoos and circular-breathing chants. "Avatar" creates a mood that is simultaneously quite exciting and truly strange. This holds true for most of the record, this strangely exciting mood. Devic Kingdom isn't made up of songs, per se, more improvisatory mood pieces that, when taken in together, evoke a time and place almost completely alien to modern, everyday existence.

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Rolan Vega :: Documentary (Community Library, CD)

They say that an artist has their entire life to create their first album. Documentary is Vega's first album, and from the sound of it, he's had some very diverse experiences from which to draw inspiration. The fifteen tracks collected here apparently were live scores for short films, some of which were his own Super-8 productions. And normally the tag of soundtrack music in the electronic scene is the kiss of death, but here Vega crosses enough genre boundaries to avoid being tagged. "Documentary" mixes short tracks with longer ones, pieces evoking Brian Eno and mid-70s Tangerine Dream. Vega appears to have done his homework, at least with electronic music history -- he sounds like he was influenced by the classics (Eno, T. Dream, Moroder, Biosphere, etc.), and refreshingly, does not sound in any way like he was influenced by Autechre (Its good to know that Booth and Brown haven't infected everyone yet). At times embracing the minimal 80s synths and ambient-motorik of Cluster ("Playlite"), or the industrial electronics of Brad Fidel ("4 Autiim"), Vega creating moods more than writes songs, and succeeds by keeping his pieces at the right length, mostly succinct, but stretching out to around five minutes when the music calls for it. Its a nice, balanced record that works both as background ambient and detailed listening. Recommended.

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Maps :: We Can Create (Mute, CD)

I tried, I really did. I thought We Can Create would be right up my alley. Neo-shoegazer James Chapman, working in his midlands-England bedroom on a 16-track, diligently built his legend through a series of singles and EPs, holding off on releasing an album until the hype got too loud to ignore. Create is the full length result, a not-quite-successful mishmash of fuzzy guitars and lazy songwriting. And it starts with promise, the anthem-that-will-never-be "So Low, So High," with a sweeping melody and sing-along chorus. But then Create falls flat on its fuzzed-out face, with "You Don't Know Her Name," which sounds like something MBV would have tossed off in an afternoon and thrown away in 1988. The rest of the eleven tracks act as further examples of these two extremes -- one great, one terrible. Overall, We Can Create comes off as a bland middle ground between awesome and atrocious. And the lack of any tonal variety on the album makes it grate after a while. I like the first track quite a bit, but didn't want to hear it ten more times with slightly different music and lyrics. Mix it up, Maps, and next time I'll plot out a route to check you out further.

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Drifting In Silence :: Fallto (Labile, CD)

Um, wow. I love getting blown away by an album or a band that I've never heard of before. It doesn't happen that much anymore, and with more music being released every year than the year before, the signal-to-noise ratio gets lower and finding awesome bands or albums gets harder. Fallto by Drifting In Silence (aka Derrick Stembridge) makes sorting through the dreck worthwhile, with a sound wavering between industrial ("Chameleon" and its two remixes) epic, cinematic ambient dance ("Pretend," "Meaning of Life"), and grand cathedrals of sound ("Closure"). Embracing Autechre, Tangerine Dream and lesser bands on the Wax Trax! label (Borghesia or Pankow, maybe?) as influences, Stembridge blends their respective aesthetics together and spits back a stone classic. We're getting close to the end of the year, and I know this one will be near the top of my list. The only problem with Fallto is that its too short! Cutting the two remixes (which are mostly extraneous, although the "Drev Remix" is a real EBM stomper) at the end, this runs only 40 minutes. And while that's enough to whet my whistle, I wish there was more. Excellence like this doesn't come along that often.

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Rewound 6

Here's the August 2007 edition of my rewound column.


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Apparat :: Walls (Shitkatapult, CD)

I've listened to this album at least 20 times over the last few weeks and I'll be damned if I can form a strong opinion about it. I put it on, it plays, I listen to it, I forget about it when it stops playing. Then I play it again, which must account for something. If it was really bad, I'd just write a scathing review and be done. But something about Walls keeps drawing me back to it. Maybe it is just my melancholic nature, but Walls oozes vibrations of ineffable sadness right from the beginning with the sad, Warren Ellis-esque violin of "Not a Number." RazOhara's vocals, especially on "Hailin From The Edge" sound emotionally tired, as if there was too much sadness in the world for his spirits to ever be lifted. Not that this is in any way bad, mind you. Walls pulses and shuffles throughout its nearly 60 minutes and 13 tracks, staying down-tempo for most of the time. At times Walls sounds lush, the auditory equivalent to Corinthian leather, as on "Useless Information" or the near-house of "Limelight," but for the most part, Apparat keeps things more minimal, making this good for the come-down part of the night. There's enough here to keep you going, but nothing that will demand you get up and dance. Maybe, ultimately, Walls is the best example of the idea that the more familiar something is, the better it seems. Because I've listened to this a couple more times, and things are starting to stick. Perhaps, for me, a dive into the back catalog is in order.

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Decomposure :: Vertical Lines A (Blank Squirrel, CD/DVD)

First things first -- this is an album in the truest sense, incorporating as it does both an excellent full-length album of post-Postal Service electronic pop, and a DVD with 15 or so hours of extras, including the original source material, instrumental mixes, interviews, a 79-page pdf sketchbook, and more pictures than can easily be digested. There's a lot here to be sure, and it appears quite overwhelming. It is quite rare that an artist has allowed such a penetrating view into their creative process: there are isolated beat mixes, "process recordings," and the 11 hour-long recordings that comprise the base matter for the album. Very nice. The end result, VLA, is eleven tracks of break-the-mold electronic pop music that hurdles over genre lines from hiphop to glitch, idm, and piano-driven rockers in the Ben Folds vein. Caleb Mueller, Decomposure's beatician, is at the peak of his power, wielding surgically precise drum programming with unexpectedly melodic vocals. Mueller spews forth a frothy mix of popart imagery with his lyrics, delivered alternately in a Ben Gibbard-like croon or in an Ice-T-esque spoken word monotone, or both at once at lightning speed. At times the vocals are mixed under the drums (most noticeably on "Hour 10," a highlight), a nice change-up that shows just how much care Mueller pours into each track. Academically, this is serious music for people who love to pick apart percussion tracks. If there was a college course in electronic composition, this album should be one of the textbooks. If you stop trying to pick tracks apart and let the album flow, you'll find that its a groovy 57 minutes of refreshing synthpop, a breath of fresh air and an exhilarating rush of adrenaline.

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The Green Kingdom :: The Green Kingdom (SEM, CD)

Hailing from the unfolding disaster that is Detroit, Michael Cottone ignores the post-industrial malaise of his hometown and indulges in some airy laptop ambience on his debut album. Crossing field recordings with electro-acoustic touchstones and heavily manipulated guitar, Cottoneblahblahblah- there's any number of ways to describe this album, but all of them sound like hoary old cliches, ubiquitous enough to now be virtually meaningless. But they all apply here: "soundtrack to nonexistent movie," "movie for your ears," etc., etc. But where I'm unsuccessful in finding apt words to describe this piece of art, Cottone succeeds in making an eminently listenable album of, for lack of a better genre-mashup, pastoral-glitch, maybe. But that's not entirely an accurate assessment. Here's four associations I made when listening to this album for three continuous hours: Imagine BOC signed to Kranky. Tortoise abandoning stringed instruments. Harold Budd with only a guitar and Nobukazu Takemura producing. Fennesz without the puritanical rigidity. There are a thousand more (not literally) of these, and Green Kingdom is both all and none of them. Labeling a piece of art reduces it, makes it more identifiable, and therefore less mysterious. As such, I'll refrain from making a definitive name for the sounds of Green Kingdom, because that's not fair to you. I received this with virtually no leading information as to what it would sound like, and it is a pleasant surprise that first time. I wouldn't want to ruin it.

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Lights Out Asia :: Tanks and Recognizers (n5MD, CD)

First of all, a big shout out to all the Tron fans out there who catch the reference in the title. Hell yeah. Tron blew the back of my nine year old head off when I saw it in the theatre. I went on to lie, beg, borrow, and sneak my way in to see it five more times. And while I'll never make my own Tron suit, I'll always defend it to the haters. Thanks to Lights Out Asia for bringing one more reminder of the awesomeness of Tron to light. Unexpectedly, the album itself if not a Wendy/Walter Carlos synth-fest, not at all. Matter of fact, that's about as far away as one could get from what Tanks and Recognizers is -- perhaps the most satisfying neo-shoegaze record ever. No qualms about it, I'm saying ever. Stripping away the excesses of My Bloody Valentine, and dumping it next to the aggression of Ride, Lights Out Asia marry the bliss of early Chapterhouse to the fragile structures of Slowdive, and end up sounding like Wayne Coyne fronting Flying Saucer Attack, with Mark Van Hoen producing. Hyperbole? Perhaps. I don't think so, but I have to concede, that may be a little over the top. But only because this record is so solid from beginning to end. LOA masterfully match a floating kosmiche vibe with soaring vocals on "March Against The Savages," and chiming guitars to Florian Fricke-washes of atmosphere on "Art Divided By Science." And these are just two of nine fully-realized songs. It's about time shoegaze came back, and Lights Out Asia is right out front.

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Po :: The Sound of Summer Silence (Dynamophone, CD)

Dynamophone, Po's label, is declaring this album's sound to be 'screengaze,' but offer no further explanation. I'll extrapolate that that is supposed to be an amalgamation of the early 90s' shoegaze fuzz and electronically manipulated sounds. 18-year-old Daniel Porcelli has much more in mind than just making loud buzzing noises with stringed instruments. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, heavens no, where would we be without Loveless or Just For a Day?) Po aims for serene beauty, which on ...Summer Silence, lay in its abundant simplicity. For this is not complicated-sounding music. Mostly ambient with some scattered beats ("Seconds"), Po uses cello, bells, acoustic guitar, and vocals to extremely subtle lengths. In the same spirit of Eno's original ambient thesis, that ambient music can work at either loud or soft volume, ...Summer Silence acts as both something to focus attention on and as background soundtrack, and is equally compelling in either setting. If nothing else, this may be the most soothing album to be released in 2007, being an excellent soundtrack to a rainy afternoon, the sunshine in its grooves sure to drive the clouds away.

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Ryan Rapsys :: The-Novus-Arcadia (Erratik Productions, CD)

Duluth? Really? City on the western shores of Lake Superior? Stuff this great comes out of Duluth? "All the time," you Minnesotans may say. Who knew? More please, if Ryan Rapsys is any sort of indicator of the quality of music coming from that fine fine city. For The-Novus-Arcadia is a mighty beast, an hour-long exploration of beat and melody, fourth-world ambience and dance. Rapsys is a classically trained composer, and it shows. Each track is a rich vein of that classic IDM feel, updated for an impatient age, welded together into a symphony that no orchestra would be brave enough to tackle. Well, maybe the London Sinfonetta. Novus is, if nothing else, an urgent record, filled with a sublime, anxious expectation and a rewarding, glorious release in each track. Building up tension through clever drum programming and a heightened sense of atmosphere, each track ups the ante for the album as a whole, while being complete in and of themselves. This is no small feat. Even the two beatless interludes, "Intermezzo-i" and "-ii" shy away from the nice side of ambient and bring out an almost isolationist-ambient aggression, making the tracks they lead into all the more explosive. I had never really considered Duluth at all, really, no more so than the very probably state of Idaho, and now I find I have been remiss. This is fantastic stuff. What else have you got there?

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