3 Conceptual Sounds

Move over February- it's International Ideas Month! In terms of art, most great things start off as great ideas; some of them don't stem far from that. Conceptual visual art gets plenty of press, but here's three wholly conceptual pieces of sound art to celebrate Ideas Month with:

John Cage- 4'33"

 

Cage's famous and controversial 4'33" is based on the idea that the only shared feature of all sound is length. Whether you like it or loathe it, the piece was significant enough to be performed in the Great Albert Hall. Note that there is actually sheet music to this piece, but that it's just three pages reading 'Tacet' which means not to play. Also note that in the above performance, this sheet music is written in comic sans.

Alvin Lucier- I am Sitting In A Room

Alvin Lucier reads a short explanation of the piece, then plays the explanation back on tape recording the results, which are in turned played and then recoded. The repeated process of playing back and rerecording means Lucier's speech is slowly converted into an ambient sound scape displaying only the resonant frequencies of the room he was in. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the piece, is the undeniable musicality that results from a seemingly arbitrary process.

Steve Reich- Pendulum Music

Several microphones are swung over amplifiers feeding back as they pass over until they lose momentum. Steve Reich's musical sculpture is, at it's heart, a simple and elegant demonstration of feedback and interlocking tempos.

GIG: Dan Haywood, Sun Skeletons & Wild Islands

Don't be bored this Friday; Psych-folkster Dan Haywood is playing the geographic highlight of his career for fans of Dr. Strangely Strange and Nick Drake. Excellent support from the strange modal hooks of Sun Skeletons and the reverb soaked strings of Wild Islands.

This psyched out display of easy-vibes will cost you (very specifically) £5.25 and starts 8:00pm at South Street. Get there!

ALBUM: Schoolboy Q- Oxymoron

The first track on this album is called "Gansta". Schoolboy Q says the word "gangsta" in it just under a hundred times; that's once every two and a bit seconds. How you feel about this fact is probably a good indicator of how you feel about Q's third album Oxymoron.

It's a Black Hippy release from Top Dawg, but don't expect another Good Kid, M.a.a.d City; This album isn't going to break any major ground. But with tracks like the grimey domestic tales of Hoover street; the twisted feel good vibes of Break The Bank; and guest features from the likes of Raekwon, Kendrick Lamar and Kurupt this is a highly successful update of the same strain of hip hop that's been running since Wu-Tang Clan or Death Row Records.

Oxymoron is out now on Digital Download from Top Dawg Entertainment

EP: Jon Hopkins- Collider Remixes

The stark, repeating minimalism of Jon Hopkins' Collider meant it was always going to be a good song to remix. So unsurprisingly, the 12" release of mixes from Pangea, Karenn and Objekt is definitely a good thing. (If you haven't heard Hopkins' original yet, check out the live session he did in January with Seattle's KEXP Radio here)

The most impressive thing about this release is the variation that comes out of one song: Pangea hardens the beat, bringing out the distorted snares and adding old-school synthwaves other the back half of the track; Karenn flips the laid back patience of Collider upside down, turning the track into a constant acceleration; and Objekt glitters smooth xylophone arpeggios over cold, percussive backing. The record can easily be listened to one sitting despite each song stemming from the same beat, something definitely worth doing if Hopkins' LP Immunity stood out for you as a highlight of last year.

Collider Remixes EP is available on 12" and Download from Domino

Three Chords of Strychnine

Happy Monday everyone! It's also World Bartender Day so head down to your local speakeasy and get your favorite drink, whatever that might be. Black Flag were happy with beer, Bowie and The Doors were in search of Whiskey, and The Sonics had a taste for strychnine.

At least that's how the song goes. Strychnine's a classic example of the over driven form of 60s Garage Rock that went on to evolve into punk, rockabilly and all sorts of awesome stuff like that. The whole scene still holds up today as pretty decent proof that you don't need any more than three chords to make a racket. So listen to some Kingsmen, Kinks or Trashmen if you need proof that great music doesn't require great musicianship. Garage Rock is also one of those genres that has a revival each time you blink and there's been some good stuff recently from California cassette junkies Burger Records. So check them out as well for awesome bands like The Orwells or The Tough Shits.

TRACK: The Ruby Suns- Desert of Pop

Psychedelic animation? Check. Vintage camera footage? Check. Shots of outdated technology? Check. The Ruby Suns might be too cool for their own good, but the new music video to Desert of Pop is actually pretty awesome. Plus as its name suggests, the song is an unabashedly hooky explosion of pure pop sunshine. Start your weekend with some Ruby Suns:

The Ruby Suns' Christopher is available on CD, LP and Digital Download from Sub Pop

ALBUM: Angel Olson- Burn Your Fire For No Witness

Angel Olson released her first proper LP years ago now; It was easily one of the better albums from 2012. Angel Olsen's voice is the perfect halfway point between razors and silk; wholesome and melancholy in equal measure. Her guitar style worked well and the album had real high points.

From the second track of Burn Your Fire For No Witness however, its clear that this is a new ball park. Forgiven/Forgotten (which people might recognise from its single release) retains all the home spun folk-charm of Angel Olson's previous releases but her decision to move towards electric guitars means it's now punky, loud and catchy as hell. Any worries that the track is a one off are instantly dispelled by the energetic swagger of High-Five that follows. Burn Your Fire For No Witness continues how it starts; from the laid back ramble of High & Wild to the ghostly charm of Windows, each song is gold dust in its own way.

Olsen's clear 60s folk influence could lead to cliche, but she finds enough of her own voice to keep the record current without losing any of the nostalgic appeal from her influences. Throughout its tidy forty-five minute run time Burn Your Fire For No Witness is an album that manages to have it's cake and eat it too.

Burn Your Fire For No Witness is out on CD, LP AND Digital Download from Jagjaguwar

TRACK: Fat White Family- Touch The Leather

There's always been a weird sex thing that goes on in Noise Rock. Maybe it's because the fuzzy, overdriven guitars lend themselves nicely to filth, maybe it's because unusual genres of music attract unusual people and interests. For whatever reason, I always figured that since The Stooges released Dirt, if you wanted to be a Noise Rock band you had to make at least one song about kinky sex.

London Noise-Perverts Fat White Family seem to be trying to one up this trend since there brilliantly seedy upcoming single "Touch The Leather" now has an even seedier counterpart in the 'Redux Edition' of the music video. The blown out guitars and screamed vocals have been switched for a steady clicking glockenspiel while frontman Lias Saoudi murmurs his lyrics of pure filth like they where pillow talk from your nightmares. Also another member of the band jumps around with his trousers down in slow motion, so yeah, be warned.

Here's both versions, but if you've only got three and a half minutes spare in your day, I'd recommend the single version:

Touch The Leather is out on 7" in early March from Hate Hate Hate Records. It's available now on preorder from Rough Trade.

Ps. Also out now on Hate Hate Hate, for FREE, is surf-rock-gone-brilliantly-awry band the Wytches' incredible Gravedweller EP. It's definately worth a listen, and like I said, it's free, so get it here.

Daisies and Rap Stars

Happy Monday everyone! It's Random Act of Kindness Day, so get out out there and do something friendly! Just in case you need some inspiration, here's some positive vibes from the Daisy Age's famed A Tribe Called Quest.

For those of you who haven't heard of the Daisy Age, here's a quick history lesson: while Hip-Hop was being awesome and aggressive in the late 80s/early 90s, it was also being awesome and friendly. Bands like De La Soul and Pharcyde who rapped an overall more positive, fun loving message than their counterparts were dubbed as being part of "the Daisy Age". Oh yeah, and loads of them were really, really good.

Also don't let the fact that it's Monday stop you going out! Ezra Furman's in town for anyone who lives in the City of Dreams and what to here some good old fashioned rock and roll. Otherwise, you can always settle for second place and listen to him from the comfort of your home:

GIG: Burnt Tomorrow, Sly and the Family Drone, The Cottonettes, New Puritans

Happy Valentines Day! Why not celebrate by listening to the suspended vibes of Spiritualized incredible upcoming release Always Together With You?

If you're stuck without a date in the world's city of love, simply wait till the weekend for Club Velocity's various flavours of punk at The Rising Sun Arts Centre.

Folksters Burnt Tomorrow are headlining. The obvious comparison is Billy Bragg, but without the politics. So, I guess not at all like Billy Bragg. Fans of Frank Turner prick your ears up.

Sly and the Family Drone will be bringing their brand of percussion heavy feedback drone music. Catching them live is always a good idea; they regularly give bits of the drum kit to the audience turning their last song into a mass participation drum circle. And yes, it is every bit as insane as that sounds.

Fans of Sham 69 and Cockney Rejects will enjoy Oi-Punks The Cottonettes and New Puritans (nothing to do with similarly named These New Puritans) bringing enough UK styled overdriven guitars and shouting for everyone.


It's all also a birthday celebration (Happy birthday Matt Unwin!) so rumor has it free cake and balloons are included in the five pound entry fee (four pounds if you're savvy enough to buy online). Not a bad Saturday night for fans of birthday cake or any type of punk rock.

EP: Holly Herndon- Chorus

Electronic music moves fast, and people are already moving decidedly away from the silky smooth beats of last year's Deep House mania. Holly Herndon's Chorus EP (although it's more a 12" single given it features only two songs) is a prime example of this; the crisp, clean aesthetics of Herndon's vocal sampling places it well in the 21st century electronic trend, but the instantly disorienting choppy electronics sound timelessly outsider.

More Steve Reich than Fat Boy Slim, the title track twists vocal samplings round nervous beats. The result is a glitchy, warped groove that's dizzyingly addictive. B-Side Solo Voice is a subtler affair; fading beats zone in and out creating the sense that one is constantly on the edge of something. Anyone that's spoke to a fan of electronic music will undoubtably have heard the one hour lecture telling you "It's all about the drop!" so it's an edgy move, creating an electronic song that deliberately lingers on the edge of the infamous "drop". Fortunately for the San Francisco based music student, it's one that, like the rest of her Chorus EP experiments, ultimately pays off. A must listen for anyone wanting something that sounds new, Ezra Pound would be happy.

Chorus EP is out now on Vinyl and Digital Download from RVNG

TRACK: Workin' Man Noise Unit- Yellow Mind

Loud music alert! Anyone who went to the release party on Friday might have already got their hands on Workin' Man Noise Unit's new 7" Yellow Mind. Anyone else can try and pick one up on their upcoming tour, listen to it online, or order it from Blow the Reactors online store.

Either option is worth doing; the A-side's shout-along chorus runs like a summer hit, except that its much heavier than that. Pedal noise has been pushed a bit more to the forefront than some of their earlier releases and whirs and screams perfectly alongside a hard rock guitar solo.

There's two B-sides because Workin' Man are a generous lot, the highlight being Rat Poison which is takes the sound down an early Black Flag hardcore punk route. It's all packaged fairly nicely with a yellow coloured vinyl that reads "Play Loud". Good Advice.

Yellow Mind is available on 7" from Blow the Reactors

Punks and Plimsolls

Happy Plimsoll day! But please, for the love of God, don't celebrate by performing you're own interpretative dance ballet. Partly because the day is actually in memory of Samuel Plimsoll who invented the Plimsoll Line which is a series of markings painted onto cargo ships to prevent overloading, but more significantly because interpretive dance is an art form best left to the experts.

If you're still in need of a big fix of interpretive dance, why not check out art punk legends The Fall and contemporary dance group Michael Clark & Company's avant-garde ballet' "I am curious, Orange". Apparently it's loosely based on the ascension of William of Orange to the throne. The key word is loosely, as you'll see in the included clip which features giant baked beans cans running across the stage. "Are you growing out of trying to shock people?" asks an interviewer at the end of the video, and we don't hear Mark E. Smith's reply. One can only assume he said no.

GIG: Workin' Man Noise Unit, Monroe, Joe Marshall

Release party time! High octane riffsters Workin' Man Noise Unit have a 7" coming out alongside reissuing their previous tape releases on one big tape! If you're not quite sure what to do tonight and you live near the world's cultural hotspot then you can see them play tonight at South Street Art Centre.

Workin' Man Noise Unit play a full on riff assault with feedback loops for fans of Pissed Jeans or Normal Man. If you haven't heard them yet then you definitely should and to make it easier for you here's a video of them playing somewhere up in London:

Support comes from Monroe and Joe Marshall. I'm actually playing in Monroe so I don't want to shamelessly self plug too much but we play big loud psych-rock and you can hear us here.

Joe Marshall will be opening with ambient drone soundscapes of waves and clouds coming from one guitar and about a hundred effects pedals.

Noise is the key word here, so for anyone with a lack of loudness in their life this is one to see.

Entry is £4 and doors open at 20:00.

ALBUM: Sun Kil Moon- Benji

In a way, you'd be forgiven for wanting to nominate Benji as having the worst album cover of 2014 so far; a grainy out of focus shot of some trees taken from a moving car without a written title. In the same way, the songs are filled with stark, spontaneous lyrics that showcase songwriter Mark Kozelek's unedited thoughts draped over free running guitar hooks.

But it's this raw, unedited feeling that makes Benji one of the most interesting releases of the last few months. Closing track, Ben's My Friend, for example, takes us through a day in the recording process of the album complete with Kozelek's memories of meeting Postal Service frontman Ben Gibbard. The words are fairly prosaic and unstructured; Kozelek informally crams as many syllables into each line as he can just about get away with, and the chorus is simply a repetition of whatever line was said most recently. In one such chorus, Kozelek reminisces "staring at the walls covered in sports bar shit" and  backing vocals chime in with a repetition of "Sports bar shit, sports bar shit". It could easily be one of the most ridiculous moments in rock music, instead it's heartfelt and tender.

Just as any Woody Allen fan will tell you, a really good artist doesn't have to write about wars and plague because there's already enough drama in the nuances of everyday life to be brought out. That's the exact trick that Sun Kil Moon master on every single track of Benji, and it's also exactly why a refrain of "sports bar shit" sung over bossa-nova style guitar is easily one of the most interesting choruses this year.

 

Benji is available on CD pre-order now from Caldo Verde Records

TRACK: Xiu Xiu- Stupid In the Dark

Seriously dark electronic beats dropped yesterday with Bella Union's release of Xiu Xiu's LP Angel Guts: Red Classroom and track Stupid in the Dark is now available to stream online. Half 80s rollar disco, half experimental noise, the most obvious comparison is Prurient's more recent stuff, but it's more fun to think of it as what would have happen if predator had fronted Duran Duran. The result is a harsh pulsing beat alongside hushed vocals that sound like they could easily be the result of the cold call from the opening scene of Scream. Inexplicably, that results in it being catchy. Then, at about the 2:15 mark, pitch-bending electronics enter the scene and everything goes completely fucking insane.

Angel Guts: Red Classroom is available now on CD and LP from Bella Union

LIST: 5 Songs About Books

It's now February, or for the more bookish, Library Lovers' Month! You can always show your support by heading down to your local library, but given it's February and miserable you'd be forgiven for staying warm inside and reading this top five list instead. Here's the top five songs about books: (Sorry Kate Bush fans, but that one's not included)

5. The Cure- Killing an Arab (Albert Camus- L’Étranger)

"Whichever I choose it amounts to the same;

I'm alive, I'm dead, I'm the stranger killing an Arab"

Photo by Alfred T. Palmer

The Cure are a happy bunch, so it's no surprise they'd be inspired to write a song based on Camus' novel L’Étranger (The Stranger). The novel centers around sociopath Meursault's murdering of an Arab and subsequent execution. Because that wouldn't be bleak enough by itself, Camus' novel also serves as a metaphor for the absence of meaning and value in a cruel uncaring universe. The Cure's song, which centers around the book's murder scene, features similarly bleak existential woes.

4. The Normal- Warm Leatherette (J. G. Ballard- Crash)

"Hear the crushing steel,

feel the steering wheel.

Warm Leatherette"

Photo by Dwayne MacGowan

J. G. Ballard's controversial novel Crash, about people who get sexual thrills from re-enacting the car crashes of famous celebrities, was labelled by one publisher as "The author is beyond psychiatric help. DO NOT PUBLISH!". That didn't stop Daniel Miller (A.k.a. The Normal) from reading it however, who worked on a film script version of the book that was later scrapped and turned into a song. The result was the brilliant violent Warm Leatherette that perfectly captures the detached perversion of the book's subjects.

3. Led Zeppelin- Ramble On (J.R.Tolkien- Lord of the Rings)

"In the darkest depths of Mordor I met a girl so fair

But Gollum and the evil one crept up and slipped away with her"

Photo by Ronnie Faienza

For a band that has done a lot of really dumb stuff over the years,  Led Zeppelin are pretty well read. Alongside their well known reference to Melville's literary classic Moby Dick, is Ramble On, which is based on Tolkien's three book tale of questing, Lord of the Rings. Robert Plant makes explicit mention of Mordor and Gollum, although the actual events he describes (including Gollum stealing his girlfriend) don't actually occur in any of the books.

2. Insane Clown Posse- Ol' Evil Eye (Edgar Allen Poe- The Tell Tale Heart)

"Creepers, where'd you get that ball
And tell me how it even fits in your skull?"

Photo by John Liu

What's creepier than clowns rapping? Clown's rapping out a retelling of Edgar Allen Poe's legendarily chilling short story, The Tell Tale Heart.  That's exactly what you get in Insane Clown Posse's Ol' Evil Eye which featuring Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope fantasising about murdering an old man because of his haunting eye. And yes, it's every bit as twisted as it sounds in that description.

1. Velvet Underground- Venus in Furs (Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch- Venus in Furs)

"Kiss the boot of shiny, shiny leather
Shiny leather in the dark"

Photo by Hannah-

In terms of literature meets music, art rockers Velvet Underground's mystic abrasiveness and Sacher-Masoch's (whom after masochism is named) novella filled with mythology and dream sequences in the perfect mix. Both the story and song focus on protagonists Severin's submissive love affair with his mistress Wanda. The song is a cacophonous spiral of whirling noise that perfectly complements the exotic madness from Sacher-Masoch's masterpiece.

Those are the top five, but if you still haven't got you're fix of lit-rock here's some honorable mentions;
The Blue Airplanes- The Applicant, David Bowie- 1984, The Field Mice- So Said Kay, Hawkwind- Steppenwolf, Sonic Youth- Sister, The Smiths- William, It was Really Nothing