New Music: Fursaxa, Wolf & Cub, Christa Pfangen

Fursaxa - Alone In The Dark Wood (Eclipse 2007)

Fursaxa - Alone In The Dark Wood / Eclipse

Music, at its very best, should be a vehicle to another place. Like a beam of pure information expanding your senses, informing them of this new surrounding, sight, sound, smell, wholly convincing in its realness. There's a million angles to take when reviewing a record. I tend to always spout off about location, certain sounds evoking Finland, having my morning coffee, floating through space, or whatever; the point is I like music to vividly construct a scene, to set entirely fabricated worlds in motion. So hopefully now you can understand my joy in discovering a new Fursaxa record. Its not easy keeping up with the world of handpainted cd-r's and Geocities homepages but apparently Alone In The Dark Woods is out on LP through Eclipse Records, to be released later this year on CD by All Tomorrow's Parties (or ATP).

If you're not already filled in on Fursaxa (aka Tara Burke), its a long, winding road but lets get you up to speed. It'd be easy to lump Fursaxa in with the New Weird America crowd, but the spirits that Burke channels exist on a different plane, freakier and folkier than where Devendra Banhartt dwells, and more medieval than Joanna Newsom. Its this kind of 12th century world where nature worship is a very big thing, most likely because its a tangible religion. Sitting by the stream at night, you can see the water nymphs sparkling just below the water's placid surface. It really is that intense. The most effective instrument here is Tara Burke's voice, echoing the same sadness as Nico, but instead of Chelsea Girl, its more like Benedictine Girl. Often being looped many times over, her vocals combine in different timbres to resemble Mass being chanted by a large congregation. Churches do exist in Fursaxa's world, as places full of reverance and that weird, chilling sensation you get when inside such monolithic structures.



Its amazing how Fursaxa always creates a wardrobe effect. Open the doors and step inside, follow that voice deeper and deeper into another world. Burke uses her voice brilliantly to propel her songs, deceptively simple instrumentation combines with cavernous, swelling chants to overwhelming effect. Its a feature of Fursaxa that I think Burke is conscious of, the seventeen second "Intro" serves to sweep you along into receptiveness. The first half of the record is especially funereal, culminating in the title track's black forest feel, disembodied voices echoing through the trees as a lone traveler plucks away nervously around the fire. "Nawne Ye" is the sound of a pagan harvest ceremony, invoking earth-bound spirits to insure good crops and prosperity. "In The Hollow Mink Shoal" begins as a sweet lullaby only to be swallow by quickly rising guitar, sounding almost celebratory. This is a familiar pattern of Fursaxa albums; Burke always mires things in darkness before delivering us with cleansing white magic.

Alone In The Dark Woods is a memorable entry into Fursaxa's already deep discography, and its no surprise she is championed by the highly reputable likes of Thurston Moore and Makoto Kawabata. Burke is a true visionairy, decidely single-minded and legitimately ancient, with determination to forge her own sound. This is timeless music offering the purest possible sense of escape to far away places in time and space.




Wolf & Cub - Steal Their Gold (4AD 2007)

Wolf & Cub - Vessels / 4AD

Ok, I've gotta admit this one caught me off-guard. Life is hard and you can't hear everything, not even the truest Audiversitarian. History shows that Wolf bands are good. The cover art is of this hash party full of all sorts of oddities. Firmly convinced, I played this for the first time at this record store where I work and for the duration of the album kept getting backhanded by all the rock-n-roll theatrics, all the smart tricks of the trade, that I was constantly made to pronounce to my coworker incomprehensibly dudetastic statements like, "Man..this is real rock-n-roll right here!!". This Australian group may be their country's best rock export since AC/DC...and blame it on my southern heritage but AC/DC are true r'n'r greats. Thats Wolf & Cub's trick, to be totally amorphous, cleverly picking through all that is good in rock music and sprinkling bits here and there to create a sound as much apart of the past as it is of the future.

Title track,"Vessels", plunges you in deep right away, plowing ahead with decadent swagger, riffing long and hard like the Stooges circa Funhouse. "This Mess" would be a choice single, stomping akin to Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" but with way more muscle, eventually sporting a burly lead guitar veering into rock god territory, as much devoted to the MC5 as it is to Molly Hatchet. Tracks like "Rozalia Bizarre" and "Conundrum" are awash in heavy feedback and psychedelic intentions; these tracks showing that Wolf & Cub are equally adept at jamming out into krauty oblivion, and based on their dexterity here I'd like for these guys to extend themselves a bit more into the ten minute realm. Singer/lone guitarist, Joel Byrne, is a more than adequate frontman whose vocal style falls somewhere between Iggy Pop and Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie on the wonderful but semi-forgotten record, XTRMNTR. Theres a definite dance undercurrent to all this rock-n-roll fervor, a track like "March of the Clouds" would be well-suited for remix action from someone like the Presets. Some consider it heresy to combine rock and dance but we must keep forging forward, potential pitfalls and all.

Wolf & Cub's music is a rare beast, as strong as it is smart. The influences are there to see but never easily pinned. It wouldn't be an overstatement to say that this music perfectly combines all the right ingredients from the past thirty years of rock history, broken down and reassembled into a coherent sound, existing inside of an ever-shifting but believable framework of reference points. So raise your fist for rock-n-roll, Vessels may be the cream of '07.




Christa Pfangen - Today (Die Schachtel 2007)

Christa Pfangen - Watch Me Getting Back The End / Die Schachtel

Sorry for the shoddy representation of the album cover but there are some things even Google can't do. But I'm not too surprised, especially when general consensus of this group leans heavily on words like "enigmatic", "improvisational", and the dreaded "unclassifiable". However, it is certain that Christa Pfangen is the female Italian duo of Andrea Belfi and Mattia Coletti, and NOT the actual Christa Pfangen (better known to us as Nico). Further investigation reveals a whole new world of Italian experimental music. Aside from knowing Larsen and Ovo, I have to admit complete ignorance of Italy's avant garde scene. Die Schachtel seems to be the place, though, a label with a solid ideological base; "Die Schachtel" apparently being a metaphor for, amongst other things, the conceptual and creative space occupied by both composers and publishers of music.

You can throw alot of terms at Christa Pfangen but none of them truly stick. Watch Me Getting Back The End will be attractive to fans of Animal Collective's type of playful abstraction, the tricky technical wizardry of Battles, or Sigur Ros's post-rock soundscapes. More specifically, this duo creates electro-acoustic alchemy with an improvisational feel. Despite the improv tag, Christa Pfangen manages to be quite fluid, employing treated voice to smooth things over, to add a touch of human warmth, although proceedings rarely veer into the red, avoiding becoming too skronky or wanky. "Today" is a song of soft edges and watercolor sensibilities, two voices interlocking in harmony as guitar and drum turn tricks in the distance. The drumming here is exceptional, sometimes free jazz kit work and at other times, like on "Showing You How A Soft Beat Works As Well", settling into a surprisingly deliberate breakbeat.

For all their experimentation, Christa Pfangen makes surprisingly pleasant music. There's peace made between guitar and drum interplay, hugged by rich electronic washes and gentle voices bereft of words. Watch Me Getting Back The End has alot of potential appeal, especially to the internet-seekers here in the States. And while I'd love to see these Italian musicians get their due, lets try to avoid making Italo electro-acoustic avant garde another passing blogosphere trend.