New Music: Gutevolk, Matta Llama, Magik Markers

Gutevolk - Portable Rain (Noble 2007)

Gutevolk - Tiny People Singing Over The Rainbow / Noble

Tiny People Singing Over The Rainbow is the fourth album of electro-acoustic sunshine from Hirono Nishiyama. Previously operating under her given name, Nishiyama worked closely with Nobukazu Takemura, releasing a few records on his Childisc label, and even providing cute, understated vocal work to some of Takemura's childlike electronic pieces. Her marriage to Noble is a no-brainer. Noble's aim is to curate "music for daily life", a kind of easygoing aesthetic characterized as "purely beautiful and simply liberated". The label has also released material by Kazumasa Hashimoto, Midori Hirano, and Yasushi Yoshida, all musicians interested in creating wonderfully naive compositions.

To say I'm in love with Japanese "music for daily life" would be an understatement. From Lullatone's patented pajama pop to Yuichiro Fujimoto's tiny minimalism, this type of thing sends me drifting along without a care in the world. Gutevolk will perhaps be more digestable than those artists, more recognizable to Western internet-seekers, those devoted to constant pursuit of cutting edge blogosphere fanfare. Falling in a loosely-bound school of mellowgold indie pop featuring the likes of Stereolab, The Books, and Manitoba/Caribou., Gutevolk certainly has the capacity to perk plenty of ears. "Portable Rain" is a long stroll on a brisk spring day, projecting hazy dreams of such a perfect setting. Songs like "This Moon Is Following Me" and "Ao To Kura" are playful indie pop-filtered bossa nova numbers with Bacharachian sensibilities. It all rolls along so effortlessly. "Seed of Sky" and "I Like Rainbow" opt for less structured pastures, in tandem scoring an escape to dreamlike dandilion meadows.

I don't know "whats in the water" over in Japan but the country keeps giving birth to wonderful cultural exports that are beguiling and more than a little alien to Western sensibilities. But I don't mean to write a treatise on cultural cross-pollenation; in fact I aim to do the opposite. After this last sentence is typed, I will retire to my wonderful backporch and watch the sun set on a beautiful March day, soaking in life's simple pleasures.




Matta Llama - A Sky Blue Screw (Mad Monk 2007)

Matta Llama - S/T / Mad Monk

Matta Llama is a mysterious psych rock force, scorching the earth direct from NYC. All other details are sketchy other than the band being a foursome featuring Arik Moonhawk Roper doing it up on bass guitar, who, for all I know, could be the rightful king of Atlantis. Matta Llama sure sounds mystical, existing hidden for thousands of years hidden deep in the Himalayas. Its all about lost cities, the kind Calvino wrote about. If it can be imagined then it might as well exist, no matter how surreal. Lets not forget that "psych" is still short for "psychedelic", and the jams have to be a proper trip. Feel the gravitational pull here on Matta Llama's self-titled LP.

"Egypt Chic" comes to us from deep inside a cavern. Jazzy caveman drumming and undulating bongwater bass dimly light the way until a lightning breathed, guitar-wielding hydra emerges from the depths. Things are nice and chill until that guitar, rightfully placed to shake things up. "Thetan Cruise" is a heavy contrast to the dark opener, like hopping a freight train to the cosmos, chugging along with a fuzzed out groove and particularly athletic drumming always picking up speed. Whoever the guitar wizard is, his intrusions are always tasteful in how they totally blow a hole straight thru your brain. Matta Llama is given a voice on "A Sky Blue Screw". Its like peaking in on someone's acid trip, hearing their conversations with God, with them vehemently making demands for change in reality. Kind of rambling and certainly creepy, this barely coherent, definitely enraged voice kind of reminds me of Swans' Michael Gira in its sheer vainbusting intensity.

Matta Llama's debut is a proper one, appealing equally to true New Weird Americans and to those who think Dead Meadow is the only band still soldiering on with the psych rock schtick. This stuff truly exists outside of schtick, the inhuman grunting on "A Deepening Sky" sounding completely unaware of itself as such, done in a vaccuum where everything sticks with a sincere belief that grunting is an acceptable form of artistic expression. I wholeheartedly agree that after hearing enough people talk it all eventually devolves into just a bunch of grunting. "Grunt more often", decreed the great guardian of Matta Llama.




Magik Markers - Don't Come Home (Arbitrary Signs 2007)

Magik Markers - Castel Franco: Veneto/Zagreb Super Report / Arbitrary Signs

Its hard to believe that I've been holding my breath for twenty-three years. Somehow Magik Markers caught my blindspot, slipped thru the cracks, but now I can finally exhale. Castel Franco: Veneto/Zagreb Super Report is yet another limited release cd-r from one of out-sound's favorite rock bands. This record won't be too surprising for those following the band's prolific output, but as for myself, for once without those jaded glasses, this album came like a wicked uppercut, knocking me into the stratosphere of deep personal introspection. Like the first time I heard Born Against or Guyana Punchline, somehow the ferocity of Magik Markers has gotten under my skin with moving cacaphony. I don't mean to descend into Braffisms, but this band may change your life.

Formerly a trio, Magik Markers is now, at least for this recording, the duo of Pete Nolan & Elisa Ambrogio. You may have heard about Ambrogio's tendency to devour showgoers. It may seem like histrionics but theres a kind of unsteady trust beaming from her, an animalistic unpredictability, challenging the connection between performer and audience. Listen to the recording. Listen to her tear and rip at the guitar, casting off inner demons. Maybe most importantly, go watch to get the full treatment. Like staring into the Bucket Of Truth, its easy to lose yourself in the maelstrom, but like Ian Robert's detective with existential angst, I say "Don't you think I already know that?". The group's free-rock dirges are intense and ultimately cathartic, addressing frustrations both long-simmering and freshly struck. Its like breaking things for the hell of it, shaking your fist at the sky in defiance even though you know it won't change a thing.

"Fire of the Mind" kicks off this live recording. Heavy background chatter is like captured EVP as Ambroggio channels demons thru her admittedly "masturbatory" guitar style, constantly climaxing as Pete Nolan lays down bed-of-nails drumbeats. "Don't Come Home" is some of the most vitally urgent music I've heard in ages, channeling early Sonic Youth thru the epic guitar palette of *gasp* Neil Young. Ambroggio's narrative passionately espousing harsh travels far from home, a life void of comfort and familiarity. "Can't Kill Luck" is the apex of the album, covered in rattlesnakes, Ambroggio plays an angel of death, disguised as a "buxom woman, black hair, with a firm ass and small waist", virulently laying down the facts of life to a dying man, recounting the glorious, never again attainable attributes of youth and the inevitable march towards death. The second-half of the album picks up the pace, the group settling into a groove with their patented low-end anti-rock, charging forward sonically with reckless abandon. The record ends with a hovering drone number, running at ten minutes its a good way to ease your way out of things.

Castel Franco: Veneto/Zagreb Super Report captures Magik Markers at a time when they are shining brighter than ever. This may be that record, the kind of essential document that becomes a standard point of reference for namedropping record nerds. There's a heavy haze that forms over the course of the record, but its worth it to stand tall and enjoy it from start to finish. This may only be one of fifteen release for the band this year but they certainly have me by the throat for the whole ride.

Used-Bin Bargains: Wilson Simonal

Wilson Simonal - Destino E Destino De Severino Nonô Na Cidade De São Sebastião Do Rio De Janeiro (Oh Yeah!) (Odeon 1970)

Wilson Simonal – Simona / Odeon

My introduction to Wilson Simonal came with my first exploration into the amazing hip-hop, jazz, funk and soul magazine, Wax Poetics (of which I now read like a bible). Featured about three-fourths way through issue number eight, Greg Casseus gives an exhaustive account of the tumultuous career of Simonal and in turn introduces one of South America’s biggest fallen pop stars to an entirely new audience. (This is probably the best time to point out that the majority of the information I am about to divulge was pulled from that article, “The Saga of Wilson Simonal” –Greg Casseus, Wax Poetics, Issue Number Eight, Spring 2004, as well as the Allmusic.com entry, and you are best suited to read the entire story from the people doing the all-important legwork). It is downright amazing that a performer as gigantically popular as Simonal was in Brazil and South America as a whole in the 60s is still relatively unknown to the rest of the world. It just goes to show you the monolithic influence of the press, who condemned Simonal in the early 70s for supposedly acting as an informant for the infamous Department of Order and Social Protection/Departamento de Ordem Política e Social (DOPS) and the destructive right-wing military coup that would reign over Brazil from 1964 to 1984. During his 40-year musical career, which stretches all the way to his death in June of 2000, Simonal went from being Brazil’s biggest Black entertainer, rivaling Pelé at the peak of his popularity, to an ignored outcast in the very same country. It is a story that screams for a drama-filled biopic… oh! and there is some amazing music involved as well. Since we like to concentrate on a particular album with this column, I am going to highlight 1970’s Simona, not only because it features Simonal at a creative crossroads of style and at nearly the peak of his popularity, but also (mostly) because it’s the album I cheerily stumbled across in the used section of Reckless Records last week.

The Rio de Janeiro-born Wilson Simonal De Castro began his musical career following a stint in the army in the late 50s as a personal assistant to Carlos Imperial, a writer, talent scout, booking agent and maybe the first man in Brazil to take rock-and-roll seriously. The time spent with Imperial was schooling in all things media and entertainment, from how to handle critics to performing in any style thrown at him. He developed a pop star’s grasp on how to sway a crowd and a silky smooth, genre-transcending baritone that rarely was caught off-key. He debuted on wax with 1962’s A Nova Dimesão do Samba and signed to Odeon Records where he would stay for the next decade until controversy forced him to sign with rival label Philips. Throughout the 60s, Simonal would take on every popular style in vogue and mix and mesh them into completely new genres at will. His debut album, a commercial misstep, featured arrangements in the vein of American R&B and doo wop but with traditional samba rhythms. 1963’s Tem Algo Mais, on the other hand, found a comfortable blend of bossa nova, jazz and orchestral pop that established Simonal as a musical force. For the rest of the decade, he continually paved the way for hip new sounds by experimenting with combinations of styles and enlisting young, aspiring songwriters including the whose who of Tropicália (who would later rally against him and even later retake his side) including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Chico Buarque and Geraldo Vandré.

By 1966, the military coup had taken over the Brazilian government and the popular music scene underwent significant stylistic changes. Bossa Nova was being ousted by a superficial form of Beatles-inspired pop/rock aimed at teenagers known as “iê- iê- iê” and Simonal was experimenting with a new collage-happy sound known as pilantragem or “piracy.” With his excellent boogaloo-inspired soul-jazz-samba backing trio, Som Três, he basically pulled source material from wherever he found inspiration and utilized it in his music. This stylistic philosophy (not too far from sampling really) elevated Simonal’s career to pop star status and along with hugely selling records, he hosted his own weekly TV variety show. At what was probably the apex of his career, ’66-’68, he issued a series of albums called Alegria! Alegria! which produced a great amount of popular singles in Brazil as well as being the beginnings of world-wide recognition. Simultaneously, there was exponentially growing tension between the overthrown Brazilian government and the bubbling university counterculture. The military leaders were shouting “Brazil: Love It or Leave It” completely skewing all views of patriotism while the burgeoning leftist and Tropicália movements (who ironically where the most patriotic of the bunch) were demanding people and especially pop stars to choose sides. Simonal was stuck in the middle; he was a rich, widely known Black man who really had no interest in politics or supporting the military regime which pissed off the coup as much as the young left-wingers who either considered you “one of us” or “one of them.”

This about brings us to 1970 and the release of Simona. Simonal had just outperformed global star Sergio Mendes and the Brasil ’66 in front of tens of thousands of people and started his own production and management company Simonal Produções Ltda. to try an expand his growing media empire. His backing band, Som Três, were making a name of their own with the albums he produced, his songs were being made into themes for the national soccer team who won their third-straight World Cup in Mexico 1970, and funk was beginning to grab a hold of Brazil as well as the rest of the world. Simona, his third-to-last for Odeon, features Simonal in a number of masks including party-starter, balladeer and pop star. His shape-changing, silky-smooth baritone jumps from classic Brazilian soul to almost Rat Pack-like crooning with equal ferocity. With Som Três performing in full form, the album opens with the upbeat Fred Falcao/Arnoldo Mederios-penned “Sem Essa” which features the sound of Northern Brazilian soul: smooth, buoyant vocals with multi-layered shaker rhythms, popping horns and orchestrated accompaniment. My personal favorite, “Destino E Destino De Severino Nonô Na Cidade De São Sebastião Do Rio De Janeiro (Oh Yeah!)” follows with this completely infectious stripped-down funk pop groove. Fittingly, the lyrics tell the tale of a northeastern singer becoming a star in Rio and forgetting his roots, how poignant. If this track has not been cleverly sampled, then it’s a damn shame. The Latin influence shows it’s head with the cha cha rhythm and smooth orchestra-pop of “Comigo é Assim,” and “O Mundo Igual De Cada Um” features a light and fluffy funk-pop spirit that rides a baritone sax squawk, horn stabs and vibrant Brazilian guitar. The second half of the album is decisively more laid-back with tracks like the absolutely ghostly “Sistema Nervoso” which includes Twilight Zone-like sound effects and the patient organ crawl of album closer “Não Tem Solução.” Even “Aí Você Começa A Chorar,” which I assume would be considered a bit aged and overproduced for the time, is still completely addictive with Simonal’s vocal dexterity jumping from oddly tuned falsetto to low growl. With my limited knowledge of the coinciding music scene at Simona’s release, it is hard for me to put the album in accurate cultural and musical perspective, but I will say that is an absolute joy to listen too no matter what the context. It is definitely much smoother, produced and mainstream than any of the Tropicália records but just as infectious, if not more so.

From here on out it was all downhill for the career of Wilson Simonal. Leading the way for the MPB movement that would dominate Brazilian music through the 70s, Simonal recorded two more albums for Odeon before a hugely traumatic mistake that would take 30 years to recover from. In 1971, Simonal met with his accountant, Rafael Vivani, to go over his books and determine where he stood financially. After Vivani informed him that despite selling millions of records world-wide, his over-exuberant pop-star lifestyle had in fact left him not only broke but also in debt. Simonal poorly chose in a fit of rage to contact his “friends” at the DOPS to threaten the accountant while they were off-duty in an attempt to reveal conspiracies of embezzlement. Nothing was accomplished and Vivani sued Simonal for extortion, which instigated a wave of terrible press accusing Simonal of being in cohorts with the government and acting as an informant for the DOPS. Not completely unlike the Red Scare in the U.S., Simonal was ousted and blacklisted by the music industry and being an easily accusable public figure, was always assumed guilty in anything related to political-media scandals, like Veloso and Gil’s exiles for example. The decisively non-political musician kept on recording albums after signing with Odeon rival Philips and later RCA in the 70s, but his popularity was diminishing by the day as both the left and right condemned him for false accusations. There were even a few albums in the 80s and 90s on independent labels, but the damage was done and it was almost as if the complete memory of Simonal’s amazingly productive music career was wiped from existence. He married a lawyer who spent the majority of the 90s successfully clearing his name though Simonal was already on the slippery slope of alcoholism and depression. Two years after his final album, 1998’s Bem Brasil-Estilo Simonal, Wilson Simonal died of cirrhosis. His name was eventually cleared after the Justice Ministry and Department of Strategic Affairs documents were liberated in the post-dictatorship amnesty. Thankfully, through the last decade’s interest in Brazilian music and vinyl collecting along with the hard work of his sons Max De Castro and Wilson Simoninha, both prospering musicians in their own right, Simonal’s music is once again reaching fans across the globe. Like Simona, his LPs are being reissued on CD for lucky music fans like myself to merrily stumble across in record stores everywhere.

Singleversity #2

Audiversity’s weekly column on random music in exactly 144 words.

(Ed. - Originally this was called Threeversity, but in the spirit of simplicity we've decided to retroactively relabel all of these posts. The content remains unchanged.)

MA:
(#144 of a random playlist generated from my ever-changing database of 12,500+ songs)



I’m not too pleased with what the spirits of random chose this week: RJD2’s “Clean Living.” Not that I dislike the song, but RJ is an artist I have fell out of sorts with in the last year. I have yet to hear his new album, but everyone seems pretty up in arms that he turned his back on hip-hop. Did you actually listen to Since We Last Spoke? Did you really not see it coming? All rants aside, “Clean Living” was my favorite song from that disc until I heard where he sampled that amazingly elastic bass line from, Pure Essence’s "Third Rock." To say RJ sampled liberally would be putting it lightly. Personally, I like the original version better; it’s the actual definition of smooth-prog-funk, a genre explored way too rarely. Who knew underground Cincinnati circa 197? was so silky smooth.

JR:



Mythos was mainly guided by the cosmic wisdom of Stephan Kaske. A similar figure to Silver Apple's Simeon, Kaske was seemingly touched by the burning knowledge of the night sky; not simply an electronics guru AND sitar wiz, this "high school dropout" was capable of incredible flute wizardry. "Message" is culled from 1975's Dreamlab, a testament to the power of psychedelic drugs to pry open frontiers of the mind otherwise not yet within our evolutionary reach. Train your senses on the sound of a hovering spaceship; synth, drums, bass, and flute all combining, intensifying, bursting forth with manic energy. Suddenly the hovering, fluorescent shape of Kaske in your dreams, riffing madly on that flute to open interdimensional doorways. Its a one-off affair, much like a DMT trip; living forever with "We are brothers!! Put Your Weapons Away!!" emblazoned in gold on the back of your eyelids.

PM:

As my name is Patrick and my heritage is 100% Irish-American (the last of a dying breed), St. Paddy’s Day is a soft spot for me; also, it never gets old hearing people ask what I’m doing for “St. You Day!” Seriously. In the spirit of the holiday, here’s something from three guys who are always in the mood to talk about how Irish they are: Wolfe Tones (named after Theobald Wolfe Tone, 1798 Irish Rebellion leader) have been banned from Aer Lingus flights and taken off Irish radio for being a little too Irish (in Ireland, even!). “Come Out Ye Black and Tans” is my favorite anti-English song, a 1920s jig originally written by Dominic Behan and shortened here to three verses. You can be sure I’m only going to remember the chorus after my sixth Guiness later tonight... Sláinte to that, then.

New Music: Numero Group, The Huxtables

Annette Poindexter & the Pieces of Peace - Mama (Numero Group 2007, originally Twinight 1970)

Johnny Williams - Breaking Point (Numero Group 2007, originally Twinight 1967)

Various Artists – Twinight's Lunar Rotation / Numero Group

After unearthing dusty soul miss-hits in Miami, Detroit, Phoenix and churches everywhere, Numero Group returns home for their second dig into the wonderfully rich history of Chicago's underground music scene. They introduced the Eccentric Soul series with the windy city's lost Bandit Label and have spent the two years since piecing together the seemingly buried story of a similar imprint born out of ambition, business know-how and a bluesy R&B singer who went by Syl Johnson. From 1967 to 1972, Twinight Records rode the funds brought in by Sylvester Thompson's continuous stream of local hits under his hipper alias while putting out 45 after 45 of local musicians attempting to mimic the success story of labels like Stax and Motown. Despite cultivating a good amount of talent and masterfully working the PR game, the bands just could not breakout of the all-night radio stream of no-name singles from aspiring artists the DJ's dubbed the lunar rotation. Eventually, most of the promising young groups lost hope and returned to their day jobs, Syl Johnson left Chicago for the burgeoning Hi Records and Willie Mitchell's crafted rhythm section, and the two men behind Twinight returned to their independent promotion gigs.

Howard Bedno and Peter Wright, of independent promotion group Bedno-Wright Assoicates, honed their PR skills by cleverly aiming the music of Chess, Stax, Motown, Atlantic and numerous smaller labels into the ears of Chicagoans throughout the late 50s and 60s by any means possible, whether it be your local watering hole's jukebox or by the omniscient radio waves of WVON, Chicago's premier R&B station at the time. They knew the game and they were good at playing it, so it only made sense to utilize these skills for themselves as well and henceforth Twinight (which was initially called Twilight but tweaked at the end of 1967 due to a California imprint already owning the name) was born as a potentially lucrative side project. Incredibly important to the upstart was a silent third partner, the program director of WVON, Mr. E. Rodney Jones (I told you they were masterminds of the PR game), who was also the de facto manager of a seconds-before-breaking-out Syl Johnson. Jones talked Bedno into funding Johnson's first single in 1966 ("Straight Love No Chaser"), which was a local hit, and a year later Johnson's nationally-charting second single ("Come On Sock It To Me") was sporting Twilight 001.

This began the Twinight cycle of the next 4 years: Johnson would produce a hit and the incoming funds were re-invested into other local acts attempting to produce another star. For one reason or another though none of the artists was able to breakout of the local scene. Over the span of Twinight's existence, Bedno and Wright released numerous soul and R&B 45s but not one of the non-Johnson singles would claim any national attention. As this two-disc compilation clearly portrays, it was not for lack of talent and it obviously wasn't the result of poor promotions. I guess you can mark it down as one of life's many mysteries, because no matter how I try to wrap my brain around it, there is absolutely no reason that any of these included songs could not have been rocking the pop-R&B charts along side the many hits of Atlantic, Motown and Stax. Eventually Johnson got fed up with the lack of progress in the label's popularity (and obviously his earned money being invested in flopping local groups) and left for Willie Mitchell's Hi Records where he had another string of hits. Without those driving funds, the label could not support itself and quietly shut its doors in 1972. Bedno and Wright went back to promoting independently and the master tapes were stored away for dust collecting.

Numero opted to not include any of Syl Johnson's individual cuts on this two-disc collection, which makes sense since they are concentrating on the obscure, but there is a good amount of his production and influence strewn around the comp. The 40 songs that are included frequent the pop-R&B genre with stops in instrumental funk, heart-wrenching soul and throwback blues from musicians you more than likely have never heard of and probably will never again. They are the local talent show winners, the powerful voices from the neighborhood church's gospel choir, the child protégés, the on-the-corner fast-talker with his decent singing girlfriends and the disc jockeys with ambition. The songs' musical themes are familiar, though you have never heard the actual song before; they ooze this impossible-to-place nostalgia like the day-tripping bass line of Stormy's "The Devastator," the buoyant pop strings of Annette Poindexter & the Pieces of Peace's "Mama," the Donny Hathaway keyboard twinkles of Josephine Taylor's "I've Made Up My Mind" care of… oh, wait that's actually an early appearance from Hathaway, or the soulful Curtis Mayfield groove from future Impression Nate Evans.

With Twinight's Lunar Rotation, Numero Group has once again supplied us with an amazing compilation of crate-diggers' dreams, but you have to wonder when these re-issuers will hit the eventual ceiling. Even with the rampant revolving door of independent labels during this era, there are still only a finite number of them in existence. At some point, the diggers are going to stick their shovel in the ground and hear that clunking sound of rock bottom. Once all the gems are unearthed, where will they turn? In what direction will labels like Numero Group head towards? The men behind the N, Rob Sevier, Ken Shipley and Tom Lunt, have not come close to letting us down yet, so there is little to worry about in the immediate future, but you have to be at least a little excited anticipating the next eventual wave of digging.






The Huxtables - Hopper C (the Bunny) (Famous Class 2007)

The Huxtables – A Touch of Wonder / Famous Class

Well twenty years from now, The Huxtables may very well be one of those bands being dug up during the next generation of crate-digging. They are a relatively obscure duo, have a quirky name, are on a tiny D.I.Y. label and have a sound that is infectious without being typical. As long as this album goes sorely unnoticed then we are in business… well maybe that's too much to ask because I don't feel like waiting 20 years to enjoy the jovial rambunctiousness of A Touch of Wonder.

This is the third of the exuberantly packaged Famous Class albums I have received in the last few months, and it doesn't come close to disappointing. First came the infectious synth-pop of Snakes Say Hisss!, then the raucous surf of Boogie Boarder and now we have basement party-noise of The Huxtables. In fact, I just about tackled the poor girl who pulled it out of its envelope in my office a few days ago. She removed the strikingly colored 60-page handmade booklet from its bland yellow mailing envelope and simply said, "wow." I took once glance, recognized it immediately and flew out of my chair from across the room and snatched it out of her trembling hand before she could say another word. Sure she has not talked to me since, but hell, I don't need anyone because The Huxtables are bringing all the party I need directly to my headphones.

With twelve songs in just over twenty minutes, A Touch of Wonder is the best kind of party there is: brief and to the point. Each of the first three tracks barely surpasses the one-minute mark and match wits between scraping electric noise and raw drum/guitar interplay. As with the rest of the album as well, synths and bass make occasional appearances to accent the sound, but everything is basically thrown into a trashy mid-frequency range and sprayed out confetti-style on whoever is willing to toss their body around the cement basement. It’s loose and youthful but not all together juvenile. “Crystal Cubes” sounds Hella-ish but at half-speed (which is still pretty fast), “The Death of Private Pig/Hogs of the Road” features some Rob Crow-like guitar lines before they seem to lose interest with that idea and move on, and “The Goose” could have been a GSL throwaway from five years ago. These kids are decent musicians (I think), but seem more content to stay in the basement playing for their friends rather than producing a well-developed album. In fact, most of the appeal of an album like A Touch of Wonder is the whatever vibe of the music. The Huxtables sound as if they have been doing this to cure boring Saturday nights for years without any interest of taking it too seriously or to the next level. It’s two kids with no formal training slamming away on some hand-me-down instruments and having a damn good time doing it. Twenty years from now, that very well may be the free-spirit we need and crave, and if for some reason no one takes much interest this time around, I’ll be there to dig it up for a second chance.

New Music: Gowns, Zu & Nobukazu Takemura, Wilderness Pangs

Gowns - Fake July (Cardboard 2007)

Gowns - Red State / Cardboard

Arguably the most famous quotation from Bulgakov's masterpiece "The Master and Margarita" is "manuscripts don't burn." It was a defiant mark of protest to the Soviet government and the NKVD at a time when anti-Stalinist works were being eradicated and artists were being thrown in jail, their books burned and the works in theory burned with them. But no idea burns that is in the mind of its creator, and perhaps no idea burns so intensely as the idea of burning itself, which is what Gowns have accomplished on their latest album, Red State.

The band's two members - Erika Anderson of Amps for Christ and Ezra Buchla of The Mae Shi - have crafted a 42-minute album that is the sound of fire. But it's not just a raging blaze as featured MySpace song and much blogged-about eight-minute epic "White Like Heaven" leads you to believe; in fact, that's the centerpiece of the album and clearly its longest, but it is not necessarily its best. Fire comes in all shapes and sizes: The brush fire, the house fire, the raging blaze, the pitiful flame. Red State brilliantly puts a soundtrack to all of these forms.

It starts out innocently enough, a strummed guitar introducing "Fargo" before a list of drugs takes over and the swell of white noise-feedback as an undercurrent kicks in; the hot coals of Sonic Youth's past have arrived. It's everywhere. Buchla does a decent job when he gets his chance to take the lead mic, whispering here on "Fake July" to great effect. But it really is Anderson's wonderfully smokey vocal delivery that just out-impresses with that desolate kind of voice you expect to hear smoldering at the end of a long night when it's all over and the fire marshalls have declared the blaze well and truly over with. "Clawless" illustrates this best, an a cappella performance that provides an uneasy yet poignant moment before the rumbling rush of "Mercy Springs" arrives. This is the sound of fire, that much is true. But it is also the sound of a creativity that burns in the hearts of all true artists, and that speaks as much to the legacy of Bulgakov as any Tea Party song.













Zu & Nobukazu Takemura - Everyone Gets His Own Nemesis (Atavistic 2007)

Zu & Nobukazu Takemura - Identification With the Enemy: A Key to the Underworld / Atavistic

In another take on fire, it not only burns and rages and smolders and kills, it also melts and fuses and re-shapes. That's the kind of fire burning inside the intrepid Italian trio Zu. Behind virtually all of their music is a willingness to obliterate the very notion of genres and meld together the most disparate and different aspects of rock, jazz and electronica. If you've kept up with Chicago-based Atavistic's output for these Romans, you already know that this collaboration with legendary Japanese DJ Nobukazu Takemura is not the first: Mats Gustafsson, Eugene Chadbourne, Dälek (which I had no idea of, I swear), and Ken Vandermark are just some of the high-profile names these boys have worked with in the past, and all of it has been more or less solid output with a nod at the avant-garde.

Identification With the Enemy: A Key to the Underworld is the latest full-length release (There's a 7" picture disc also out, but that's another story for another day) and it blends Zu's willingness to straddle the line between Hella and Yellow Swans with Takemura's decades-honed craft of glitchy electro that has made a comfortable niche of its own on Thrill Jockey. If it seems like a strange concoction, it's not: These guys work chaotically well together, sending what they know of electronic shards, ambient droning and math-rock freak-outs into the furnace to bring it out again a glowing piece of music that will appeal to anyone looking for an aural challenge. "Alone With the Alone" rockets off straight away as a jazz-math disaster the Coleman family would be proud of, but it's not all 666 in outer-space here either. In fact, the album's momentum is almost totally destroyed on the 12-minute ambient timewarp "Usual Conversations With Yama." Though it flitters and flickers with drill n' bass and any minute you expect to hear a Wolf Eyes-esque squall of feedback, it never comes. Just hums along, minding its own business, until you reach the other side and "Awake in the Other Room" sounds like the album that had just been taking a break.

Radio transmissions and high-level frequencies bring you back to the more "songy" sounds of the final two numbers, but the point has by now long been made: Zu have once again teamed up with an artist more than willing to heat up the idea of the genre and the results are one steaming, beautiful pile of lava. One can barely tell what it is anymore, and more often than not it's that kind of sound that really paves the way for the boiling tar and paved asphalt to follow. Sheer madness.













Wilderness Pangs - The Elephant Ghost Saga Parts 1 & 2 (Apocalypse the Apocalypse 2007)

Wilderness Pangs - The Indivisible Squalor of Wilderness Pangs / Apocalypse the Apocalypse

But the worst kind of madness, I'd imagine, is the one you'd have living in hell for all eternity. Now I'm not a bettin' man, but I generally like to err on the side of caution when moral dealings are in play. Baton Rouge, Louisiana-bred Wilderness Pangs, on the other hand, have no such qualms. In fact, they've already sold their souls to Woland in exchange for having their tunes as the soundtrack to a real musician's hell. Frankly, Dream Theater could learn a thing or two from these guys: The Indivisible Squalor of Wilderness Pangs is, much like Zu & Takemura, a total mess of sounds coagulating together to form some glorious, noisy, disheveled kind of album only God himself could love unconditionally.

I take that back. Color me a sinner, but I'm possessed by this album at the moment. Right from the outset of the unassuming "Magic Bullet," you're thrown into the middle of the woods as howling wolves and alien spacecraft surround you. The bayou doesn't get any friendlier after you've been abducted into "The Elephant Ghost Saga Parts 1 & 2," easily one of the noisiest and most overmodulated pieces of music I've heard this year and all the better for its lo-fi effect. If you've ever wondered what living in a Kuznetsov turbofan sounds like without any earplugs, you've got two options: My Bloody Valentine's "Only Shallow" (which is far more akin to a Rolls Royce than a Kuznetsov, pretty and delicate in its power rather than smoking and careless of stealth) or the second song on this 14-tracker. It gets friendlier (if no less strange) in the third part, a separate song altogether. The vocals here really make a difference, and help to anchor what would otherwise be beautiful but somewhat remote. Randy Faucheux (which I sincerely hope is his actual name) can sing along with an erratic horn and make it sound like there's an anchor to it all. Indeed, a few times on here you've actually got a straightforward folk song to balance out the acid-rock hysteria ("I Shot My Favorite Horse" is the first example, but "Wolfman" is also genuinely pretty in its slow-roasted folk pastiche).

In the case of Wilderness Pangs, the manuscripts can't burn because there simply weren't any to begin with; repeating some of these performances must be difficult if not impossible, but once again it's the delivered energy that makes all the difference. Doesn't matter if they don't repeat every shaken coin jar or include every processed beat every single time; the fact that they produced it at all in the first place is a testament both to their seemingly endless supply of ideas and the creative blaze that's currently engulfing Wilderness Pangs. To think this is but their first album... Well, that is something special. Bulgakov would be proud.

New Music: Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid, Cassette Concréte/Joshi, Jandek

Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid - Our Time (Domino 2007)

Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid – Tongues / Domino

Think back to radio circa 1964. Or, if you’re of the younger generation, turn on your local Oldies station. I can guarantee that within an hour or two, you will hear the chugging rhythm and anthemic vocals of the Motown staple “Dancing in the Street” care of Martha Reeves’ powerful vocal cords. Is it the blind optimism of the lyrics that draws so many people to listen cheerfully year after year? Well maybe a little, but I’m guessing that without “one of the most primal rhythms in the Motown annals” (AMG) the song would not have quite as much resounding longevity. While Mrs. Reeves gets most of the credit for the Marvin Gaye-penned anthem, the man behind the soul-stirring rhythm that drives the song into our memories goes for the most part unnoticed. That young man was a 20-year-old Steve Reid and it was the very beginning of an extremely impressive career for the multi-talented percussionist. Over his 40-plus years behind the kit, he has played with nearly every huge name in jazz and R&B: from Miles Davis to James Brown, Sun Ra to Dione Warwick, Fela Kuti to Dee Dee Bridgewater. And now, still drumming as strong as ever in his early 60s, Reid is finally back in the spotlight for the first time since the mid-70s thanks to his highly-acclaimed 2005 album Spirit Walk on Soul Jazz and his recent collaborations with Kieran Hebden.

Hebden is widely regarded for his work as Four Tet in which he cleverly mixes electronics with jazz, folk, post-rock, hip-hop and found sound. Initially a side-project of the excellent post-rock band Fridge (with Adam Ilhan or Adem and Sam Jeffers), the Four Tet moniker took off in 1999 with his debut solo album Dialogue, and with each concurrent album his popularity has grown exponentially. Hebden took part as an auxiliary to the Spirit Walk recordings where he accentuated the spiritual jazz music with tasteful electronics. This spurred a full on collaboration between Reid and Hebden which first saw the light of day early last year with two installments of The Exchange Sessions on Domino. Each album contained only three tracks, though they clocked in around 15-minutes at a minimum, and featured the colorful improvisations of Reid on drums and percussion and Hebden twiddling his numerous electronic triggers. As I put it my review of the Sessions: “the duo creates an indefinable sound that spits, gurgles, swirls and transports the listener into a completely different aural world.”

Underground music’s odd couple has been touring the globe nonstop it seems over the last year, and if you haven’t caught them yet, I highly recommend it. As their newest set of recordings reveals, this rigorous tour schedule and their constant collaborating has bridged their creative minds and they have never sounded tighter than on this album. First off, Tongues is much more accessible than either of the Exchange Sessions if only because it consists of ten shorter tracks rather than three elongated ones. The overall sound has not changed too much, once again recorded live with no overdubs or edits, but there is a definite higher level of musical comfort where both artists are much more schooled in what to expect from the other and how to react accordingly. Tongues is also decisively more buoyant and playful, Hebden’s electronics bubble and babble and gurgle and swirl over Reid’s patient drum kit and percussive toys. Not that the Exchange Sessions were abrasive or anything of that sort, but the underlying melodies of Tongues just seem a lot more welcoming and hypnotic.

“Our Time” should be all you have to hear to realize that Hebden and Reid are on a completely new level with Tongues. Hebden lays down the kind of warm, looping, harp-like melody that made Rounds so addicting while Reid eases a steadily fluctuating beat underneath. As the song progresses, Hebden’s lighthearted electronic adlibs flutter in between Reid’s flickering idiophones making the kind of loose, jazzy, organic instrumental that Hebden dreamed of making as Four Tet. On the same tip, album opener “The Sun Never Sets” builds from a simple, throbbing keyboard melody into stuttering, stammering, skittering mess of bright electronics and kaleidoscoping percussion that is just a joy to let completely envelope your ears. They even take on the traditional “Greensleeves,” which is spun into a ghostly twinkle of a melody so familiar it almost aches. Everything is just not audible sparklers though. Tracks like “People Be Happy” and “Rhythm Dance” ride on Reid’s chugging drum kit and u.f.o. sound effects; much more in the vein of the earlier recordings but in condensed formats. Whether you really get into the album or not is all about your acceptance of the sometimes off-the-wall improvs from Hebden’s array of noisemakers. Like on “Brain” when they are skipping along to a groovy rhythm and a pleasant melodic loop, when at which point Hebden winds up his chaotic noise and starts drilling incessantly. But then again, the same synthetic wackiness is abundant on “Superheros,” yet I find that one much more playful than annoying.

Tongues is a great progression for the duo and a much more accessible album than either of the Exchange Sessions. If you were a fan of those earlier albums, this is a must have, and if you wanted to like them but had a little trouble sitting through the fatiguing songs, I urge you to give this one a try. Hebden and Reid are once again hitting the road, so definitely keep an eye out because it is an absolutely must see show. They are as well already gearing up for their next recording session in Senegal. Sometime this year, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a remix EP or something of that nature featuring Audion and James Holden, and what we have all been waiting the last six years for: a new Fridge album.






Joshi - Apocalypso (Leisure Class 2006)

Cassette Concréte/Joshi – A Tape Gone Leaves No Trace/Animal Faith / Leisure Class

"I record primarily on cassettes [CHEAP.] b/c manipulations are fluid, immersive, intuitive - direct, skin-on-ironoxide, realistic flesh-tone timewarp, plus playback function. The sound is wet & can find no way, singing backwards into the world. My hands are too large rough and brusque for digital doilies who bruise easy - decks get broke, some smoke...I'd much rather just play 30's-style jazz clarinet or trumpet."

Josh Carrigan does not hide his ethos; he displays them proudly on his MySpace page, granted in fractured free verse, but for anyone willing to pick through, it's right there. Like a DJ who refuses to give up his tangible wax grooves for the mysterious binary reproduction even though it may be more user-friendly, Carrigan understands the allure of imperfection and fluidity that comes with analog anything and I do believe his homemade music would actually lose some of it's appeal in any other format. Throughout this full-length split with his not-so-distant alter ego, Carrigan explores experimental folk music as Cassette Concréte first, then as Joshi; the difference is subtle, but it creates a good swelling of intrigue that roped me in from the start and kept my ears attentive throughout the entire hour-plus exploration through the eerie landscape of lo-fi post-folk.

Packaged in a hand-stitched construction paper case, A Tape Gone Leaves No Trace/Animal Faith actually came out in the summer of 06, but I'm guessing it's taken a little momentum for the idealist, DIY North Hampton, MA label, Leisure Class, to suit up for radio distribution. It's a shame though because Carrigan can really hold his own against similar acts rising up the indie hierarchy like Akron/Family, Animal Collective or Dirty Projectors, though he is decisively more lo-fi. His sort of sound collage mixes plucky folk with tingling ambience and oddly layered overdubs of everything from toy guitars and chimes to field recordings of beaches and faucets. It gently and fluidly wisps around your ears until before long, you're completely lost in the numerous swirling sounds and are content to just lie back in the tall grass and enjoy.

His latest moniker, Cassette Concréte takes on side one of the split-album with A Tape Gone Leaves No Trace, which utilizes an Akron/Family like approach of intertwining gentle vocal melodies and backwoods folk with odd ambient environments and impossible to decipher manipulations of… well everything. "Nest Where We Tape" is a good example of the more folk side as Carrigan sings a loose, over-dub ridden tune about love and travel while his acoustic starts and stops with sparse knee-slap percussion and delicate touches of reverberation. Just a few songs later though, "Drone in the Desert" matches (as the name implies) low-toned drone with distant, shuffling production and what sounds like analog snyth flares which escalates into a bubbling mesh of un-placeable sounds. Yet another approach closes the half as "Icefishing the Americas" pushes into post-rocky ambient haze with tinkling tones and ghostly vocals.

The second half of the split, Animal Faith under the Joshi alias, was recorded a year prior and is obviously the statement of a multi-talented artist playing with ideas. After a quick recording of child banter, the title track surprisingly kicks off with a playful lo-fi drum machine ditty garnished with what sounds like xylophone plinks and a bright, wavering electronic pitch. "Noistereo" follows with an endearing, whistle-touched folk-pop tune that once again opens up to odd electronic manipulation and knee-slapping percussion (hmmm, I'm start to see a theme). "Apocalypso" is my absolute favorite of the album with its stomping drum march leading the way for an array of colorful twinkling noises and what very well may be an improvised bass line. It lacks any obvious structure, but that only adds to the cluttering appeal, which is really the most endearing part of the entire collection of homemade songs. It's really just a talented musician with a bunch of quirky tools and his trusty 4-track, and though that usually translates to unlistenable by anyone other than the person creating it, Carrigan has wide-spread appeal. I am very much looking forward to seeing what cassette surfaces next and which wacky stitched-together world lies within that magnetic tape.






Jandek - Other End of Town (Corwood Industries 2006)

Jandek – Newcastle Sunday / Corwood Industries

I like to think about Jandek as the weeping clown of underground music. There is some definite novelty to the mysterious singer/songwriter from Houston, Texas who has spent nearly 30 years self-releasing self-recorded and self-packaged solo material from his own label, Corwood Industries. The novelty is not that he produces a parody of folk and blues music though; instead the odd idiosyncratic atonalities of his music make it somewhat disturbing. With the entire story at hand (please check out the Jandek on Corwood documentary for the whole legend), the acclaimed man behind the mystery, Sterling Richard Smith, does become this figure that you can't help but stare at. It should be funny to listen to, but his voice and songwriting is just so sad and demented; he should be this clownish figure, but the clown is just so depressing that you end up gawking at it's strangeness. And then, the more you stare and the more you really study the intricacies, the more an underlying beauty and individualism starts to appear. The sheer amount of material he has released (nearly 50 odd albums of continually differing sounds) completely on his own and the concurrent cult following is downright respectable making Smith this figurehead for DIY recording. The weeping clown is a figure that is shrouded in so many opposing emotions that you can't help but be sucked in by its hypnotic aura, which is the exact same draw of a Jandek recording.

Newcastle Sunday is the 44th release from Smith, the first double album and the second ever of his live performances, of which he has just started to do regularly, to be recorded for release. Captured during his concert at The Sage in Gateshead, England on May 22, 2005, the album is surprisingly rock-oriented, but we're obviously talking Jandek rock meaning atonal, amelodic and avant-garde. Joined by Richard Youngs on electric bass and Alex Neilson on drums, Smith careens through twelve songs of murky avant-blues-folk that would sound completely improvised if not for the accompanying players ability to stay somewhat in tow. Smith yelps, mumbles and shrieks odd and typically undecipherable lyrics in his Texas country drawl over his menacingly strummed electric guitar. Not being able to actually see what his fingers are doing makes it impossible to know if these songs were seriously composed or if it's just blind chord improvisations. I would actually lean toward the former, which makes the recording more impressive because in the midst of all that jerking reverberation there is an underlying method to the mayhem. Then again though, if you make it through the 85+ minutes of chugging avant-rock, I may actually be more impressed with you. Being as this album features a much more aggressive sound than the majority of the Jandek albums, I would actually start somewhere else if this is your first introduction to the peculiar singer/songwriter. In fact, I would suggest beginning with the documentary, Jandek on Corwood. You get the entire legend summed up to date without revealing any of the ongoing mystery along with a large helping of his recorded output over the last 30 years. Jandek is one of underground music's greatest personalities and worth your time to explore even if you do not dig the music on it's own.

Radio Show Playlist 3/14

6a:
1. Husker Du - Could You Be the One? - Warehouse: Songs & Stories (Warner 1987)
2. The Bon Mots - Under Wraps - Le Main Drag (Mellifluid 2002)
3. The (International) Noise Conspiracy - Smash It Up - Live at Oslo Jazz Festival (Alternative Tentacles 2007)
4. ZZZZ - Assisination Polka - Live on WLUW (2005)
5. Hint Hint - Harry's Ass is a Picnic - Sex is Everything EP (Cold Crush 2002)
6. (by request) LCD Soundsystem - Losing My Edge - LCD Soundsystem (DFA 2004)
7. SJ Esau - Wears the Control - Wrong Faced Cat Feed Collapse (Anticon 2007)
8. Kings of Convenience - Know-How - Riot on an Empty Street (Astralwerks 2004)
9. Caetano Veloso - Outro - Ce (Nonesuch 2006)
10. Low - Breaker - Drums and Guns (Sub Pop 2007)
11. The Fucking AM - Acoustico Gomez - Gold (Drag City 2004)

7a:
1. Stars of the Lid - A Meaningful Moment Through a Meaning(less) Process - Stars of the Lid and Their Refinement of the Decline (Kranky 2007)
2. Steve Reich - Pulses - Music for 18 Musicians (ECM 1978, composed 1976)
3. Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid - Our Time - Tongues (Domino 2007)
4. Secret Mommy - Diciduism - Plays (Ache 2007)
5. Sticks and Stones - 430 - Shed Grace (Thrill Jockey 2004)
6. Panda Bear - Bros - Person Pitch (Paw Tracks 2007)
7. Joshi - Apocalypso - A Tape Gone Leaves No Trace/Animal Faith (Leisure Class 2006)
8. The Stylistics - People Make the World Go Round - The Stylistics (Amherst 1971)
9. Radiants - My Sunshine Girl - Eccentric Soul: Twinight's Lunar Rotation (Numero Group 2007, originally 1971)
10. Letta Mbulu - What's Wrong with Groovin? (196?) copped from Souled on Music
11. Guy Pedersen - Les Copains de la Basse (196?) copped from Souled on Music

New Music: Zodiacs, Kavinsky, Der Teenage Panzerkorps

Zodiacs - Messin Up (Holy Mountain 2007)

Zodiacs - Gone / Holy Mountain

I've never been a fan of the desert. I could never connect with my grandfather's love of old west shoot-em-up's, and I always wondered why Spike didn't get just get smart and find himself a comfortable suburban doghouse. Growing up in South Carolina, the desert may as well have been outer space. There was no tangible connection, and despite never having been to the Himalayas either, there seemed to be something more to other settings, something alot less boring than ghost towns and bandits. Becoming a man, though, setting out on my own into the world, I finally got the appeal. One day you wake up fuzzyheaded and more than a little surprised to see you've been stranded deep inside this perilous game we call "life". Much like the loner anti-heroes of the Old West, you've gotta make your own way.

Riding in on hot summer wind, we have Zodiacs, three rough-n-tumble bunkhouse brawlers here to drink your beer and steal your women. These dudes also do time in Hush Arbors, Sunburned Hand, and WW&VV, three key elements of that New Weird America trainwreck. I hate the hoopla over "movements, especially in today's fad-a-minute climate, but I do feel New Weird America is quantifiable, evident here in the burly sludge jams of Gone. Over the course of these four tracks, spanning forty-three minutes, Zodiacs extend a solid hand towards psychedelic rock oblivion. Its altogether a more focused affair than their other projects, showcasing the power of guitar, bass, drums, and most importantly, feedback, to possibly one day defend the Planet Earth from alien invasion.

"Born Free" is a nice welcome to the record. Thick guitar feedback pushing and pulling you, the slow-burning groove of the bassline cementing you in place. To listen closely to this song is like trying to keep the tides from changing with your bare hands. "Messin Up" starts off with a winding, patient guitar solo that would make Eric Clapton cry himself to sleep at night. Its got this outlaw blues feel, whether camping under the stars in 1889 or 1989, its connected to the timeless primal nature of the desert. "Get Off/Come Together" reminds me of Acid Mothers Temple at their single-minded best, its a proper psych rock freakout, taking no prisoners in its search for the sound of the cosmos. Its tough meat to gnaw, but rewarding to say the least. Play this for Burning Man's Weekend Warriors; see how soon they start to roam free, following the Flight of the Eagle as their souls have been set ablaze by the awesome power of Zodiacs.

So now I finally understand the appeal of scorched earth, how guys like Zodiacs can totally rule it. Gone is the aural equivalent of talking the talk AND walking the walk. Its like rolling up on a windswept town, the streets deserted and all the door locked. Its about all the maverick shit I used to think was hokey. In life you've gotta make power moves, take the girl and the money but always maintain a sense of honor.




Kavinsky - Dead Cruiser (Record Makers 2007)

Kavinsky - 1986 EP / Record Makers

Even critics have soft spots. I know I write about Finnish psych folk and other "difficult" music but I'm still buzzing from !!!'s Myth Takes. Those long nights keep on rolling, especially now that the weather down here in Cap City is conducive to porch life, the kind of mellowgold living when there's no excuse not to drink early and often.

So in celebratory spirit, announcing the arrival of spring and the breaking of winter's chains, here is a new EP from undead French playboy, Kavinsky. Raised from the dead by the current technicolor tide of French electro streaming from the Ed Banger and Kitsune camps, Kavinsky is here to bring the party 1986-style to all the potentially saddest nights out in the entire world. If reports are to be believed, Kavinsky bit it nearly twenty years ago in a gnarly wreck. Having totally destroyed his rare Ferrari, Kavinsky was nowhere to be found at the scene of the accident. Kept alive by the sheer power of the finest cocaine and a love for Giorgio Moroder, Kavinsky lived on, only to surface when the time was right. That time is now, post-trendy 80's worship be damned, 1986 is a synthtastic masterpiece.

Following up last year's deft but somewhat raw Teddy Boy EP, this new five-track offering is a gift from Jan Hammer himself, a blessing from the Great Keyboard in the sky, all white ties and 80's decadence. "Dead Cruiser" is bursting with laserbeam synth work, beefing up new wave explorations until the sheer size of sound can go toe-to-toe with the like of Justice. "Grand Canyon" could have scored the crowning film achievement of Jean-Claude Van Damme, a version of Bloodsport with the emotional depth of Hamlet. It seems like Sebastian is holding all the cards right now and he checks in with a sleek remix of Teddy Boy's "Testarossa Autodrive", speeding around hairpin turns in the glitz and glammer of Monaco.

Added this to your "hot night out!!" I-Tunes playlist. You may be partying in a mid-sized southern city but be assured the night will take on a posh vibe. No matter where you are, the jaguar instinct of fast cars and even faster living may usurp your soul. 1986 brings the brashly-boasted party of the mid-80's to the decidedly referential days of '07.




Der Teenage Panzerkorps - Nameless Diseases (Siltbreeze 2007)

Der Teenage Panzerkorps - Harmful Emotions / Siltbreeze

Seems like my reviews this week have been all about time machines, tripping the multiple contingencies of time and space. The music of Der Teenage Panzer Unit (Der TPK, for short) imagines if Himmler would have fronted a punk band. Its a smart maneuver given all the trappings that go with even the smallest hints of Nazism. Its amazing that this type of stunt can fly without mass outrage but such is the interpetive leeway given to art. It seems to me the band's image is more about the danger of nations and group-think mentality that, yes, even finds its way into punk rock.

Specific details about Der TPK are clouded. Context clues lead to an association with the psych-folk purveyors of Jeweled Antler Collective. In fact, enigmatic frontman, Edmund Xavier, is rumored to be Skygreen Leopard's member, Glenn Donaldson. This record's presence on the Siltbreeze label sheds further light on the band's intentions; Siltbreeze has a racism-free track record releasing crucial early material from the Dead C, Charalambides, Ashtray Navigations, and others. So, just to assure you one more time, this is far from Screwdriver. What Der TPK does is take the driving nihilism of early punk and twists it into a blackened war machine wrapped in an evil Third Reich aesthetic that we've all been drilled to despise.

Now that all the idealistic worries have been settled, I can tell you the reasons why you've gotta get your hands on Der TPK's first LP, limited to five-hundred copies on wax. Harmful Emotions is a top-notch punk record, way way smarter than anything today sporting spikes and studs. The recording is excellent, capable of fooling even the most astute punk vinyl fiend into thinking that he may have let one slip through the cracks. There's plenty of lo-fi racket; the murky recording convincing in its authenticity, and the disembodied Germanic vocal diatribes adding to the already heavy atmosphere. All tracks typically cut off around two minutes like any self-aware punk song should. Despite the band's best efforts to evoke tidy fascism, hints of kraut rock and black metal seep through. Okay...so maybe that is still a nod to Aryanism and I'm sorry for doubting how deep and wide this idea actually goes. This is one of the smartest "punk" records in ages, and without the internet's information-grabbing powers, Der TPK's aesthetic would be totally impenetrable.

New Music: Kinetic Stereokids, El-P, Panda Bear

Kinetic Stereokids - Mindf*ck (Overdraft 2007)

Kinetic Stereokids - Basement Kids / Overdraft

So today is it: My last official Spring Break. I guess I should be savoring it on the beaches of Panama City or partying it up in a hotel, tan and swole like everyone else on television makes it appear... But I'll take a few days at home to recuperate and decompress over a few too many Coronas on the white sands of San Padre Island. Or, as was the case last year, passing out on the lawn of Wagner College on Staten Island at 4AM. Pure class right there.

If I should ever foresee myself yearning for the beaches this week, I can do one of two things: Spend three hours driving down to Charleston to enjoy the splendor of a city that's known primarily for starting the American Civil War, or pop Kinetic Stereokids into my CD player. With fuel the way it is and with my income disproportionately insufficient, Basement Kids will have to do.

Which is okay, because these four young men out of Flint, Michigan are prepared for a larger audience. They've been together in one capacity or another since 1997, and apparently while everyone else in high school was covering Dave Matthews Band and 311, these guys were following the path down free-jazz improv rock. They've already got a handful of full-lengths and though Basement Kids is getting some national press, it sounds as delightfully DIY as any home recording could. The beachside "Mindf*ck" opens on a breezy note, swirling percussion taking you in and easing you into the following nine songs. The singing is endearing in its imperfections, underproduced and at times almost overmodulating. The music is serene and, though they take an unfortunate spoken-word detour on "Red Star," the rest of the album is a pretty solid expansion of territory Beck has been landscaping for the last decade. They may have opened for Explosions in the Sky and Wolf Eyes(?!) and The Secret Machines, but it's Hansen these guys seem to relate to most closely. The touches of scratching, snippets of conversation between songs, and acoustic-based folk-pop songs all contribute to the greater good: If that Information re-release this week just wasn't enough for you, this might help ease the pain. Ah, Spring Break. You've found your first last good soundtrack.













El-P - The Overly Dramatic Truth (Definitive Jux 2007)

El-P - I'll Sleep When You're Dead / Definitive Jux

Jaime Meline is another story. Indeed, I'll Sleep When You're Dead is a whole other story itself. For three years, we've waited to see what would happen with El-Producto in the wake of the renowned Collecting the Kid. But three years is a bad sign in the music industry acting on warp overdrive all the time: Whether you've been partying it up a little too much or you had a bad case of writer's block (or both), you tend to lose attention you might've garnered beforehand if you wait any longer. Unless you're Guns N' Roses, which some people astonishingly still care about.

In the case of El-P, all we can really gather from the new drop is that he's done a lot of listening. All the remixes and collaborations with Matthew Shipp in the world don't replace the beauty of a full-length, and the delivery here shows that it was worth the wait. Speaking of, a little pre-album publicity of the any-kind-is-a-good-kind variety can't hurt. You can do up the details yourself elsewhere, but here's basically how it went: El-P takes a picture with Diddy, a bunch of emails and misunderstandings are exchanged with Rawkus Records, I'll Sleep When You're Dead gets a little beef to go with its bite.

And boy does this album bite. Already noted for his aggressive delivery, El-P holds the line here and the results are remarkable. Right from the outset of the marvelously titled "Tasmanian Pain Coaster," El-P is delivering straight from the heart in a dense mess of lyrical eloquence that doesn't resonate in quite the same way when he's dissing Jarrett Myer in a MySpace blog. A notable aspect to this album that has already been pointed out is how he hates collaborations or features. But look at this laundry list of names: Aesop Rock, Cage, Cat Power, Matt Sweeney, Murs, Slug, both bro fros from The Mars Volta, Trent Reznor... And that's not even the full list. Obviously El got a little carried away with having folks stop by the studio to add their two cents, so maybe that's why the Brooklyn renaissance man's taken as long as he has. "The Overly Dramatic Truth" features Daryl Palumbo, but thankfully there's not much intruding by the Glassjaw/Head Automatica frontman beyond added keys. If you were like me last year and you opted to go north for Spring Break instead of head south, this is your soundtrack. Little doubt in my mind remains that El-P is, despite all the conflict and collaborations and clean edits (Sorry, adults), still at the top of his game. Ace.













Panda Bear - Search for Delicious (Paw Tracks 2007)

Panda Bear - Person Pitch / Paw Tracks

But for Panda Bear, an artist we've already featured here at Audiversity, it's back to the beaches for our final entry of the day. It seems like it's been less than a month since we last talked about Noah Lennox, and as memory serves correctly, not too long ago we were chatting up the Excepter split 12. Well, if you've had the pleasure of hearing the "Carrots" extended medley (or "Bros," even in remixed form by incestuous colleagues Terrestrial Tones) from said glorious piece of vinyl, you are in for a treat: Person Pitch is a magnificent folk album that has enough harmonies to make, well, The Beach Boys jealous. It was too easy.

And everything on this album sounds effortlessly natural to the point that it fits together perfectly. The shortest song on here ("Search for Delicious") is just over two minutes; the longest is "Good Girl" at 12:42. Nevermind the time disparities though, because it all comes together seamlessly in a way Animal Collective have become experts at over the years and a way in which Panda Bear personally has seen through on this solo effort. This vocals-as-instrument stuff works well yet again and though it feels dense at times, don't mind all that reverb and reversed percussion and bleeps and bloops and furiously strummed guitars: This is exactly the kind of Spring Break every freshman in university dreams of having, committed to tape... And with "Search for Delicious," it ends happily. No angry parents checking their credit card bills to see all the money you spent on "emergencies," no wicked hangovers from "beer" you bought in Cancún, no break-ups with girlfriends who were probably cheating on you back. All you come away with is a content smile on your face and a nice tan, you beautiful, beautiful man you.

Last time we brought up Panda Bear, we called it disco from outer-space, beyond the safety of the space shuttle. But it's time for recontextualization, a running theme in the music I've been listening to lately and something that speaks to the greater power of great music to be able to morph and change and adapt to particular, juxtaposing states of mind: Person Pitch isn't disco from outer-space. It's not even disco. It's beach music. Pure relaxation. The ultimate soundtrack to the open-windowed, late-night drive home at the end of the craziness that great Volkswagen commercials are made of. It's going to be a good Spring Break '07 for a lot of people; hopefully, these songs will provide a little balance to the usual club fare. It can't all be Red Jumpsuit Apparatus or Rich Boy.

Used-Bin Bargains: Weldon Irvine

Weldon Irvine - Watergate (Nodlew 1973)

Weldon Irvine – Time Capsule / Nodlew

Weldon Irvine is a hard figure to ignore when exploring underground/socially-conscious rap music in the 90s and the very beginning of the 00s. You may not see his name directly, though perhaps his rap moniker Master-Wel pops up on occasion, but he’s there. Snippets of his music have been flipped effortlessly by Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Boogie Down Productions on many occasions; that’s him playing organ on Black Star’s “Astronomy (8th Light)” and arranging Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides; he’s the one schooling the ambitious rappers like Q-Tip, Common and members of The Roots on the intricacies of keyboard playing; hell, just put on one of your four-hundred Madlib records and I can guarantee that at least one Irvine sample is quilted in there somewhere during each album. He’s one of the very rare multi-generational artists who has found his musical niche no matter the decade: studying jazz in the 60s, purveying fusion in the 70s, writing musicals in the 80s, schooling the rap crowd (and producing a couple records himself) in the 90s and being fully embraced before his untimely death in the early 00s. Yet, Irvine is far from a household name. In fact it took me two or three years after first stumbling upon his name to come across a CD that was not being imported at my expense. One fateful day last fall while digging through the plastic slip cases of Chicago’s Reckless Records, I finally located not one but three used Irvine CDs, two of which were still Japanese imports but not priced accordingly, and I was finally properly introduced to the soulful sounds of Mr. Irvine. Of the three I am now quite familiar with, 1973’s Time Capsule, 1974’s Cosmic Vortex (Justice Divine) and 1976’s Sinbad, I have decided to concentrate on Time Capsule because of its acclaimed reputation and that it happens to be my personal favorite as well.

Surprisingly with his musical context in mind, Weldon Irvine was raised in a very privileged setting. His parents were divorced at his birth, so he was brought up in Hampton, VA by his grandfather, a dean at Hampton Institute (later Hampton University), and his grandmother, a classically trained upright bass player. Even called a “Victorian upbringing” by Irvine himself, the childhood provided a life-long set of amiable manners and well-read knowledge, though in the 50s, he was exposed to the polar opposite environment when moved off campus. His teenage years living in the ghetto completely rounded out Irvine’s unique childhood revealing both sides of life, the privileged and the unappreciated, and what it took to survive in each. It’s a theme that would surface in his later music time and again, the urgency of struggle and oppression brought to life through thoroughly trained musicianship and all other possibilities of such a rare pairing. His late teens in the mid-60s were spent like most kids these days, in college to appease their parents, but actually immersed in one exciting counterculture or another; in Irvine’s case, the burgeoning scene of post-bop and spiritual jazz. A promising keyboardist, Irvine moved to New York and was immediately recruited by Kenny Dorham and Joe Henderson for their big band where he spent the next three years honing his craft. In 1968, he auditioned for Nina Simone’s open-call for an organist to tour with her new ensemble. Not only did he get the gig, but he did it with his very first chord at which point Ms. Simone proclaimed he had perfect pitch and eventually brought him on not only as an organist, but the bandleader, arranger, road manager and co-writer as well. Irvine spent the next three years with Simone during which he penned an unfathomable amount of songs including his most famous composition, “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s play of the same name.

In the early 70s, Weldon Irvine ventured out on his own forming a 17-piece group whose sound is typically categorized as jazz-funk or fusion but incorporated elements of soul, R&B, blues, gospel, pop, Latin and rock as well. The fusion tag I especially hesitate on, though I can easily see why it’s so often used. Irvine typically played the electric piano and as the years went on incorporated more and more buoyant bass lines and synthetic characteristics, so it’s hard not to drop that vague tag. His early albums are decisively jazz-funk though; think a combination of Stevie Wonder, Alice Coltrane, Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson and Charles Mingus. His themes have always been that of political and social change as well as deep spirituality and he often used student musicians in his band. 1972 saw Irvine’s first solo album, Liberated Brother on his own label Nodlew (look at it in a mirror), whose rampant style meshes, political and philosophical undertones and funky, electric sound would define his recordings from here on out.

This finally gets us to 1973’s Time Capsule, his last before jumping from his own imprint to RCA. Usually heralded as the defining album in Irvine’s career, Capsule finds the perfect equilibrium for all of his many, many influences and distinguishing musical elements, not to mention characteristics of genres yet to come, especially rap. Political, spiritual, funky, grooving, buoyant, sprawling, infectious, challenging and masterfully arranged and played, it’s an album that really takes on the mindset of 1973’s counterculture. Irvine mostly sticks to his keyboards whether it is the piano, acoustic and electric, organ or melodica, as well as adding occasional lyrical content. The record opens with a poem called “I Am” by Charlotte Cook, which is revisited again later in the album, discussing the spirits of man over Irvine’s electric piano accentuations. “Feelin’ Mellow” follows setting the stage for the groovy vibe of the album; interestingly enough, Irvine decides to save the more potent political shout-outs for later and begins with a friendly, out-reaching hand. He then pens an ode to the lady with “Soul Sisters,” a Jimmy Smith-derived soul-funk number with an outstanding trumpet solo care of Jimmy Owens. “Déjà vu” splits the record with nine-and-a-half minutes of Latin-jazz-leaning electric-funk that screams for sampling. It also displays Irvine’s poetic fortitude as he tries to unite all the spiritual people of the world no matter your actual religion with a shared interest in peace. “Watergate” is probably the most striking song though with it’s shuffling, Stevie Wonder-like backdrop for what Irvine calls a “kind of group free style.” Members of the band take turns improvising typically humorous lines of political observations that eventually ends with a call for togetherness. “Spontaneous Interaction” shows off Irvine’s ability to seamlessly interweave genres as he combines a loose, spacey psychedelia and an impressive walking bop bass line. After revisiting the “I Am” poem, which you know already if you’ve spent any time with Madlib, the album closes with “Bananas,” the shortest instrumental of the record that actually leaves you with a feeling of incompleteness. I’m not sure if it’s on purpose or not, but it always sends me for either the repeat button or another album wanting to listen to more.

Weldon Irvine had a string of well-received albums through the rest of the 70s, though they didn’t produce the sales figures a major label like RCA expects. He was released from the label in 1976 at which point he almost left the music industry to concentrate on writing musicals. Throughout the 80s more than 20 of his plays were shown at The Billie Holiday Theatre in New York including Young, Gifted and Broke, The Vampire and the Dentist, The Will and Keep It Real. Hip-hop was sprouting at the same time, and Irvine was an active participant in it from the beginning. He encouraged producers to sample his back-catalogue, trained aspiring rappers to write their own music, admired groundbreaking artists like the Wu-Tang Clan and Eric B. & Rakim, pushed the socially conscious rappers to speak their minds and even rhymed a little himself. Also during the 90s, he recorded a few hip-hop-inspired albums for indie labels and rapped under the alias Master Wel while providing arrangements for rappers he appreciated like Mos Def, Common and Q-Tip. Tragically though, Irvine committed suicide on April 9th, 2002 at just 58 years old for reasons unknown. It’s an incredibly sad ending for an amazingly inventive and groundbreaking artist who was known as much for his amiability as his musicianship.