Multi-disciplinary New York trio Sontag Shogun (including Jeremy Young, whom I reviewed playing live in London last year as Foxout!’s guitarist) sent me some news about the recent release of their debut album ‘Tale’. Ostensibly post-rockers, Sontag Shogun don’t conform much to the genre’s more insular tendencies, being made up of three restless multi-media artists moving from craft to craft and from continent to continent. Jeremy, for instance, also co-runs the band’s not-just-a-record-label Palaver Press, which unifies sound publication with assorted texts and fine-art bookbinding.
‘Tale’ was recorded in carefully-hoarded scraps created around the world while Jeremy (sound sources and contact miking) was studying in London, Jesse Perlstein (laptop, tweaked voice and kleptomaniac microphone) was traveling in Korea, and Ian Temple (the grand piano) was back at home in Brooklyn. Field recordings were gleaned from diverse adventures including “a trek through a Columbian jungle, a piano tuner testing the ivory at the Southbank Centre and a South Korean traditional singer hitting a buk (or leather folk drum).” Back in New York, the results were looped, layered and mixed with planned performance (both final takes and rehearsal scrapings) to create a tender collage and a trans-genre which Sontag Shogun call “lullanoise”.
For a taste of what this sounds like, here’s the simple and beautiful but implicatory video for one of the album’s piano-led tracks, The Musk Ox (directed by Isabel Nao):
and here’s a video of Sontag Shogun performing another album track, Let The Flies In, live in France in 2013:
‘Tale’ is available as either CD and download and can be ordered from here.
One Thousand Lucky Cranes: ‘One Thousand Lucky Cranes’ EP
From Tennessee to the heart of the mountains of central Japan is a long way. I’m not sure what’s brought Ben Bryant from one to the other, but his debut offering as One Thousand Lucky Cranes shows the stretch. While these four tunes are nominally in the box for downtempo chillout electronica (with a side helping of glitch), they’re also attenuated, deconstructed tunes. Untitled agglutinations. Restful hiccups. A feeling that’s a little like that moment when, relaxing on a beach somewhere, you’re momentarily jolted into realising just how far from home you are.
Despite the tumbling data-flop of its intro (and the corrupting glitch atmospherics which score creases and interruptions into its texture), No.1 quickly reveals itself as deconstructed soul. More specifically, a Philly-inspired slow jam; from the lustrous breath-sighs to the jazzy climbs, to those Air-style analogue doodles with their pitch-bending vocalisé effect. Everything in it has that cushioned lushness and summertime daydream feel to it, with electric piano pads stroked and lovingly distorted into tiled, fuzzed chillout chimes. Notes and sounds have a fallaway feel to them, as Ben toys with wavering queasy pitching or leaves us in expectation. Japanese trinket tinkles worm their way into the mix: toys wearing down their batteries on the console.
There’s a little bit of soul in No.2, though only the slightest taste. One of Ben’s sounds is sourced from the sweetest electric organ sounds, but sliced off the top of the frequencies and rendered from gospel hints into an artful saccharin. Most of the other sounds are flickered by processing – treble-sharpened melody gurgles, a sweet baby-tone climb glimpsed through a strobing blur of reverb. Even the drum sounds (despite keeping a thread of industrial funk running throughout) are inverted and upended, imploded beats and cymbal hits trapped in a thicket.
On No.3, glitched beats are dropped into the music like someone dropping random glass beads into a Geiger counter. A slow phased sweep of synth pads (like the luminous cloud-roll Prophet-noise of the late ‘70s), offers something slightly meditative and slightly irritated, cross-legged but glaring sideways. Layers of glitched percussion twists and carpet-bomb bass distortions are folded into the mix. If you’ve still kept hold of that beachy simile from above, imagine the same, but with little smoke-shells bursting in mid-air above the mellow golden sands.
No.4 rises out of a sea of finely sifted white noise, revealing an ominous minor-key structure behind it. There’s something here that’s similar to the sweetly-sung anxieties of Horace Andy at work with Massive Attack on ‘Mezzanine’: a hint of ghost-town industry, of grand soul with the security sucked out of it… perhaps an echo of Detroit despair imprinted on in the architecture. Rather than Andy’s sensual suede-creak of a voice, though, the vocal here is an accelerated burble, part-housefly and part child-babble, stretching and meandering around the slow-stepping arches of fuzzy melody. Glitch-taps and dubstep activity fire about in the percussion, data-screeches kick some cold sparks off the chords. Throughout, the white noise comes through in hose-spurts; or tide-smacks, pushing its way through the buildings – a dream of the first drops of the flood. As with all of the tracks on this EP, the sense of solidity, dislocation and imminent upset come bundled close together, blurred over like a multiple exposure.
One Thousand Lucky Cranes: ‘One Thousand Lucky Cranes’
One Thousand Lucky Cranes (self-released, no catalogue number or barcode)
Vinyl/download EP
Released: 26th November 2012
Radiohead are history. And they know they are: elevated into a pantheon of great expectations and rock landmarks a mere three albums into their career, and somewhat against their own wishes. Like a latterday Pink Floyd crossed with Nirvana (with the universality of both) they’ve had the rock world at their feet. But they’re also fully aware that, like Miles Davis before them, they need to let go of an expected history before they congeal. Embracing the difficult development of their own history by allowing – or forcibly inducing – change to come through.
So it’s goodbye to Old Radiohead’s upfront army of rock guitars, Thom Yorke’s frenzied in-yer-face angst, and those singles scooping at the soul like the hook in the fish’s mouth. And all the talk of the band making a record that mostly junks standard concepts of guitars, lyrics and pure song in favour of Warp Records-style electronica and muttering left-field oddness has turned out to be true.
‘Kid A’ does indeed have no singles and no singalongs – lovesick, punch-drunk or otherwise. It has a bleary, fractalized, impersonal mountain-scape etched out on computer for a cover; a lyrical agenda which is plainest in its absence. And its diverse pieces are deliberately disassociated from each other. Sometimes chill, sometimes as mechanistic as automata moving in a warehouse; all strung-out and scrambled by filters, Pro-Tools or anti-technique. Trusted “recorder” Nigel Godrich plays an odd mixture of Eno and Albini roles, squeezed alongside the band in the producer’s chair. Sometimes you can hear a band member at work, untweaked. More often you can’t. It’s like a set of glass cases enclosing specimens, puzzling specimens of music pulled up and laid out with a firm “that’s what you’re getting – goodbye” sense to it. Anti-pop, not pleasing anyone’s appetite for a snackable chorus.
And already (to filch another Yorke line) the knives are out. Radiohead are busily having their seams ripped open and their functioning organs speared, teased out and compared scrupulously against charts; a list of names marking off the components of ‘Kid A’ track by track. And, increasingly, marking it down. “Charles Mingus, Autechre, Alice Coltrane, Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin…” goes the chant. “Rip-off. Buy the originals. Who the hell do Radiohead think they are?” And yes, none of ‘Kid A’ is as groundbreaking as any of those recorded texts, which Yorke and co readily cite as influences. There’s no element that a student of improv, post-rock, serious electronica or revolution jazz won’t have heard already. But this also means that one of the world’s biggest rock bands have admitted they’re at least as much learners as teachers. Sounds like cause for celebration to me.
In fact it’s other legendary records – the likes of Robert Wyatt’s ‘Rock Bottom’, Scott Walker’s ‘Tilt’ and Robert Fripp‘s ‘Exposure’ – which ‘Kid A’ is most genuinely akin to. Each of these records strives to meet its ends by a mixture of instinct, cold science flushed hot again with consuming passion, and their own secretive internalised logic. It’s a big step going from ‘OK Computer’ (one of the most explicit and upfront records of the ’90s, in which Thom Yorke was a incandescent clench of ego; stubborn, scarred, and railing against the draining fear and indifference of the adult world we’re trained for) to a twenty-first century record which is as weirdly egoless as this one is. An inarticulate speech of the heart via samplers, hazard and evasion.
Significantly, the most memorable and accessible song on ‘Kid A’ (the tear-blown strum and shivering strings of How To Disappear Completely, echoing both King Crimson‘s desperately vulnerable Waiting Man and Walker’s cryptic Patriot) sees Yorke singing softly and acceptingly of the ultimate relinquishment. Drifting away from himself in Dublin, becoming insubstantial, not as a surrender, but as some kind of transcendence. “I’m not here… this isn’t happening,” he sings, a tired relief (and, almost, a kind of love) suffusing his voice as the quivering violins flutter down, snow-like, obscuring the signposts.
It’s the emotional rightness in ‘Kid A’ that finally pulls it clear of the dissectory attacks people are aiming at it. As if the cry of rage that dominated ‘OK Computer’ is now diffused in a temporarily helpless scatter of images and impulses. As if the echo, coming back, has impacted on a band whose foes and fears are now nested in the fabric of the world, who can no longer respond with a simple song.
The fabulously grotesque artwork (a booklet of nightmare kid’s drawings) that lurks, hidden, in the back of the CD tray, gives a little glance into this world. Stick men boot each other in the balls; small mice squeaking copyright signs wander into the maw of a toothy beast growling a trademark; frightened eyes stare out of threatened houses, and Tony Blair’s PR grin is distorted into empty-eyed predatory lust. A nation of grinning little bears end up on the end of people’s forks or balaclava-clad and tooled up with Kalashnikovs, and a screaming parade of vitriolically surreal words march across the pages like circus handbills. Like the doomsday rhetoric of Godspeed You Black Emperor, it’s almost comical… yet it jolts, like the sound of a chisel stealthily tapping at your wall.
And perhaps ‘Kid A’, rather than being the rebel songbook for this world, is the recovery notes for those as cracked by it as ‘OK Computer’ predicted they would be. There’s a terrible surrender and relief about Everything in Its Right Place, freewheeling along on tranquillised electric piano chording with a slipstream of sliced up, gossamer-keening Yorke vocals tangled in its tail. In which two of the few comprehensible lines are “yesterday I woke up sucking on a lemon – yesterday I woke up soaking,” and “what is that you tried to say?” This is disarrangement, dysfunctionality – not order. Yet Yorke seems to realise that this too has its place in a person’s history; and the sheer beauty of his singing throughout implies there’s hope waiting up beyond the dissolution.
About half of ‘Kid A’ ties in with this dissolve. The clinking music-box-meets-hip-hop narcosis of the title track, a nursery lullaby as rendered by an uptight and drier Massive Attack. Yorke’s bass-warped, filtered and generally fucked voice wavers, croons and ties little musical bows in and out of the pernickety beats, while words about “heads on sticks”, “ventriloquists” and “a little white lie” work their way through the dirty pink clouds. Who blinks first? The gaudily humming electro-disco on Idioteque reveals an empty dancefloor grooving away to itself as catastrophe looms. Yorke, in a slurred keen, is spilling out surreal sub-sense like David Byrne on sodium pentothal (“laugh until my head falls off / I swallow ’til I burst… / Women and children first, and children first…”) but sounds ecstatically happy (“here I’m alive, everything all of the time”), and the last sounds on the track aren’t death-booms but an aviary of feverish guitar loops.
The breakdown’s in the motorik groove of The National Anthem, adhesive thumbstains of bass underpinning a brawling rabble of brass that sound fresh from a vigorous drunken debate at Mingus’ Jazz Workshop or the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Yorke’s voice winds out of the airshaft with a lobotomised “everyone around here… everyone is so clear”: later quavering “everyone has got the fear” as the horns become restive, but affirming “it’s holding on… it’s holding on.”
The other half? Anyone’s guess. The smears and rumbles, the webbing of indistinct voices, the gusts of emotion hurtling up towards invisible targets, all blur the picture. The ghostly tundra ring of Treefingers gives away nothing but a deathly peace. The unravelling trip-hop of In Limbo, full of unhitched folk guitar and stutters of echoed organ, is lost somewhere in the subconscious: grumbling “you’re living in a fantasy world” while itself threatened by nightmares of loss and disappearance (“I’m on your side, / nowhere to hide, / trapdoors that open, / I spiral down”), and finally swirling away in a rush of killing reverb as if down an enormous storm drain.
There are a few dud or ill-fitting moments while Radiohead grope in the fog. Morning Bell, for one, where they knock out a scratchy, swamping, insect-buzzing song which sounds like nothing so much as Echo & The Bunnymen shaking with the D.T.s. Or the tribal tom booms, wiry laceration of rhythm guitars and guilt-ridden lyric on Optimistic, harkening back too much to ‘The Bends’ (or the out-of-focus U2 of ‘The Unforgettable Fire’). But the starved boniness renders these hauntingly hollow-eyed stuff, compared to the previous fire. “If you try the best you can / the best you can is good enough,” sings Yorke, with a scratched, dented demeanour belying his words.
The final act is Motion Picture Soundtrack, journeying on an exultant wheeze of harmonium, celestially riffling harps and gusting bass wind as Thom Yorke settles back into love as if he’s settling back into a wrecked old armchair. And it’s love among the trashed – “red wine and sleeping pills / help me get back to your arms. / Cheap sex and sad films / Help me get where I belong.” Querulous (as he protests “Stop sending letters, / letters always get burned. / It’s not like the movies,”), but there’s happy-sad commitment here as he murmurs “I think you’re crazy, maybe… / I will see you in the next life.” Then one last delayed pink gush of electrophonic orchestration, and out.
But it’s in its totality that ‘Kid A’ sinks into your mind. There’s no way it could ever be counted as a flawless record – in fact, it revels in its flagrant imperfection with such a fierce joy (and one born of abstract willpower) that it’s hard to condemn it for that. But it’s a vitally important record for Radiohead; and a rewarding one for the listener.
The peculiar triumph of ‘Kid A’ is the way that it transcends both its own wanton abstractions and Radiohead’s past explicitness to resonate beyond each of them, in the way that an impact on a random strand can shake the whole web. To hear it is to be haunted by the emotional husks of messages long lost and made irrelevant, or by the impressions left by intentions deflected and displaced into half-formed actions and events. To have your mind rippled by the last exhausted breeze from a shockwave far, far away. To be moved by the vibration of history – Radiohead’s history, at any rate – as it passes.
Radiohead: ‘Kid A’
Parlophone, CDKIDA 1 (72435 2959020)/7243 5 27753 4 7 (72435 27753 47)/LPKIDA 1 (724352 959013)
CD/cassette/10-inch double vinyl album
Released: 2nd October 2000 Get it from:(2020 update) buy/download from W.A.S.T.E. Store, Google Play or Amazon Music; stream via Soundcloud, Deezer, YouTube, Apple Music or Spotify Radiohead online:
‘Now You See It…’: Robert Fripp Soundscapes, 10th March 1996
Tucked against a curving concrete wall, under a sweep of plate-glass windows, there’s the familiar stool with a beautiful rock-fetishist’s dream of a Les Paul guitar, flanked by rack-mounted gizmos like a gaggle of worshipful Artoo Detoos and a flat henge of volume pedals and multi-purpose stomp-boxes. Over to the right, David Singleton sits at the mixing desk, quite the portrait of the calm fixer for the artist’s determined leaps. Arranged in a long staggered curve in front of the opposite wall, lining the long walk between the entrance and the Purcell Room, are at least eight tall speaker cabinets. Occasionally in residence is the sleek, compact form of Wimborne’s most formidable musical son.
These Soundscapes are part of the ‘Now You See It…’ season of contemporary performance art, sharing the building with the Hypermusic Symposium (in which Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno, David Toop and others debate the future of music, and people nervously finger such unorthodox instruments as literally musical chairs and picture frames or the Interactive Baton) while avant-garde dance groups hijack the Purcell Room and stick the audience on the stage, and (less happily) over at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith an appallingly pretentious bunch of Euro-thespians do a vandalistic mixed-media Schubert performance.
In these surroundings, Robert Fripp‘s increasingly out-there journeys in solo sound fit in surprisingly well, both physically and intellectually. When a squadron of incredibly young women in bare feet and little black dresses trot busily past (every quarter of an hour, on the dot) to meet their cues in a back-to-front theatre piece next door, it seems inexplicably appropriate. Tonight – Sunday 10th – is the fourth of Fripp’s residencies, a mere four-hour performance compared to the rear-numbing six- and even ten-hour marathons he’s performed earlier in the week. Some people have returned, regardless. Within that length of time, anything could happen: the music that Fripp claims to channel rather than compose could lead him anywhere.
Soundscapes, the successor to the layered sound-loops of Frippertronics, is a major leap forwards, sideways, anyways from its progenitor: the digital technology stores his patterns and transforms his tones to the point where there isn’t a single recognisable Crimsonic guitar sound to be heard all evening. In effect, Fripp and Singleton are playing a wholly new collective instrument, a community of speakers, desk, guitar and digital cyberspace. The end results are a swathe of overlapping, opposing electrophonic voices, sometimes beautiful and sometimes disturbing – polytextural hums; a sound like a seventy-foot high piece of glass being torn like cloth; wailing, spectral swells like American freight trains blowing a blue whistle into a desert of ghosts; aquatic, gem-faceted calls of a Loch Ness Monster; tingling pianistic or xylophonic ringing; squiggling crystal-bat chitters. It emerges as a sound that’s on the brink of being recognisable, somewhere deep down in the soul… but not quite.
As it rolls on, evolving like strata, burying what’s come before like the march of ages, you may find it impossible to concentrate on (four hours is a long time) but it saturates your mind regardless: you’ll sure as hell be thinking differently. While I’m here, I meet somebody who ascribes near-mystical powers to the first Soundscapes album, ‘A Blessing of Tears’ – “any pain you have, any problem, it will heal it…” Even on the basis of what I’m personally experiencing in the music tonight (the rollers, breakers, capricious tides and immense flickering lulls of an alien sea under a midnight-blue sky, occasionally rent by sheets of violet lightning and mile-wide twists in the current… I think I’m in for a night on the ocean wave) I can believe him. This isn’t New Age pretty-stuff.
And so the Soundscapes are installed, piece by lambent unsettling piece, more challenging abstractions than Fripp’s ever attempted before. But most of the people here seem to have missed the point – sitting deferentially in the arc of chairs facing Robert and his little cliffs of winking lights, watching him silently manipulate his gold-top Les Paul or peer into his effects racks, they pay a silent tribute. This isn’t how to do it. When Fripp calls what he does “Soundscapes”, he means it literally. There’s a fifth element in that communal instrumentation: three-dimensional space. Each of the eight speakers arranged in an arc behind the audience is fed by a slightly different sound source. Walking slowly back and forth across the foyer, one passes in and out of phase with the sounds: a different listening angle provides a different piece, an ability and opportunity to concentrate on a different section of the Fripp orchestra. Music to literally explore.
I feel a bit of a fool, though, pacing up and down the floor to curious glances from the audience; it’s not quite the same as hanging around, in gig-approved fashion, with a drink in your hand and lunging up and down gently to your favourite song. Mind you, the rest of the audience are behaving exactly in the way you’d expect at a Fripp-related gig or an art installation. Here are a couple snogging vigorously, French-kissing amidst the unsettling washes of the music; three rows in from the front, a man appears to have passed out, lolling over the back of his chair with his wide-open mouth pointing wetly at the ceiling. Music to intoxicate? Perhaps: it ignores standard musical dimensions in a way that one only otherwise hears in the most deliriously spaced-out Lee Perry dubscapes, although the notoriously drug-free Fripp looks more composed than I’ve even seen him before.
‘Now You See It…’: Robert Fripp Soundscapes, 10th March 1996 (programme)
But then perhaps once the music slips beyond the control of his fretting fingers, flexing feet and console-fondling fingers, it ceases to be his responsibility anyway. The nature of Soundscapes is such that Fripp’s very presence can become little more than a trigger. Turn away at the wrong time and you’ll turn back to find the guitar leaned against the stool and Fripp gone, sipping at a cup of coffee over by the mixing desk as the music wreathes onwards without him, or wandering out through the audience to check a corner of the sound. It’s a little disturbing when, conversing quietly and walking around the circuit of speakers to experience the different sounds, one comes within six inches of Fripp padding lightly in the opposite direction, close enough for you to sense the implacability of his will, pushing at the realms of the possible like a smooth arrowhead.
The element of hazard plays its role too. Sometimes, amongst the layers of harmonic tissue that Fripp is laying down, a mismatch occurs. Or a part decays too soon, or a speaker refuses to cooperate with the vision, and the musical organism is deformed, loses balance, develops cancer. At such times Fripp shrugs in frustration and looks over to Singleton, or out to the audience in the only acknowledgement he ever gives them, lets go of the guitar with palms turned upwards in the universal gesture of helplessness. The music thins out and he begins to build his organism again.
This continues for four hours: time to get several drinks, chat quietly in the background, arrange assignations with other musicians and writers, even formulate whole arguments about what we’re seeing (in other words, make our own contributions to the Soundscape ambience), and still not miss out on the crystallising veils of sound that drift around the foyer, perplexing this evening’s Mozart concertgoers, putting thoughtful expressions on the faces of the cloakroom attendants as it numbs their resistance. At the end, Fripp puts the guitar down, as he’s done so many times before during the evening, and walks slowly away to vanish down the passageway leading to the dressing rooms. The applause that follows his retreating back is sincere, but oddly unfocussed, as if the audience is unsure whether they should be applauding him or the air that’s been buoying up the music and carrying it around like a whispered ritual, I catch the train home, as I usually do; things seem just a touch sharper than normal. Soundscapes don’t so much take you to another world as grant you a shimmering new lens to experience this one through.
Swoon. /swo͞on/ A verb. To be emotionally affected by someone or something that one admires; become ecstatic. Here are some people and things that make me swoon. #swoon #swoonage
Misfit City 