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November 1996 – album reviews – Labradford’s ‘Labradford’ (“aural massage never sounded so nerve-wracking”)

15 Nov

Labradford: 'Labradford'

Labradford: ‘Labradford’

With two albums already behind them, it’s time to stop lumping Labradford in with Tortoise as the only two notable examples of American post-rock. Post-rock is an uncomfortable catch-all that can’t really adequately describe a spectrum that takes in the noisy Trans Am at one end and the classical minimalism of Rachel’s at the other. And where Tortoise approach from an obviously jazzy direction, Labradford’s methods are ice-cold developments on ambience that now seem to be reaching a creative peak.

When a known band suddenly gives, say, their third album the name of the band (the way one would usually do for a debut), you can generally guess that they’re making a pointed statement of identity and distancing themselves from much of what went before. And – appropriately – ‘Labradford’ is Labradford’s most fulfilling statement so far; showing a fully-developed band consolidating the intriguing (but ultimately frustrating and insubstantial) thumbnail sketches they provided on ‘Prazision’ and ‘A Stable Reference’.

Experiments like the deep sub-frequency bass – straight out of acid house – dropping into the chilling ambience of The Cipher or the dissonant tones that break up the background of Lake Speed are perhaps signs of ears being opened to electronica; although this also leads to a loss of the band’s shared interest in the ancient music and religious plainsong which influenced their earlier albums. And which kept me listening past the point where I’d gotten infuriated by their sheer collegiate lethargy, the way they sounded like something made by people who only got out of bed to turn their Neu! record over.

That spectral and distinctly European quality is missing from this year’s model to be replaced by more obviously technologically produced atmospherics, and better production has separated out the sounds from the claustrophobia of ‘A Stable Reference’. The addition of rhythms, albeit perfunctory and not necessarily conventional drum sounds, makes a big difference to the progress of the pieces. Where previously Labradford songs started, hung in stasis in a foggy air and then disappeared, there is now a definite propulsion, a moving forward. Reassuringly, though, we’re not talking 120 bpm…


 
For a group dealing in mainly instrumental ambient atmospheres, it comes as something of a joy to come across titles that, for once, bear some relation to the sounds being heard. The first track really does sound like a Phantom Channel Crossing – the most nightmarish vision imaginable of a midnight journey in a tin hulk of a ferry. The engines, the chains, the metallic resonances, the emptiness – all there. Maybe I’m imagining things. Painting my own picture for the sounds I’m hearing.

But if that’s not what Labradford’s all about, then there’s no point. This is a gallery of sound, rather than music. And yes, Midrange really does appear to exist all in that spectrum. It’s claustrophobic. While Mark Nelson’s voice mouths more of his usual indecipherable profundities over the group’s ghostly atmospherics, it is noticeable that more light is seeping into the sonic palette – distant violins and, most distinct from the usual swirling morass, a subtly tapped-out rhythm. It still ends with the growing unease of that Labradford noise, however – the closest description being the amplified sound of air ventilation.


 
Lake Speed is underpinned by a metronomic, surprisingly insistent bass drum rhythm, like a niggling thought tapping constantly on the wall of your brain. “Like a clock / In pieces / On the floor / I try to fix it fast / So I don’t lose too much time” – and as the clock ticks, all manner of worryingly gentle alarms go off in the background. It gives the impression of a David Lynch piece that is seeking to add to your feelings of paranoia. Aural massage never sounded so nerve-wracking. One of the track’s twisted and elongated effects sounds like a man giving vent to a low, painful scream. It’s buried deep in the mix… but it’s there. How appropriate.


 
Scenic Recovery retains much of the sound and atmosphere of Lake Speed. But still the thoughts keep churning away inside. The tap-tap-tapping rhythm has altered slightly – suddenly it’s the regular but ineffectual pulse of a coma patient. As the mire of sound envelops you, and tension hangs in the air, a solitary violin carries a melody through the ether. Pico is one of Labradford’s “songs”; rather than just shifting atmospheres. Almost hymnal in its simplicity – a sequence of heartbreaking chords, a melody that is played by a friendly alien on a space-age tin whistle, a barely-there whisper of a vocal and another minimalist, almost endearingly clumsy rhythm. The pace is processional, almost holy.



 
Oh God, how does one describe The Cipher? It is just there. It exists, like sounds exist even in the most silent of nights. Look, this is the sound of digital and analogue air rustling chains. Ghostly. Calming. It is all of these things. But mostly, it just is.


 
Battered, the closer, is almost eventful. Delicately balanced on a hesitant mandolin-like guitar, a brightly melodic riff, and with a beep providing the rhythm – coma patients again, nurse – it hits a Cocteaus-like bliss-out at the end. Perfect pop for Prozac people.


 
The last notes we hear are desert guitars drifting into the night. Death Valley, here we come…

(review by Col Ainsley)

Labradford: ‘Labradford’
Mute Liberation Technologies/Blast First Records, BFFP 136CD (5 016027 611360)
CD/download album
Released: 12th November 1996

Get it from:
(2018 update) CD best obtained second-hand, or download from Bandcamp.

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September 1996 – album reviews – John Greaves/David Cunningham’s ‘Greaves, Cunningham’ reissue (“a muted treasure”)

10 Sep

John Greaves, David Cunningham: 'Greaves, Cunningham'

John Greaves, David Cunningham: ‘Greaves, Cunningham’

Too much information.

I’ll own up to being the occasional sad muso, the sort of person who wants to know which guest musician banged the tambourine on the second (unused) take of The Beatles’ Revolution on June 24, 1968, and what colour trousers they were wearing. (Look, it’s a hypothetical. Don’t send your replies).

It’s refreshing, then, to be recommended an album and know little or nothing about the artist. David Cunningham I am familiar with as the person behind The Flying Lizards, purveyors of bizarre‑sounding kitchen‑sink electronics who had a surprise hit in the ’70s with a version of early Motown hit Money, and has since produced much of Michael Nyman’s work. John Greaves? Search me. My excellent editor will no doubt insert a knowledgeable mini‑biog here. I think John Greaves may have been in some way involved in prog. God help us… (Near enough. He used to be in Henry Cow ‑ an enthralling but demanding gang of ferociously complex Maoist art‑rockers in the ’70s ‑ playing bass on revolutionary stuff that was far too twisty to sing over. Perhaps as a reaction, he’s been a song‑albums man ever since. Prog by default, I guess: the difference isn’t as wide as some would like to imply ‑ ED.).

So I didn’t know what to expect. What I found is a delicate and intensely beautiful curio. Totally motionless. Ice cold. Pure electronics, free of the distortion and sampling that we so associate with the form now, and only occasionally breathed upon by natural sounds. And a voice that sings of emotion but remains, almost intriguingly, detached.

The Mirage is a less than promising opening, though. It almost justifies the accusation that much avant‑garde music is simply nice melodies and good singers ruined by someone working randomly through all the programs on their synth in the background. But one is immediately struck by the voice of John Greaves: somewhere between Dominic Appleton of Breathless (and, more famously, This Mortal Coil) and John Cale ‑ appropriately, Greaves is also a Welsh tenor. The sort of voice, frankly, that is only ever heard in art‑rock. It’s heard to great effect on one of the stand‑out tracks, The Magical Building. A beautiful melody and a peculiarly touching analogy ‑ “Oh darling, it’s all so mysterious / The magical building that is us” ‑ despite its unusually clinical feel. Cunningham’s stark, clean electronic backing evokes further This Mortal Coil comparisons.


 
One Summer allows about the most human emotion on this album. Regret. The harmonies are all‑too‑real in beautifully surrounding Greaves’ voice as he regrets: “Swimming all around and never getting closer / To the one damn thing you knew we needed most…/ In a way, we never happened / In a way, we were never there / In a way, we were phantoms / In a way, we were fish in air…/ In a way, we didn’t care / And there’s nobody left to tell the tale.” If that doesn’t get you weeping over summer love affairs long gone, you are truly heartless.


 
In between the longer vocal tracks, there are a number of short ambient pieces. Whilst all retain the icy atmosphere of the album, the vocals elsewhere are so stunning one longs for their return. Nevertheless, the instrumentals are arresting in their own way, several of them sharing similarities with the recent work of Jansen and Barbieri; particularly the final track, The Map Of The Mountains, where marimbas play a softly rhythmic motif over an evolving ambient sequence. The Red Sand is a rhythmic instrumental of pulsating piano, percussion, strange dislocated vocal snatches, parping saxes and clarinet. The Other World ‑ due to its instrumentation in particular ‑ proves to be a more substantial interruption to the flow of the songs. The acoustic guitars and saxophone bring a more laid‑back feel when the steel‑cold otherworldly electronics have just got you entranced. One big flaw, though ‑ the sax player is given far too many solos whilst suffering from avant‑garditis. He doesn’t so much play the tune so much as parp strange caterwauling noises. Cheers, mate ‑ do ruin the atmosphere. Anyway…



 
The Voice returns. The Inside, penned by Greaves alone, is (apart from a recurring, majestic‑bubblegum hook of “oh, baby, oh”) sung entirely in French. So, no, I have no idea what it’s about: suffice to say that it appears an unwritten rule of art‑rock albums that they must feature a track sung in French. Whatever the content, this is an achingly simple torch song, so standard in its verse‑chorus‑verse‑bridge structure that it emerges as a feat of understatement when the temptation to load on the sounds would have been all too easy. The Same Way, also a Greaves‑penned track, is another song about lost love, finding love, insecurity about love ‑ “You could say I’m way off course / You could say I love you.” Indeed, it ends in the same way it began.

This is an album, a muted treasure, to discover as autumn ends. Music for a midwinter morning ‑ intensely cold, but intensely beautiful.

(review by Vaughan Simons)

John Greaves/David Cunningham: ‘Greaves, Cunningham’
Piano, PIANO 506 (604388401024)
CD-only album reissue
Released: 1996

Get it from:
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August 1996 – album reviews – Aqueous’ ‘Tall Cloudtrees Falling’ (“ambient emotional blackmail”)

24 Aug
Aqueous: 'Tall Cloudtrees Falling'

Aqueous: ‘Tall Cloudtrees Falling’

One thing ambient music is supposed to do is to be passive and let you play the unlistener. That way, you know where you stand. Put on an ambient record, flood yourself with the pastel light or shadow of your choice, lie back and just relax into it like a big cushion of sound waves. There might or might not be some gentle beats involved, you might get the odd trumpet or whale-song, it might be dark or it might be light… Whatever it is, you’ve got control and it’s tailored to one-size-fits-all. No problems. No thinking necessary.

Aqueous: ‘Catching Sight of Land’

At first hearing, Aqueous’ ‘Tall Cloudtrees Falling’ sounds as if it’s going to be one of those archetypal ambient throw-pillows. Listening to Andrew Heath and Felix Jay gently ping and buzz their way through Catching Sight of Land (whole-tone scale digital abstractions; robotic bass blobbing up in gentle ruminant belches) or Under a Heavy Sky’s dewdrops of Rhodes piano and wowing buzzes, you can settle down, open your book, drift off…

Hang about. Brain message, confused. Surely there should be something here to latch on to? The reassuring melody-ette, the heartbeat to the ambient womb? Either someone’s made off with it, or Aqueous have folded it up like origami – all the expected angles in the wrong place. You can’t read the book; there are gaps in the music which your subconscious is forcing you to listen to. Ambient emotional blackmail.

And eventually you have to respond. You put down the book, and you listen to this wandering, gentle collection of electronic shapes. A third of it makes sense. The remainder refuses to stay in your grasp, melting off into the air like an evasive scent. The ice has melted in your drink.

Back to the book. This time, the music creeps up behind you and gently, insistently – maddeningly – tugs at your shoulder. It demands, ever so gently that you listen to it: but as soon as you turn around, it’s gone again. Sub-audible – in the night-breaths of Antarctica as insubstantial, yet as unmistakeably there, as the shape a leaf-laden branch makes in the breeze. In Les Trois Jours D’Ete, capturing the silence of a sun-washed garden… with the eyes drawn up over the top of the wall in expectation of sudden, silent summer events. You shelter in it. It slowly sags and gives way at unexpected angles beneath you: turning you round, dropping you into Sweet Santoor’s zither of icicles and Stylophonic buzzes (amid snatches of disintegrating Satie).

Aqueous: ‘Within This Dream I Awake’

This carpet-slippered game of cat and mouse could go on for ever, while you attempt to either pursue or ignore Aqueous’ essence. You can draw a few comparisons if you like. The mingling, exchanging, misty patterns in Leaving Alexandria in the Cold Light of Dawn mixes Harold Budd’s still-air vistas with the insidious kind of fluting, droning analogue shapes that Vangelis cooked up during his mid-’70s Nemo peak, during quieter moments. The whole album has echoes of Cluster.

But attempting to pin Aqueous music down to absolutes is as futile as trying to pull that unlistening ambient-consumer’s trick on it. Like the various states of water, this music can both give and refuse to give; and it infiltrates the environment it enters, with the insidiousness of transient vapour or with the unyielding fragility of an ice sheath over a pond.

Aqueous: ‘Tall Cloudtrees Falling’
Hermetic Recordings, HERM 2222
CD album
Released: 19th August 1996

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August 1996 – album reviews – Disco Inferno’s ‘Technicolour’ (“a poignant, if a touch unsatisfactory, monument to a band who did a most remarkable thing”)

5 Aug

Disco Inferno: 'Technicolour'

Disco Inferno: ‘Technicolour’

They were going to change the world with their world‑weary lyrics, noisy guitars and random artillery of samples.

As the USA brings us an ever more inventive and experimental range of post‑rock bands, it is sobering to reflect that, whether you like that all‑embracing genre‑heading or not, the UK could not sustain such a futuristic leap in pop music for long. Disco Inferno, Bark Psychosis, Seefeel, Insides and their ilk were just a temporary blip in the inexorable rise of ’60s revivalism.

Disco Inferno, in particular, had the cruellest of brief careers. Picked up and lauded by the likes of ‘The Wire’ and ‘Mixing It’, and used as a constant token of their superior musical taste by ‘NME’ and ‘Melody Maker’ journalists (a secret for them to keep and drop into reviews as an esoteric influence) Disco Inferno didn’t stand a chance of taking their unique vision to where they wanted it to be: the pop world.


 
This album nearly became the great “lost” work ‑ curtailed by the demise of the band, publishing difficulties made it uncertain if ‘Technicolour’ would ever see the light of day. Finally released months later, it stands as a poignant, if a touch unsatisfactory, monument to a band who did a most remarkable thing. Whilst producing truly “experimental” music, they didn’t forget the need for (well, it’s almost heresy to some chin‑stroking musical aesthetes) emotionally‑involving lyrics and a damn good melody.

So, for a sampladelic band, the opening two tracks scare the sheep with noisy guitar abandon. The title track, blasts in with a none‑more‑guitar‑and‑distortion start, but the unique invention soon creeps in ‑ a shuddering rhythm supplied by car horns, dog barks, shouts and breaking glass. A collision between The Art Of Noise and the glycerine melodies of The Lightning Seeds, with an end result comparable to late‑’80s Wire. Things Move Fast lives up to the title, and is a delirious noise‑guitar and beat‑fuelled rush through modern society. It ends with a sample of rapturous crowd noise. Truly, these guys lived in hope ’til the last.


 
I’m Still In Love reasserts DI’s passionate belief that a tender love song and futuristic sound could be combined: Ian Crause devoting himself to someone as they seal themselves away from the harsh iniquities of the world outside, with fireworks exploding and crackling during the exhilarating noise‑upon‑noise of the chorus. Lovely.

Sleight Of Hand is another hymn to the jaded view of the world as seen through Crause’s eyes ‑ “and once you see the sleight of hand / it’s never the same. / Once you see the cards are marked / it’s all in the game.” It’s the adult version of realising Santa Claus is actually your father dressed up in a red coat and cotton wool, pissed on cheap sherry. We’ve all been there. The feather cushion is provided by the swirling, tumbling harps, heavenly harmonies and chiming synth‑drums ‑ straight out of the ’70s ‑ in the chorus.



 
Don’t You Know is a sample sequel to Footprints In Snow from the band’s stunning 1994 album, ‘DI Go Pop’. This tine the rhythm is provided by the sound of heels on pavement, surrounded by the ethereal and enveloping electronica that features on so many of DI’s utterly entrancing slower tracks ‑ it really is best described by the contradictory term “acoustic sampledelia”. It’s a truly indefinable sound that I have only heard once before: in the unforgettable work of AR Kane in the late ’80s, another band who sounded like they were piecing together from the music and sound elements of a nuclear event. That is the spirit of Disco Inferno.



 
It’s A Kid’s World was the “big” single. That’s irony, by the way. It’s based on that Lust For Life drum intro. Kids’ TV themes ‑ ‘Doctor Who’, ‘Playschool’ ‑ are plundered for samples. There are even self‑referential samples from earlier DI tracks. It’s a veritable junkshop of found sounds. By any other standards, a triumph. By Ian Crause’s standards, this sounds like an attempt to produce what people expect post‑modern sampledelia to sound like ‑ knowingly ironic, dischordant brain music for ‘Wire’ readers and other musical eggheads.

But it lacks the tangible human emotions of most of the group’s material, unlike When The Story Breaks, which is perhaps the closest DI get to pop music for the twenty‑second century. The clattering synthetic drum breaks, harsh electronic ambience and (of all things) a sequence played on a touch‑tone telephone shows that some attention had undoubtedly been paid to the ten‑fledgling sound of drum’n’bass but applied to their melodic song‑based outlook.


 
Similarly, Can’t See Through It is almost a Blue Nile sound for the ’90s, a beautifully hushed marriage of natural acoustics and electronics. But more than anything, it is a song that sounds broken and exhausted. The lyrics state Crause’s dilemma at Disco Inferno’s situation: utter belief in the musical path they are following (“nothing can touch us / ‘cos everything in us / is digital cold”), but clear frustration that they’re not getting their vision across (“I can’t see through it / There’s no way back / I can’t get home…”).


 
It’s a lyrical concern that is developed in the final track. Devastating emotion soaked into its words, Over And Over is by far the most simply-recorded track Disco Inferno ever did ‑ just Crause’s voice, a guitar and a haunting drone in the background (more acoustic sampledelia…) It’s pure assumption, but it sounds like it was performed solo, after the split. The lyrics are undeniably concerned with the band’s demise ‑ “So many plans, so little time, / I can’t shake the feeling I’ve watched it all back from the end / Every missed chance and mistake / I hear when we’re playing / Forever in my head.” The man obviously lived for this project. It’s our loss that we didn’t sign up to it in droves.

I, for one, sincerely hope that Ian Crause and Disco Inferno soon find that they can’t bear not to present their music to the world, whether in a reformed group or a new set‑up (rumours abound of a new Crause band called Floorshow…). Perhaps the musical environment will be right this time ‑ more open minds, more adventurous listeners. Well, you live in hope. But it would be a tragedy for Disco Inferno to enter the files of Great Lost Hopes populated by Furniture, Kevin Rowlands, Bark Psychosis and… insert your own choice here.


 
Ian Crause’s last words on Over And Over are “it’s always, it’s always the same. / It’s never the way that you dream, / it’s never complete…” Disco Inferno, RIP.

(review by Vaughan Simons)

Disco Inferno: ‘Technicolour’
Rough Trade Records, R4102 (5022781204106)
CD‑only album
Released: 22nd July 1996

Get it from: (updated 2018) pick up the reissue (on vinyl and CD) from One Little Indian.

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July 1996 – album reviews – Eyeless In Gaza’s ‘All Under The Leaves, The Leaves Of Life’ (“rings the sonic changes track by track”)

25 Jul

Eyeless In Gaza: 'All Under The Leaves, The Leaves Of Life'

Eyeless In Gaza: ‘All Under The Leaves, The Leaves Of Life’

Still undimmed after years of following a winding path from visionary post-punk to surreal pop, and through to a beautiful breed of semi-ambient outsider-folk, Eyeless In Gaza continue to blossom in their triumphant 1990s renaissance. They’re also as restless as ever – following soon after their ‘Bitter Apples‘ album (with its sustained autumnal mood) ‘All Under The Leaves, The Leaves Of Life’ rings the sonic changes track by track.

Indeed, Eyeless seem as happy to draw on their post-punk past as they are to explore the ghostly folk that’s left an impressive stamp on their recent music. Monstrous Joy opens the album and… God help us, it’s 1981 again! Joy Division bass rumbles, spindly single-note synths, buzzingly active electronic drums. Yet despite the timewarp, this is no Xerox copy of those years. Instrumentally, it’s a skilfully layered slice of pop atmospherics: lyrically, emotions are conveyed much more directly. Gone are the allusions to nature, but the atmosphere holds a definite frost in the air – “here is a sorrow that owns me, here is a sorrow that speaks.”


 
Struck Like Jacob Marley (despite the Dickensian title, a highly contemporary standout) does nothing to ease the chill. Led by rumbling bass guitar and defiantly noisy and distorted electric guitar, the lyrics are upfront advice to a friend consumed by cynicism – “it’s almost as though you have no positive view / and the old warmth is going, even though you don’t wish it to.” Hard words.

Meanwhile, the sonic adventures just keep on coming. Fracture Track is a mesmerising and bloody assault on the Eyeless sound. A violently struck, hypnotic rhythm guitar riff is blasted on all sides by discordant drones and buzzes: there are no drums, yet it sounds huge, and Martyn Bates pushes out a harsh-edged, ferocious vocal. “Blasted and blinded to chaos… / riding an animal hatred… / forcing such a numb and wasting path for you to blithely tread.” The violent and nihilistic imagery only adds towards making this the darkest, most fearsome track Eyeless In Gaza have ever recorded.

The traditional Leaves Of Life, as arranged by Eyeless, sounds like a less wasted Flying Saucer Attack turned on their heads. The vocals and spartan folk acoustics take place up close, whilst the unsettling ambience – provided mainly by startlingly severe treatment and distortion of electric guitars and other electrical interferences – scares the life out of you in the background. Gothic folk at its best. And trip-hop? Well, OK, nearly. Answer Song And Dance definitely possesses a dark, nervous trip-hop undercarriage, with a slow, menacing beat, cool electronic sheen and Martyn’s vocals relayed through digital effects and compression: more experiments in new sound are going on here.


 
Three Ships, another arrangement of a traditional piece, is perhaps the most reassuringly familiar Eyeless In Gaza track here, comprising a solo vocal over Peter Becker’s long churchy organ notes (“all the black keys”, as they once called it). Even here, though, the second part of the track becomes subject to the unsettling aural sculptures of pervasive otherworldly drones, sonic interferences and sinister electronic pulses. It sounds like a late 90’s version of one of the frankly peculiar little improvised instrumentals that have littered Eyeless B-sides and rarities in the past: but, satisfyingly, it’s an example of technology finally catching up with the duo’s ambitious musical vision, so that they can finally express their experimental sides to the full.


 
It’s tempting to see this album as the second side of the coin flipped by ‘Bitter Apples’ last year. If the former was the familiar world of acoustic alchemy, natural imagery and the avant-folk song, then ‘All Under The Leaves…’ sees Eyeless In Gaza striking out for new challenges: testing their own musical limits, and casting off the gauze of allusion and allegory to put forward sometimes difficult lyrical statements directly. And while, on ‘Bitter Apples’, vibrant colours were all around and there was a last gasp of summer’s warmth, ‘…Leaves…’ is winter-cold. Challenging, but ultimately beautiful when viewed in the harshest of frosts.

Since unexpectedly bursting back into life in 1993, Eyeless In Gaza have been immensely prolific. But as their continuing string of albums in the comeback sequence show, quality has remained high: and Bates and Becker’s desire to move forward and experiment – while retaining Eyeless’ essential character – remains intact and proud.

(review by Vaughan Simons)

Eyeless In Gaza: ‘All Under The Leaves, The Leaves Of Life’
Ambivalent Scale Recording, A‑SCALE 021 (5 021958 463025)
CD‑only album
Released: 19th July 1996

Get it from:
(2018 update) original CD and 2009 Cherry Red Records reissue best obtained second-hand.

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March 1996 – album reviews – Nicola Alesini & Pier Luigi Andreoni’s ‘Marco Polo’ (“like diving into a tapestry”)

24 Mar

Nicola Alesini & Pier Paulo Andreoni: 'Marco Polo'

Nicola Alesini & Pier Paulo Andreoni: ‘Marco Polo’

Listening to this album is like diving into a tapestry. Well, I guess a lot of prog and ambient-related music is, given its emphasis on the visual qualities of music and the proggy tendency (in particular) to fixate on the past; and that counts for even more at the crossover point. Nicola Alesini and Pier Luigi Andreoni, though, do it that much better. ‘Marco Polo’ – based loosely on the adventures of said merchant, explorer and diplomatic in the mediaeval Cathay of Kublai Khan – is a journey on the silkiest of roads, one on which you could really lose yourself in the billowing, drifting shapes which reality assumes.


 
Even while rising in the world of Italian jazz, saxophonist Alesini has also frequently been drawn into the world of art rock, kosmische music and ambient electronica. Andreoni’s already had a two-decade history as a multi-instrumentalist – starting out with Piacenzan comedy rockers La Pattona in the mid-’70s and passing through New Wave, experimental folk and minimalist synthing via The Doubling Riders and A.T.R.O.X. during the ’80s. Most recently, he’s been making a showing in the experimental ambient Andreolina duo during the ’90s. Much of the latter (with the exception of the comedy) leaves its mark on ‘Marco Polo’, although arguably the defining musical voice is Alesini’s upfront, intimate soprano sax – breathy, sweet and fragile, yet possessing a white-flame passion.


 
Andreoni, meanwhile, reveals himself to be a master of ambient keyboarding following the Brian Eno and Richard Barbieri path, using his instruments as subtle invisible chisels for sculpting electrons and the air into a colossal romantic spectrum of sound. Between the two of them they craft a set of compositions that phase slowly across the face of the world, colouring their own instrumental textures with the careful deployment of harmoniums and bouzoukis, cello and atmosphere guitar. This is an album of travelling, of seeing heartstopping landscapes for the first time, of releasing those feelings that the wanderer knows, of attempting to paint all of this in music.


 
This they do in glowing detail; the snake-charmer sax of Sumatra, the warped radio-chat and disassociated sway of Buchara, the metallophone Chinese chiming and fluting reeds of Quinsai, La Citta’del Cielo. With this type of thought being brought to bear on it, ‘Marco Polo’ is very much a deep-shaded ambient dreamscape album of the David Sylvian school, filled with sweeps of electronic space and shade, and immeasurably elevated when other musicians drift into the mix to stir up Alesini and Andreoni’s immaculate studies. David Torn‘s contribution of guitars, for instance, which bellow like yaks or hover like the promise of avalanches in Yangchow or M. Polo; or when Harold Budd places his sparse Himalayan points of piano into Samarca or The Valley of Pamir.



 
Roger Eno is on board as well, his less polished keyboard approach adding a wonderfully naïve human touch to the lambent, warmly aloof perfection (in particular on the aquamarine piano study of Il Libro dell’Incessante Accordo con Il Cielo). The pale vulnerable tones of his voice carry reedily through the twinkling spectral travel-songs of M. Polo and Samarca. Arturo Stalteri (the New Age keyboardist who originally made his name in progressive Italian folk duo Pierrot Lunaire) adds harmonium to the former, buried deep in the mix somewhere. The best moments come, though, when David Sylvian himself is brought in to sing on three tracks; his luminous baritone wreathing through the misty dawn-music of Come Morning (Stalteri’s bouzouki adding a glimmering coda), fluttering above the vague rattling sketches of Maya, or brooding (over cello, sax and a rippling ghost of electronic percussion) on dreamy images of god-games on The Golden Way.



 
And yet, in spite of all of the talent squeezed onto the album, somehow ‘Marco Polo’ doesn’t completely satisfy. It’s a little too remote, too self-contained and preoccupied with its own panoramic reveries. Behind the rich melodies and atmospheres, there’s only the vaguest engagement with the historical Marco Polo and Cathay; there’s not quite enough substance behind the shimmering surface of the album’s undeniable loveliness. Maybe it’s best viewed from the other end of a room, from a distance where the threads in the tapestry blue together into a captivating portrait which defies laws of time and space, where it can give such a convincingly four-dimensional performance that its audience can forget its two-dimensional thinness. But if you can live with that, ‘Marco Polo’ makes a wonderful tapestry.


 
Nicola Alesini & Pier Luigi Andreoni: ‘Marco Polo’
Materiali Sonori, MASO CD 90069 (8012957006921)
CD-only album
Released: 22nd March 1996
Get it from: (2020 update) Get CD from Materiali Sonori, or second-hand; stream from last.fm, Apple Music, Google Play or Spotify.
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March 1996 – live reviews – Robert Fripp’s South Bank Soundscapes @ Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer, South Bank, London, 10th March (“more challenging abstractions than Fripp’s ever attempted before”)

12 Mar

'Now You See It...': Robert Fripp Soundscapes, 10th March 1996

‘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)

‘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.

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November 1995 – album reviews – Eyeless In Gaza’s ‘Bitter Apples’ (“an autumnal album in the most inspiring way”)

30 Nov

Eyeless In Gaza: 'Bitter Apples'

Eyeless In Gaza: ‘Bitter Apples’

After seventeen years on the wildest, furthest reaches of contemporary music, Eyeless In Gaza’s time may finally have come. With the British music scene proclaiming itself as boundary-free, cross-pollination of styles is the name of the game. Experimentation is the byword. Ears are open to new sounds.

Eyeless, of course, have been doing it for ages – from industrial electronics through early-80’s sparse electronic punk, bedsit acoustic folk, a stab at a big pop sound and experiments with mechanistic ambience. Then a seven-year abeyance followed by a shock return with the modern dance-pop of ‘Fabulous Library’ and by ‘Saw You In Reminding Pictures’ (an album of improvised, cinematic, ambient songs and atmospheres). Yet all, thanks to Martyn Bates’ distinctive, expressive voice and Peter Becker’s endlessly inventive musical collages, recognisably Eyeless In Gaza.

Much of Europe has been in on their greatness for years. Now that they have returned it is time that Britain listened in; particularly as, since Eyeless reformed, their career has been no nostalgic re-run of past styles, but a body of work that has engaged with the best of them in the camp marked “pre-millennial boundary-breaking zeitgeist experimentation”. Or something.


 
Following the head-expanding soundscape world of ‘Saw You In Reminding Pictures’, ‘Bitter Apples’ comes announced as a return to song structures and a live folk feel (acoustic guitars, bass, drums). The matured Eyeless In Gaza are now reinventing the brand of avant-folk song first heard on their Drumming The Beating Heart album over a decade ago. Lyrics such as those on Bushes And Briars immediately announce the folk influence – “through bushes and through briars / I lately made my way / all for to hear the young birds sing / and the lambs to skip and play.”

But any hint of preciousness about such a style is dispelled by the ghostly a-capella treatment of Bates’ voice, treated with vocal effects that make him sound like a possessed changeling, wrapped in his own tingling harmonies. Martyn Bates’ voice is unique – expressive in hushing to a sense of menace, or delicate and weary, or surging with the power to hit the rafters. He occasionally retains a slight rasp, an edge, to his voice from the first punk-inflected vocals of early Eyeless. A comparison? Impossible.


 
Year Dot demonstrates how Eyeless In Gaza can produce powerfully rhythmic, surging music from the basis of harsh acoustic riffs, Martyn letting his voice roam over the melodies with unfettered power. But technology is not anathema to such natural surroundings, though – the track closes in a sharp crescendo of electronic interference. Contemporary experimentation mixes it further with avant-folk on Jump To Glory Jane – zither passages are built upon bursts of white noise, klaxons, and improvised wordless vocal harmonies as just another instrument in the delicate construction. It’s a perfect demonstration of the duo’s implicit feel for building such atmospheres, and sets the tone for much of the rest of the album.

Perhaps the central track, though, is To Listen Across The Sands: powerful and urgent, built upon a crashing electronic drum pattern remorselessly pushing the rhythm forward and echoing the lyrical theme of listening to “all the mad, crashing waves.” The song would seem to be an allegory for a journey through a stormy life – “listen across the sands / to the waves drifting where you stand / and all their voices swallowing your life.” A theme that is returned to, lyrically and musically, on the title track. To an up-tempo soundtrack of syncopated guitar and percussion (plus a star appearance from a keyboard relic in Peter Becker’s armoury of sounds – the Wasp), nature’s imagery is once again summoned to describe the unpleasant aspects of life we sometimes have to wade through. “Such a bitter harvest, such a windfall falling that I can’t move… / all that I taste wastes me away – all that I’m succoured by and living on… / bitter apples…”

This is an autumnal album in the most inspiring way – new invigorating cooler winds provoking the falling leaves and scudding clouds. And Eyeless in Gaza are long-overdue for rediscovery, yet still ripe. Pluck.

(review by Vaughan Simons)

Eyeless In Gaza: ‘Bitter Apples’
Ambivalent Scale Recording, A‑SCALE 020 (5021958453026)
CD‑only album
Released: autumn 1995

Get it from:
(2018 update) original CD best obtained second-hand. There was a 2011 reissue on Hand/Eye Records which might be easier to find.

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September 1995 – live reviews – B. J. Cole & The Transparent Music Ensemble + Billy Currie & Blaine L. Reininger @ Upstairs at the Garage, Highbury, London, 20th September (“a classical dissection of folk, like Irish airs meeting New York minimalism… / …a beautiful translucent sound”)

23 Sep

A definite whiff of conservatoire rock tonight. Viola player Billy Currie used to be in Ultravox,: nowadays he looks more like an Irish pub musician, but his music has taken a more interesting turn, as has his choice of collaborators. Former Tuxedomoon violinist and occasional singer Blaine L. Reininger – with his unnerving bespectacled stare, lugubrious ironic drawl, Zappa face-fuzz and impeccable suit – looks like a college professor whom you wouldn’t allow near the children, and draws most of the attention this evening.

This unlikely pair perform a set of serious brow-furrowed John Cale-y string duets with a flavour of compressed folk, using an endearingly cheap sequencer to expand the instrumentation: clave and sweep piano program on Bittersweet, digital string orchestra on Overcast. On The Reach of Memory, sparse piano clumps, drum program and synth bass kicks into Currie and Reininger’s apparent take on Appalachian mountain music. The Thin End of the Wedge sees Reininger on trashy art-rock guitar for a Velvet Underground feel.

Their music has a strange, detachedly astringent feel; a classical dissection of folk, like Irish airs meeting New York minimalism. A sense of towering expression repressed, amplified, by Reininger’s menacing suavity: the set highlight is The Green Door, in which Reininger sings words from a documentary on schizophrenia to a strong melody over sparse drum program and organ. Seems wholly appropriate. I’m impressed, but I feel a little queasy.

In contrast, pedal steel guitarist B.J. Cole is a ridiculously normal-looking guy with a peculiar past. Back in the ’70s he was the leader of Cochise (probably the only prog/psychedelic band based around pedal steel) and subsequently explored psychedelic country music in 1973 on his ‘New Hovering Dog’ album. Over the years since then, he’s been the ubiquitous sideman and sessioneer to everyone who wants an open-minded pedal steel approach, from The Orb to Björk to Procul Harum to Scott Walker, and in particular John Cale. Since 1989 he’s also been leading this occasional band; the Transparent Music Ensemble, an ambient-flavoured chamber music quintet also featuring keyboards, cello, percussion and violin prodigy Bobby Valentino, best known for his London country music stardom.

Cole’s Transparent Music is a sedate, relaxing experience, pleasantly beautiful and unfussy, far too laid-back to be pretentious. Reflective melodic strings tie in with his steel lines, keyboards support gently, percussion shades rather than impels. Some people point out Brian Eno as the inventor of ambient music: others such as Cole know that it goes back to the days of Satie and Debussy, both of whole expressed ambient intentions long before the days of synths and tape loops, wishing to create music that merged with the tinkle of cutlery. Works by both are played tonight, along with a version of Ennio Morricone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, a slow cloudy cover with Cole’s ringing pedal steel dreaming out the tune.

Transparent Music is unselfconsciously universal: if something fits in with that softly lustrous sound, Cole and co. play it and let someone else draw up the distinctions if they’ve got nothing better to do. The original pieces stream neatly into place alongside the classics: Indian Willow’s choppy subterranean strings, Promenade & Arabesque’s pizzicato accents. Throughout, Cole’s steel pines and slides gracefully. That is, when he hasn’t MIDI-processed it into another sound – sad film-noir saxophone on Adagio in Blue to contrast with Valentino’s passionate classical violin, or the fluting electronic sounds on Easter Cool counterpointing the piano and bass drum.

It isn’t exactly music to stir the blood. What it is is very accomplished classy atmosphere music, a beautiful translucent sound whose function is just to exist and to please. That may sound superficial, but if so it’s a refined and civilised pleasure of superficiality. Gentle classics stroked with electricity and with a sense of ambient context, reclaiming the sector where popular instrumental and classical cross, and with no hint of elevator music. Easy listening with a brain. Satie and Debussy would have approved.

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September 1995 – live reviews – Kate St. John @ DreamHouse @ The Water Rats, Kings Cross, London, 5th September (“like finding a pearl in the Sunday teacups”)

8 Sep

Kate St. John is best known as reedsperson to the stars: whenever someone wants a solo oboe on a rock record, she’s usually the one who gets the call. In her time, she’s been a member of The Ravishing Beauties, of Dream Academy and of the collective Channel Light Vessel (which also boasted Bill Nelson and Roger Eno). Now there’s the solo project – an apparently gorgeous album called ‘Indescribable Night’ and a four-piece acoustic band in which her voice and reeds are joined by guitar, viola and fretless bass.

What with her past work and the sessions for the likes of Julian Cope, we’d expect her to launch into a crazy and beautiful atmosphere project. But what Kate seems to be into right now is a featherlight fusion of classical, lounge jazz and blues – ‘Green Park Blues’ being the most obviously successful example tonight. A love of the French chanson tradition shows itself as well, in the summery ‘Paris Skies’ and in Kate’s choice of cover version tonight (Francoise Hardy’s ‘Le Premiere Bonheur de Toujours’).

This comes as quite a surprise (positioned as it is in the midst of a DreamHouse evening of intense contemporary rock singer-songwriters with guitars, but Kate and co. are unfailingly tasteful: beautiful arrangements played impeccably to form a sort of mildly fusion-flavoured chamber music. One can’t help thinking, though, that it’s a pretty tame world for such musicians to be installing themselves in. It all just floats along gracefully on leisurely viola shapes and restrained guitar, with Kate’s wispily pretty voice bathing in nostalgic warmth. And then she places an oboe, a cor anglais or an alto sax in her mouth, and out comes this phenomenally beautiful sound which stops you dead in your tracks and sets hunger in your soul…

It’s like finding a pearl in the Sunday teacups: sheer beauty reduced by finely-crafted but over-genteel surroundings. Kate St. John’s musicality needs a more passionate setting than this, a possibility hinted at by the ethereal mediaeval vocalising of ‘There is Sweet Music’ with its heart-stoppingly lovely cor anglais. But until then, at least we have this fine quartet. Many of you may be intrigued by this tasteful breed of crossover music: if so, I’d advise you to seek out the album. I myself am left wondering what it would take for such a phenomenal thread of music to be allowed freedom from the cosiness of café memories and to fly liberated, soaring to the heights that each and every one of tonight’s reed solos hints at.

Kate St. John online:
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Additional notes: (2020 update) Kate St. John spends most of her time supervising film music these days – if you want to listen to the album which this music came from, it’s available on Bandcamp.

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March 1995 – album reviews – Eskimo’s ‘The Further Adventures of Der Shrimpkin’ (“a sort of comedic musical lucky dip”)

24 Mar
Eskimo; 'The Further Adventures of Der Shrimpkin'

Eskimo; ‘The Further Adventures of Der Shrimpkin’

San Francisco’s Bay Area still seems to be a hotbed for particularly off-the-wall musical artistry. The headquarters of hippydom in the ’60s is now the place where players’ players (Joe Satriani, Fred Frith, Michael Manring) make their homes, and bands like Primus and Faith No More forged their scrambled mongrel funk/punk/metal in the same neighbourhoods. It’s also the place from which a secrecy-shrouded band called The Residents sent out a series of sharply clever and mischievous recordings during the ’70s, analysing, deconstructing and parodying popular music in all of its manifestations. One of these was a concept album called ‘Eskimo’, a fanciful reconstruction of Inuit life and lifestyles. Even now, no-one’s absolutely sure whether it was a joke or not.

You’d guess that a band taking their name from that Residents album is gonna be just as difficult to pin down. Apparently Eskimo did start off as a joke band, set up by a collection of shaggy undergraduates from UC Berkeley with a penchant for party dresses. They’d hang out on campus corners busking frenetic, eccentric acoustic sets – stabs at TV theme tunes; Springsteen parodies; Who medleys. To an extent, you could say that they’ve never really grown out of those days of unbridled silliness. Eskimo still have wacky and zany written all over them in giant red fifty-foot letters, and anyone who finds the absurdist lunacy of the current Californian freak-muso scene unbearable would be advised to steer well clear.

Those not put off by that rubbery sense of humour will probably have a field day. Adding Tom Yoder’s trombone and David Cooper’s marimba and vibraphone to the standard guitar, bass and drums, Eskimo have a lounge-jazz element to their sound that’s got a lot in common with that other late, great, wise Californian eccentric Frank Zappa. A lot of ‘…Der Shrimpkin’ could have come from the same barn as Montana and One Size Fits All. That said, there’s at least as much of Primus slap-bass Muppet silliness in Eskimo as there is of the Mother of Freaks.

But like both Zappa and Les Claypool, the band have a love of American popular culture with all of its attendant and hugely enjoyable junk music. Their masterful playing (switching styles, moods, and tempos at the drop of a dime, and as happy with modal jazz charts as with playtime funk) is offset by their complete lack of concern about serious subject matter or, indeed, sense. With most of the twenty-four tracks on ‘…Der Shrimpkin’ clocking in at under two minutes, the album’s a tossed salad of circus music, playground chants, nursery rhymes, gibberish gospel, scuzz-metal and drunken jazz trombone exuberance, all mixed up in a freak-rock pudding. A sort of comedic musical lucky dip.

It could all be unbridled silliness but for the fact that ‘…Der Shrimpkin’ never quite loses the aura of anarchic menace that hangs around each of its ingredients. One of the few remaining covers on here – a faithful version of Snakefinger’s Residents collaboration ‘Kill the Great Raven’ – is (despite its kiddie vocals and campy haunted-house bellowing) a bloody ceremony of ritual murder and resurrection. ‘Babykins’ flavours a police siege with infantile fears. ‘The You’re So Slender’ is a Disney cartoon from Dali-Hell, while the jolly slap-funking ‘Bughead’ (sung in musing tones by guitarist John Shiurba) babbles about the sadistic rituals kids develop for the playground. ‘Oops’ (once you can decipher it) seems to be about the divine right of extermination; and ‘Ribbit’ sounds like Mark Twain taking on the princess-and-frog legends, complete with yelling hick farmer and squirming vocals.


What with many of the other tracks being short snippets of surreally twisty, dark-toned vibe-jazz (the sort that accompanies swaying cameras creeping around the Bates Motel) Eskimo may initially come across as a comedy band, but they re definitely no joke. A child’s nightmare with a big red pasted-on grin, perhaps. Coco the Clown fingering a cleaver. A set of practical jokes for the damned.

Eskimo seem intent on nailing jokey voices and songs onto the menacing shadows of the subconscious, as they do in the exuberant nonsense words of ‘Dado Peru’s hop-skip-and-jumping Dada/Beefheart-jazz, or in the restaurant full of freaks in ‘Electric Acid Pancake House’, all happily hallucinating about Elvis’ return as a serial killer. What with that, plus a cheerful stab at Duke Ellington’s ‘Blue Pepper’ and the odd spiritual song about tacos, they re probably perfect for the enjoyably warped. Give Eskimo a try next time you re having one of those gratuitously loony, twisted days… but watch out for the backwards messages.

Eskimo: ‘The Further Adventures of Der Shrimpkin’
Mammoth Records/Prawn Song Records, MR0102-2 (0 35498-0102-2 4)
CD/download album)
Released: 21st March 1995
Get it from: (2020 update) Original CD best obtained second-hand; or download album from Bandcamp.
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February 1995 – album reviews – Laundry’s ‘Blacktongue’ (“a scuffed, brooding black-iron hybrid”)

20 Feb
Laundry: 'Blacktongue'

Laundry: ‘Blacktongue’

Pity the aging hardcore punk purists. They’ll talk about the punk wars they fought in order to kill off prog rock, but they forgot that little pockets on each side of a war have a tendency to learn each others’ languages and swap cigarettes during lulls in the battle. Or that invaders tend to crossbreed with the invaded. In Britain at the beginning of the ’80s, the likes of Magazine and Cardiacs drew prog rock ambition back into punk energy. Over in the States in the ’90s, the second coming of punk was spearheaded by Kurt Cobain – a Robert Fripp fan. You can shout and proclaim your Year Zeroes all you like, but you can’t kill knowledge or the desire to grow.

Hence, in the here and now, the appearance of bands such as Laundry. Like the lunatic punk/prog/funk/freak metal band Primus (with whom they share their astonishing drummer Herb Alexander), they hail from the fertile Bay Area scene in northern California and have roots in art punk bands Grotus and Sordid Humor. But they’ll just as readily admit to drawing from European prog and art rock such as Can and King Crimson as from the usual suspects; the terrifying electro negativism of the likes of Nine Inch Nails, plus strange post-punk/psych experimentalists like Butthole Surfers. Laundry’s deep black, forbidding music (using similar instrumentation to the later, stripped down versions of King Crimson) plants itself in that dark and hellish area in which “alternative” and “prog” seem must suited to meet and surprise each other.

Musically at least, it’s an unselfconscious blend – a scuffed, brooding black-iron hybrid of ‘Discipline’ rock gamelan, gruff Nomeansno hardcore force, and Pearl Jam histrionics. The latter comes courtesy of former Sordid Humor drummer Toby Hawkins’ snarling Vedder esque baritone, while guitarist Tom Butler chops out minimal metal riffs or a Fripp-like mixture of metallic rending noises and compellingly ugly solos. The real strength, though, is in the rhythm section: Herb swaggering around his drums like a funkier, fluider Bill Bruford and the remarkable Ian Varriale playing phenomenally dirty, polyphonically funky basslines on the Chapman Stick (which has so long been considered an instrument for jazz technicians and art rock eggheads that it’s a revelation to hear it sounding as raw as it does here).

Despite the strong musicality of the players, this is far from an airy prog trip. This Laundry seems to be where the darkest, dirtiest stains on the soul are scoured out, or are wrung out by the mangle. The oppressed, threatening, dissatisfied feel of grunge, which forced a seething dysfunctional contemporary rage into the mainstream, still casts a long shadow over contemporary American rock; and Laundry are very much part of that.

And how. Toby Hawkins (although he seems to have escaped Trent Reznor’s pathological need to actively shock or destroy the sensibilities of his audience) is consumed by the sort of fuck-up negativity that even the most confrontational of hardcore bellowers or the darkest of grungers would find difficult to relate to. Recurrent images of disgust, physical and mental sickness pervade ‘Blacktongue’: Alice in Chains were a barrel of laughs by comparison. The harsh, paranoid sexual fable of the title track and the grinding depression/sedation rant of ‘Misery Alarm’ are just two examples: the fantastical psychosis of ‘Monarch Man’ (prefaced by colossal distorted cat purring) lays colourful musings of twisted beauty over a tortuously funked up Crimson-ic march, while the angel messenger in ‘Skin’ brings only word of freezing, disease, and sexual loathing.

Not light-hearted stuff by any means, and the unremitting bleakness of the album does tell against it. While the music draws on fury and darkness to swell its compulsive strength, the lyrical content – reading like notes from an agonised, hopeless therapy session – displays an unrelenting despair, misery and withdrawal from human life, without the leavening of humour and compassion that make such thoughts palatable. Consequently, many a ferocious burst of taut musical excitement is dragged down by the millstone of Hawkins’ suicidal roar.

There are some moments of relief, however. If you’re into the pattern side of Laundry’s music, there’s the disconnected Stick geometries of ‘Monkey’s Wrench’. If you’re looking for redemption in song, there’s ‘Canvas’, in which Hawkins (backed by Butler’s lilting arpeggios) breaks out of his doomy caterwauling to discover the possibilities of art therapy and achieve a measure of peace. “Try to make sense of your shadow, paint a picture of the way it should be, colours arranged carefully…/ Inside the frame on the wall, paint your heart under a waterfall / paint your world the way it should be, so you can understand what you see.”

Generally, though, Laundry are more interested in dysfunction than healing. And despite Hawkins’ self-flagellating attempts to build significance out of the topic, it takes the wit of a guest to really get things moving. “I can’t stand it for anyone to be more awkward, self hateful, stupid, or inappropriate than I am” crackles the sardonic, telephone relayed voice of Bay Area artist Don Bajema on ’19’. Over a marvellous brooding thudding riff (a slower, darker ‘Thela Hun Ginjeet’), Bajema unwinds his cynical but concerned ideas: deliberate awkwardness, withdrawal and self humiliation may be his only logical response to and defence against a sick and ridiculous world, but it’s simultaneously an unwanted mask against those he truly loves, “the last people I would want to see me like this…” A disturbing confession, but one that rings so true that it’s easily the moment that makes the album.

Will Laundry clean up? Dubious – even deep-dyed grungers will have trouble with their uncompromising grimness and suspicion of anything approaching a tune; and Toby Hawkins’s obsession with depression and psychosis comes across all too often as self-indulgent droning and ranting, without the redemptive melodies of Nirvana or Pearl Jam. What draws the band out of this trough of misery is their brutal power, their brooding energy and the masterly rhythmatism of Varriale and Herb: the powerful spine of the music which tugs them towards the darker, unforgiving end of progressive rock, towards Hammill-esque heart-crushing and 21st century schizophrenia. Flawed and muddied by defeatism it might be, but ‘Blacktongue’ is still a potent (if still no more than potential) statement from a band in waiting.

Laundry: ‘Blacktongue’
Mammoth Records/Prawn Song Records, MR0098 2 (35498009822)
CD-only album
Released: 20th February 1995
Get it from: (2020 update) Best obtained second-hand.
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October 1994 – mini-album reviews – King Crimson’s ‘VROOOM’ (“like a gigantic work-worn machine developing a telling fault”)

31 Oct

King Crimson: 'VROOOM'

King Crimson: ‘VROOOM’

The first new music from King Crimson in a whole decade rolls in with a yawn… or the sound of a hitman’s car tyres slithering quietly past your house. I don’t know. Whatever it is, it’s subliminal – a dark, stretching, barely audible ambient sound. Reverbed and resting right on the edge of the listener’s attention, it’s something which creeps in and cases the joint, maybe clears it of distractions. The last set of King Crimson albums, back in the ’80s, went straight in with clean, pealing, bell-like guitar patterns. Perhaps there’s a big clue to current Crimsonizing in that this one doesn’t.

Although the band’s known for its high turnover of disparate personnel and fresh starts, ‘VROOOM’ unexpectedly reunites that stable-against-the-odds 1980s Crimson lineup (Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, Tony Levin and Bill Bruford) but augments them with two new members: Trey Gunn (a graduate of Fripp’s Guitar Craft course, doubling Levin’s 10-string Chapman Stick) and Pat Mastelotto (a jobbing, dextrous rock drummer best known for being part of American AOR act Mr Mister). Historically, when Crimson’s added members it’s been for as much for specific sonorities as much as personal approach. Perhaps a jazz or military saxophonist to break up a beat group, or a violinist to bring in classical textures. Maybe a Stick player to replace, fan out and reshape the bass chair; maybe, to upset the whole applecart and reboot the other players’ brains, an avant-garde improv percussionist with a thousand-yard stare and a junkyard armoury, or a master of cartoonish sound-effect guitar. Conversely, this is the first time Fripp’s apparently hired people mostly to thicken out the existing sound. This might be another clue.

What emerges – after that scouting roll – does and doesn’t sound like King Crimson. The New York brightnesses of the ’80s lineup (those circular Steve Reich and Talking Heads echoes which so thoroughly rebooted Crimson’s former Anglo-prog approach) have been banished. The title track is a descending, angry staircase of screech – simultaneously in synch and slightly ragged, like a gigantic work-worn machine developing a telling fault. If there’s a template for it, it’s the sound and structure of key ’70s Crimson track Red (the frowning, minimalist/totalitarian march which announced that Fripp had honed his once-florid instincts to a fine metallic economy).

The difference is that the big bare bones of this follow-up are fletched with additional details; disruptive flams and spurs, heavy digital processing resulting in analogue splurge, gears splintering but carrying on. A second huge instrumental track – THRaK – lurches forward in angry displacements, a blind giant hammering at a wall. In both tracks there are breathers which aren’t breathers – sighing passages where instruments fall back and Fripp’s misty ambient drones come in; or where a clambering bittersweet arpeggio makes a bed for a solo passage of wracked and pearly beauty before the hammers come down again. Throughout, there’s the sense of highly-stressed engineering precision just one slip away from disastrously throwing a rod, or a kind of hellish chamber music electrified to breaking point.

The band’s nervously sunny human face during the ’80s, Adrian Belew has been sucked backwards into this bigger, blurrier ensemble (predominantly providing a battery of guitar shrieks, leftfield lunges and rubbery solo lines). He still sings; is still the go-to song guy; but it’s clear that the songs have been almost entirely subverted by the new approach. On Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream, King Crimson rattles through a bluesy lurch; Adrian sounding like an animatronic waiter covering John Lee Hooker, delivering sub-Dada wordplay in murmur-to-scream builds before the band explodes into barely contained passages of full-on percussive chaos.

A little of the ’80s Crimson is allowed into Cage, with Fripp’s cackling speed-arpeggios making it a close cousin to ‘Discipline’s breakneck Thela Hun Ginjeet. Like Thela, it’s a neurotic street cry, but what was once simply threatening has now turned actively murderous as Belew’s prissy paranoia is taken up to international level (“walking down the street, do you stare at your feet / and never do you let your eyes meet the freaks, / the deadbeat addicts, social fanatics, / they’re a dime a dozen and they carry guns. / Halloween every other day of the week… Holy smoke! somebody blew up the Pope!”) while didgeridoos yelp and Fripp provides a barrage of his most jarring, churning guitar disruptions.


 
A third instrumental – When I Say Stop, Continue – mingles both King Crimson’s old knack for doomy improvised sound-pictures and the band’s puckishly dry sense of humour. Over an ambient creeping horror of a Fripp Soundscape, the band knock, shrill, drill and build up a swelling industrial noiseuntil Belew yells “Ok, come to a dead stop. One, two, three, four!…” only for the band to wilfully drift on without him, trailing ghostly shrouds of presence, until the drummers slam and nail the doors shut.


 
Only with One Time do both King Crimson and Belew emerge from this deliberately uneasy fug. Here, the sextet drop delicately into perfect synch and sweet restraint, a softly-mutated post-bossa pulse and Levin’s springy bassline coaxing along Belew’s lapping reverse-rhythm guitar and gentle vocal melancholia. It’s a reminder that King Crimson also have a knack for the beautiful offbeat ballad alongside the harsh upheaval. This is no exception, grasping wistfully and tenderly after a fleeting sense of centredness, throwing what’s come before into a more human-scaled relief.

King Crimson: ‘VROOOM’
Discipline Global Mobile, DGM 0004 (5 028676 900016)
CD-only mini-album
Released: 31st October 1994
Get it from: (2020 update) some original copies still available from Burning Shed – also reissued, along with the material from its companion volume ‘The VROOOM Sessions’, as part of 2015’s 16-disc ‘THRAK BOX (King Crimson Live and Studio Recordings 1994-1997)’, also available from Burning Shed
King Crimson online:
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May 1994 – live reviews – Django Bates’ Delightful Precipice at London Jazz Festival @ The Bloomsbury Theatre, Bloomsbury, London, 17th May 1994 (“behind the whimsy lies the mind of a genius, or a sadist. Probably both.”)

19 May

Time to open your eyes a little wider, ‘cos something strange is stirring in the home counties…

Those of you familiar with Bill Bruford’s Earthworks will be aware of the contribution made by one Django Bates on keyboards, tenor horn and compositional skills. If you’ve done your homework, you’ll also know that he and Earthworks’ brilliant saxophonist Iain Ballamy originally worked together in the anarchic and thoroughly enjoyable Loose Tubes, a jazz big band who sounded like a joyous drunken party in a brass instrument factory.

If you’re really keeping up with Bates’ freewheeling progress, you might also know that he has his own big band in the form of the seventeen-piece Delightful Precipice, featuring Ballamy and several other Loose Tubes-ers such as flautist Eddie Parker, clarinettist Dai Pritchard, saxophonists Julian Arguelles and Steve Buckley… well, a large chunk of the current British jazz scene, when it comes down to it. Certainly half of the musical population of London, clutching various brass and woodwind implements, seems to have ambled amiably onstage along with the flamboyant Bates. While this lot might not have the profiles of the Courtney Pines of this world, they’re probably doing more to extend the boundaries of innovative music. With Earthworks, Bates breaks new ground and moves the landscape around; with Delightful Precipice, he teeters teasingly on a thrilling new brink (as suggested by the title of tonight’s opener, ‘Tightrope’).

It’s certainly brinksmanship of a high order. From the first notes, I’m transfixed by the music Bates and co. are producing: all of you who speak knowledgeably of the complexities of prog bands should lend an ear to Delightful Precipice, and get an earful of Django Bates’ muse. It’s a rich, densely textured experience; this is music so complex and ferociously intelligent that I feel as if it’s forcing entry to my skull. Pressed back in my seat as the music powers on, rushing through my mind like irresistible floodwaters, I’m firstly overwhelmed by the sheer substance of it. Later, as it shows no sign of letting up, I feel my reluctant slow little brain being gently forced into activity; it’s like slowly being woken up, given a massage and a pep talk. This is music so cerebral that it even brings your mind up to speed.

‘Tightrope’ opens the show in slamming clusters of notes like being punched to death by brass, before the band gently finger-snap their way into ‘Armchair March’, a melancholy Bates-y stomp with long peals of English brass band sound (a Loose Tubes trademark). The following ‘Fox Across the Road’ is a menacing, darkly harmonic undulation, sliced up by samples of screeching car brakes, speech, beeps and horn toots, and savaged by Mike Mondesir’s slap-bass breaks.

Bates cuts an eccentric figure onstage – curly-headed, immaculately stylish and handsome, spinning around behind his keyboard or pulling out a hunting horn for a quick blast. His ironic smile, plus the reams of music manuscript spilling over the keyboard and the musing, other-worldly humour of his between-song comments give him the air of some elegantly mad professor, a Lewis Carroll of the jazz scene. He dedicates the handclappy lunacy of ‘Ice is Slippery’ to his sporting heroine, Tonya Harding. ‘The Loneliness of Being Right’ features a lengthy chunk of free-association gibberish (“Bud Freeman Hardy Willis… do not forsake me, oh my Darjeeling tea…”)

But don’t be fooled. Behind the whimsy lies the mind of a genius, or a sadist. Probably both. His music manages to balance both an astounding inventiveness and enough humour to keep us listening to it. There is the considerable problem that a poor sound mix renders his keyboard all but inaudible, but the guy still seems to be everywhere – dancing and conducting his ferociously complicated arrangements, playing behind his back, waltzing through ‘Queen of Puddings’, generally having a good time.

The second half of the show is more accessible than the dense and demanding first, opening with Eddie Parker’s breezy big-band rush ‘Exeter – King of Cities’, a carefree musical evocation of the Devon summer. We also get ‘Glad Afrika’, a revamp of Bates’ Loose Tubes standard ‘Sad Afrika’ translated into “happy stylee” in celebration of the end of apartheid. It’s a glorious burst of happy-sad brass, a cartwheeling piece rolling through chorale to cacophony and ending up in a great soft resolution.

Almost impossible to top; but Bates manages it when he straps on his tenor horn and walks out from behind his keyboard to deliver a reading of Earthworks’ ‘Candles Still Flicker in Romania’s Dark’ which reduces the original to a pale, ineffectual shadow. His horn playing is phenomenal, sputtering and spiralling, clutching at heaven and breaking hearts, devastatingly sad and angry. The band – as previously noted, a sterling group of musicians and no mere wallpaper backing – also excel themselves in their sudden subtlety on the wispy pulses of the chordal background.

For closers we get the hyper-percussive artillery of ‘Martin France at Seven-and-Three-Quarters’ (with the aforementioned drummer going to town on his rig electronics) and the wry musing on disappointment, ‘You Can’t Have Everything’, in which Bates and his horn break up the glumness by invading the audience. Plus, as an encore, there’s another of Bates’ grabs at incorporating different musical forms into his art – this time, it’s the noble English football chant, fused alongside some heavy rock wallop into the raucous ‘Discovering Metal’. I’m treating to the spectacle of the arty Bloomsbury audience gleefully yelling along to “woah-oh, oh oh oh!” like a bunch of benevolent hooligans.

Bates comments, as he shuffles the music for ‘You Can’t Have Everything’, that the fate of the modern British jazzer is to be famous for two weeks and then to be dropped by the record company. “Only joking,” he goes on. “The fact is that there is a British jazz scene, as long as we all make it happen.” Well, Delightful Precipice can provide us with a whole evening’s worth of reasons why we should.; and I’d urge you to become familiar with their arguments. Wit, technique, complexity and another jump forward in the universe of jazz. To think that this is happening in England!

Django Bates online:
Homepage, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Bandcamp, Last.fm, Apple Music, YouTube, Vimeo, Deezer, Spotify, Tidal, Amazon Music

The Bloomsbury Theatre online:
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August 1993 – live reviews – Martin Taylor @ Ferens Live Art Space, Kingston-upon-Hull, England, 5th August (“like hearing crystallised music”)

8 Aug

It’s nice, for a change, not to have to do anything except sit back and listen.

Listening to Martin Taylor is like a breath of fresh air after a particularly sticky storm. He stands alone on a little white block of a stage with only his guitar and gently tapping foot, and gently unravels a long flowing river of melody to soothe the heart and to excite the brain. Pure and simple music. After a surfeit of analysis, a slew of post-modern criticism, a stew of eclecticism and image, it’s nice to get back to that once in a while.

Listening to Martin Taylor allows you to rediscover a love of the old tunes. He’s not a composer; his strength lies in the re-interpretation of classic standards, but rather than murdering them by pouring on strings and pallid flutes to make them ripe for serving up in the air conditioning, he offers you the chance to hear him dust down an oldie, hold it up to the light and then skilfully polish it, smiling as he shows it to you again and points out a hundred little details which you never saw before, a source of fresh wonder.

Because listening to Martin Taylor is like hearing crystallised music. You can distinguish the original tune somewhere in the glittering web of notes which his fingers are drawing out of the guitar – maybe it’s a ballad from ‘West Side Story’, maybe Duke Ellington’s Just Squeeze Me or a Hoagy Carmichael piece – but it’s been reflected and amplified through so many harmonies, echoes and byways along the way that what finally emerges bears as much resemblance to the original as a cut diamond does to glass. Old tunes turned corny and worn down by their own familiarity re-emerge as multi-faceted gems, cut and refined by a master’s technique, multi-layered and ornate.

If you stop listening to Martin Taylor for a moment, you might be able to hear the sharp clicks as the jaws of the guitarists in the audience drop smartly onto the floor. This crystalline music – richly syncopated melody and harmony played together, simultaneously with swooping basslines – is, after all, being played by one man without even the whiff of an effects pedal. During the interval, people are overheard wondering if there are four other guitarists concealed under the stage or behind the curtains. But there’s no denying that this music is being played by a human being; no pristine technician, Taylor’s impeccable skill is shaped as much by punchy string snaps and fretboard noise as it is by his carefully considered polyphony and his vertical, dense approach to arrangement. He’s as likely to use a violent slide up the bass strings as he is to tease out a gentle classic jazz chord in the treble; and, as the most exciting musicians do, he lets you hear him stretching towards his objective rather than simply delivering it ready-packed and icily perfect.

Listening to Martin Taylor when he stops playing and talks for a while is, in its way, no less of a joyful experience. Here we have one of the world’s greatest and most underrated jazz guitarists and he turns out to be a warm, humble and self-effacing guy with a nice line in gentle humour and a shy manner, as if tonight was his first gig. Taylor is possibly also one of the world’s first motherable jazzmen. No guitar god here: even when he speaks of his sessions with the legendary likes of Joe Pass and Chet Atkins, he makes it sound like a comfy jam session after an evening at the pub. Very British. I’m not sure if these isles can produce a legend of their own these days – we’re just no good at mystical PR…

No matter. Who needs a legend or the cartoon padding of a star, anyway? Taylor’s music is possessed of enough to soothe, stun, stimulate, delight and relax without recourse to tortured artistry, space-cadet communion or outlaw chic. And if he prefers to continue playing gorgeously low-key and intimate gigs, just one man and a warm-toned guitar, then I for one will continue to turn up to listen to Martin Taylor.

Because listening to Martin Taylor makes you remember just how wonderful listening can be.

Martin Taylor online:
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