If you think you would like to post a review, please feel free to send it to me and I'll post it here.
Included this time:
Jim O'Rourke
The Remington MS3 2000
Emperor
Rechenzentrum
Mutamassik
Ultra-Red/ Anna Planeta
Foreigner
Jim O'Rourke
I'm happy and I'm singing and a 1,2,3,4...
Mego
I had heard a lot of bad things about this, but was happy to brush all them handily aside after listening to this little gem. There are 3 tracks here, and most rework traditional instruments (with what I would assume to be complex MSP patches). The first two are fairly peppy arrangements of guitars, horns and woodwinds, with everything being processed pretty heavily, in vague but dense layers. The last track is more drone based, and to be honest drags a bit.
The thing with this style of new composition is to try to get dynamic music that sweeps and changes and has form, both tonally and structurally. Fennesz made probably the best recent album ("Endless Summer") of this sort last summer, and this seems to be the first process album that lives up to that record's hype. Hopefully he won't just start pumping this sort of stuff out.
It's nice to savor stuff like this...
The Remington MS3 2000
Cordless washable razor
My Daddy raised me to be a pussy boy that uses electric razors. I'm not proud of the fact, but I am honest. Previously I had used various Braun razors thinking that the German's really had made a superior razor. WRONG! This Christmas present kicks it! It shaves close, fast and holds a charge like nobody's business!
Emperor
"Prometheus: Disepline of fire and demise"
(candlelight usa)
So I'm sure you're all familiar with Emperor. This is their latest album, hard to get stateside. For those of you not "in the know" as the street kids say these days, Emperor are sort of the epitome of Norwegian Black Metal. While some might think this scene to be more than a bit lunk-headed (what with the murders and church burnings and all) The music has been pretty great.Then there's Emperor.
This album is easily one of the best composed, most fascinating, most astonishingly devastating while surprising beautiful albums I've heard in a long time. They incorporate all the elements we expect in metal but arrange them in such a surprising way, in ways not that dissimilar to the best prog rock. Chock-full of bull-shit classical, garnished with some subtle electronics and loaded with every sort of ripping metal guitars and vocals imaginable. Oh, then there's the brutal drum work. A must listen!!! Last track particularly impressive.
Rechenzentrum
heimkehr
shitkatapult / kompakt
Cleverly disguised under the re-printed skin of a moldering old record, battered edges scanned and reprinted, Rechenzentrum give us some of the most unusual sounds ever to be culled from a computer. Both sides of the album start with a chaotic range of fuzzy, processed tiny thumping swirls in semi-repeating order. One might say that these sounds are glitchy, but something makes me think more of Victrolas and Edison Cylinder players. Rechenzentrum make sounds that might throwback to the mechanical-age, but are still too untraceable, too disembodied. On the B-side, these rubbing, throbbing sounds are joined by the sounds of large crowds, but only for punctuation. It's funny, because listening to this record (and really anything that truly defies genre) I thought of so many words to describe what Rechenzentrum do, but they all seemed so useless. In fact, the only thing traceable to any genre is the use of bass kicks, but more often than not, they aren't 4/4's but more like heartbeats.
To completely beguile us, Rechenzentrum ends each side with huge drone based pieces. These stand in stark contrast to the more minimal and low-end style of the previous works and leave the listener thinking uneasily about My Bloody Valentine. If you can find it, this one's a must.
Mutamassik
War Booty
Soot#4
Who would have thought that DJ Rupture's kick-ass mix CD, "Gold Teeth Thief", would have taken over the world and set up shop as reigning DJ master? I mean it was only done with 2 turntables, but there he is, wind blowing through his hair, high on top kick-ass mountain. Maybe one reason he rules is because of his own music that's sprinkled throughout. Well he's back with "Mutammassik".
It's a combination African rhyddims and dark breaks- simple fare if your attuned to the DJ Rupture sound. But take a second listen. Is that "Off the Wall" sampled in the back on "War Booty"? What's up with the tribal field-recordings on "BABOMB". How about the plaintive piano nestled within the chaotic aggro beats of "Show 2 Show"? There's tons going on here and Rupture's pushing the limits- mostly his own.
It seems that the earthy sounds of "primitive Africa" are the last place that we'd find such interesting experimentation between source/sample, digital/analogue/non-electric, as well as the next frontier for breakcore battle breaks. But primarily Mutamassik adds needed life to the dynamic of hardcore production. Their incorporation of odd sounding time signatures, third-world harmonies to the usual amen breaks suggests the next generation of aggressive beats.
Maybe this record will allow Rupture to ascend to the realm of myth and leave us mere mortals behind?
Ultra-Red/ Anna Planeta
Artist Split 27/28
Fat Cat
This time out Fat Cat takes 2 artists that deal with field recording in wildly different approaches and continue to lead us into new territory.
Anna Planeta makes real-time improvisations inside large spaces. They pretty much press play and go to it in large reverberated halls, which had led me- previous to listening- to believe that they had just been bored. But when you listen to the recordings they come across as abstract jazz compositions, as large shifting drones that intersect and bounce back slightly different than echoes uttered. There's only two tracks, the best of which is "Good Morning Glitter-Disk", which clocks in at a healthy 14:08. It's heavy atmosphere, clanging metal, plunked guitar and sliding drones get inside your body, making you wish the piece lasted 14 hours instead of minutes.
But it's the politically minded Ultra-Red that steals this disk. They: "composed (this music) exclusively from site recordings made during street protests against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, Washington DC, April 16 and 17, 2000." While I had expected this to be full of disposable activist rhetoric, I was more than surprised to find: house music!
Though obviously not your usual "dance with me baby" type house, it nevertheless is conventional 4 on the floor with little claps with polite little bass hits. But that's just a foundation for the MAX/MSP manipulation and sequencing of myriad snippets of chanting, comments, and the intermittent hum of police and media helicopters. But Ultra-Red do try to push themselves further than just dance music, and they succeed when they highlight the active processes of the protesters. Choruses of "Hold that Line!" echo through the crowd, communications are spread by word of mouth-pass-it-on. "There is a Suggestion..." bounces from voice to voice disseminating information so that the mob-mentality has a brain and a voice unified in diversity.
While it would be hard to say that you get the experience of being there- or even a sense of what the protesting is all about, it is clear that Ultra-Red are considering their music and what it means to be creative and productive in a world were social injustice seems to get worse rather than better. They're looking to find a new music in places where one would never think to find it- let alone shake that rump.
Foreigner
"4"
Atlantic Records (1981)
If one were looking for rocking lixxs, brilliant fist punching rock and fucking roll, one would have to look no farther than the early eighties band Foreigner. While "4" was a mega-smash back in the day, today it's found throughout thrift store America with dog-eared covers and ballpoint signatures of ownership no longer valid.
But why discuss Foreigner now?
Because in the context of contemporary electronic music with all its excesses in conceptualism, in minimalism, in blatant copycat phenomena, in every genre coveting break and synth pattern it swipes, there is a kernel of synth rock. A shadow ten times removed from the original, the elements we found so exciting when we were kids can be heard in the keyboard solos, the noisy intros and outros, the drum-pad breaks.
For some it was straight up Run DMC, but for most of this milk-fed nation it was he overproduced rock of Foreigner, Def Leppard, and ZZ Top that earned our hard-earned allowance money. These groups and more held their rock cards close to their hearts while producers like John "Mutt" Lang and Mick Jones - who both share production credits on this gem- infused the straight ahead rock/pop of their proteges with fancy (ie: gay) synths and beats from hip-hip, new wave, and electro. Go ahead, listen to a ZZ Top album (such as Afterburner) and be amazed at the wealth of synths and drum machines found therein.
But this is about Foreigner, so let's get to it. These guys were awesome! While I was only passively interested in them at the time, listening fresh to "4" makes me wish I had been aware of the nuances of the music then.
First off, Foreigner has an incredible talent for composing memorable pop/rock riffs that linger in the mind second only by the memorability of Lou Gramm's gravel-smooth voice and soulful crooning (such as the impossible-not-to-sing-all-day "Waiting For A Girl Like You"). As we all know, the resultant combination in songs like "I'm Gonna Win", "Urgent" and the fucking unreal "Juke Box Hero" make your head want to explode off your shoulders.
But it's this last song, "Juke Box Hero", that has always held my attention closest. The song builds from a dark synth riff and builds through the lower drums, then the bass, then the guitars, while Gramm holds his own with the lyrics which gain strength, gain momentum and power as the lyrics build to the stardom and phallic intensity that the character aspires to. The ripping guitars jump out windmilling their way to stardom, making every would be dreamer and fuck-up in this one-horse town want to be on stage with fucking KISS, blowing shit up with Ace Freeley and fucking ten groupies at a time in wild rock and roll orgies that live on in Homeric verse and lyric. But then the dream clears, it's the bridge. The synths are back. The dream builds whenever the rock and roll dreamer gets lost in the stars in his eyes' and is at full tilt when Mick Jones' guitar solo makes you spasmodically temble at the power if his 6-string will, demanding you to pump your fist in a fantasy of rockin' solidarity. But the dream always fades back to that dark synth line showing the reality of your shitty little Guitar Center life. But the dream is always the dream of that "One guitar" and the resonance of freedom.
There's power here to be reexamined. It's time more contemporary musicians got "stars in their eyes"...
