Justified & Enceinte

Two posts in one day.  But the reviews were written weeks apart.  So not that noteworthy.  Tum ti tum.

MOTHDROP/ GRAVID/ CHALK HORSES/ FIRE HEALER – Gravid, The Jericho, 25/9/21

Tonight’s gig is billed as “an evening of live psych”, but if psych to you this means tie-dye kaftans and songs about pixie hootenannies you’re liable to be going home to your toadstool glade unhappy.  Some define psychedelia as music that takes you to another place – although we might counter that this is what all music does, if it’s any cop.

Where Fire Healer take us is the turn of the 90s, probably watching the opener for Front 242 in their techno-friendly days, with some spacious grooves built on the sort of digidub basslines Youth might have had a Rizla-sticky hand in.  Although each track starts from a similar point, they extend their tendrils into different styles, from rink-dink spy theme organ, to a deformed cousin of “Misirlou” on a distorted mandolin, to a guttering torch song vocal.  It’s easy for this sort of live looping improvisation to be indulgent twaddle, but Fire Healer delivers a warmly charming set.

Chalk Horses are a more refined proposition, consisting of cello, bass, guitar and lush harmonised vocals over electronic backing tracks.  They lightly nod towards the post-club folktronica of Ultramarine, but their elegant chamber-pop sounds more like Waterson:Carthy as produced by White Town.  The first couple of numbers don’t always gel – which might be more to do with backing levels than performance – but they soon find a hypnotic space (or maybe they were always there, and we had to find our way in).  The limpid vocal are quite lovely, but the understated star is the guitar, and our notebook contains references as various as Fripp, Renbourn and highlife maestro Ebo Taylor.

Gig organisors Gravid are the most obviously psychedelic act on tonight, and yet the most straightforward.  Their chugging rock jalopy comes right at us down the centre lane, foglamps blinding and thick smoke belching behind (which might not all be from the exhaust).  It’s basically Hawkwind, but without the wind, and impossible to dislike.  On the downside, the keyboard-player is shockingly underused, and an attempt to slow things down becomes a Slack Sabbath jumble, but they end with an excellently taut Joy Division bulletin (of course, Joy Division were always a psych band, they just took us to Interzone, not the warlock’s pantry).

Techno artist Mothdrop has been DJing all night, but we’re treated to a brief live set in the crowd as the kit onstage is dismantled (neat logistics!).  There’s a crisp post-Detroit efficiency to the rhythms which reminds us of B12, but they build and mutate with lovely sound design, and some ultra-reverbed vocal howls stop the ambience getting too cosy.  As promised, this gig took us many places, but it finally takes us to a chair via the bar, just to get our breath back.

Genesis Exodus

Here's my second review for musicOMH.  I bloody love this record, and advise you to get it if you enjoy semi-abstract sonic collage...or even if you don't.  It was especially pleasing because I thought the album would be basically fine, based on the older Calix records I've heard.  You can read it in the wild here, https://www.musicomh.com/reviews/albums/mira-calix-absent-origin.

MIRA CALIX – ABSENT ORIGIN (Warp)

The story goes that in 1959 Brion Gysin declared literature to be “fifty years behind art”, before demonstrating the cut-up technique to an attentive William Burroughs.  But, if Gysin’s statement was true, music was only very slightly ahead in the race, and the technology allowing musique  concrète tape splicing was still shiny and fresh when Gysin was wielding his scalpel.  Fast forward a mere decade, though, and multitrack studio methodology meant that almost every recording was effectively a montage, and in our digital world it’s almost impossible to envision a music-making that doesn’t consist of placing discrete elements together.  For this new album, Mira Calix has studied fine art collagists to create a record from samples and fragments of previous projects that reinvigorates the concept of the audio collage in the age of drag-and-drop assemblage, and which is arguably their best work to date. 

Calix came to prominence when Warptonica was becoming a recognised series of gestures, a defined genre to be emulated, and revisiting their debut, 2000’s One To One, we find a series of IDM workouts which are adept and enjoyable, but hardly shocking: anyone with an I-Spy Book of Late 90s Electronica will be able to tick off Plaid tinkles, Autechre awkwardness and dark Aphex brooding before a few tracks have passed.  Absent Origin, on the other hand, is as idiosyncratic as it is immersive.  

Opener A Mark Of Resistance starts with tiny slaps and claps, moments of skin-on-skin contact that gradually increase in frequency like building rain heard inside a tent, before spoken or chanted samples are weaved over the top, in a manner that recalls the finger clicks and found fragments of Elizabeth Price’s Turner-winning video The Woolworth’s Choir Of 1979.  This sets the blueprint for the construction of the rest of the album – if techno can be thought of as having a grid structure, most of Absent Origin may be envisaged as a swarm.  It also introduces a concern with feminism - or at least strong female voices - expressed through the delightful contrast of the snippets “Her wounds came from the same source as her power”, “Free our sisters, free ourselves” and “Cross my path, your ass’ll get whipped!”

Although the album is best experienced as a single hour-long event, an aural pool in which to become submerged, there are myriad highlights.  Silence Is Silve introduces some delicately pretty piano amongst the found sounds, which is reminiscent of Anne Dudley’s work in The Art Of Noise, and also boasts scissor samples so gloriously crisp you worry your headphone lead might get cut (it’s tempting to think of these snips as Calix collecting her source material, and the duct tape unpeeling sounds on Fractions Fractured Factions showing how they got stuck together).  Bower Of Bliss pushes porn groans and a whirring mecha-snore into a blizzard of strings in a manner that is far from blissful, and is immediately balanced by Wooddrifts’ bucolic flute and archival description of an isolated creative hideaway.  A stately piece like An Infinite Thrum (Archipelago), which adds syllabic fragments and birdsong to strings in a way that recall 90s Balanescu Quartet is contrasted with  Transport Me, which seems to adapt Charles Ives’s compositional conceit of being equidistant between two marching bands, except that this time we’re hemmed in by five radio receivers, a New Orleans funeral march, a colliery silver band, an electro workout, and a beautifully fruity voice reading poetry (which might just be Edith Sitwell).  Oh, and someone recites some lyrics from Toni Basil’s 1982 hit Hey Mickey, just in case that melange sounds too predictable.

The only moments where this album falters are some instances where slightly more regimented rhythms are introduced, such as on There Is Always A Girl With A Secret and the wonderfully titled Like Jenga (Only It reaches All The Way To The Sky And It’s Made Of Knives): programmed or looped drums are so much a part of the lingua franca of contemporary popular music that it jars slightly when they are paired with more abstract material.  This is a minor criticism though, and by the time the melancholic Schoenberg soprano has drifted into the ether at the end of The Abandoned Colony Collapsed My World, you’ll be ready for a repeat listen – although you’ll hear so many different elements the second time round, you’ll wonder whether the album isn’t secretly mutating whilst your back’s turned.

Super Fly!

Here we go, this is my first review for a new editor.  I am now writing for musicOMH.  I can tell you that it's a good site, full of high quality writing and a broad spectrum of music (they have a classical reviewer, which I love); I can tell you that you know it's good because my Nutshaft chum Sam Shepherd has written there for years, and he's the one who proposed me as a new contributor; I can't tell you what OHM stands for, it seems to be a secret; I can tell you I always type OHM by mistake, given that this is a magazine I wrote for about 15 years ago.

You can read the review in it's original form at https://www.musicomh.com/reviews/albums/herbert-musca..and you probably should, I dare say it will help with advertising revenue or something.

HERBERT – MUSCA (Accidental Records)

Bad workmen blame their tools, but bad musicians celebrate theirs.  The longer someone tells you about the custom strings and hand-burnished finish on their guitar, or about how their modular synth set-up is 100% Soviet era technology from the Latvian state broadcaster, the less interesting their music tends to be.  A similar breed exists within field-sampling obsessives, who will proudly tell you how their entire sonic palette is sourced from a single turnip, before proceeding to play the most uninteresting chunks of generic techno.  The major exceptions to this rule have always been Matmos and Herbert, both of whom tend to apply rigid sound-sourcing strictures to their projects, but who deliver music that’s varied, thoughtful and – most importantly – actually good.

But whilst Matmos make twitchy, glitchy artcore, Herbert’s music has always had a warm melodic heart and at least one foot on the dancefloor, even when the sonic sources are making a high-concept political point (check the critique of industrialised food production on 2005’s Plat Du Jour).  Musca is the latest album in Herbert’s “domestic house” style – musca domestica is the scientific name for the common house fly, entomology fans – and utilises samples from the farm on which he lives, alongside real instruments and a raft of vocalists.  Of course, thousands of artists will have spent the last 18 months writing music about being stuck at home, but very few will have realised said music by banging bits of their actual house.  In doing so, Herbert may have produced the quintessential lockdown project

If this preamble brings visions of wonky lofi collages, however, the truth is that Musca is an album packed with wide-angled production, crisp sounds and clear, limpid vocal lines.  The truly impressive trick here is not that Herbert has managed to make a record from sounds including pigs snoring and foxes growling, but how quickly you forget all about it; the opening minute of slow gravel-crunching footsteps and distant birdsong is false advertising, and is soon replaced by a pulsating piece of ritualistic house with a sinisterly smouldering Massive Attack vocal, on Two Doors.  For this is an album, not of austere isolationist soundscapes or dreamy escapism, but well crafted songs, with a roster of strong, expressive singers (none of whom Herbert met before or during production, fascinatingly).  Highlights include Chain Reaction, which drapes an intermittent, sultry bass and rich, intimate vocals over a naggingly repeated little boing sound, which is probably what Clippy the paperclip sounded like in a fit of pique, and The Impossible, a tap-drip dub with snaky hollow percussion, sounding like an existentially troubled cousin of Björk’s Human Behaviour, that ends by slowly backing into an endless corridor of reverb (or maybe just the bathroom). 

Many of the tracks sound like putative club choons that were artfully kept from growing to full maturity, and at their best these bonsai bangers marry space and delicacy with vocals that are soulful but breathily intimate.  When Mel Uye-Parker sings “you’ve got to be somewhere, you’ve got to be here”, in another universe this is a euphoric refrain in a festival anthem, but in the context of social distancing it has an entirely different interpretation – especially when riding the sort of ersatz “snare” that sounds equally like someone hitting a cassette box with a biro and an excited locust.  Similarly, Siân Roseanna’s smooth croon that “a feeling like this always lasts” in Tell Me A Secret becomes rather less hedonistic when imagined as the mantra for lockdown week 37, the claustrophobic jitteriness exacerbated by a spiky rhythm that resembles some cutlery stuck in a tumble drier.

 There are moments when Musca loses this enticingly odd atmosphere, most notably a couple of piano jazz ballads which skirt perilously close to Diana Krall’s vanilla sophistication, and the album is definitely a little too long - then again, what could be more authentically part of the COVID experience than time seeming to drag occasionally? - but overall Musca is disarmingly intimate and intriguing.  The album ends with Gold Dust, a grinning Rhodes pop groove that surprises by going beyond the spare clarity of preceding tracks with a huge Nelson Riddle meets Quincy Jones brass arrangement.  Perhaps, to represent someone double-jabbed and off into the world again after so long in the house, the tentative, introspective songs have been joyously replaced by what sounds like something by Shirley Bassey...albeit with extra bass, naturally.

Being Pleasured Aurally

Here's my review for the latest Nightshift, the first to be available as a hard copy for over a year!  It's sincerely exciting and a little moving to have the scabrous Demo Dumper in print again, if for no other reason than so the unbelievers can burn it.

In other news, I will now be doing some reviews for a website.  My reviewing chum Sam Shepherd volunteered me, and I had to do a micro-application form in which I detailed my three favourite albums of the past 12 months.  There wasn't much science in it, but I thought they were fun little summaries, so as a bonus treat, here they are:

Oneohtrix Point Never – Magic Oneohtrix Point Never (Warp)

Vaporwave can be fun, but most of its creators seem to be trying to recapture the innocence of youth, and might be equally happy shutting down Ableton and joining the “who remembers Pyramints?” messageboards.  Whilst Daniel Lopatin’s mature masterpiece nods (sleepily) towards all the hypnagogic tropes – tape deck hum, VHS flicker, corporate ident synth – there’s a depth to the songwriting, which matches ornate pop with emotional  directness, half ELO and half double glazing ad jingles.  The radio dial-twirling concept might be played out as a way of structuring an album, but this parade of gaseous mini-epics is more like someone flipping through the Rolodex of your half-remembered dreams.  With some really nice DX7 noises over the top.

 

Dry Cleaning – New Long Leg (4AD)

Since punk, boredom has often been weaponised, so that a yawn is just a slower paced sneer.  What’s refreshing about Florence Shaw is her unconfrontationally bored delivery, somewhere between indolent and exhausted, too laconic to stretch as far as melodies, a suburban precinct sprechgesang celebrating the surreality of the mundane.  The mordantly funny non sequiturs in the lyric sheets read like Sleaford Mods if they responded to the modern world with wry defeatism rather than twitchy disgust.  It’s musically no slouch either, sparse hypnotic classic indie motifs riding elastic Steve Hanley/Peter Hook basslines off into the distance.

 

The Bug – Fire (Ninja Tune)

Sometimes, though, as well as the literate ennui you just want some righteous ire, and this album is nothing but sonic anger, sometimes smouldering and malevolent, sometimes spittle-lipped and raging.  There are some pandemic-flavoured statements, and a few allusions to global politics, but really it’s no more a meaningful dystopian satire than most black metal is a coherent deconstruction of Christian morality, it’s simply a celebration of fury.  Just check the track titles.  “Vexed”.  “War”.  “Hammer”.  “Fuck Off”.  Especially “Fuck Off”.  And while the rich roster of doom prophet vocalists rail, the tracks rumble and rasp, dense, deep and insistent, like geological klaxons.

ENJOYABLE LISTENS/ MOOGIEMAN/ THE MAY, All Will Be Well, Port Mahon, 28/8/21

 We talk about musicians “playing” a gig, but it’s quite rare that this implies a childlike experimental glee.  Crouched over an array of electronics that he admits he only partly understands, The May takes us down ludic alleyways of electronica, sometimes erudite in the vein of Orbital’s philosophy ‘n’ bass classic “Are We Here?”, sometimes much dumbasser with 90s beats and buzzing synthlines (one COVID-safe raver inadvertently giving us Altern8 flashbacks).  There’s a witty wastrel edge to The May, recalling obscure Planet Mu signing Tim Exile’s “nuisance gabbaret lounge”, and the whole thing is as much fun to watch as it apparently is to create.  All The May’s bleepy gear even comes in a little wagon, like he’s Linus from Peanuts off to Megadog.

 Seeing event host Moogieman solo is rare nowadays, although that was how we first encountered him.  Where he once wielded an acoustic and sang cheeky Radio 4 songs, he now has sparsely programmed electronics and intones sententiously.  A huge improvement, in short.  At times there’s a cosmic, consciousness-expanding feel to the words at odds with the deadpan delivery and minimal sonics – think Wilhelm Reich recited by Laurie Anderson – and one piece is what we imagine a Scientology induction is like, but the beating pop heart of metaphysical rant “Mr Curator” still shines through, the indie fanfare of the band version turned into a sleek melding of The Blue Aeroplanes and Suicide.

 Enjoyable Listens is Luke Duffett, his phone, and several hogsheads of cabaret showmanship.  He gyrates and sways like an Animatronic Bryan Ferry, and croons his poetic balladry in the style of Lloyd Cole or Tony Hadley (and even, at times, early Vic Reeves).  His songs are ostensibly simple fare to tug the hearts - and loins - of an audience raised on estate agent pop and John Hughes movies, but there’s an addictive passion to the performance, which takes place in the crowd as often as onstage, that reminds us of Jack Goldstein.  We even end up singing along to a Bonnie Tyler cover, which is only a step away from pier-end schlock, but that step has been so elegantly taken you could easily  miss how masterful Duffett’s performance is.  That’s the total eclipse of the art.