Log #168 - Rumours Going Down

I came late to Rumours as explained here but its charms have grown on me, particularly on the more rock orientated numbers like the excellent The Chain which is so much more than that slightly annoying bass riff used for that very annoying car programme. It was a video I caught this week on youtube of a live performance of The Chain that encouraged me to give the album another spin.

Fleetwood Mac Rumours

Neil Young Hitchhiker

Foals What Went Down

Edgar Froese Epsilon In Malaysian Pale
John Martyn Solid Air

Neil Young Rust Never Sleeps

Hitchhiker was an album by Neil Young recorded in 1976. For some reason it was not released then...

- actually the reason I believe was the record company thought the solo acoustic songs should be recorded as a band.

- indeed some like Powderfinger were later re-recorded with a band and appeared on a subsequent album (Rust Never Sleeps and others).

Anyway Hitchhhiker, like Chrome Dreams and some others, became one of those legendary lost albums of Young's - until last year when the original was released.

It is indeed a shame this album did not see the light of day for so long as, despite it having an air of demo about it, it is actually one of Young's best. There are ten excellent songs, 9 on guitar, one on piano. Eight have appeared on other albums, usually in a differing version / two are previously unreleased. I do believe it may be Young's only entirely solo album??

[By the way any Neil Young fan should check out his Archives website - this is a subscriber service but there is always a free to stream featured album available].

Excellent stuff from the Foals on this, their fourth album. It is a pretty heavy album but still demonstrates their excellent musicianship.

'What Went Down' is unbelievably aggressive, a bold return so to speak, combining a fierce pulsating drumbeat with erratic overdriven guitars that lend a real intensity.

Clash Magazine

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Log #129 - Elaenia Meets A Country Gent In Rothko Chapel

Josh T Pearson The Last Of The Country Gentlemen

Larkin Poe Fall

Edgar Froese Epsilon In Malaysian Pale

Morton Feldman Rothko Chapel

Floating Points Elaenia

Tim Hecker Virgins

Morton Feldman was an American 20th Century composer famous for his very long (some lasting multiple hours) minimalist pieces. Rothko Chapel was written in 1971 for the Rothko Chapel in Houston which houses paintings by Mark Rothko. The composition is a 5 piece suite lasting a relatively modest 25 minutes in total. On this CD it is twinned with Why Patterns? which is a 29 minute single part piece composed in 1978. 

Both pieces are very quiet and very still. In fact some of the most minimal minimalist music I've ever heard. Rothko Chapel is characterised by ghostly choral singing and Why Patterns is a piece scored for flute, glockenspiel, and piano. Closest comparisons that spring to my mind are Ligeti (famous for his 2001: A Space Odyssey film soundtrack - but not the well known riff, that's Richard Strauss) and Takemitsu (although his music is much busier). The stillness separates it from the more frantic and insistent music of fellow New York composers Glass and Reich, and its underlying melodious nature from the avant-garde of Cage. As such Feldman's work is much closer to modern ambient music.

The most interesting aspect for me, composing exclusively with patterns, is that there is not one organizational procedure more advantageous than another, perhaps because no one pattern ever takes precedence over the others. The compositional concentration is solely on which pattern should be reiterated and for how long.

Feldman made an analogy with Middle Eastern rug makers who, to his eye, laid out a set of patterns to be woven concurrently, with no pattern holding precedence over another. They coexist in the final product, running their course on the rug with separate rates of recurrence. 

Like many pieces of minimalist music his compositions make use of phasing where a series of motifs are repeated slightly out of sync. coming together occasionally and particularly at the end. For such experimental and atmospheric music to work it needs the time and space to breath and fulfil. 

I really like the Floating Points album Elaenia. It's instrumental jazz tinged electronica most reminiscent of Cinematic Orchestra, Hidden Orchestra or GoGo Penguin. Believe it or not  the album also takes me back to John Martyn's most electric piano infused album Solid Air. 

Some of the tracks sound like a full on band, they are so well produced, but I understand Floating Points is the stage name of Manchester producer Sam Shepherd. Case in point is the centrepiece of the album Silhouettes which is an impressive electric piano led piece with horns, strings, chant, and deep bass - all underpinned by wonderful funky cymbal laden jazz drumming which flutters incessantly over a ticking metronome and comes to life particularly for the second half. This sounds so good (so live, real and organic) I find it hard to believe it's electronically created by one person.

It's my track of the week (and of course it's not one person!):

The 7 tracks are all different though. Ranging from the jazz fusion of the Silhouettes through ambience to pulsed electronics (Jean Michel Jarre, Luke Vibert or Tangerine Dream). There are lovely dynamics in tone, tempo and volume. Talk Talk's landmark post rock albums Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock have been cited as influences. 

Quick words on the other new (re) entries this week. I've had visitors this weekend so the slots of the magazine have been on a bit of a rotation (in particular slots 1 and 2 which take most the temporary traffic). Some albums came and went (including Rory Gallagher, Morte Macabre, KLF, Band Of Horses, and Father John Misty) but my Sunday snapshot happened upon Josh T Pearson and Larkin Poe.

The songs reach an apparent end and then he goes off on another round as if he's just thought of something else.

The Josh T Pearson album is another marmite record. On the surface you could say Pearson sings interminable introspective personal songs with a slurry spoken Southern drawl and a cheap out of tune acoustic guitar (the album is supplemented with some fiddle backing from Nick Cave collaborator in chief Warren Ellis). You could also say it sounds like he's making them up as he goes along. The sloppy guitar picking and strumming sounds random and void of rhythm. The songs reach an apparent end and then he goes off on another round as if he's just thought of something else. But on a deeper level there is definitely something more. I think it's the authenticity. The rawness and passion trumps the musical limitations. He really feels his music and makes you do too. 

Does this authenticity extend to him believing he's the Second Coming? I'm sure not but nevertheless I expect he did play on this with his image.

Sweetheart I Ain't Your Christ he sings ironically while looking just like Christ:

I ain't your Savior or your Christ
Or your goddamn sacrifice
And when I said I'd give my life
I weren't talking suicide

I saw him live once and his stage personae was also very Christ like with his long hair and beard (now all shorn incidentally), standing stationary, centre stage, in a skinny black suit, lit by a single spot light. He was charismatic and mesmerising, and as I found out at the signing afterwards a really nice bloke too. 

I think the best track on the album is Woman, When I've Raised Hell where his low voice and downward cascading guitar chords come together in a powerful and foreboding song:
 
Woman when I've raised hell, you're gonna know it

There won't be a shadow of doubt in your bright little mind

No pictures left hangin' only lonely unpainted nails

Ah honey you'll connect those dots read the writin' on the wall

In 2010 Americana country rock band Larkin Poe, formed around Atlanta sisters Rebecca and Megan Lovell, released four EPs: Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter:

They are beautifully packaged in cardboard digi sleeves. The music is pretty good too. It's melodic and relatively heavy with the Lovells excelling on electric and slide guitar. Each record has around half a dozen songs or more and at about 30 mins is pretty much a complete album in its own right.

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Log #128 - Virgins Born Under A Bad Sun

This week we take in 3 new artists to the blog all from the experimental electronic stable: Tim Hecker, Mark Pritchard and Venetian Snares. These new boys on the block sandwich entries from Nils Frahm, Edgar Froese and Burial whose strong albums deservedly maintain a place in the magazine for further absorption.

Mark Pritchard Under The Sun

Nils Frahm All Melody

Edgar Froese Epsilon In Malaysian Pale

Burial Untrue

Venetian Snares Rossz Csillag Alatt Született

Tim Hecker Virgins

Tim Hecker is an artist I've read a lot about but up until now not actually heard. Thank you once again to @TheElectricApe for supplying this #NewMusicAlert.

Who is he? A Canadian electronic musician and sound artist. Tim Hecker is also an academic and lecturer on sound culture with a PhD (including a thesis on urban noise) from McGill University.  

What does he sound like? I'm only going by this 2013 album (bear in mind he's produced 10 albums since his 2001 debut Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again - don't be misled as I was that his preceding album Ravedeath, 1972 was actually from 1972!) but on this evidence his sound includes elements of ambient and glitch but is closest to classical minimalism. 

The phased piano loops of Virginal I and II are from the Philip Glass and Steve Reich schools of minimalism. Yet Black Refraction is a beautiful slow piano solo similar to some of Nils Frahm's works or Glass's Solo Piano - at least until the piece literally decays towards the end. Decay and distortion are constant bedfellows through the album calling for obvious comparisons with William Basinski.

Virgins is not an easy listen as a whole but ever interesting and highlighted by moments of sheer beauty that occasionally surface above the noise: Live Room and Live Room Out combine both the jarring repeating loops of the minimalist composers and the chordal string beauty of artists like Stars Of The Lid. Stigmata II does something similar beginning with a hypnotic pulsing ripping sound that merges into gorgeous wavering synth flutes like those frequenting the Edgar Froese album which has taken up residence in the magazine.

Mark Pritchard comes from the Warp music label which, as a home to Aphex Twin, Luke Vibert, Boards of Canada, and Autechre, amongst many other groundbreaking experimental artists, is almost always a good sign. 

On initial listens of Under The Sun, however, I'm not so convinced here. The first half of the album particularly could possibly suffer from "guest vocalist syndrome" where vocals are plastered over the top of an otherwise instrumental piece (reading that back that sounds obvious, all songs would be instrumentals without vocals - I think I mean there is sometimes a sense of shoehorning some vocals in as an after thought although perhaps this is just my current predisposition to instrumental music). 

Worse when the guest vocalist is a named star such as Bono or Gabriel (I'm thinking of some mid-era Afro Celt albums that attempted to go mainstream) or in this case Thom Yorke. Maybe good for kudos and sales but I find Thom Yorke's miserabalist mumblerock moanings ill fit most music. 

We also have a spoken word track The Blinds Cage which I think would be better as an instrumental - this one voiced by someone called Beans, and the title track which has an annoying high pitched female choir round possibly manageable as a one minute synthesizer interlude like tracks Hi Red or Dawn Of The North but at 6 1/2 minutes it grates. 

In another about turn You Wash My Soul has very ghostly vocals backed just by acoustic guitar - it comes over as very righteous. I think the best vocal track is Give It Your Choir although even this one, with it's choral proggy leanings, is possibly a fish out of water in this variable album. It's a nice song nontheless.

Unsurprisingly then, it's the instrumental sections of the album I like best. Strip out the songs and you'd have a decent album of ambient drones, loops and ghostly sound effects.  Longest track Ems is probably the pick. The trouble is these sorts of records rely on building tension and atmosphere over a sustained period. The disjointed nature of this album fails to do this for me.

Bonkers! There isn't a better way to describe Venetian Snares. I describe it as classical music set to drum and bass. How does that sound? Well, it sounds like Rossz Csillag Alatt Született, prolific Canadian (another) electronic musician Aaron Funk's 15th album released in 2005. The track titles are in Hungarian and the album title translates as Born Under a Bad Star. The album was inspired by a visit to Hungary and encounters with pigeons in Budapest (hence the classy cover photo at the head of this post):

It's just a pigeon, looking for its nest
It doesn't know that it's wild
It doesn't know that it scares me
Why am I frightened so easily?
Pigeon, why can you scare me?
Am I not a part of your life anymore?
Am I not welcome anymore?
Am I not part of your life?

Some works great: Öngyilkos Vasárnap is Portishead turned up to 11 with super sharp beats and sawing violins (the sampled vocals belong to Billie Holiday's Gloomy Sunday). It's a truly haunting and moving song.

Felbomlasztott Mentőkocsi is brooding and portentous, sounding like Arvo Part or Gorecki (I'm assuming all the classical music is sampled and am not going to attempt to list the sources).

Hajnal is a masterpiece moving from jazz flavoured piano to full on breakbeat. (I was surprised on seeing Goldie with The Heritage Orchestra last year that you could actually have live drum and bass drummers, but I'm certain no human drummers could drum as fast as this).

But Szamár Madár is frankly horrible. It's a familiar classical piece and as such comes over as classical pops.

It's an intriguing and novel approach but part of me wonders if there is much more to this than simply setting classical pieces to random banging beats. And, like I say, sometimes the marriage works like on the Billie Holiday number but sometimes the union seems mismatched and irrelevant. It may miss the point somewhat but one of my favourite tracks is the final Senki Dala which combines guitar harmonics with plaintive violin and piano. It's a beautiful piece and ironically there are no drums. 

ps. I'm trying a new concept this week. Any Spotify users out there? Here is the link to a playlist for this week's selection. I understand it should play the complete tracks although some users (possibly non account holders or non logged in people) may only get 30 second previews (which would suit many anyway). Here goes: 

Looks like success!

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Log #127 - Things Just Got A Lot Weirder

Eddy continues his bid to name-check every band under the sun this week with 4 brand new artists and 2 making only a second appearance.

Nucleus Plastic Rock

Nils Frahm All Melody

Edgar Froese Epsilon In Malaysian Pale

Burial Untrue

Soft Hair Soft Hair

Hats Off Gentlemen It's Adequate Out Of Mind

Firstly the 2: Edgar Froese's sumptuous Epsilon In Malaysian Pale easily slots into the Tangerine Dream early to mid 70s canon of classic Berlin school albums somewhere in between Phaedra and Rubycon. Eddy went all green and moist over Epsilon in a recent review.

There was also a degree of moistness with the Nucleus album which Eddy discovered in log #125, Plastic Rock easily claiming the "record of the week" spot in his Roger Dean retrospective.

For those that like their jazz fusion just a little bit more easy listening than Bitches Brew.

On to green pastures anew: Hats Off Gentlemen It's Adequate appear a curious proposition. For a start what's that name all about? It's not even the album title name. It's actually the band name. Are they actually a band even? It seems like Hats Off / HOGIA are perhaps just two people, in which case their complex prog rock sound is remarkable. They are either a couple of amazing multi-instrumentalists or computer geniuses or both.

HOGIA throw the full prog gambit at Out Of Mind which takes us on a whirlwind tour through Marillion and Genesis infused music containing a myriad of instruments, time signatures, involved lyrics, dynamics and tempos, not only across songs but within them too. It's a lot to take in but fans of those two bands (particularly the Marillion on the vocal tracks, and the Genesis on the instrumental passages) will lap it up.

With it's gurgling keyboard Defiance is like one of the instrumentals littered throughout The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. But it's the guitar sound I love most. The latter half of the album in particular exhibits some gorgeous slow drawn out guitar glissando with pleasing chord changes that strike you right in the gut; reminiscent of Neil Young on Zuma or Alex Lifeson at his best on La Villa Strangiato or By-Tor And The Snow Dog, but with the Steve Hackett (a fan apparently) sound (and a hint of Mark Knopfler too). Take Maze for example with its gentle guitar arpeggio, the spacey If I Miss The Stars, or If You Think This World Is Bad, an impressively efficient bass pulse driven 3 minute instrumental break amongst a sea of 6 and 7 minute epics. Favourite track and most gorgeous of all is Losing Myself (and indeed I do in that guitar figure).

No entry at the music map as yet but I've made a nomination.

The disturbing cover at the head of this log belongs to the Soft Hair album. It actually fits the album of sleazy funk disco really well. I like the band's unusual sound which is a dark mash-up of Michael Jackson, Prince, and Sly and the Family Stone (you can't get more sleazy than a Jackson-Prince-Stone menage-a-trois), and as if produced by Boards of Canada too. It came out as recently as 2016 although was many years in its conception by co-collaborators Connan Mockasin (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Sam Dust (LA Priest and Late Of The Pier). The Gainsbourg connection perhaps being significant as despite never hearing her father's classic sleaze disco album Histoire de Melody Nelson all the way through, I am confident this record is from that lineage.

I like to watch you run
But I'll never touch your bum

Check out this track which pretty much summarises this peculiar album (be warned the parental advisory sticker should apply to their videos as well as the music):

Who are Burial? Well, in fact, Burial is electronic music producer William Bevan from South London. The reclusive Bevan remained anonymous for a while leading to speculation that Burial was in fact another pseudonym for Richard James (Aphex Twin) or Keiran Hebden (Four Tet). His cover was blown in 2008 when his second album Untrue was nominated for the Mercury Prize.

This acclaimed album draws upon breakbeat, dubstep, rave, and drum and bass, but also there is a lot of ambient glitch, vinyl crackle, distortion and decay.  Think of the aural innovation of Portishead when they first came out, and factor it up by ten.

It could be a dog's breakfast with all those influences but is actually a coherent whole and oddly the distorted vocal fragments in particular make Untrue quite an interesting companion (or counterpoint?) piece to the Soft Hair (maybe that Boards Of Canada aesthetic being the common touchpoint?).

Who is Nils Frahm? I've heard the name and had my expectations. This album by the Berlin composer surpasses them. Why? Unsure. I think, again (and how often do I say this?), it wasn't what I was expecting. There is beautiful treated solo piano which is minimalist with space to breath. But there is pulse and beats too. The title track has a gorgeously hypnotic gated synth which is right up my Tangerine Dream / Jean Michel Jarre strabe / rue (and get the Daft Punk influences too). Here is Frahm performing title track All Melody live:

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Moist Green Gorgeousness from Edgar Froese

Odd sometimes to come across a record you haven't heard before that you think you should have done so by now. I've followed Tangerine Dream for a long time and am a particular fan of their early to mid 70s work. Odd then, that I've not heard Edgar Froese's Epsilon In Malaysian Pale album before, which was released in 1975. Much thanks to Brighton sequencer guru and world TD authority @TheElectricApe for rectifying this oversight and advises:

Turn down the lights, light up or crack open something suitable, and submerge yourself in this beauty.

Froese was the founder of Tangerine Dream (in 1967) and the band's mainstay throughout their career (until his death in 2015), and 1975 was, for many fans, the peak of TD's career smack bang in the middle of a run of albums starting with Phaedra (1974), through Ricochet and Rubycon (1975), then Stratosfear (1976), that represented not only some of the best music from Tangerine Dream themselves, but some of the best from the whole ambient/electronic/Berlin scene. So it stands to reason Epsilon In Malaysian Pale would present most likely more of the same.

The soundtrack of my life when I lived in Berlin.

David Bowie

And it does. It is a predictable (not in a bad way) extension of the bridge between Tangerine Dream's earliest ambient work (Zeit, Atem) and their later more pulsed sequencer work. A bridge that began on the phenomenal Phaedra album which developed melodic classical string ambience through Mysterious Semblance At The Strand Of Nightmares and made first moves towards gated rhythms through it's title track.

Epsilon continues that bridge. We have two tracks of approximately 15 minutes each (so pleasing the record company have not added superfluous dilutionary padding in the CD release). The first side (in old vinyl terms) is the title track and the second piece is entitled Maroubra Bay.

The titles, inspired by travels in Malaysia and Australia, are typically "TD exotic" (as is the gorgeous rain forest ferned cover - indeed the album begins with rain forest sounds which set a scene of lush green wetness from a land that time forgot - I imagine dinosaurs lurking in the undergrowth and pterodactyls flying overhead, and it's raining, heavily, of course). [That's enough now, Ed.]

It's all gorgeous and moist, like my other go to "green" albums - the "gardens wet with rain" Astral Weeks, and the "water slapping" The Meeting Pool.  The cover is important and part of the tangible overall aesthetic - a feeling lost on digital downloads of course, and a subject I've banged on about a lot at this website.

A gorgeous piece of impressionism.

Julian Cope

Side one begins with exotic jungle noise and then a gentle flute (synth) heralds in a beautiful Debussyesque / Vaughan Williams soundscape. It's all lovely and wet... nearly all. There are a couple of jolts which almost sound like sudden tape edits but on the other hand sound entirely deliberate. They keep your interest. At about 9 minutes in, the beauty, most reminiscent of the stringed parts of Phaedra, yet more melodic, gives way to some avant-garde sounds and the first gated synth pulse of the album, and it's actually a slight disappointment. Not that it spoils the piece at all (possibly the peace perhaps) - it's just a bit more "run of the mill" standard TD fayre and out of place for a moment. This section actually fades to silence completely before the padded strings and "flute" return for the conclusion of the track.

My only criticism of some of this type of ambient music is, paradoxically, sometimes the artists throw too much in. Does that make sense? So you'll have a pulsed hypnotic loop or you'll have luscious strings. But sometimes you'll have both, plus a relatively random keyboard solo over the top that sounds a bit like jamming. Some Klaus Schulze (ex-TD) stuff can veer off into such noodling. Set the controls for the heart of the moog and impro. over the top. Anyway, a minor issue, and not much leeway for excess in these two super tight tracks (I have a Schulze track that sprints at a pace for about 50 minutes - it's both amazing and exhausting).

The second half of the album completes the bridge. For the first 5 minutes we have some interesting improvisational chords cutting keen melodic lines like Kraftwerk's Autobahn. Then an insistent hypnotic circular bass synth kicks in. Quicker than most TD tracks the central section bubbles along inducing an almost transcendental state complete with involuntary head nodding and foot tapping. Modest horned synths from the first movement return to do their stuff over the top but this section is all about that gated rhythm. Similar in structure to the first piece, albeit more upbeat, the pulse eventually fades and a wash of broad synth brushstrokes sees out the gorgeous coda.

It's a wonder to discover this old album which comes upon me like a lost Tangerine Dream classic from their most important period. Epsilon In Malaysian Pale deserves its place in the TD pantheon alongside Ricochet and Phaedra.

Editor's note: It is important to seek out the original 1975 recording. A remixed version by Froese himself was released in 2004 to mixed reviews.

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