Sunday, 8 November 2009
Blissy tricks
Saturday, 7 November 2009
Foothills or meadows

"A kind of formless post-stoner rock combining a limited sound palette, musical development & emotional range with a near-limitless protractedness…"
I’m an unashamed Mountains lover. But even — or especially — with an appetite for their shimmering, accumulating sound that takes in any release I can find (including both solo guises), it’s worth trying to imagine why people might not love their music.
Only for a moment, though, as those people are wrong! For me, Mountains’ limits & limitlessness are at the core of their uniqueness. Listening back across their albums before Choral & Etching, they seem always to have had this subtly self-confident willingness to work & rework their narrow but, in its sly, slow way, very intense furrow — gentle, accepting, somewhat yearning (but muted).
You could say that the newer records, the relatively vigorous Etching especially, are in more obviously Mountainous terrain: yomping up to single note-driven swollen, riffy peaks, then ebbing down to regroup below. But I’ve never found that their name fits them at all well — this is music of the foothills or meadows, one that is precisely not about soaring peaks but rather long (not arduous) journeys or undertakings.
There’s also a timelessness at work, clearly – both indifference to conventional notions of structure, of starting & ending, & in the sense of a sound out of time: not especially contemporary nor actively backwards-looking either (though fans of Another Green World-era art-rock might feel an unexpected spark of recognition at some of the textures making up Etching’s lovely murk).
Etching has a definite performance feel (though that might be down to Thrill Jockey sharing the circumstances of its making, I concede). I seem to hear more overt kinetic energy than before, though the languid, reflective tempo has hardly altered.
It’s a dense, rich sound of several boxes of tricks being emptied out & put to play – more strummed than I remember from initial listens, but also clattering, buzzing & with a darker, riffier tone towards the end.
Perhaps it’s just my prejudice. But granted the power to ban Mountains from their acoustic guitar (guitars?), I might be tempted – to force them to work even more with the blobbier, more viscous part of their sound, or even to dig out the bells of Melodica another time.
It’s interesting to put Mountains up against Emeralds (the closest peer?). In this light the duo’s bristly, blurred sound seems more individual & less rooted in a single influence than the excellent Emeralds of What Happened & the European tour CD…
Friday, 6 November 2009
To the waterfront
Thursday, 5 November 2009
Martian shoe factory
“It’s like having a cup of coffee and a donut in the middle of a Martian shoe factory,” says Story of his first experience producing a Cluster session. “Moebi and Achim always have the incredible knack of carving a bit of warmth and humanity out of the most unlikely elements. On Qua, there's a surprisingly melodic solo that Moe performed on our squeaky bathroom door, and a virtuoso performance ‘playing’ the feedback from the unplugged end of a guitar cable. Meanwhile, Ach plays a bass line on our old orange Farfisa organ — and naturally centers his riff around the one note that's broken.”
The squeaky-door solo is one of many mysterious sounds on the 17-track Qua that Cluster and Story have sewn together to make seamless, artful music out of what others hear as noise.
Story muses: “It’s what makes Cluster absolutely unique — taking the debris of life, and the sounds most other people would ‘tune out’, and turning them into supremely odd, but engagingly human poetry. A happy marriage of Dada and romance.”
That happy marriage (albeit with its on-again, off-again moments [see the glaring omission from Moebius' links - LMYE]) has continued for nearly 40 years — so it would be a natural to assume that the music resulting from Cluster’s return to the studio would have been something of a nostalgia trip. But at an age when other musicians are making bank on old ideas, Cluster is making music that is in every way new.
“When we first starting talking about making this record, I imagined a 20th-century version of Sowiesoso or Zuckerzeit,” recalls Story, “abandoning for now the long, freeform improvisations that had been a staple of Cluster’s recent live performances, and revisiting the short idiosyncratic miniatures that we would be able to achieve in a studio setting. But even I wouldn’t have guessed that a total of 17 great pieces would result — each with it’s own inner logic and personality, and all working within the framework of the whole.”
Even more remarkably, Qua’s 17 tracks aren’t just audio novelties — they have a richness of texture, tone and character unexpected in the electronic music genre. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Cluster’s sound-as-sandbox approach to music — and why they’ve inspired so many other influential musicians — is that they explore inventive and expressive potentials in electronic music seldom realized by others.
Tuesday, 20 October 2009
Yes bloody please

Highbrow mucker
Exploring the relationship between composition and chance, Jørgensen created the music for this release by drawing upon a palette of acoustic instrumentation and field recordings which were then transformed via computer processing into luminous textures, crystalline tones and vibrant ambient drones.
‘To’ is divided into two clearly defined sections across its 30 minute running time. Broad swathes of sound, juxtaposed chords and miniature crescendos during the first half give way to a more introspective and peaceful denouement as the album draws to an end.
Monday, 19 October 2009
“as ignorable as it is interesting”
Foregrounded, the pieces have of course to be accepted on their own terms. Inevitably, their elongation & repetition means that ‘development’ is near-glacial — & limited: more like time spent static than travelling. That feeling is clearly heightened by their being monochromes in the sense of a very restricted palette of tone & mood.
Although far from revolutionary & strikingly narrow in range, they do reward the substantial investment of time (if not constant attention) they demand… But it’s a bit discomforting to ask what difference it would have made if ‘Monochrome 4′ had come in at 17 minutes, rather than 30?
No doubt TU M’s artistic judgement about how long each piece should go on was based on their assessment of that weight & cadence – but as artists like Scanner &, yes, Eno start to make use of the iPhone to offer loops that listeners can run for however long they like, it’s kind of interesting to imagine the Monochromes released in that endless format.
[Scanner's newly-released & currently free Whisper for iPhone/iPod Touch (http://bit.ly/sP8oU), is a strong recommendation in these parts - a haunting, moody loop that feels like an ultra-modern conception & delivery of music...]
Another angle on this. TU M’ put an 8:16 “excerpt” of the unreleased Monochromes 00 up online (it's below). Since we don’t know how long the full version is intended to be, we can only take the excerpt on its merits (it’s as beguiling as the rest, with an occasional sliver of muffled echo somewhat reminiscent of Chris McNamara’s ‘Vague Cities’).
To weigh the excerpt against an unavailable but by definition longer full version, an iPhone-type loop would let you feel your own way to its perfect, Platonic length – if one exists!

Tuesday, 13 October 2009
Rude not too

Monday, 12 October 2009
It ain't so
Friday, 9 October 2009
Amalgamated twit
Forthcoming murk
Thursday, 8 October 2009
Rude not to

Sunday, 4 October 2009
Return to Navapolatsk
Lovely, dubby squelch from cross-border collaborations with Belarus, curated by ~scape: I/DEX vs Pole > Minsk, Pinch meets Pavel Ambiont > Poison / Remedy (both from Connections, re-upped [original post] to mark its release today...).
Saturday, 3 October 2009
Gothic gravity
Unsound have Biosphere & Stars of the Lid performing in the same space this year, making these ears wish they were trekking out to Krakow this time round. So too do the tribe of other tasty performers captured in Philip Sherburne's round-up mix of 2009's cast of thousands (fascinating background here, by the way) & in bshosa's crisp, urgent 08/09 package.
Frost's new By The Throat is out imminently. I've not heard it yet (apart from the The Carpathians giveaway featured below), but those who have rate it - no surprise, given the savage excellence of the earlier Theory of Machines. It & other fine Frost output (though not Steinbruechel's amazing, ultra-subtle Theory reworkings on Basis, regrettably...) can be streamed here.
Ben Frost > Unsound 08 (LMYE hack) > The Carpathians (from By The Throat, Bedroom Community)
Oh, & Unsound & ~scape finally unveiled the Connections free download album previewed here previously today. As reported & rehosted, its east/west collaborations feature both Pole & Pinch (will re-up separately)...
Wednesday, 30 September 2009
Earthling release
Tuesday, 22 September 2009
Venerable vigour
Monday, 7 September 2009
Dit’moi Monsieur
01:27 Regolith – Sap Rising
03:57 Signal – Ermafa
07:05 LJ Kruzer – Kruzerlude
09:46 Moondog – Tugboat Toccata
11:48 Benge – Polymoog
12:29 Moondog – Gloving It
12:48 Autechre – Altibzz
14:16 Ricardo Villalobos – Minimoonstar
17:05 Justus Kohncke – Yacht
22:14 Benge – Oberheim Xpander
23:47 Jordi Savall performing Tobias Hume: Beccus An Hungarian Lord
25:45 Tomita performing Debussy: The Girl With The Flaxen Hair
Tam - LJ Kruzer Video from JimJam Graphics on Vimeo.
Wednesday, 12 August 2009
"This Awareness asks"
Kranky: "While Tim's description may read as somewhat dry and technical, the sonic landscapes that he composes are anything but. He sculpts textural washes of sound to create immersive, constantly shifting aural psychedelic environments. Hazy, gaseous atmospheres that are alternately arid and humid float above, in and around the muffled pulses used as rhythms. The experience is not unlike that of landing on an alien planet, stepping out of a spaceship, and surveying new terrain."
Tuesday, 11 August 2009
Distiller's macho






















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