REVIEWS

lazy magnetWow, i feel tired, and why? I’ve just listened to Lazy Magnet’s album He Sought for that Magic by Which all Glory and Glamour of Mystic Chivalry Were Made to Shine or Is Music Even That Good? The title in length, I guess is tiring enough, but the music even more so. Not because it’s arduous or tedious, far from it in fact. It’s the constant switching of styles and feelings which displaces me as a listener. In places it’s as punk as spitting, in others, as beach as boardies or as lounge like a dry Martini. Kooky, krazy, eklectic or klassically serious, there always feels a little bit of a tongue poking into someone elses cheek. But for all the tiring ever changing elements of this album, it’s seriously enjoyable and through the never resting attitude the 40-something minutes fly by, leaving me feeling thoroughly magnet fucked. From the kind of throwaway attitude there is here to stylistic affiliation I see a big finger being shown to genres. Why should it matter what we can say about how it fits in or not, in fact, I should not spend as much time writing about how it doesn’t fit to anything, it just IS, und Ende. Further more to this, I have recently seen a few visuals from Lazy Magnet from the Corleone 10 Years DVD (which I will hopefully review later). Lazy Magnet`s 7 minute animated story here (which also turnes into a live stage performance) about men that turn into monsters and fight with dragons and wizards and in another story a cat and a rabbit taking mushrooms, tripping out, being kidnapped (or cat & bunny-napped) and then dropped in the sea, so delicious. Interesting lo-fi animation techniques sat very well with Lazy Magnet’s laid back attitude to style. What u think?

:: Lazy Magnet/He Sought For That Magic By Which All Glory And Glamour Of Mystic Chivalry Were Made To Shine - or - Is Music Even Good? - Corleone Records/Import.

feral vapoursIt is hard to write about an experience as personal as that of listening to Feral Vapours of the Silver Ether feeling that is more of a secret’s confession rather than an album review. The narration of the world’s facade including realism and fantasy is not an easy one to read, especially when it affects you personally as part of it. Feral Vapours of the Silver Ether is a place where good and bad meet and co-exist in peace, a fact that makes understood that it is the combination of two creative and intense personalities sentimentally connected as well. This saunter amongst the personal atmospheric woods where experimentation manages to meet with pleasure leads to walking in circles somewhere dark but safe. A labyrinth from which there is no escape urgency.

A minimally decorated no-space on Earth or elsewhere that can belong to everyone is the sacred book that one would pick from the bookshelf to bring back a memory. Same as listening to Cartertitti’s album; the process is ALL YOURS. Somewhere far from here. Which maybe hurts. Cause it hurts to be calm, it hurts to be quiet, it hurts being carried away by landscapes of your own imagination within the existing busyness of our visual culture. Every track is another trip in the foggy mountain. Cosey’s voice caresses motherly ears and body while you are lying on the blanket knitted from Chris Carter’s soundscapes knowingly claiming that “everything is OK” despite the lack of direction. The bitter-sweet lyrics hold the secrets of the contemporary average human’s history. This ambient version of presenting realism turns your speakers into some sort of pagan god’s mouth that doesn’t instruct, but confesses and apologises. Chance fallen into the harmony of the no-world order.

:: Carter Tutti/Feral Vapours of the Silver Ether - Conspiracy Intn/Cargo. 

13 BluesIn the age of consumer choice, I always had trouble playing favourites, finding it difficult to settle on one drink, one brand, one football star, as time and marketing departments kept upturning the tables of my ordered universe. With music, things were simpler – I had Godspeed You! Black Emperor. In an age where a band’s rise is inseparable from the backlash that accompanies it, people forget how perfect GY!BE seemed when they first appeared, how vital their grainy, apocalyptic catharsis sounded. Admittedly, I was particularly ripe for their music: young, emotional, in the thrall of far-left politics and the tension and release of post-rock, listening to F#A#∞, their 1998 debut, I felt like I was hearing music for the first time. Pairing a kind of romantic anarchist disaffection with the raw, gut-busting bombast of a Branca symphony, a gift for sustained crescendo with a feel for the slow-burn, the Canadian collective managed to pick up the detritus of the world and meld it into something truly beautiful, moving even, the inevitability of their music somehow eased by the sheer sweep and range of it. Abandoning songs for long movements scrawled on cardboard, GY!BE was, in the beginning at least, a collective in the truest sense, a faceless, true-hearted bunch content to let their melted strings, screwdrivered guitars and ranting crazies do the talking. Then, after two rich LPs and one jaw-dropping EP, Godspeed made their first misstep, the strangely stilted Yanqui XYO. The record’s blandness, its beating of the same drum, wasn’t helped by the emerging legion of disaffected, emotional kids the collective had inspired. Soon enough, the band’s once-signature mix of grit and symphony had become usurped by an increasingly crowded field of Caucasian post-rock. The inevitable backlash ensued, and the mysterious group did what bands do when they don’t break up, and went on indefinite hiatus.

Two years before GY!BE began to fade from view, Efrum Menuck, the notoriously publicity-averse band’s most recognizable figure, struck out with his GY!BE-in-miniature project A Silver Mt. Zion, featuring a much smaller band and a palette to match. On their first record, the still-wonderful He Has Left Us Alone but Sometimes Shards of Light Grace the Corners of Our Rooms, Menuck and fellow GY!BE refugees Sophie Trudeau and Thierry Amar distilled the bigger band’s gift for imbuing the inevitability of the tension/release dynamic with grace and subtlety into littler, even prettier songs, their sparseness a welcome relief from the swarm of GY!BE. Three years later, when it seemed clear that GY!BE were done, A Silver Mt. Zion became the full-time gig of an increasing number of the collective’s members, and the object of the many GY!BE tragics’ passions. With each passing LP, A Silver Mt. Zion seem to get closer in size to the band it was spawned from – with a ridiculous, ever-changing name to match – and less and less capable of capturing their old band’s alchemy, depth or range. More and more, their records seem like exercises in diminishing returns, not so much straying from what made them great as having lost it somewhere along the way. Menuck, who once seemed so at pains to make himself invisible, is now all over the records, his wayward yelling a feature of every lengthy track the band puts out. With his voice the centre of every song, the range of the band behind seems to have narrowed in direct proportion, and a frustrating sameness now plagues each track. The band’s experiments with songform are an uneasy fit for their fifteen-minute compositions, and the results hang uneasily somewhere between the movements of old and the strangled protest songs they seem to want to create.

Menuck and Co. are still angry, still resigned, remarking on the pretty shapes the flames make when everything burns. But with 13 Blues For Thirteen Moons, they seem finally incapable of translating this feeling into anything resembling compelling music. As an emotion, it seems, resignation can be exhausted pretty easily. And then what? Then comes more yelling, at us, at everyone, but yelling still tethered so strongly to the feeling nothing will ever change you get the sense after a while that you’re being harangued, attacked by someone whose anger has finally turned on itself. When, during the record’s 1st proper piece (the record begins with 12 incidental five second tracks) ‘1,000,000 Died to Make This Sound,’ Menuck sings, ‘your band/your bland/your band is bland’ you really begin to wonder where the inspiration has gone. Are these the same people responsible for ‘Providence’ and ‘Moya’? When the yelling stops, the band is still capable of making a beautiful racket, the cello-and-riff-led breakdown of ‘1,000,000 Died To Make This Sound’ a welcome relief from the unending tuneless vocals, the slow build of the closer ‘Blindblindblind’ at first sounding like the weary, sepia-hued march of old. But as the momentum gives way to some plucked strings and more of Menuck’s ceaseless yelling, you start to realize that even the dynamic is gone, the build and mood now sunk in a foundation so heavy and lightless that you wonder if the spark and nuance that once made them so special might ever make it back out from the murk.
On ‘Black Waters Blowed/Engine Broke Blues’, the record’s penultimate track, as Menuck repeats ‘building trainwrecks/in the setting sun’ over and over again, he sounds, finally, like a record stuck in a groove, a man whose one trick, great though it once was, has finally worn itself out.

Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band/13 Blues For Thirteen Moons - Constellation/Alive.

nemethThis CD was very interesting for me coming from “ein Beruf” where we create music and sfx for film and tv. As I like this so much, this time I’ve decided to analyse it track by track. Opener Via L4 Norte - A city scene, a semi busy road, and fades in jazzish drums, but in a somehow tribal style. Its a great scene setter, and already living up to the album title: “Film”.  We can really picture a motion picture unravelling here through our ears. I have a very wide feeling when listening to this first track. It seems to encompass everything in there, some great toxic rhythms and atmospheric unnatural sounds, along obviously with the field recordings.

Track 2, Field has a similar rhythmic basis, although with a slightly more dub feel. Still the processed sounds phase in and out and another constant is the use of, I believe, the top or bottom of a guitar, near the pegs or below the bridge, being plucked. Some other great field recording are incorporated into this track too and I particularly liked the pneumatic drill, it was very fitting sonically and perfectly placed. No. 3, Transitions starts with a Musique Concrete and Pierre Schaeffer industrial raw tape intro, but Németh soon “drops” a repetitive, simple beat taken from the first tape style rhythm. Then the hypnotic beat is interspersed screeches and electronic impulses until the middle part of the track when the main (snare I guess, although sounds like a stick on an oil drum) drops out leaving just the kick, then coming back in with drive and electronics.

A great little piece, I can imagine an indecisive scene or a plan sequence for this. It finishes phased out, still in old school Musique Concrete but with a digital beep which blends nicely into the next “scene”, Luukkaankangas, is 4, with  another atmospheric Anfang and quite a generous amount of static thrown in there for authenticity.  This develops into a beautiful and skillfully panned rhythm which is in someways reminiscent of a record player. Contrasted with the sweet, lightly played Fender Rhodes and the building basses that track pleases me a lot. A short cool down and then a steady build to a confusing cacophony of electronic pulses and static feedbacks, whilst a very chilled chord sequence is played although sometimes quite hidden in the mix.

Piano rain starts Track 5 Soprus off, with a faint but building feedback wind. Some chinese bells, and (do I hear right?) an accordion somewhere give this short track a very cute feel. I see it as someone is thinking. In fact, most of these tracks are thinking tracks, very inward focused.  6, Ortem Ende has most elements of all tracks in. Rumbling electronics, atmospheric drones, static, well sculpted panning, and interesting rhythms.

: : Nemeth/Film - Thrill Jockey/Rough Trade. 

mahjonggMahjongg’s LP, is not an easy case of musical definition. As a whole it is a blend of various sound species and styles varying from power-pop with persistent instrumental extended and repetitive drumming to afro-kongotronic vibes. The common point in all tracks would be the intensity of the rhythmical observation either they include vocals or not. Mahjongg seems to belong to the type of collective -indie band flirting with the neo - dance scene that can audibly be related to the tendency of the 00’s to rebirth the 80’s. The term “collective” here is not only to refer to the band but the sound as well. The instruments have certain interchange ability within the tracks and seem to come and go when least expected. And, in fact, enjoyable element of this album’s attitude is that the shifts of musical references mentioned above are not only amongst the expected kinds but also embrace with banal or old-fashioned composition styles such as waltz. Overall, Mahjongg’s first LP is good news to the indie underground, considering the band’s fruitfully arrogant attitude towards the “hype” obsession of the sound genre they belong to which is what defines mostly their musical identity.
: : Mahjongg/Kontpab - Krecs/Cargo.