Reviews: Cutleri and Marley Butler

These reviews can also be read at http://oliverarditi.com/


Cutleri - Let Me Show You My Sweater (folk/ Americana)

self released, 2011, DD album, 33m 55s, $free

http://cutleri.bandcamp.com/

Production standards for self released music have become so generically polished and exact, that it has almost ceased to be meaningful or valuable to release a well recorded album. I’m being facetious, obviously, and of course I like to hear music I like sounding good, but sometimes the slickness of everything becomes incredibly desolate; some noise, some artifacts, and the boxy sound of cheaper equipment can serve as a welcome reminder that a recording embodies something real. Recordings are artistic constructions, and it’s a fallacy to think they represent an impression of something else, but sometimes their impact rests on the sensation that they do.

I’m not accusing Cutleri of recording badly, deliberately or otherwise, and nor am I suggesting they’ve taken a self-consciously constructivist approach to making this album. It’s very simply a collection of demos and live recordings, assembled with minimal (if any) mastering and made available for free in advance of their forthcoming debut. But the fact that it is full of noises off, hisses and crackles, uncontrollable giggling and general tomfoolery paints a far more detailed and revealing portrait of the band than a glossy studio recording might; it may not be an accurate portrait, and it may indeed be a contrived one, but it gives the listener the impression they are genuinely getting to know the band, and they’ll want to believe it, because the impression it gives is so damn’ charming!

The ingredients here (as far as I can make out) are banjo, ukulele, harmonica, three female voices in harmony, and a variety of percussion and wind instruments. The material ranges from the traditional to the bizarre, by way of Broadway: there’s a Brian Jonestown Massacre cover, the eighteenth century song ‘Shady Grove’, ‘Moon River’, a sparse improvisation populated with vocal saxophone impressions (‘Let Me Show You My Sweater’), a song one of the members wrote to sing to her cat (‘Weasel Goose’) and… well, you get the idea.

I expect their upcoming studio release will be more polished and finished: Cutleri are not about to upturn any applecarts with their technical skills, but they are able players with a good command of their instruments’ and voices’ dramatic and expressive potential. They perform their songs with such humour and casual diffidence that it’s obvious a technically polished performance is not their central aim, and nor is entertainment, though they are certainly entertaining. This is music performed for the performers’ pleasure: not in an exclusive way, but with an invitation to the listener to join the party, and you can hear these three women are having so much fun that it’s a party you want to join.

Marley Butler - Procras The Sample (ambient/ electronica)

Naplew Productions, 2011, DD EP, 19m 45s, £free

http://m-s-b.bandcamp.com/album/procras-the-sample-ep

Marley Butler had something to do; but, he also had a new software sampler he’d downloaded for free. The something didn’t get done: but he did record this EP, which strikes me as some pretty darn constructive procrastination. Each tune was written, recorded and mixed in a single evening, and two of them were embellished by Jamie Osborne, who wrote and recorded vocals under similar time constraints. A third has Butler’s own self-effacing and reflective rhyming.

There is a short coda, a mellow elaboration of some brass samples, before which the three tunes are presented in instrumental and vocal versions. Exactly what Butler’s reasoning is in doing this is unclear, although it pays homage to certain practices involving two sides of a piece of vinyl, and the tunes are short enough that it almost plays like an extended song structure when listening to the EP as a whole.

Taking such a programmatic approach to the working process, rather than tweaking the product endlessly, has not, curiously, made the result sound unfinished or ragged; how much to read into the creative method when listening is moot. Clearly the EP is presented as a record of a process, which in a way gives it more in common with instrumental than other electronic recordings, and in a way it could even be regarded as a live session, or a species of field recording. These things only matter if you know how it was made however; an insight into the making of a work is always an insight into its meaning, but there is little, if anything, in the sound that can be directly ascribed to Butler’s self imposed restraints, and nothing in it to suggest them.

These tunes have a soft and ethereal atmosphere, abetted by the relatively organic drum samples, and they are ambient in the sense of ambient dance music, not in the sense of the stuff that gets filed next to drone, in the imaginary record shop that actually stocks that sort of thing. They are pretty experimental in character nevertheless, with oblique and pleasingly strange lyrics. Sounds are treated much like pigment, and fitted into rhythmic structures that resemble drawn lines, to create something very visual, in a way that puts me more in mind of illustration than painting.

The sound is gently involving, intriguing and thought provoking, and shows a great deal of creativity. More than that though, it shows a real clarity of artistic vision, in identifying the potential of his process, and having the conviction to carry it through and share what it generates. Butler has a very interesting compositional voice, and a sophisticated approach to the business of making art from sounds: I’ll be interested to hear what he comes up with next.

Monday Musings: Information Wants To Be Free, or How Do You Own A Sound?

This post can also be read at http://oliverarditi.com/

The critic wants breakfast.

There’s a lot of thought being given, in all quarters, to how to turn music into money in the unprecedented circumstances in which we find ourselves. What is music worth? What is it about music that is tradeable? What parts of the traditional commercial landscape are worth defending? To what extent do people and organisations need to throw up their hands and just go with the new situation? What, ultimately, is the best way to derive revenue from making music? What, ethically and legally, is it that creators, licensors and licensees can be said to ‘own’?

In many cases these questions are engaged with, not through legal debate, business plans, philosophical discourse, or the market: they are engaged with through the appearance of new technologies, for the production and distribution of music.

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Stewart Brand, 1984

Stewart Brand is the founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue, a project designed to promote the positive, empowering, accessible, local and DIY potential of technology; he was speaking at the first Hackers’ Conference, a gathering of computer industry tech-heads which (by its name) is predicated on the value of stretching a system’s intended use, or using it in unintended ways. While he was talking about data at a time when that meant very little other than computer code, he might easily have been talking about music right now, when similar conditions have come to apply.

Music is certainly valuable: to me, and many others, it is one of the most valued things in our lives. It can, has, and continues to change my life in unexpected, sometimes uncomfortable, but always rewarding ways. The ease and low cost of its distribution doesn’t need to be re-hashed here. So in my opinion, the dialectic that Brand identified, in an era of newly affordable removeable media, and a new awareness of the personal and commercial value of code and data, is equally applicable to music today.

I would argue that the new media, and the digital music revolution, do not simply represent a new way of handling recordings, but expose a long-standing misapprehension about what recorded music is, and how it should be thought about. Music became a reproducible, tradeable commodity with the advent of sheet music printing, which really took off in the early nineteenth century, and with it certain ideas, such as copyright, and territorial licensing. When sound recordings began to be commercially exploited a context already existed where music was conceived as a physical thing: ‘the music’ had come to mean a piece of paper with notation printed on it, and in many quarters it still does.

Now most people will agree that if someone makes an object, and someone else wants it, they have to accept the terms the maker sets on giving it to them: conventionally this involves some money changing hands. After all, it costs money to have a CD pressed and packaged, and no one would expect that to be done as an act of charity. For roughly 80 years, until the widespread adoption of the cassette, the only way to get access to a sound recording for your own use was to buy a record. For obvious enough reasons, the cost of producing the recording was summed with the manufacturing cost of the final package: as businesses, record companies, had their costs, and largely realised their revenue through retail sales (although licensing was important as well). A consequence of this was that ultimately no distinction was made between a record and the sound that was on it.

I can understand how recording artists and labels must have felt when the cassette appeared: why should it have looked any different to them than if someone had simply taken a copy of their record to a pressing plant, or stolen a copy of it from a shop? They lived in a world in which a song was a thing, and could be traded as such: you knew whether you owned it or not, because you could see it and feel it. Nowadays there a re a good number of people who would stand to make a lot of money if they could only persuade the world that a musical recording is a physical object, or should be treated as such. So let’s just go back to Stewart Brand for a moment.

What exactly is it about music that’s valuable? Is it the physical package? Well to many people, myself included, that’s a part of it. I pay for a lot of music on CD, because I like having a thing to go with the sound, and enhance my experience of it: but I’m aware that what I’m buying is actually merchandise, like a tee shirt or a keyring. It’s the same as a souvenir concert program. Let me repeat myself: merchandise enhances my experience of the sound.

The valuable thing is the experience: what people pay for is access to the experience. Serious music fans will always pay out for all sorts of things, but the vast majority of people who have paid out for music historically, have done so for the right to control their experience, rather than hoping the song they like will happen to come up on the radio. If you give them the choice, they are never going to pay: and right now, from now on, they have the choice. And there’s Brand’s competing force: it costs nothing to get music, and nothing to share it, not even a cassette.

Owners of large music catalogues are quick to point out, quite reasonably, that just because it’s easy to steal something, doesn’t make it right. So let’s get to the point here (because I’ve gone on long enough, and there’s at least one book in this topic): what they own is the copyright. The right to copy. The right to make and sell a physical package that encodes the recording. The important, valuable thing, the experience, the sound, is something they never owned, never could and never will. You can’t own a sound. It’s absolutely ludicrous to suggest than you can.

From now on, every time anyone looks at my nose I’m going to charge them a fiver. And if they should take a photo of it, I’m going to prosecute them. And I’m going to apply these principles most of all to those that bear me the greatest goodwill. Or perhaps, just maybe, I’ll let everyone look at it, and if the experience is wonderful enough somebody might make a donation to assist with its upkeep.

Morally, if you have devoted your valuable time to making a beautiful work of art, that other people are going to benefit from, you have the right to be the one that gets remunerated (whether you are a person or an organisation). Nobody else should make any money off your work without your permission. But once you publish something, it’s out there: you can’t control it. You can’t decide what (non-commercial) use people will make of it, or who they will share it with; and why would you want to? Surely you want the word to get out: the creation of stars to generate scarcity value used to be the important commercial mechanism: there is still financial value in star making, but there will never be scarcity again.

There’s a spurious similarity between copying a data file and reproducing a wax cylinder, which has confused some parties. To the listener, it’s completely irrelevant: it doesn’t matter to me whether the data from which my audio device constructs a sound resides on a CD, my HD, or someone else’s HD. When there’s no physical package, who cares where it isn’t? Remember that the next time a record company executive accuses you of stealing an imaginary LP.

Of course I want musicians to be well remunerated for their work. But it’s obvious that restricting access to their recordings is not how that’s going to happen. There are a million ways to capitalise on a fanbase: there are a myriad of physical objects a fan will buy, and there are many points at which they might be persuaded to make a donation to an artist, including, but not limited to, the moment at which they download a recording. It is a donation though, not a purchase price: for centuries professional musicians, who unlike painters did not make anything physical, were supported by the patronage of wealthy individuals. Now it’s all about the cloud and the crowd, but the patronage principle remains a sound one: if people love something, they will often be happy to pay just for the knowledge that they have helped to support it, that their contribution helped to make it happen. The mechanical reproduction age is over, and with it a whole raft of ideology. You can’t own a sound: if you disagree, or don’t believe me, that’s fine. Just go ahead and try.

I haven’t paid much attention to the news this week, but there have been some great blog posts full of sound advice for DIY musicians:

http://miccontrol.com/#/micschool/crowdfunded-music-making-it-count/

http://miccontrol.com/#/micschool/the-keys-to-a-successful-house-concert/

http://miccontrol.com/#/micschool/how-to-make-a-multi-camera-live-dvd/

http://www.liveunsigned.com/blog/2011/05/building-your-unsigned-artist-support-network-part-2/

http://www.liveunsigned.com/blog/2011/05/how-to-create-a-music-press-release/

http://www.unsignedbandpromotion.com/band-promotion-blog/2011/05/04/build-a-team-of-online-support-for-your-band/

Reviews: Steve Lawson & The Fierce And The Dead

This post can also be read at http://oliverarditi.com/


Steve Lawson - 11 Reasons Why 3 Is Greater Than Everything (ambient)

Pillow Mountain Records, 2011, DD album, 1h 21m 21s, £TBC

http://music.stevelawson.net/

I review quite a variety of recordings that are experimental, avant-garde, unconventional or just plain uncommercial, and it is often hard to find an appropriate genre tag to put at the top, and to file them under in my collection. Usually the artists are no help at all, and leave ‘genre’ blank in the ID3 tags. It was nice to receive some music from an artist who’s willing to commit himself to a genre: it doesn’t, after all, represent any kind of an obligation, or endorsement of genre boundaries, but just a friendly gesture to the listener, and a willingness to describe the music in terms its potential audience will understand. So if Steve Lawson says this is ambient, that’s good enough for me.

The pieces on this album are indeed highly atmospheric, but don’t let this lead you to believe that ambience is all, or even principally, what the music is about. The principal quality of these tunes, their defining feature, and the central locus of Lawson’s creative effort, is melody. Pretty, haunting, lyrical melody, with a clear debt to jazz, but possessed of a self-confident harmonic simplicity, runs through this album like the plot of a novel. Perhaps it is because he is well established in the live-looping solo bass scene that Lawson feels he has nothing to prove, but the predominant impression is of someone who, as a player and a man, is comfortable in their skin. Musically straightforward, devoid of technical gymnastics (although not without technical accomplishment, as evident in the consistently burnished tone), and not especially challenging to the listener, this is an album with stories to tell, but no axes to grind.

Bass guitars, particularly when processed, are capable of an astonishing variety of sounds, and those with six strings and twenty-four frets have a  range of over four octaves, so it is by no means predictable what a solo bass artist will sound like. Steve Lawson’s method here is predominantly to loop some harmony, either gently kinetic plucking, or arrhythmic pads, and then to improvise melody on top of it. ‘Travelling North’ has a low key percussive element, and ‘Moon Landing On What’ revolves entirely around the manipulation of synth-like sound washes, but the majority of the recordings have a straightforward homophonic texture. There are many and varied manipulations of the instruments’ sound, but these serve to enrich and deepen the atmosphere, rather than drawing attention to themselves.

I’ve had occasion recently to consider carefully the relation between words and music, while reviewing vocal songs: the pieces collected here are articulated entirely through the voice of Lawson’s fretted and fretless bass guitars, but he introduces a verbal, semantic element through his inclusion of detailed and specific sleeve notes. This album, at over eighty minutes in length, will only be available as a download, and the download will include a text file of some sort (my review copy came with a PDF which may or may not be identical to the release notes). For each recording there is a paragraph which sets out the intention behind the title, and effectively tells us what the music means, to Lawson himself, at any rate. It is very interesting to know what he was thinking about at the time that each track was composed/ conceived/ improvised/ assembled; how close the feelings they will engender in their listeners are to the feelings that inspired them is a matter for individual reflection, but as with the lyrics to a song, the short essays Lawson provides constitute an added dimension to the experience of the music. If his creative vision presents any kind of challenge or difficulty, it is a challenge to engage actively with the music, and to relate his explicitly intended meanings to those we bring to, or read into it.

I’ve recently reviewed work from two other solo bass performers, and in both cases it was work that got in your face in a rather more direct way. In the case of Russ Sargeant it is aesthetically challenging music, in that, while pretty on the surface, it engages with some painful emotional subject matter; and with Simon Little, there is a far stronger focus on timbral and textural invention. The ‘sleeve’ notes provide an insight into the reasons for this difference: Lawson, so far as I can discern, seems to be having a deeply satisfying, creative, stimulating and inspiring time. To put it simply, he sounds as happy as a pig in shit.

Even on ‘I Will Fix It Tonight By Dining On Artichokes’, where he explores the cracks between tonal and atonal improvisation, and employs some moderately disruptive processing, there is a sense of the pastoral to his playing: the atmosphere he generates is certainly a long way from being disturbing or difficult. Similarly, in ‘Travelling North’, he employs a fizzing, saturated distortion, that could so easily have sounded heavy, but it sits happily in his warm, consonant harmonies, and sinks without a ripple into his soundworld.

In fact, a sense of the pastoral is something I take from the entire album. The pastoral is a somewhat neglected genre in modern popular music, but perhaps less so in the kind of experimental, solo bass performances that are often (to my great irritation) labeled as ‘new age’. Much of this music functions, to my ear, as a celebration of a relatively static life experience, of the author’s daily bread, rather than their adventures; if there is any disjunct between Lawson’s avowed intentions and my listening experience, it is that I hear rather more melancholy than he ascribes to his work, but there is a very strong sense of place, and of experience. These are the moods of phases of life, like the ebb and flow of the long hot summers of childhood.

The danger of such gently ambient music, with it’s lack of sharp corners, or rhythmic and harmonic tensions, is that it can slip by almost unnoticed. Indeed, the idea of ambient music was initially as much to be an environmental condition as a creative discourse. I rather doubt that Steve Lawson wants anyone to ignore his music, or to relegate it to the status of aural wallpaper, but there is a marked absence of obvious drama or pain in his subject matter, and at times it verges on the anodyne. It is of course any creative person’s right to use their work as an expression of their self, and their lived experience, but audiences like to hear stories, journeys, and the release of tension. Myself, I like diversity, and I find it satisfying to hear music that engages with emotional materials of a less obviously creatively promising nature: the flip side of an audience’s need to hear some kind of dialectic, is that the kind of positive, uncontroversial experiences we value most in our lives are the hardest to give voice to. Any songwriter will tell you how hard it is to write a happy song that doesn’t sound cheesy or sentimental. This music is neither: many listeners will let it waft gently through whatever else they are doing; those that listen closely will be rewarded with insights of a subtler and gentler sort than they may have been expecting.

available May 18

The Fierce And The Dead - If It Carries On Like This We Are Moving To Morecambe (post-rock)

Spencer Park, 2011, CD album, 37m 25s, £7

http://thefierceandthedead.bandcamp.com/album/if-it-carries-on-like-this-we-are-moving-to-morecambe

This album contains, but does not start with, the follow up to TFATD’s initial release, Part 1, an EP consisting of a single eighteen minute track called ‘Part 1’. ‘Part 2’ is only a little over five minutes in length, but it does cram a remarkable amount of dramatic incident into that span. What this band does, to unfairly summarise them, is texture and dynamics: rhythmically they evince a measured, regular propulsiveness, that reminds me of driving, and melodically they are conventionally tonal, though inventive. But their textures are works of careful sonic craftsmanship, and the totality of their sound is so unassumingly engaging that when their arrangements swoop through steep gradients of changing density and volume, the listener is carried along like a twig on a tsunami.

This is instrumental rock, but it is not your daddy’s instrumental rock. Where are the overtly complex stop time passages? Where are the schlong-waggling stratospheric guitar solos? Where is the pointlessly shred-tastic bass solo from a player who has gone ba-dum on the root for the rest of the album? As you can tell, my first exposures to instrumental rock did not impress me much, but at some point in the nineties, some musicians began to get more interested in exploiting neglected areas of the guitar band’s potential soundworlds, laying a stylistic and creative foundation (frequently labelled ‘post-rock’) which TFATD take as a point of departure.

First a word about guitarist Matt Stevens, since his voice is the main source of sonic variety. He’s not a virtuoso: he’s an extremely fine player, but I’d know his sound anywhere. A virtuoso is a player who can play anything, precisely as its composer requires, and can act the part of any player on demand: as soon as Matt plays a single note line, his note choice, his phrasing, and his ethereally light, slow vibrato betray him. In other words, he has personality as a player. He does not, however, have the arrogance to think that his personality alone is enough to carry an LP sized album, and he makes liberal use of his strongest asset, one that has enabled him to record hours of highly listenable music with just an acoustic guitar: his imagination.

The sheer range of approaches and methods to sound production on this album is impressive: there are picked and strummed chords, using sounds that are processed to various degrees (‘The Wait’, ‘Daddies Little Helper’); there are eBowed, or otherwise finagled attack free, arrhythmic soundscapes (‘Hotel No.6’); there is distorted tremolo thrashing, as in the crescendo of ‘H.R.’, and semi-random atonal insanity in ‘Landcrab’ that reminds me of Gregg Ginn (of Black Flag). While Stevens messes about, Kev Feazey (bass) and Stuart Marshall (drums) steer a path that is necessarily exact and rectilinear, but not without its own moments of frothing intensity, as in the noise-rock riot that is ‘Landcrab’. Here Marshall eschews fills and rolls in favour of clattering trills and flams that lift his beat into jackhammer territory, while Feazey uses the kind of clanking, overdriven sound that used to require a Rickenbacker in the days before digital processing. Contrast this with the incredible subtlety of Marshall’s involvement in ‘Hotel No.6’ (and Feazey’s absence).

The way I’m going on, you’d think this was an electric Matt Stevens album, and that Feazey and Marshall were his sidemen. In fact, the album sounds very much like a band album: the rhythm section is more than a supporting character. This is mature, multi-faceted music, and there is a lot more to it than a succession of textures and dynamic levels. Compositionally, that regular, rectilinear bass and drums sound structures these pieces overtly, like the external girders and service ducts of High-tech architecture. They almost seem to say: ‘here’s the music. That Matt Stevens is going to decorate it.’

These two supremely solid and locked-in players do not play fills: I don’t think I can recall a single outbreak of engine room lyricism anywhere on the whole album. I can’t speak from personal experience of the drums, but unless you are a bass player you have no clue how difficult that is for Kev Feazey! What they do is deeply expressive, nevertheless, in the way that they work with rhythmic stress patterns: they do this in a way to develop forward motion, certainly (and this album is hugely kinetic), but also to build tension, utilising the subtlest of syncopations and note length variations to establish expectations and atmospheric directions. They provide an object lesson in how to put meaningful content into simple, functional musical structures, without resorting to technical showmanship.

On two tracks the three core members of TFATD are joined by saxophonist Terry Edwards, who has played for Lydia Lunch and Nick Cave, among other notables, and who seems to be a fellow traveller, aesthetically. On the predominantly gentle ‘Daddies Little Helper’ he focusses on manipulating his tone, and on making simple, pleasing note choices. He also picks up very effectively on the angularity of the rhythm section, and trades funny noises with Stevens in the final section, giving the album its sole moment of recognisable humour (other than its title). On ‘Andy Fox’ he builds slowly, with the track, until he is honking, squawking, frantically trilling and generally going mental, until he seemingly runs out of breath, and the tune expends itself in a gentle wash of harmonic colour, which fades away, and with it the album.

This album sounds very much a part of the same creative project as their first release, from January 2010. It has a similarly dramatic, cinematic quality, and although it is broken into short tracks, it has that same epic sense of journey. For a relatively avant-garde, creatively uncompromising piece of work, If It Carries On Like This We Are Moving To Morecambe is a strikingly entertaining listen. Its emotional tenor is not of the jolliest, with a tense, ominous and melancholy atmosphere, relieved by moments of cathartic, angry thrashing, but there is such a strong sense of narrative that the effect is not harrowing, so much as moving. I hope this band receives some recognition, because this kind of intelligent, soulful, undiluted creativity deserves exposure, and could teach a few vocal guitar bands a thing or two about arranging.

available May 16

Review: EPs from Yonks, Pirate & Cobie, and Simon Little

This post can also be read at http://oliverarditi.com/


Yonks - Yonks Marluk (electronica/ ambient)

Spencer Park, 2011, DD EP, 11m 54s, £name your price

http://yonks.bandcamp.com/album/yonks-marluk

This is the second release from Yonks, hence the name. What do you mean you don’t know what marluk means? It means ‘two’ in no less than three languages. Admittedly they’re only spoken in Greenland, but still.

The guitar plus electronics duo continue to plough their distinctive and highly listenable furrow, with three more tracks of (I think) highly processed guitar and programmed beats. There are bits that are clearly guitar, and bits that are clearly percussion: there also many bits that could have been made by any of a number of means. Sonic invention is central to this project, but never in a way that is abrasive or overly dissonant: even quite aggressively angular interventions of distorted guitar are subsumed into the broader atmosphere, which is one of slightly eerie, spatial suspension. There is melody, and even a kicking beat (on ‘Yonks 7’), but the emphasis is always on texture, on a succession of mad sounds going off in your ear, organised to express a relaxed but witty, cool and slightly loopy aesthetic.

I don’t know what Lextrical sounds like alone, but the other half of the project, Matt Stevens, has a distinctive voice as a guitarist, which comes through very clearly, despite the dissimilarity from his work under his own name or with The Fierce And The Dead. This is a Good Thing, because he’s a fine player. These three tracks are a gentle feast of creativity, floaty atmosphere and varied texture: an excellent concept, beautifully realised.

Pirate & Cobie - Pirate & Cobie (indie-rock)

self released, 2011, DD EP, 8m 57s, £free

http://piratecobie.bandcamp.com/

Bass, guitar, drums, singing; these are well used ingredients, so for a band to stand out it needs to use them with a bit of imagination. Pirate & Cobie are in indie-rock territory, and that shapes their approach to a degree, but they give the impression of being there because it’s the music they love, not just because there’s a big audience for it, and they are quite highly creative in several ways.

Firstly, and most evidently, they have a taste for electronic sounds, and a good understanding of how to put them at the service of a song – all too often songs are made to serve electronics, because many producers only know how to make dance tracks. Here they are used like any other instrumental texture and slot in seamlessly to the arrangements, evincing a good bit of careful tweaking. Secondly, they would clearly like to avoid being formulaic, even if they are relatively conventional stylistically: devices such as ending a track abruptly mid play-out, as they do in ‘Not Here’, or their flexible approach to song structure, are evidence of a creative thought process that extends to every aspect of their work.

The real question for a band like this, is whether the songs are any good. Do they combine, lyric, melody, harmony, groove, texture and performance in a way that makes the listener feel something valuable just happened to them? Well, I have to hold up my hands and admit that this isn’t the sort of thing I tend to get very excited about, but the answer is yes. What they do is well worth doing, and they do it very well.

Simon Little - Rejectamenta (ambient/ jazz)

self released, 2011, DD EP, 21m 28s, £name your price

http://music.simonlittlebass.com/album/rejectamenta-ep

This is a five track collection of material Simon Little elected not to include on his forthcoming second album. These decisions were not made because the tunes didn’t make the grade, but because he felt they weren’t a good fit: they are, however, a good fit with each other, and represent a convincing development of his work on Mandala.

Like Mandala, Rejectamenta features ambient soundscapes that Little accretes by layering looped sequences of sound he generates with his bass guitar and a variety of effects; a bass guitar is capable of making a huge range of noises, and very little of this sounds like bass per se, although some tunes do have basslines in the conventional sense. Most also feature Little’s mid to upper register melodic improvisation.

The upper register work here sounds to my ear like a significant advance on the earlier album: it is full of meaningful melodic content, and is frankly less noodly. Little’s rapid fire soloing on his first release sounded great, but functioned essentially as a texture: here, even when he puts his foot on the gas, he has something to say. It is predominantly in a minor modal or pentatonic vein, and it would be good to hear him venture into spicier territory at times, but there are some interesting ideas, such as the very folky cast his melody adopts on ‘must get out [more]’.

Texturally and timbrally he is consistently inventive, and shows a good command of his technological resources: particularly effective are the fifths effect in the lead part of the aforementioned track, and the slapped ring-modulator sound in ‘the rhythmatist’. If this is the stuff he rejected, I can’t wait to hear his next release!

Monday Musings: Is The Meaning In The Lyrics Or The Music? and my weekly news roundup

This post can also be read at http://oliverarditi.com/

The critic has a muffin.

A few of the recordings I’ve reviewed lately have challenged me to think about the relationship between words and music, and the location of meanings in vocal songs. I’ve never shied away from discussing music with a lyric in a language I don’t understand, but I’m always aware that I’m missing out on a whole heap of possible interpretations. I listen to a lot of instrumental stuff, so it’s easy enough to find meaning and value (or its absence) in foreign language songs, but clearly, when the lyrics are in English, I need to consider them carefully.

I try to take my cues from the artist when I decide how much attention to pay to the lyrics: if they consider them sufficiently important to print them on the inlay, or post them on their website, I take them as being central to the work, and make sure I read them in full. I rarely go to the trouble of working out what every word is if the artist hasn’t bothered to tell me, but I still try to pay some attention, and often form my understanding of the creative intention from whatever snippets of verbal language I pick up on. If time wasn’t an issue, I might write them all out, but to be honest, I’d probably transcribe the instrumental parts first.

The crucial point in all this is to be aware that a song is not a piece of instrumental music with some poetry attached to it. There have been some sublime, genius songs (I’m thinking of Bob Dylan) where either component taken in isolation would be pedestrian or incoherent, but the way in which they work together generates meanings not expressed in one or the other. There are rhetorical tropes that can be used, such as irony; The Rolling Stones’ ‘Dead Flowers’ features a dark lyric and an upbeat, jaunty performance, but even where the lyrical and musical meanings are in apparently total concordance, there’s still more to it.

We have an idea of music as a ‘thing’, a specific kind of activity, which shapes sounds to generate meaning in relation to other sounds. It is easy to forget that this ‘thing’ is a culturally specific idea, rather than something with an independent, objective existence. In some other cultures there is no concept of music, although activities that we would identify as such are common in all societies. Humans everywhere organise sound, phonetically, tonally, rhythmically or timbrally, for many different reasons, aesthetic, semantic, spiritual, ritual and others. We are used to a phonetic-semantic, and a tonal-aesthetic emphasis in the Western world, but Indian classical musics, for instance, emphasise a rhythmic-phonetic-aesthetic system, among others, and Chinese languages have a phonetic-tonal structure. In many cases non-semantic uses of sound (i.e. ‘music’) are not conceived of as activities in their own right, but as components in a broader ritual or communal practice, and there is no word for it. In flamenco there is no traditional sense that cante (singing), toque (guitar playing) and baile (dance) are separate, independent activities: the palo (genre) and compás (rhythm)are articulated by all participants equally, and while the singer is considered central, the meanings of the performance are in the totality of the ensemble.

Similarly, we have a thing called ‘song’, which exists at the conjunction of two other concepts called ‘music’ and ‘verse’: the fact that these other ideas have a high status in our culture, while ‘song’ is thought to be a subset of ‘music’, has served to muddy things when we think and talk about the meanings of songs. The usual issue is that writers (especially rock critics) think they can talk about the meanings of songs by analysing the lyric, and then discussing how the music supports the lyrical meanings. This is a fallacy: when we address a song, we need to prise its meanings out of the crack between these two components. A song’s meaning can never be paraphrased, because it is both verbal and experiential.

So as usual I’ve sketched out some complex ideas that can’t possibly be done justice here, but I’ve been thinking about this stuff, and the above is, roughly, what I’ve been thinking about it. If anybody reading this is crazy enough to want to open up some debate, I’d love to read your comments. And now for something completely different.

http://thesunbreak.com/2011/04/26/white-punk-on-hope-an-interview-with-crasss-steve-ignorant/

This is an in-depth interview with a properly principled and creative punk musician.

http://music3point0.blogspot.com/2011/04/myth-of-streaming-royalties.html

Streaming subscription services: if you’re a musician, don’t ever expect to see any money from them.

http://thenjunderground.com/blog/2011/4/27/bon-jovi-to-open-pay-what-you-want-restaurant-in-red-bank.html

Jon Bon Jovi is opening a pay-what-you-want restaurant. Commendable, but kind of ironic bearing in mind some of the things he’s said about new models in music distribution.

http://blog.fatdrop.co.uk/How-does-A-and-R-work-in-the-internet-era

I’ve said and read quite a lot about the social media era from the musician’s perspective: here’s an interesting insight into how it looks from the labels’ side of things.

http://www.poly-styrene.com/

This is the week’s main news for me. RIP to a great, creative original.

Reviews: Caustic and Bing Ji Ling

This post can also be read at http://oliverarditi.com/


Review: Caustic - The Golden Vagina Of Fame And Profit (electro-industrial)

L-Tracks Music LT 007, 2011, CD album, 42m 46s, €14

http://www.tellmeaboutmyuterus.com/

The difference between the electro-industrial and powernoize genres can sometimes be no more than the degree of distortion involved. Much of this album’s beats and song structures could have sat quite happily on Matt Fanales previous Caustic release ...And You Will Know Me By The Trail Of Vomit, but they have largely been constructed with cleaner, tighter, less brutally devastating sounds. There is distortion, sure (if it’s even valid to talk about an entirely synthetic sound being distorted), and some tunes are still on the powernoize side of the fence, but it’s mostly a bit of spice, a dash of aural vodka stiffening and thickening the mix, rather than its defining feature.

Trail Of Vomit has plenty of tunes that deliver on the dancefloor, but they weren’t aimed at it quite as precisely as the contents of the latest release. Fanale has taken his production work to the next level in terms of making highly focussed, irresistibly thunderous beats, although to my ear its been at the expense of some dynamic range, and some of his creative individuality.

The electro-industrial scene has developed methods and expectations in the last ten years, ones that most listeners and producers are plugged into: in terms of generating immense, floor-filling beats, technical standards have undeniably risen. Creativity on the other hand has taken a back seat: it can be hard to distinguish one act from another, and in fact, one tune can often be distinguished from another solely by the samples it employs. Despite this (or because of it) practitioners of the style have hyped their status as auteurs to comical levels, and often give the impression of having bought into the scene’s stylistic tropes, as though they think they are really vampires, demons, serial killers or commanders of intergalactic warships. Caustic has made a career out of poking holes in all this, using his powerful, snarling vocal delivery and brain-crushing beats to bring us the humour that is often all too lacking in industrial music.

So the crucial question with this album is this: has he effectively continued in this mission with this latest, more commercial, club-orientated release? And if not, what’s he doing instead? Has he compromised on his creative integrity, or just chosen a different avenue for it?

Well, I have to say that a big part of the humour in his earlier work was, for me, the sheer frothing insanity of it, and by taming things somewhat, he steps back from his role as the music’s court jester. The tunes in which his vocal is prominent, such as ‘666 On The Crucifix’ or ‘Hiroshima Burn’ still sound very much like Caustic, but some of the others sound frankly generic. There are also some brilliantly murderous beats, as on ‘Carpe Rectum’ and ‘Darling Nicky’s Gnarly Dicking’, but I don’t feel either track benefits greatly from the slicker production and mastering.

There are four collaborations on the album: ‘White Knuckle Head Fuck’, which features Faderhead, has a classic Faderhead synth riff, and really sounds like a Faderhead tune with Caustic on guest vocals. It’s a fierce electro-industrial clubtrack, but it doesn’t sound very Caustic. ‘Churn The Waters’ is a superb track, and mainly so for the guest vocal from Ned Kirby of Stromkern, which takes the form of a rap that verges on nerdcore in its delivery. ‘Generate Chaos’ features Bitch Brigade, although it’s hard to say in what measure: it’s a stonking beat regardless. Unwoman is a very interesting and creative musician, and I was intrigued to hear what her collaboration with Caustic would sound like: sadly it’s the weakest track on the album, with a pedestrian melody and an undistinguished beat.

Don’t get me wrong: this album is going to be on heavy rotation at Chateau Arditi for a good while. It’s full of juicy, saturated basses and jackhammer kicks, superb samples, insane vocals and beats that brook no standing still. As long as you remember to crank up the volume, it will always be a good listen. DJs will love this record, and Caustic is certain to get more club play than ever before. But to me, this sounds a lot more like other electro-industrial producers’ output, where earlier Caustic was unmistakeably, wonderfully unhinged.

Review: Bing Ji Ling - Shadow To Shine (funk/ soul)

Tummy Touch Records TUCH2025, 2011, CD album, 38m 34s, £6.99

http://tummytouch.greedbag.com/

This is a record drenched in the seventies, literally dripping with honeyed, soulful, in-your-face, grinning disco lurve. I mean, look at the cover. Quinn Luke is a man who lives his creative convictions (or knows exactly how to give his audience the impression that he does).

These songs are full of that wonderful fusion of the sexual and the spiritual that defined the best of the disco era: ‘when I get you alone here’s what I’m gon’ do/ gon’ love all your outsides and your insides too’ he sings in ‘Hypnotized’. Bing Ji Ling has embraced the aesthetic of the cheesy, and confronts us with the uncomfortable truth that we only think it’s cheesy because we are afraid to admit publicly to feeling the things he gives voice to. Like his illustrious predecessors (Barry White, Earth Wind And Fire, Tower Of Power, Al Green, and many more seventies soul and disco lyricists and performers) Luke doesn’t set out to write a specific, analytical description of a relationship, but deals in universals, most notably the positive vibes of deep sexual love, or the sadness of its termination. If he was writing poems or novels it would be empty sentimentality, but this is music, and he has an impressive command of melody and harmony to add depth and nuance to his message.

Does that sound like I’m asking you to re-evaluate disco and seventies soul and find them creatively profound? I hope so, because you should. While much music of that era did indeed peddle empty sentimentality, there was also a great deal that touched something more significant, with its total disregard for coolness, its unmediated joyfulness, and its unrestrained outpouring of positive emotional generosity. This was the era in which peace and love hit the mainstream of black American music, and it left a legacy that has been almost unfeasibly influential, although few artists have had the courage to revisit it in the round as Bing Ji Ling has on this recording. Peace and love is a controversial message: it says ‘fuck you’ to many of the vested interests in our society and economy, and since it proved impossible to stamp out in the late sixties, the cultural mainstream has spared little effort to co-opt and de-radicalise it. Bing Ji Ling reinvests it with meaning, because he makes it unmistakeably clear that he believes in it.

These ten songs are filled with dreamy sunshine and mellow groove, that I anticipate forming a core component of my personal soundtrack this summer. Relaxed but tightly locked-in rhythm section feels are festooned with an array of expertly crafted sonic raiment, from predictably funky, clean guitar, swooping strings and idiomatic brass and woodwind arrangements, to psychedelically burnished noise. On ‘Hold Tight’ there is so much grit on the Hammond organ that the tone wheels sound like grindstones spinning, and ‘Bye Bye’ is dominated by a fuzzed out guitar more reminiscent of ’69 than ’74; but still, both songs are shimmering waterfalls of sincere, groovy soul.

The musicianship throughout this album is top notch, with a fantastic feel and developed technique: Luke himself is an excellent guitarist and vocalist, but he is too much of an all round musician to let those skills become the focus of the album, which is never about the playing, but always about the groove and the vibe. There’s really nothing bad I can think of to say about this recording: it won’t be to everyone’s taste, but for those that can listen to it without their cheese alarm ringing, it’s a slice of irresistible summery joy.

Reviews: Eleanor Williams & Tim Oehlers

This post can also be read at http://oliverarditi.com/


Eleanor Williams - Orange Peel And Paper (acoustic/ singer-songwriter)

Naplew Productions, 2010, DD album, 29m 8s, £name your price

(all proceeds donated to the charity Women’s Aid)

http://m-s-b.bandcamp.com/album/orange-peel-and-paper

I’ve been lucky enough a few times recently to find myself reviewing music that’s motivated by a creative generosity. This is not to say that it involves any expectation of gratitude, but simply that it is presented with total honesty, and a pleasing absence of defensive posing. Eleanor Williams, in her cover art, sits upright, leaning slightly forward, with an open stance that conveys precisely the openness and directness of her music.

In the performances recorded here Williams’ most notable strength is her singing. She is possessed of a voice that ranges from an ethereal fragility, to a resonant strength, with an impressively secure intonation that sees her around some nice ornaments and melismas, and a deeply musical sense of phrasing. Whether performing her own material, or the two Arlen/ Harburg showtunes, ‘It’s Only A Paper Moon’ and ‘If I Only Had A Brain’, she is a thoughtful vocalist, with the understanding and the resources to unify the lyrical and musical texts into a single self-supporting utterance.

As a lyricist she actually bears a certain passing resemblance to the aforementioned Yip Harburg, using wit and playfulness to say things that are frequently profound, without ever imposing her meanings on the listener. Of course Williams is not working in a high stakes commercial environment, which frees her to address her meanings more directly than Harburg, a committed socialist, could when writing the book for The Wizard Of Oz. Stylistically Williams’ own work hovers somewhere between the tonal-chromatic soundworld of the showtune and the modal-diatonic territory of folksong.

The principal accompanimental voice is Williams’ ukulele, but she is joined on a variety of instruments by the ever creative Marley Starskey Butler (whose Sagan Lane project I reviewed recently). The arrangements are mainly simple, with additional parts that do not intrude on the intimate relationship between Williams’ hands on the strings and her vocal cords, but they are highly imaginative, and make as much use of ambient or environmental sounds as they do of conventional harmonic or rhythmic reinforcement.

The album opens with a snippet of conversation and noodling, to position the listener in the session, and immediately destroys the usual separation and distance between performer and audience: obviously, we can’t join the conversation directly, but it feels as though we are invited to, particularly as the opening song is so informal. That engagement continues right through to the end of the epic folksong that closes the album.

This is a very unassuming album. It reads very much like someone playing for their own pleasure: it is chamber rather than stage music, and is ‘amateur’ in the truest sense of the word. But I say it ‘reads’ that way rather than it ‘sounds’ that way, because it is delivered with a great deal of musical skill that is anything but amateurish. I’ve already spoken about the vocal performances, but the instrumental work delivers simple parts played with relaxed precision and a sweet tone. Everything is well suited to its role in the proceedings, doing just enough and no more. The music has an under-the-radar quality, smuggling its accomplishment past the listener’s snoozing faculties. Should you choose to pay it the attention it deserves, but never demands, you’ll find a lot of attention to detail, some lovely melodies, crafty, oblique lyrics, and a warm buoyancy that provokes thought and pleasure in equal measure.

Tim Oehlers - Guitarisms (acoustic/ improvisation)

Bro Tee, 2011, CD album, 34m 31s, $8

http://timoehlers.net/

It is a common axiom that you should never judge a book by its cover: I don’t know what Tim Oehlers’ earlier recordings sound like, but the discography page on his website shows the covers of five previous albums, and they all look pretty amateurish. Either represented by sub-professional pencil drawings or slightly dodgy Photoshop work, these recordings are not sold to me effectively. There’s nothing about the way they look that makes me want to hear them; and then there’s Guitarisms.

This bold, confidently gestural and slightly glitchy visual design seems to represent in a very appropriate way the sounds it promotes: even the title perfectly evokes the assembly of phrases that the album contains, and with it’s echo of ‘truisms’, its creative intentions, if I read them right. Contrast this with Lucky Brother or Low Profile, as two earlier works are titled, and it seems that in his presentation at least, Oehlers has arrived at a new place of focussed coherence. So while I doubt very much whether the other recordings sound remotely as bad as they look, judging this one by its cover is not a bad thing to do.

All of the recordings on Guitarisms were freely improvised in a single three hour session, and although they have been edited and mastered, there is a great sense of spontaneity and enquiry to them. There is furthermore, and to my mind more importantly, a specificity to them: they represent the impression of this particular (highly individual) musician, in a specific place, at a specific time, and of all the unpredictable aleatory processes that came together in him in that moment. On his MySpace, but, curiously, not on the website linked to above, Oehlers is very clear about his religious convictions, describing himself as a ‘Christian guitarist/composer/recording artist/teacher’: although I don’t share his beliefs, I can certainly hear the spiritual in his work, the sense of music using him as a channel. The idea of the specific and unique human self is important to this album, or at least to my understanding of it, both conceptually and sonically.

‘Free improvisation’, a term Oehlers applies to his own work, is a pretty nebulous term. It has been used to describe a great variety of approaches to music, in which freedom has been sought from a great variety of constraints. It is common for free improvisers to seek freedom from tonality and metronomic time: some have gone to great lengths to avoid the use of any received musical structures, seeing some form of ‘originality’ or novelty as the acme of creativity. Others have simply felt the freedom to depart from tonality or strict tempo when the muse moves them to do so. Yet others have sought to disrupt a received vocabulary with sonic gestures usually considered extramusical, such as scrapes and knocks on their instruments, environmental noises or other interventions.

Tim Oehlers is satisfied mainly to escape the constraints of musical structure, but the building blocks of harmony, melody, rhythm, timbre and an acoustic guitar phraseology (or to put it another way, ‘guitarisms’) are the very things he wants to be free to work with. This makes his album as accessible as it is possible for free improvisation to be, with its combination of a mainly uncontroversial vocabulary and a predominantly gentle and welcoming mood. Some disruptive elements were introduced at the editing stage, in the form of some abrupt and unexpected silences, that stop the musical thought in mid flow for several seconds, before it continues relatively unperturbed. What his intention is with these interventions is ambiguous, but the effect is certainly to provoke thought, and to render the listener’s engagement with the music more serious, because it becomes more difficult. Perhaps he’s asking us to stop letting it all drift by and pay some attention, because easy to listen to as this music may be, it would do it a profound disservice to treat it as easy listening.

The eight pieces collected in Guitarisms consist of statements of simple melody and harmonies that are mainly in a minor and chromatic vein; the vocabulary is hard to define stylistically, although there are occasional elements of blues, but could fall under the broadest rubric of the term ‘folk guitar’. For the most part the rhythms are consistent and ongoing, with rubato passages or tempo changes occurring for clear reasons in relation to the melodic narrative, and although he goes where his ears lead him harmonically, Oehlers eschews any jarringly extreme changes of direction. Indeed, one of the areas he explores throughout is voice leading, an approach that depends on a relatively stable tonal or modal context. There are minor uses of aleatory elements, string noises, environmental sounds and so forth, but this is a player content to restrict himself largely to the mainstream range of the sounds that an acoustic guitar can make. There are, after all, infinite possibilities within a far smaller scope than he employs, and you don’t get any sense that he is banging against the edges or running out of territories to explore.

The willing, sympathetic listener will find that Oehlers does not abuse their trust, but takes them on a journey through a fertile, though far from febrile, melodic and harmonic imagination: this album is a contemplative, pastoral meditation, a courageous artistic endeavour, and a very rewarding, meaningful musical experience. There’s a moment in ‘Feace’ where Oehlers’ voice rises unbidden in the back of his throat to support his guitar melody, before it dies away again, but once you’ve heard it, you can hear it everywhere. He’s singing out his musical meanings with more than just his guitar, and it is well worth the effort of listening hard enough to hear them.