Category: music

  • Autechre, Artist in Residence

    Autechre, Artist in Residence

    Thoroughly enjoyed an absorbing Radio 6 mix by Autechre (the first of four!) which was almost all new to me and has provided a wealth of music and musicians to follow up – particularly the startling hip hop tracks. The show is described as:

    Step into the genre-bending world of Autechre, the legendary duo whose sonic soundscapes have redefined electronic music for over three decades. In this BBC 6 Music Artist in Residence special, Autechre present 4 electrifying mixes that navigate through rhythm, texture, and emotion. Blending bold beats, futuristic sound design, and hypnotic atmospheres these extraordinary hour long programmes showcase why Autechre are one of electronic music’s most groundbreaking and influential duos.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0025lnd

    Tracklist:

    1. noxin – Everything Was An Offer
    2. Alexander Panos – Q Windswept
    3. Alexander Panos – Cycles
    4. 96 Back – Y I’m Here
    5. kel.audio – A procession of bells
    6. Elucid – Spellling
    7. Roc Marciano – Floxxx
    8. Vektroid – Hard Toys
    9. Earl Sweatshirt – Lobby (int)
    10. neotenomie – california dream homes
    11. ShrapKnel – Cold Burn (feat. Curly Castro & PremRock)
    12. ANKHLEJOHN – How To Hack A Tesla
    13. Pink Floyd – Echoes (Live At Pompeii)
    14. billy woods – Windhoek (feat. Mach-Hommy)
    15. Body Bag Ben – Set The Stage
    16. Kool Keith – They On To Us (feat. Del the Funky Homosapien & Q-Shy)
    17. Space Afrika & Blackhaine – B£E (feat. Blackhaine)
    18. Tuxedomoon – 7 Years
    19. eLZhi – Trick Dice
    20. Portion Control – Micro Box

    u/Sylphynford has a download of the show .

  • Hüsker Dü Live

    Spent a couple of hours today listening to some of the live recordings of Hüsker Dü that can be found on the Internet Archive. It’s a mixed bag: some pretty good ones that sound as if recorded at the mixing desk, while others are just muffled noise with the occasionally recognisable vocal. I can understand why the recordings were hard to do. Hüsker Dü were pretty noisy in performance (reviewers frequently referred to their sound as a “sonic wall”.

    Most interesting is a recording of the band’s final performance at The Blue Note on 11th December 1987. It’s noisy and uneven – but wonderfully wild. From my understanding, it was immediately following this gig that Bob Mould cancelled their remaining shows and the band was no more. So it’s a real piece of music history – even if the recording is pretty awful.

    I’m not sure why I’m listening to Bob Mould and Hüsker Dü again so much. Perhaps my dominant mood at the moment is one of ferocious roaring.

     

  • Love in Constant Spectacle, Jane Weaver

    Have been listening to Jane Weaver’s Love in Constant Spectacle for a couple of weeks now. Such a carefully constructed, intimate and gentle album which builds a fragile melancholic voice over dreamy motorik beats.

    Weaver’s gentle psychedelic pastoralism (which is the best way I think I can describe it) is something I find incredibly appealing in the same way as I enjoy late 60s poppy-psychedelia (The United States of America), the tail-end of 1970s acid-folk or, more recently, a seminal band like Broadcast. Somehow I’d not heard of Weaver before so listening to her previous albums over a 20-year career is also proving to be an absolute joy.

    Tracks I particularly like: Perfect Storm, Emotional Components, Love in Constant Spectacle, Motif, Romantic Worlds – though need to say that there’s not a song on this album that I don’t think is great.

  • Bob Mould, Hüsker Dü, Sugar

    It must be the general mood I’m in at the moment but among the albums I’ve been sorting through in my never-ending organisation of my music library have been (last week) Hüsker Dü and (today) Bob Mould and Sugar. I originally got into Hüsker Dü back in in my teens in the 1980s when I saw their album Warehouse: Songs and Stories (so that must have made it 1987 when I was living in London). As I got hold of their earlier albums – Zen Arcade, New Day Rising and Candy Apple Grey – to my dismay I found that the band had split up. I remember seeing a copy of Melody Maker or NME not long after that with Bob Mould in a series of atmospheric black and white photographs promoting his new solo album, Workbook. The photos had that late 1980s/early 1990s styling that I found pretty influential at the time: a moody, austere Victoriana that evokes a sense of melancholic nostalgia for the present.

    Workbook was an album that had a tremendous impact on me and I’ve been a fan of Mould’s ever since, finding that I seem to reflect the emotional journey he’s been charting in his music (albeit about 10 years later). Equally, Mould’s post-Hüsker Dü band, Sugar, has been on my playlists for – wow! – 25+ years. I remember being in a party in the back of a house watching a drunken guy jumping over a fire in the garden when I heard Changes for the first time. In my head these are fresh albums that only just seem to have been recently released. As Mould sings in Compositions for the Young and Old: “Things used to be so simple, long time ago / Now everything is so expensive and complicated”. And, as Mould ends the same song:

    I hear the weatherman

    He says “it looks like rain for a while

    I guess I’ll have to stay inside

    Make peanut butter sandwiches and cry.

  • Rock Bottom, Robert Wyatt

    My attention in music recently has shifted again towards the early 1970s to the post-psychedelic stuff produced by musicians loosely grouped as the Canterbury Scene. My tastes in pyschedelia have always been in the slightly-folksy English pastoral strain which has brought me via Soft Machine and Matching Mole to Robert Wyatt’s stunning 1974 album, Rock Bottom.

    Once you know a little about Wyatt’s life and that, in 1973 at the age of 28 he fell out of a window drunk and broke his back leaving him permanently paralysed from the waist down, it’s difficult to listen to Rock Bottom without hearing the album as issuing from that life-altering moment (although much of it had been composed before the accident).

    It’s both incredibly beautiful and awfully saddening. Dave Gilmour said of Wyatt: “He has one of those voices which just tear at your soul. He really does have a voice which endears itself to you and tugs at the heartstrings.” And, indeed, I find Rock Bottom a sobering listen one that seems find some kind of resolution in despair. The opening track, Sea Song is a haunting as a song can get.

    Rock Bottom seems to me to be about loss and hope. It really is a wonderful album.

    [su_youtube url=”https://youtu.be/Y1Wss9RHi_Q”]

  • Tom Tom Club, 1981

    I’ve been listening to a LOT of Talking Heads lately and – while I was listening to Genius of Love performed on the live album of Stop Making Sense – realised that I’ve never really listened to the Chis Frantz and Tina Weymouth side-project, Tom Tom Club. Got to say that the first eponymously-titled first album is great. It has a joyous, uplifting vibe that I’ve absolutely enjoyed over the last few days. And it’s from 1981! These sort of things don’t seem 40+ years old to me.

    [FIFU]

    Tom Tom Club album cover

  • Three, Four Tet

    Three, Four Tet

    “It’s got enough heart that we won’t accuse it of going through the motions, yet if that was all you ever asked from Four Tet, this is surely a dream come true,” says the reviewer on Sputnikmusic of Four Tet’s new album, Four, in a rather passive-aggressive review that calls the album “solid” and declares ” its impact is too modest and its aptitude for mood music too diffuse”. I disagree. As much as I rate 2020’s Sixteen Oceans, I think this is a deceptively better one (though I’ve read that Four Tet’s Alexandria Palace live album from last year is really good). Philip Sherberne on Pitchfork thinks it’s pretty decent: “There’s much more here than meets the ear: interruptions you never see coming, intimations of sounds in the depths of the mix you can’t quite make out. That’s what separates Three from the merely chill; it takes a master craftsperson’s skill to create music that scans so simply on the surface but then opens up to reveal hidden rooms within hidden rooms”.

    So far, my favourite track is Daydream Repeat (possibly followed by 31 Bloom – the whole album more or less works as a single piece so it’s hard to decide!).

  • Gallagher & Squire

    Gallagher & Squire

    Eventually listened through Liam Gallager John Squire, the new album by.. er… Liam Gallagher and John Squire. Alexis Petridis claims: “it’s a noticeably better album than anything in Gallagher’s post-Oasis oeuvre, and indeed anything Squire has released since leaving the Stone Roses in 1996. The songwriting is melodically stronger and the performances more vibrant, with a pronounced sense that both parties are sparking off each others’ company.” Kitty Power says: “it refuses to disappoint the faithful of both bands while offering an often intriguing rearranging of the Roses/Oasis DNA”. I’m not so sure. It’s definitely got a mid/late-sixties slight psychedelic edge and isn’t offensive – especially on tracks like Just Another Rainbow and I’m So Bored. Liam does a sterling job of imitating Ian Brown, whose spectre hangs over the whole album (and to be honest, I’d probably enjoyed it far more with Brown’s vocals). Despite that, it is what Oasis/Stone Roses fans probably wanted. The cover shows a pile of commodities with the song titles as labels. You get what it says on the cover: an album by Gallagher and Squire. It’s ok but nothing special.

  • Philip Glass Solo

    Philip Glass Solo

    There’s already a great deal of Philip Glass in my music collection but I couldn’t resist listening to this latest album, Philip Glass Solo – though it was Luis Alverez Roure’s striking portrait of Glass that caught my attention. I first listened to Glass in the 1980s when I bought a copy of Glassworks on CD from Our Price, finding it both challenging in terms of what I expected from “classical” music as a teenager and beguiling for the strange, circling musical pattens that I found almost hypnotic (plus I also was attracted to the album cover which seemed to me to capture the styling of the time). I have distinct memories of sitting in my bedroom in my childhood home listening to the album in summertime. In the mid-1990s, Kronos Quartet Plays Philip GlassString Quartets 3-5 – (and the growth of the internet, of course) became the mechanism for me to listen to more and Einstein on the Beach, which I continue to find utterly compelling. There was a time when I worked in Canterbury that I’d listen to a playlist of Glass’ when I’d get into work early in the morning.

    Philip Glass Solo are 7 (mostly) short pieces played by the composer himself at home on piano during the lockdown. Glass says:

    This record is both a time capsule of 2021, and a reflection on decades of composition and practice. In other words, a document on my current thinking about the music. There is also the question of place. This is my piano, the instrument on which most of the music was written. It’s also the same room where I have worked for decades in the middle of the energy which New York City itself has brought to me. The listener may hear the quiet hum of New York in the background or feel the influence of time and memory that this space affords. To the degree possible, I made this record to invite the listener in.

    It’s a gentle album of well-known pieces which seem to me to be quieter, pensive, more intimate – maybe less large-scale atmospheric – than other recordings I’ve listened to. You get the impression of the 87 year-old composer sat alone at his piano playing with grace and poised craftmanship. Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of unfamiliar, mainly electronic and experimental music, and it’s been lovely to listen to music a little more contemplative and – dare I say – nostalgic.

  • Future Days, Can

    Future Days, Can

    The latest episode of BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking arts programme features a showcase of Can’s third album, Future Days. The programme is an enjoyable (and informative), presenting Can’s album in the context of post-Sixties Germany and of the original line-up of the band.

    I’m not sure why the programme chose Can’s third album rather than the more directly groundbreaking Tago Mago (or even all first three). In the programme, host Matthew Sweet describes Future Days as “ambient” and different from the preceding and susequent albums. Singer Damo Sazuki left the band after the album’s release in 1973 and his recent death might have contributed to the album choice. Future Days has certainly risen in the estimation of the critics over the last 50 years (Wow! It’s over fifty years old!). There’s a good write-up about the album from 2005 on Pop Matters (from which I learned that the album was recorded straight onto a 2-track machine).

    The radio programme prompted me to listen to Future Days again and I’m struck by its gentleness and optimism – as well as how short the album is: four tracks of around 40 minutes in total (Side A has three tracks; Side B is a meandering single track of nearly 20 minutes. It is a pretty uplifting, joyful record which the Free Thinking programme explores excellently.

    Can – Future Days (the Radio 3 show) can be listened to HERE.