Mountain*7 - Music, Books, Culture

Artist: Wise Children
Album: Wise Children EP
Label: Self Released

I saw Wise Children supporting Fanfarlo in the grotty interior of the Hamptons Bar in Southampton - an actually half-decent venue in what is generally a cultural wasteland. They quietly held the attention of most people in the place, despite the heat, and despite the low volume. I was intrigued enough to buy this, their first EP.

The band's sound is a fairly simple one, based around Robin Warren-Adamson's gentle voice and acoustic guitar, but there is a real depth to the sound in terms of instrumentation, and in the impact these 4 songs have. So alongside the guitar you have glockenspiels, Timothy Davies' cello plus sundry scrapings and bowings. Live this was supplemented by Jami Wilson's gorgeous backing vocals, and she is absent presence on this recording. The 4 songs were recorded in a bunch of different locations 'round Southampton - an old cinema, a bath (that makes sense in context) - and despite the fear that the pale wash of the city might have seeped into the body of the songs, it sounds great. For touchstones you might think of traditional folkies like Bert Jansch and certainly Nick Drake, yet the subtle dissonances take it beyond these comparisons. There are also elements of the modern creakier folk stuff we've yammered about on here before, like Gravenhurst or Matt Elliot- they share some of that inherent darkness. And their invocation of Efterklang might give you some idea of the direction they might take with a bigger budget...

'Paint' is a case in point. A 6 minute track that moves in four sections from a haunted opening sequence - ominous drones underpinning an odd minor-chord pattern - to a beautiful mid-section ('we've been lost from the start/let them see our deserted heart') that spirals skyward before returning to that darker central figure.

If you're interested in getting hold of the EP then you'll find stuff on their MySpace page, or you can buy a download here. There's also some tracks on a BBC Hampshire page. There will hopefully be a new EP at the end of the summer.

Download: Wise Children - Paint

Download: Wise Children - I Found Her In The Bath

Doug McCombs

This is a transcript of an interview I did with Doug from Tortoise a month or so ago on the dusty Grays Inn Road near Kings Cross. Cheers to the guys at The Line of Best Fit (where this first appeared) who have been kind enough to let me reproduce this here, and to Rowan at Thrill Jockey for setting this up. Go get the new record, Beacons of Ancestorship, it's one of their best.

I can’t think of another band like Tortoise. They’re a one off. Effortlessly straddling multiple genres (dub, jazz, hip-hop, electronica), and revelling in their sense of experimentation they still manage to retain a sheen of cool, and more to the point still function as a capital R Rock band. What’s more, they seem to be well and truly in it for the long haul – if Beacons of Ancestorship, their dazzling new record, is anything to go by, then they are still very much bursting with ideas and new sonic angles. They sound more vital, and younger, than ever. Well, I say younger…

I met Doug McCombs – Tortoise bassist and glabrous gentle giant – in the troglodytic cavern of the Thrill Jockey offices on The Grays Inn Road. As I walked up the stairs into the shadows, I could see Doug, Kurtz-like in the damp light, with his head in his huge left hand, twirling a packet of cigarettes in his right. It was half past five and after flying in late the previous evening, he’d evidently been talking to the press all day. He looked shattered. It was hot too; the heat lay across London like another layer of clothes… Mercifully, we were shown into the safety of a nondescript boozer on the far side of the road where we could escape the fug and where the cold beer suddenly made the day more attractive.

Matt – It feels like you've been away for ages. What have you guys been up to?

Doug – Yeah, I guess it seems like Tortoise disappears for periods of time but mostly we're really active all the time. It's true that we all play in other bands outside of Tortoise and that takes up a certain amount of our time but we also are pretty consistently working on Tortoise – whether it's going on tours or working on new material and so to us it feels as though we're always pretty active. We try to do as much live playing as we can, even if it's not a tour. We get lots of offers to do one off shows or festivals and even without a new record it's vital for us to go out on tour and play live as much as possible as it's part of being in a band that we like a lot.

We did a tour two years ago in the spring that was a whole tour of the US despite the fact that we didn't have a new record out and it was one of the best tours we've ever done! I don't know it seemed like that, maybe it's something to do with the fact that you get used to people only being interested in the band when you have a new record out and for us it was great to get that validation, that people were coming to our shows even when we didn't have a new album. It really gave us a lot of confidence for the longevity of this band and that we could work at our own pace.

Matt – So about the new record – where does the title, Beacons of Ancestorship come from?

Doug – Well, because we're an instrumental band, when it comes to time to title songs or albums, we're usually trying to draw on different things in our lives that we interested in. It can be anything from literature or art or whatever. Beacons of Ancestorship is an avant-garde, I guess you'd say ‘novel’, or it might be considered an artwork. Basically it was this piece of literature – and I don't even know the author's name – that's one paragraph repeated over and over again for something like 700 pages. That's not necessarily why we chose it as an album title, and I'm sure each member of the band has his own reasons for wanting to choose this title, but essentially, it was a title we all liked. To me personally, what the title invokes is how we see our place in the continuum of popular music, or at least the music we're interested in. It's a reflection of all of our influences and how we see ourselves and where we might take the band in the future.


Beacons of Ancestorship

Matt – The way you describe the repetition of the piece seems to fit in your aesthetic too.

Doug – That's true and also anything that's even vaguely cryptic fits into our aesthetic too [laughs].

Matt – It feels like a very direct record for you, there might even be what are considered a couple of 'songs' on there.

Doug – Sure. I think the second song 'Prepare Your Coffin' might be the most conventional rock song Tortoise has ever played. Which wasn't really anything conscious. Things that we were conscious of when going in to make this record were, thinking about our last album It's All Around You, I think we were trying to, at least in retrospect, refine and perfect everything we had done before and get it to some sort of compositional ideal or something, or at least try to become better as songwriters. So this time we may have unconsciously tried to push away from that a little bit and make it a little more rough around the edges, more scrappy, and more open ended – not as compositionally direct. And it feels that way to me – more direct and looser at the same time. More natural. The songs flow and don't feel as constricted. And I can't speak for everyone in the band but I think that may have been what we were trying to achieve.

The other thing is, as the band has gotten older and more experienced we've become a much better live band and I think we're more conscious of using dynamics in our live shows, and about being a more powerful rock band. When we first started we might have been a little tentative and not sure we could perform this music in front of people and have it be interesting, and so we've slowly grown into this thing where we're now pretty powerful live and also have moments of delicacy. I think we wanted to reflect some of that on this record.

We used the same compositional techniques to get to that. We didn't perform any of the songs live in the studio and we wrote most of the material the same way which is a slow process of bouncing ideas of each other and arriving at something we like by a process or subtraction or addition or cutting up or rearranging. So we didn't perform any of it live but to me it reflects more what we can do live.

Tortoise - Prepare Your Coffin from Thrill Jockey Records on Vimeo.

Matt – How much of that goes back to the ATP shows you did, where you played the whole of Millions Now Living Will Never Die from start to finish? Was that part of the confidence building process?

Doug – No, that's different. Playing Millions... live from start to finish was a completely separate challenge because we'd never attempted to play parts of those songs live ever. For instance 'Djed' which many people see as the cornerstone of the record, we'd never played that in its entirety in a live situation. So that was a real challenge as that song is really a tape edit or a collage. That's not really what I was talking about – I was more getting at the fact that when we started the band a lot of the music was so delicate that we felt if we were going to rock out on it we'd almost do it a disservice so we eventually grew into the thing of not being afraid to rock out. So even though we all came from rock bands in the first place it was almost as if we were treating the Tortoise music with too much reverence.

Matt – I was listening to the first album again recently and I'd forgotten how many delicate, essentially ambient moments there were on there. There's little of that on the Beacons...

Doug – The new album has moments.... The other direct thing about the album I think is the rhythm patterns on the songs, even though some of them are contrapuntal and interlocked, most of the songs are in 4/4 time signature. And we've always done stuff in 4/4 but we've also used a lot of semi-convoluted time signatures and I think that lends a certain directness to the record. There's only 1 track, 'Minors', which jumps from phrases of 3 and 4 to phrases of 7. That was all sort of a compositional experiment – Jeff wrote the melody to no time signature at all and then put the chords under it after the melody had been laid down and he realised the chords slipped into weird times.

TLOBF – A couple of the tracks seem to have an almost dubstep inflection to them, 'Northern Something' and even 'Gigantes'. It made me think of D/j Rupture.

Doug – 'Northern Something' for sure references some of that stuff – it's almost like a dancehall or dubstep samba. I think that was a conscious nod. 'Gigantes' was also a song that was based around a rhythm before anything else – the interlocking drum patterns came first before the melodic content.

Matt – And what about 'Yinxianghechengqi'?

Doug – [Laughs] I don't actually know how to pronounce that word! I think it's Chinese. Someone told me it was the first synthesiser ever manufactured in the country. Anyway, that song was another experiment. We were in the studio talking about modern composition and someone said wouldn't it be hilarious to try twelve tone and hardcore which is basically what that is.

TLOBF – So you're mixing Schoenberg and Hardcore? It's been done millions of times, I don't know why you bothered... The track though is really falling apart under its own weight, splitting at the sides.

Doug – That's probably actually the oldest song on the album and we've probably recorded 5 or 6 different versions of it and that version on the album is two wildly different versions spliced together with really different feels. The first part has this sense that we can barely play feel to it, and then it kicks into the real version.

Matt – Has the way you've recorded changed at all? You've said that at times things do get in the way – other projects, band members having families etc.

Doug – Our first two albums were recorded almost all analogue, on tape machines; only on the second album, a little bit of digital editing came in – just some cross fades or something. This was right when digital recording programs first came in. So from the third album until now, it's been in the digital age where, we do record on analogue tapes, but we'll bounce back stuff from tape to pro-tools or vice versa. So, our recording process since the digital era has been pretty much the same. We'll go to the studio, start throwing around ideas and recording them as we go. On a more practical level since some of the guys have children there are times when not all of us can make it to the studio at the same time. But then it's not always that important for us to be in the studio all the time – as long as everybody is there some of the time to agree on any major changes. It can become frustrating when we're in a particularly creative period and someone doesn't show up - I've been that guy too – but it's just the way it has to be.

Matt – Does one of you take charge in the studio, as it were?

Doug – John [McEntire] does most of the recording and mixing. He's the one with the real experience as far as being a recording engineer goes. John Herndon and Dan Bitney have home recording set ups of their own, and they can do stuff with tape machines and pro tools. But John can do it with a remote control – just walk into a room and hit play and away he goes. As far as what you would call production, that is the group effort and John is sort of the conduit. He's able to interpret everyone's ideas and translate them into what's going to work in terms of recording. For someone like me, who's not really familiar with a lot of the equipment, it's really awesome to have someone who understands what I mean when I describe how I want something to sound because he can do it. It's a really amazing thing to have in a band, to have that autonomy, and to have that total confidence in someone to realise those ideas you have. It's a privilege really.


A Lazarus Taxon

Matt – Can we talk a little about A Lazarus Taxon? What was behind the decision to release that box set?

Doug – The main impetus was sort of a compulsive need to gather things together. I felt like the material in that box set represented a side of Tortoise that people weren't that familiar with. I think our albums represent one side of Tortoise, then we have this other side, which is when someone asks us for a track for a compilation, or we make a 7” to sell on tour, or someone asks us to do a remix. A lot of that stuff involves a different working process for us as a band, and some of the results are quite different to the stuff that ends up on the albums. And there was so much floating around out there in different places, and I'd been pushing it for a while to gather it all up so people could hear this other side to the band.

Matt – It's a fantastic artefact, just as an object – but I read somewhere that it was like a tombstone.

Doug – I heard somebody say that too, like 'this band is over'! That's not really what it was meant to be. Maybe they got the idea from the imagery on the front.

Matt – Those Odermatt photos are incredible...

Doug - He was an Austrian, and an employee of the police, and part of his job was to document car accidents. Most of his photographs don't seem to be documenting tragic events – I mean most of them are just fender benders, it doesn't look like anyone died in them. But they are beautiful photographs. And since then there's been another book, of his colour work [Arnold Odermatt: On Duty], featuring loads of Austrian police cadets doing callisthenics, and there's one series of broken tail lights, all melted.


Arnold Odermatt - Untitled

Matt - They struck me as so Ballardian – not just the obvious car crash element, but the affectlessness of them, they're so clean. Going back to ...Lazarus, I also read someone describing it as a time capsule.

Doug – That's a better way of describing it! To me, that box set documents a totally different side to Tortoise – recorded much quicker, less structured, making less decisions, doing it out of necessity.

Matt – I was listening to Rhythms, Resolutions and Clusters EP on the way up here [the third CD in the A Lazarus Taxon box] and there is some very strange stuff on there...

Doug – For sure. Rhythms, Resolutions and Clusters was after our first album and we were definitely into the idea of our songs never being finished, or that there was potential for them to go in different directions there didn't have to be a definitive version. So we thought it would be cool if there was a different version of the album and all of the people on the EP were friends of ours. It was never a situation of 'let's find the hippest producers' – it was more like 'let's give these tracks to some people we like and respect and see what happens'. Later on, after our second album all those remixes were done by people we did and didn't know and after that we just weren't really interested any more. It was more like at that point we felt our songs were standing on their own.

Matt – That period is often seized upon as a kind of zenith for Tortoise in terms of output, which I guess must be quite frustrating for you guys? What do you make of that whole 'godfathers of post-rock' stuff?

Doug – I don't really know how I feel about I. A couple of years into this band I knew that we had potential to be a band for a really long time – just from the chemistry, and that's the way I still feel. The strength of this band isn't going to be how we peaked in the ‘90s; our strength is going to be how we continue to be band, and what comes in the future. We're working through some of those things now. I definitely know that some members of Tortoise are not really that thrilled with Millions Now Living Will Never Die – I mean it was pretty ambitious and we did a good job of it but it was never really completely finished, we didn't have the resources. There was a sense of 'this is what we have and this is going to have to do.' There are some successful experiments on it and some loose ends. And I feel like over the years we've got way better at tying up those loose ends and not having any extraneous, unnecessary material on our albums.


Millions Now Living Will Never Die

Matt – So is there another vaults-worth of stuff waiting to come out?

Doug – There are odds and ends floating around but no, no vault [laughs].

Matt– I'm intrigued by what you said about Beacons earlier, and you're place in a continuum of music – who are the other beacons along the line?

Doug – There are too many to mention! I guess our ambition is to be part of the continuum, be part of what makes music move along. Our only hope could be that we might inspire people to make music, the way the music we all love has inspired us.

Matt – As a final question, going on from the last one I suppose: how do you explain your position as a rock band in that the general response to Tortoise's stuff seems to stand outside the usual clichés of rock music – the simple build and release and the emotional response. How does sit with you? How does it work?

Doug – I think people have become used to hearing music in a certain context, and only if they become really interested in music do they eventually seek out a band like us. Even somebody as successful as Sonic Youth for instance still is not on the radar of your average person. They're an insanely influential rock band and yet they've never reached a kind of universal acceptance. The average person has never heard of Sonic Youth. So I guess there's a certain kind of music listener who eventually finds out about a band like Tortoise and that's fine because those people who do find out about us will carry it with them.

Matt – What do you make of the fact that Sonic Youth have started coming in for some negative press recently? That they've become part of the nostalgia industry and cool for their record collections rather than their music?

Doug – Somebody's always going to run you down for something. I've never known Sonic Youth do anything with anything less that total integrity. And as for the nostalgia stuff, well, the whole Don't Look Back Thing isn't something we'd ever get involved in again – and Sonic Youth did a whole tour of it so must feel even worse about it! I mean, playing Millions... was kind of fun but really, as a rock band you want to be playing you're new stuff. I think we'd have been infinitely more entertaining playing our new stuff...

Matt – So when are you coming over to the UK again?

Doug – We might be here in August or September but nothing is confirmed. Other than that it might be November or December. We'll let you know for sure... [Unless you've been living underground, you must have heard the announcement of the 10th Anniversary ATP show in December. My word, what a line up. If Tortoise come over before that you'll read about it here first.]

Artist: There Will Be Fireworks
Album: There Will Be Fireworks
Label: Self Released

Got a bunch of stuff up at TLOBF: a review of Tortoise's ace new record Beacons of Ancestorship (on which they sound like a garage band jamming with Schoenberg and some polyrhythmic robot DJ from the 23rd century. Or Tortoise in other words.); a review of British Sea Power's Man of Aran (on which they indulge their dumb Romance and offer up a song of stone for all time.); and also a review of the There Will Be Fireworks record which deserves to be huge - go buy it here.

dragon chaser:
Billie Holiday - Pennies From Heaven (from Pennies From Heaven 7" 1936)
Lord Kitchener - Dr Kitch (from Dr Kitch 1967)
Gypsy Kings - Hotel California (from Big Lebowski S/Track 1998)

poacher:
Trembling Bells - I Listed All The Velvet Lessons (from Carbeth 2009)
Yo La Tengo - You Can Have It All (from And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out 2000)
Sunn O))) - Alice (from Monoliths and Dimensions 2009)

Coming Through Slaughter is a raw, fractured book, much like its subject, the turn of the century New Orleans cornet player Buddy Bolden. Bolden died in a lunatic asylum after ‘going mad’ playing in a street parade. He had had apparent schizophrenic episodes before but nothing like this – he always came back. This time he didn’t return.

He was the best and the loudest and the most loved jazzman of his time, but never professional in the brain. Unconcerned with the crack of the lip he threw out and held immense notes, could reach a force on the first note that attacked the ear. He was obsessed with the magic of the air, those smells that turned neuter as they revolved in his lung then spat out in the chosen key. The way the side of his mouth would drag a net of air in and dress it in notes and make it last and last, yearning to leave it up there in the sky like air transformed into cloud. He could see the air, could tell where it was freshest in a room by the colour.

The book has no real structure as such; rather it is like a rotting bridge, or one made only of the supporting spars. (As Geoff Dyer said of Monk: It shouldn't have held together but it did and the excitement came from the way that it looked like it might collapse at any moment.) The supports are the various voices Ondaatje sources – primary, secondary, and those he merely channels. There is his own too, which he invests with a kind of incantatory fever, summoning Bolden from the walls of his house, the dank shadows of the asylum. These are voices that attempt to represent that which resists representation: jazz's burning star core. It is in Monk's notes, it is in Dave Holland's frantic description of Miles' arcane playing directions: ' "What he means is…he's saying 'Don't play what's there. Play what's not there… He's saying 'Don't play what your fingers fall into…Play something else. Don't play what you go for. Play the next thing'.'

Frank Lewis: It was a music that had so little wisdom you wanted to clean nearly every note he passed, passed it seemed along the way as if travelling in a car, passed before he even approached it and saw it properly. There was non control except the mood of his power...and it is for this reason it is good you never heard him play on recordings. If you never heard him play some place where the weather for instance could change the next series of notes – then you should never have heard him at all. He was never recorded. He stayed away while others moved into wax history, electronic history, those who said later that Bolden broke the path. It was just as important to watch him stretch and wheel around on the last notes or to watch nerves jumping under the sweat of his head.

There are howling gaps between these voices, figured in the wide white spaces between the blocks of text; Bolden emerges from these too. He is the ghost in the white spaces. Even in the one surviving photograph of him, he fades from the surface, an uncertain wraith.


Bolden, second left, standing

Unrecorded, even his music is a phantasm, his diabolic mix of gospel and the blues scored only in legend and in what came after. The perfect invisible source.

Bolden: John Robichaux! Playing his waltzes. And I hate to admit it but I enjoyed listening to the clear forms...Did you ever meet Robichaux? I never did. I loathed everything he stood for. He dominated his audiences. He put his emotions into patters which a listening crowd had to follow. My enjoyment tonight was because I wanted something that was just a utensil. Had a bath, washed my hair, and wanted the same sort of clarity and open-headedness. But I don't believe it for a second...When I played parades we would be going down Canal Street and at each intersection people would hear just the fragment. I happened to be playing and it would fade as I went further down Canal. They would not be there to hear the end of the phrases, Robichaux's arches. I wanted them to be able to come in where they pleased and leave when they pleased and somehow hear the germs of the start and all the possible endings at whatever point in the music that I had reached them. Like your radio without the beginnings or endings. The right ending is an open door you can't see too far out of. It can mean exactly the opposite of what you are thinking.

Finally, that title? Incidental though it seems, it captures the essence of Bolden’s movement – the swing of his music, his nervous energy, his periodic disappearances, his uncertain navigations of the terrains of his self; and the last journey from which he never returned, away on a freight train into the bayou, through Slaughter to the asylum.

All my life I seemed to be a parcel on a bus. I am the famous fucker. I am the famous barber. I am the famous cornet player. Read the labels. The labels are coming home.

On re-reading this on a recent trip over to Ypres and Passchendale, aside from the awe at the naked descriptions of horror and carnage, what I was most astounded by was Remarque's, at times, near-schizophrenic appreciation of nature. It's clear that in his hyper-sensitive state Remarque/Bäumer was able to observe minute changes in the world around him - in both tone and atmosphere - as if the usual aspects of time and space had come unmoored. The passage below is from the section of the book in which Bäumer is guarding Russian prisoners a few miles behind the front line.

Most beautiful are the woods with the line of birch trees. Their colour changes with every minute. Now the stems gleam purest white, and between them airy and silken, hangs the pastel green of the leaves; the next moment all changes to an opalescent blue, as the shivering breezes pass down from the heights and touch the green lightly away; and again in one place it deepens almost to black as a cloud passes over the sun. And this shadow moves like a ghost through the dim trunks and rides far out over the moor to the sky - then the birches stand out again like gay banners on white poles, with their red and gold patches of autumn-tinted leaves.

Author: Various
Title: Caught By The River: A Collection of Words On Water
Publisher: Octopus Books

I've somehow managed to forget to mention this: the Caught By The River Book is now available to buy - and it looks like a lovely artefact. It's a collection of short pieces from various writers on rivers that have had a profound effect on their lives - from Roger Deakin writing about ice-skating on the Thames to Irvine Welsh channelling courtship rituals on the Forth. You can also see an exhibition of artwork taken from Caught by the River by John Richardson and Robert Gibbings is exhibiting in the Cafe at Foyles Bookshop (Charing Cross Road) until the 26th July.

Lastly, there's an excerpt from Bill Drummond's piece from the book - The Penkiln Burn - over at The Quietus.

James Blackshaw

My interview with James Blackshaw is up at TLOBF. This was the first phone interview I'd ever done and I was frankly, shitting myself. But James is such a decent, eloquent bloke it was a breeze. We ended up chatting for over an hour about all sorts of stuff, but a good section of it was about the new record, The Glass Bead Game, which is stunning.

A few other bits and pieces:

Byron Coley on The New Weird America (I've got the new Jackie-O-Motherfucker record on a good deal at the moment, it's squarely in this field and quite something.)
Iain Sinclair back on form reviewing Peter Ackroyd's Thames
Harold Bloom on Blood Meridian
Simon Critchley's ongoing series on Heidegger's Being and Time.
The Guardian's Go Walk series which in total featured a good 100 walks around the British Isles. Soon we're going to be tripping over each other in the countryside, the hillsides worn away, the city streets hollow and bleak...

This over at the ATP site - well now, that's not a bad line up now is it? If Sunn O))) and Godspeed (I know) get added to this, there will be riots for tickets...

We will be celebrating 10 years of ATP from December 2009 to December 2010. As the fastest selling ATP ever, Nightmare Before Christmas curated by My Bloody Valentine is almost sold out, to get things going for our milestone, ATP is incredibly excited to reveal that we will commence our 10th birthday festivities with a second weekend in December and we want you to come and party with us!!!

The Ten Years Of ATP festival will take place at Butlins Resort in Minehead from Friday 11th December to Sunday 13th December, 2009.

As this is our birthday party - it is going to be very special weekend. For the line up we are inviting our nearest and dearest to play – which means past ATP curators, ATP recordings artists and some ATP favourites thrown into the mix too...

So far confirmed to play are:

Explosions in the Sky
Dirty Three
Shellac
Tortoise
Melvins
Mudhoney
The For Carnation
Papa M
Deerhoof
F**k Buttons
The Drones
Sleepy Sun
Bardo Pond