Mountain*7 - for the person with nothing better to do

Artist: Joanna Newsom
Album: Have One One Me
Label: Drag City

There seems to me a critical space between the perception of Joanna Newsom and the actuality of what she produces, a space broad enough – and one that allows for such a huge sense of slippage – that all sorts of odd descriptions get bunged at her: musical genius, bourgeois fantasist, cutesy nonsense maker. It’s a space created by her image (self-cultivated or not), her precocity, and her style: that delivery that to many appears affected, worn. It’s also created by her talent – that thing you can’t fake. Yet it’s almost as if you have to earn the right to be accepted as odd and supernaturally talented – to be spoken of in the same breath as Joni Mitchell or Kate Bush – as if the contract is based on a system of trust. Well, Have One On Me isn’t exactly going to close that space any, as it’s as wildly ambitious and flighty as Ys and self-obsessed enough to convince the doubters. But having lived with it for a while now, it’s evidence enough for me that there’s enough going on here for a whole damn career, let alone a triple album.

Have One On Me covers six sides of vinyl and has a running time of just over two hours. Gone (mostly) are the baroque, and at times invasive and sickly flourishes of Van Dyke Parks that featured on Ys, to be replaced by series of simple arrangements and augmentations from her long time sidekick and Ys Street Band Member Ryan Francsconi. Strings do feature regularly on the album, but take their place amongst an array of instruments including a Bulgarian tambura, a Gambian kora, harpsichord and trombone. There is also a good deal of piano, and of course Newsom’s signature polymetric solo harp compositions. And in many respects, it’s actually a fairly simple premise – the arrangements as vehicles for Newsom’s explorations of the themes she has worried at across her work to date: love and being unable to love, metamorphosis and transformation, and a simple urge to metaphorise her own solipsistic journey. (And let’s be clear, Newsom’s method is solipsistic; and despite the strange creatures she weaves into her songs – which at times reach a pitch worthy of Angela Carter – you sense this is all a form of Romantic self-exploration). Yet there is always an unorthodoxy about Newsom’s creations, a non-linear sense of narration and structure that gives the songs room to develop organically and on their own terms.

Though all this does beg the question of how Newsom writes, what her method is and how the songs come to be in their final form. On Ys, however embellished the actual process was, there was the sense of completion, that Newsom had obeyed some larger calling. Have One On Me doesn’t have that same sense of completion, at least not in the immediate sense. She has spoken of how she wanted it be in the vein of the Laurel Canyon singer/songwriter albums of the early 1970s, full of that vaguely melancholic sun-dazed lope (hence the opening track, ‘Easy’ which, incidentally, with its haunted air and Robert Kirby strings is anything but easy) but instead the album became about unease (un-Ys?), the song forms and lyrical content betraying the superficial levity of the early tracks. Inevitably then, you’re drawn to examine the life, looking for clues as to why the lyrics dwell so heavily on her – or her characters’ inability – to feel, or at least to project their feelings outwards: ‘But I am still a coward…But sometimes I can almost feel the power’ from ‘In California’; ‘Honey, just open your heart/when I’ve got trouble/even opening a honey jar’ from ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’; ‘I’m telling you I can love you again/love you again’ from ‘Jackrabbits’ – and though there is often recourse to nature imagery and a kind of default recourse to anthropomorphic transformations, the themes are stark to behold. Real or fantasy, this is in many senses a fairly naked album.

That nakedness is evident in the changes in her voice, too. During the early stages of recording, Newsom developed nodes on her vocal chords and went through a period of enforced silence. A significant part of the healing process involved Newsom relearning how to sing, relearning the shape and timbre of her voice. Consequently her voice seems softer – more soulful even – and generally more adaptable to the arc and pitch of the songs. There are the odd shrill stabs, like the ‘cuckoos’ in ‘In California’ (where she sounds at her most Kate Bush-like), but overall there’s less glass in her voice somehow, it seems less likely to crack into shards. Paradoxically, there’s probably something to be said for this new found control making it easier to hide away, to shrink into the fabric of her fabulations, but you can also sense this new depth and subtlety to her voice will take her far.

And you do have to wonder how far Newsom can go. There was a feeling that Ys, with all its dramatic sweep and thematic ambition, was some kind of logical endpoint, that this thing had been taken as far as it could go. Yet, in the true passion of vaudeville, here she comes back at us, band in tow, dressed like a flapper in all that Lola Montez finery, filling that critical space with all the whirls and feints of her talent. It’s like she recognised she was at a juncture and ran with it. Gone is the whispery intimacy of the Albini production to be replaced by something broader, more rolling. Time will tell if this has the staying power it promises; and if, in its sprawling form, it can achieve the same sense of solidity that Ys seems to possess – and indeed if any of these songs will come to occupy the same sainted space as ‘Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie’ from The Milk-Eyed Mender or the jaw-dropping perfection of ‘Sawdust and Diamonds’. But from this short distance, there are so many exquisite moments – that ecstatic Nabokovian pitch of the lyrics (always room for one more detail), that bluesy refrain in ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’, the ‘bump on a bump on a log’ from the same song (the whole damn thing is a revelation), the way she turns ‘Esme’ so beautifully into a 3 syllable trill, ‘Soft As Chalk’s’ Carole King-like mid section, ‘Kingfisher’s lament of ‘It is too short/the day we are born/we commence with our dying’ – so damn many, that really, you just have to stand and boggle.

Download: Joanna Newsom - In California

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 20:12 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Sparklehorse - 'Spirit Ditch' (from Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot)

Posted by poacher in music at 08:57 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Cluster
Album: Qua
Label: Nepenthe

John Updike once said that the reason for his prolific nature was that he was still working at the problem of the ‘mystery of being me.’ Faced with fact of Dieter Moebius (who is 66) and Hans-Joachim Roedelius (who is 75) – two ageing musicians who are still working, prolifically, hunched over synthesisers and oscillators – one wonders if the same conditions apply. What’s behind this investigative drive? Habit? Or is this a now near-perpetual exploration of the mystery of the self? The more I listen to Qua the more it reveals itself to be less about any form of affect-driven odyssey of discovery, and more about a continuing modernist fascination (obsession?) with the infinite sonic possibilities of machines, and our relationship with machines. In reality Qua is set of almost totally affectless miniatures, a series of small vignettes that seem to have no higher purpose than that of documenting a processural relationship.

Qua stands and falls on the very fact of whether or not this documenting process is an engaging and interesting enough one. And in truth, if this weren’t such a seminal duo, I wonder if we’d pay much attention at all. Placed in the context of what Cluster (and Kluster before that) were a part of, and what they set in process, this feels a little incidental. The drift from those early spooked music concrete constructions to the later bucolic ‘70s albums such as Zuckerzeit and Sowiesoso that had a hand in the ‘creation’ of ambient music, is a well documented one – and from this distance it might be crass to impose a linear narrative, but there does appear to have been a purpose, a definite arc, even something as banal as a simple inward retreat. And it’s this weight of the past that makes listening to Qua such a strangely unsatisfying experience, because here there is no true sense of direction beyond the purely sonic. Which would of course be fine if it were not, as a collection, so easy to let slip by.

The odd thing is that the intimations of potential are all there – with nods to their own expansive past (both as a duo and in their solo work and collaborations – lest we forget Harmonia and Eno) to other gathered electronic tropes: the production (by Tim Story) is bright and sharp, there are synth-led ‘80s soundtracks on ‘Na Ernl’, ‘Formalt’s’ Burial-like vamps, ‘Stenthin’ almost Wobble-esque dub deeps, the propulsive warble of ‘Malturi Sa’, the more Geir Janssen than Geir Janssen glacial sweep of ‘Gissander’ and at times an overall queasiness that feels like Cluster refracted backwards through an Aphex Twin distorting mirror. And yet, here I am, a month into living with it and I’m no nearer to recommending it to anyone. The experience has been so overwhelmingly neutral that I’m a little confounded. The neutrality might be an aesthetic in itself, but not one I’d particularly care to pursue. Interesting then, but not essential.

Download: Cluster - So Ney

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 17:27 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Belly of the Whale. Image by Robin Friend


Greenhouse. Image by Robin Friend


West Country. Image by Robin Friend

"The landscape is in danger of losing its capacity to keep secrets from us."

We've not had much in the way of photography on here recently, but I came across Robin Friend today (courtesy of youyouidiot) and wanted to share. His photographs have got a damp melancholy to them, and feel both secretive and oddly voyeuristic, as if Friend were trying to restore some of the secret nature he sees as being leached away from our relationship to landscape. You can more of his work at robinfriend.co.uk and youyou has an article on Friend in this month's Hotshoe magazine.

Posted by poacher in photography at 12:37 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

I've started poncing about with a Tumblr account as it seems a neat way to share links and simple stuff like quotes and photos that don't really fit in over here, or at least don't fit with the general longer format pieces that tend to appear here. It might be that I just end up bunging the stuff up here, but for now you can find the new site at mountain7.tumblr.com. Check out the Robert Hood mix, it's class.

Posted by poacher in Mountain*7 at 10:15 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Jack Rose
Album: Luck in the Valley
Label: Thrill Jockey

There was something close to the animalistic in some of the responses to Jack Rose’s horribly premature death at the age of 38 in the December of last year. This isn’t to say that all our responses to grief don’t involve some sort of pre-lingusitic animal reaction of course, just that in this case there seemed to be an undercurrent of pure animal expression – a reaching out to some part of Rose’s personality that defied or outstripped attempts at articulation. I didn’t meet Rose, but I can remember seeing him perform in the café area at the Green Man festival, a great bear of a man hunched over his steel-strung guitar in a light pall of rain. He played unamplified and was surrounded by a tense semi-circle of about 100 people, all tilting forward slightly in the gloom. It was as intense a performance as I’ve seen, Rose clawing at his guitar, producing a great thicket of sound, at times seemingly atonal and ragged, then spiralling into moments of near transcendent finger-picked beauty. As the set progressed, the crowd pressed in, drawn towards his heat. It was an extraordinary thing to witness, but it does seem to have been the way of things. He filled more than his allotted space, broke out and dragged the world towards him.

And now we’re left with this – in the face of such a loss, the frankly bleak task of laying an unfair weight on what is now a posthumous album. The temptation is to redraw the surrounds of this, map it backwards and go searching for sinews of meaning and tease out intimations of mortality that simply aren’t there. Rose was a prolific performer and writer, and in truth Luck in the Valley isn’t a remarkable record – it’s lit up by the depth of his passion and his at times ridiculous dexterity and talent for composition, but in the context of the body of his work it feels exploratory and is a further melding of what were his then preoccupations: the raga-inflected longer pieces that dominated his early releases and the raucous pre-war music he’d been playing both in a solo capacity (as Dr. Ragtime) and with the Black Twig Pickers – with a pointed lean towards the latter.

Luck in the Valley was in fact, loosely speaking, to be the third in a trilogy (which Rose had refereed to as his ‘Ditch Trilogy) – a trilogy which, along with his albums from last year with the Black Twig Pickers and the Dr. Ragtime band, was concerned with exploring the immediacy and spontaneity of pre-war music. It’s largely based on first-take recordings and revolves around rollocking rags and hoe-downs, 3 of which are covers of American classics (‘St Louis Blues’, ‘Everybody Ought to Pray Sometime’ and ‘West Coast Blues’), works by W.C. Handy, Blind Blake, and Dennis Crumpton and Robert Summer. The band itself is made up of a revolving cast of musicians including the incendiary Twig Pickers and the likes of Glenn Jones, Micah Smaldone and Harmonica Dan (what does he do?) – and as Rose had said in the past, they swing like a motherfucker. This is, for the most part, profoundly joyous, life-affirming music.

That said, the album does feature some of the ominous tones that Rose has explored from way back since his Pelt days, and that run throughout the body of his work. This is most notable on two tracks on Luck in the Valley – ‘Tree in the Valley’ and the opening track ‘Blues for Percy Danforth’, which will rightly be lifted into the pantheon of his best works. It’s a beautiful mix of picking and raga drones, and the key is how effortless it all sounds – those dextrous runs and the deep-pinned bass notes meshing perfectly into a whole that is so immediately the Rose sound that it near pierces the heart. As the track rises to its tumult and is met by a backgrounded jews harp and soft harmonica line you realise Rose, and his tight, tight band, were so in control of where they were going with all this that it seems impossible that there’ll be no more.

We wont talk of epitaphs and the like, for music of this ferocity and timelessness beats all that. Instead we should probably take it all in the manner it was intended – wild, on the way to some oblivion or other and reeking of animal sweat and joy.

Download: Jack Rose - Woodpiles On The Side of the Road

There was a lot of quite open grieving around the time of Rose's death, and some beautifully constructed tributes and paeans. One of the finest was David Morris's, over at Strangeglue. He also put together a fine radio tribute which you can still download.

Ethan Miller also put together a fine tribute, and included a download of a relatively recent Rose show from Fredricksburg, Virginia. The show features tracks from Luck in the Valley.

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 14:42 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Teeth of the Sea
Album: Hypnoticon
Label: Rocket Recordings

On New Years Eve 2009, Teeth of the Sea performed the entire soundtrack to Flash Gordon, in full costume, lit up by a projected version of the film. What a way to see the new year in – glazed and fucked, buried under a dirty great avalanche of floor toms and camp fuzzed-up May histrionics. It must have been a hell of a sight… So now, 13 months after their diseased, choppily psychedelic debut album, Orphaned by the Ocean (which was, for the record, criminally ignored) they’ve returned with a vinyl EP that follows the spaceward trajectory set in motion by the vultan suits, and that has them sounding tighter, vaster – Hypnoticon is kosmiche space rock, in all senses of the word.

I don’t think it’s just me that felt the diseased thing about their debut. Amidst all that stately poise and harsh static was the reek of the unhinged – it felt like it might split apart at any moment, exposing rancid innards…They talked of how this was part of the very fabric of the band, this urge towards self-destruction – pushing things to a (il)logical extreme to see what might lie beyond. Tracks arose from protracted jams, the final objects more like detritus or offcuts. In this context, Hypnoticon feels more linear and complete – studied even; and sonically, the band sound absolutely in control.

The space rock aspect of their sound was fundamental to their debut, but it seemed to be mangled, sucked back in on itself. Here it’s all flung outwards, riding at times (especially on ‘Hypnoticon Viva’) on near Boredoms-like rhythmic patterns. They reprise the Flash Gordon theme too, with a gargantuan version of ‘In The Space Capsule (Love Theme)’, the tom-heavy patterns matched by a great swirls of multi-tracked guitars and banks of keyboards. It’s on ‘The Island Is’ though, that the faint whiff of disease returns, and it’s probably no surprise that it’s here that the sound at their most vital and their most profound. The track is built around a noir-ish screed of bass pulse and treated guitars, but it’s when that trumpet call arrives that you feel like you might bust through the top of your head. Jon Hassell once remarked that the trumpet was a lonely instrument – here it sounds vast, distant and ominous, and until the drums return at the track’s climax, for a time this reminded me of ‘In A Silent Way’ eating its own face.

There’s a new album due around June (if things haven’t split asunder). Things are building around this lot, and if this is anything to go by, the new record going to be quite some event. Go, Flash.

- There's a few things Teeth of the Sea related around at the moment - all worth getting your grubby hands on. A free download of an exclusive track over at the NME site. A Spotify playlist the band put together for The Quietus. A mix tape the band did for 20 jazz Funk Greats.

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 17:57 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Excuse the long hiatus, I've been sweating it out beneath the roaring sun in The Gambia and Senegal. I stepped outside work today, into the first pool of sun I've seen since being back and could scarce believe that just five days ago I was facing the same bright disc and barely able to stand it. The shot above was taken about 100km inland from the coast in Senegal at the a ford of a river. The area was rich with cultivation - onions, tomatoes, lettuce - and people tended neat gardens, pulling at weeds, taking water straight from the river with battered metal watering cans. We sat at the ford for a time and watched the comings and goings, which was mainly people passing between villages, some with things to sell, others on social visits or simply on their way to school. What I love best about the photo is the little feet. All three women had children in these back slings (though two are obscured), and each of the children looked as if they could sleep all day long. Amen to that.

Posted by poacher in photography at 17:53 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

A ruined dwelling on North Rona

I also wanted to share this - a Radio 3 feature with the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie on the remote, and now abandoned, Scottish island of North Rona. The stars of the piece are the Leach's petrels that nest on the island and fill the air with their soft bubbling laughter, and Jamie's exact language and warm lilting tone.

Posted by poacher in Podcasts, Spoken Word at 20:36 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The site was down for a few days this week so I'm celebrating its return with some immense kosmiche/drone stuff in the shape of Oneohtrix Point Never - a project of one Daniel Lopatin. Posting the video is kind of pointless, I admit, but well, just wanted to share this beautiful noise and to urge you to get hold of Rifts - it's really something.

Posted by poacher in music videos at 20:32 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)