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

I'm undecided as to whether context thickens our experience of art, or detracts - whether the burden of history and biography drains something from the simple alchemy of recognition and reception. Does the background lend more weight, or does it overburden us? Charlotte Delbo was arrested in Paris in 1942, along with her husband George Dudach, for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. After a permitted farwell, Dudach was shot by firing squad. Delbo spent the war in various camps, including a long spell in Auschwitz. She survived the war and wrote about her experiences in Auschwitz and After, from which the poem below is taken.

I used to call him my young tree
he was as handsome as a pine
the first time I saw him
his skin was so soft
the first time I held him
and all the other times
so soft
that thinking of it today
is like not feeling one's mouth
I used to call him my young tree
smooth and straight
when I held him against me
I thought of the wind
of a birch or an ash
when he held me in his arms
I no longer thought of anything.

Posted by poacher in poetry at 13:21 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Shackleton/Appleblim/
EP: Harmonia & Eno '76 (Shackleton / Appleblim & Komonazmuk Mixes)
Label: Amazing Sounds

I’ve pretty much taken my eye off dubstep this year. Whether it was an overdose, that it seemed to be atrophying (even if atrophying on a micro-scale as it gradually self-divided into more and more genres), or that I’m simply a shire-mired fud who only listens and doesn’t experience – whatever the reason, I just haven’t paid enough attention to what’s what. I’ve enjoyed the Grievous Angel’s ongoing series of mixes, the Kryptic Minds album (their mix for Blackdown is here), Cooly G (her FACT mix), some Silkie stuff, the Mordant Music/Shackleton record, and the upcoming King Midas Sound album (I guess the Hyperdub 5 compilation goes without saying), but generally if I ever did have a clue what was going on, I er, haven’t any more.

None of which means my ears didn’t instantly tingle when I heard about a Shackleton and Appleblim project to remix two tracks from the reissued Harmonia ’76 album Tracks and Traces. Some things just seem to make obvious and instant sense and Tracks and Tracesthis was one of those moments. The originals on Tracks and Traces allow for the intrusion of light and are in many respects vessels in structure, and despite being largely beatless, they do possesses that kosmiche propulsion, the sense of an outbound journey. And as the sessions involving Dieter Moebius, Hans-Jaochim Roedelius, Michael Rother and Brian Eno were definitively exploratory (they were a coming together of minds, an exercise in mutual respect – and never meant to be released), the reworkings on this 12” feel a bit like realisations instead of remixes.

Shackleton takes on the centrepiece of Tracks and Traces – the fifteen-minute ‘Sometimes in Autumn’. You can see how the original might have enticed Shackleton: beneath the passive exterior of swirling synth lines and tight-pitched oscillators is an ominous throbbing undertow; and being an exercise in sonic possibilities, it accepts rhythmic embellishment with a kind of avarice. There are pockets of the trademark Shackleton drums - the chopped snare hits that sound like sharp intakes of breath, the stilted tambourine shakes; and he manages to turn the mid-section into a kind of vortex, the bass churning against itself. He actually shaves off around 5 minutes from the original, and telescopes the closing half of the track, adding a brilliant closing rhythm pattern that, whilst far too dubbed and spliced to be anything approaching motorik, could easily have carried the track into infinity.

Appleblim’s contribution is to augment the edgy pastoral epic of ‘By The Riverside’, a languid nature symphony, which is all washes of light and buried birdsong. If anything, Appleblim’s remix is less reverential than Shackleton’s, adding a real sense of depth to the track with a trench-like bass and an array of skittish beats. Towards the close of the track, he adds what is sounds something like a prepared harp and it gives the track an eastern feel. The remix is certainly more daring yet it feels as if it sucks some of the life from the track – an odd thing given how languorous the original is.

When this project was first mentioned, I was under the impression it was going to be an entire album, and given how well these two tracks stand up I think it would work. Someone? Anyone?

This is the first release on Amazing Sounds - a label set up by the guys who run the ace Allez-Allez site. You can get the 12" from Boomkat. It's on white vinyl, too.

Download: Harmonia '76 - Sometimes in Autumn (Shackleton Remix)

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 20:44 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Shrinebuilder
Album: Shrinebuilder
Label: Neurot

Hoary old men, making hokey rock music that rules with the HAMMER OF THOR - read about it over there. The record is a near perfect synthesis of the four people involved - Scott Wienrich (who was in St. Vitus and The Obsessed - two huge bands in the old doom scene, one which featured no less than a pre-Kyuss Scott Reeder), Scott Kelly (from Neurosis), Al Cisneros (Sleep and OM), and Dale Crover (from the mighty Melvins). On a number of a levels it really is pure hokum, but it rocks like a bastard and feels like it's been underground waiting to show its hairy back, since about, well, 1991.

Download: Shrinebuilder- Solar Benediction

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 21:16 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Paul is a friend who is working in Abu Dhabi and he shot this footage from his hotel balcony. It is a thing of complete simplicity and is no less than dazzling.

Arriving in Abu Dhabi my initial reaction, standing on the balcony of my hotel room on the 20th floor, was disorientation and near-vertigo. Laid out before me was a building site on a scale I had never seen before; a small island was under construction.

This was “a room with a view” of a very different kind. Not some picturesque vista illustrating historical achievement but a vast, stark scene of becoming; a display of the knowledge, effort and will required to alter the landscape and create a new world.

The Alva Noto track 'Xerrox Monophaser 2' that forms the soundtrack to this, fits so perfectly it feels built for the task. Uncanny. Xerrox Vol. 2 is out on Raster Norton and well worth getting.

Posted by poacher in place, nature, landscape at 09:41 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Dean McPhee
Album: Brown Bear 12"
Label: Hood Faire

It’s odd how some reviews tend to revolve around a single idea, or perhaps a single word. With this new 12” from Dean McPhee (his second release, the first being a split 7” with Chapters released earlier this year), the word I keep returning to is unadorned. The music on ‘Brown Bear’ is in essence simple and elemental - built from a single electric guitar and what sounds like a couple of delay pedals. Each of the 3 tracks, recorded live in one take, are full of an extraordinary sense of space and light; and at times this sounds so natural, and so fluid, as to be of the very earth.

It might seem a strange tactic to hone in on what isn’t present in a piece of music, but with single guitar composition the tendency seems to be towards extravagance, each bar filled with flourishes and flurries of notes. McPhee’s style is far removed from this, instead the weight and mood is provided by the space between the notes. Not to say that this is necessarily minimalistic, more that McPhee seems conscious about what to leave out as much as what to include. As such, the tracks seem to unfold before and around you, the progressions and tonal shifts like shimmering pathways.

The figures in the background here aren’t the usual – this has little, if anything to do with Fahey and Robbie Basho. Indeed it’s a struggle to put your finger on exactly who the influences are. There are elements of Loren Connors for sure, some post-rock figures from Vini Reilly to 1 Mile North; but the record I keep coming back to for comparisons – and this is probably in terms of poise and impact as much as anything – is Ry Cooder’s soundtrack for Paris, Texas, another record with a sense of dynamics and an immaculate sense of itself.

In more unguarded moments I'd like to think of ‘Brown Bear’ as in the Romantic tradition, a record born from a life of contemplative listening – listening to the sound and shape of the elements and the simple fact of silence. It might just be a gentl marvel. Either way, 'Brown Bear' is quite something and worthy of your attention. You can get it over at Boomkat or from Norman Records.

You can hear the three tracks from the 12" over at Dean's website

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 21:05 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

When the air is thick and the sky overcast, we need not walk so far. We give our attention to nearer objects, being less distracted from them. I take occasion to explore some near wood which my walks commonly overshoot.

What a difference it makes between two ravines in other respects exactly similar that in the one there is a stream which drains it, while the other is dry!

I see nowadays in various places the scattered feathers of robins, etc., where some hawk or beast of prey has torn them to pieces.

I step over the slip-noose which some woodling has just set. How long since men set snares for partridges and rabbits?

Ah, my friends, I know you better than you think, and love you better, too. The day after never, we will have an explanation.

Henry David Thoreau

Posted by poacher in books quotes at 12:41 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Mountains (picture by Mapsadaisical)

This was first up at TLOBF.

I’d not been to the Slaughtered Lamb before – a dimly lit hideaway on Great Sutton Street in Farringdon – and coming in, out of the damp of a London night, down a flight of stairs and into an underground music space was a little disorienting. There was a small bar, plush sofas flush against the bare-brick walls and a variety of cushions strewn about the place. It only needed some velvet drapes and some bearskin and the bacchanalia could commence. As it was, the only orgy of the night was to be sonic; and anyway, there were far too many bearded men about for it to be enjoyable.

Pausal began the night with a series of warm drones, the two artists sat to the right of the small stage area, one working a laptop, the other coaxing gentle drift from his guitar. The duo’s EP (reviewed here and out on High Point Lowlife) has garnered some praise (including us!) for its quiet, autumnal grace and live this came across as well, the venue gradually filling with quilted swells of sound. The drones were married to some brilliant visuals as well, with what looked like blurred footage from an Arctic expedition and some haunting pencilled drawings, painstakingly pieced together to form a strange accompanying narrative. The way the film pieces were projected against two hanging squares of white muslin also created a strange ghosting effect that doubled the imagery, further deepening the overall texture of sound and visuals. The band have an album out early next year, which should be worth getting hold of.

Mountains, to me, have always seemed a band that implicitly understand the structures of silence, or at least have spent a great deal of time observing the way sound layers swarm and piece together. From their earliest pastoral drone pieces, I’ve pictured them being from some wooded backwater, hermitic and devotional, delicately piecing together sound fugues. The fact that they are based in New York only marginally messes up this neat picture… At present, as on their recent beautiful LP Etchings, the duo are using the live situation to build intricate sound pieces from accumulated drones and looped acoustic instruments, and working their intimate understanding of sound-layers towards some sort of logical conclusion. The result is one of slow constructions, of managed build and release, of a kind of channelled ecstasy. They’re becoming quite something.

Tonight, Mountains are performing a piece that has been perfected over recent live performances. The single 40-minute track begins with a simple wheezing melodica that forms the cushioned base of the entire piece; this is gradually augmented by various percussive implements (I say implements because at one stage the soft click of an egg whisk against a square of treated metal is used, later a string bag of marbles is delicately scrunched in front of a microphone) and two acoustic guitars. Slowly, the sonic texture thickens, the ear searching for quieter elements, other elements seeming to phase from the mix only to return slightly louder, or altered somehow. And because of the nature of the venue – one that allows for a simple contemplative acceptance of the performance, and, because of its structure, one that enhances and at times seems to swell the available sound – at times, you find yourself leaning into the wind of the thing searching for the resonant heart of the sound, at others metaphorically swaying your ears backward as a percussive click seems to bounce from the walls.

At around the halfway mark, the duo recollect themselves before relaunching the track towards its towering, immersive climax, where they approach the ceiling-scraping epiphanies of Fennesz or Keith Fullerton Whitman – yet that extraordinary sense of control never leaves; and the fact that the two never seem to act from any visual cues, acting from some deeper level of understanding only intensifies the whole performance. As the track approaches whiteout you feel it might be possible to ride the thing out into the street and up, up… It ends much as it begun, a slowly devolution into the warm breath of the melodica and then, again, silence. Snapping back into the room, several people are still far-gone, eyes closed and wearing the faintest of smiles. A hell of a night’s work, that.

M*7 review of Choral

Download: Mountains - Etchings (Edit)

Download: Mountains - Choral

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 19:46 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)