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

Artist: Astrïd
Title: High Blues
Label: Rune Grammofon

High Blues is such an apposite title for this collection of Astrïd tracks, it feels like any commentary does little more than circle around it, pointing great hammy arrows towards it. It perfectly encapsulates the sense of space that pervades everything they do, and gets to the heart of their tonal explorations of light and weight. High Blues is music for canyons and high wide skies.

Read the rest over at the Liminal

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 10:48 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Erland Dahlen
Title: Rolling Bomber
Label: Hubro

The first thing I noticed about the album is the sound – a thing of resonant spaces and warm velvety depths. Rolling Bomber was recorded over 3 days in February and April 2011, inside an abandoned coffee factory in Olso, a space Dahlen has utilised in the past. It consists of comparatively little – drums, obviously, subtle electrical fields, similar to something Helge Sten might eructate in his dreams, gamelan-like vibes, Dahlen’s other signature instrument the bowed saw here and there – but everything seems to levitate inside a wider field of force, the sounds expanding to the edge of your hearing. The timbre is largely a metallic one, yet there is a real tactility to the sound, as if you could clasp it to yourself.

Read the rest of the review at the Liminal.

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 13:18 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

One way not to listen to it is to focus on the notes… Instead, try to move your imagination toward the sound. It's a matter of following the sound… Follow the sound, the pitches, the colours. You have to watch them move
Donald Ayler

Posted by poacher in music at 16:11 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

...last night I played Meditations
& it told me what to do
Live, you crazy mother
Fucker!
Live!

& organise
yr shit
as rightly
burning!

Amiri Baraka

Posted by poacher in music at 13:01 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

We have some impatience with the sort of prosaic, everyday things of life, that sort of whimsical patience that other countries may have. That's really painful to endure: to be minor and so forth. We leap for the sublime. You might also say that American literature and culture begin with Paradise Lost. I always think there are two great symbolic figures that stand behind American ambition and idealism. One is Milton's Lucifer and the other is Captain Ahab. These two sublime ambitions that are doomed. I suppose this is too apocalyptic to put in this way, but it's the Ahab story of having to murder evil... What one finds wrong with American culture is the monotony of the sublime... Art is always done with both your hands in America. The artists finds new life in it and almost sheds his other life.

Robert Lowell

Posted by poacher in music at 13:49 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Matana Roberts - Mississippi Moonchile from Constellation Records on Vimeo.

Posted by poacher in music videos at 13:02 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Matana Roberts (image by Scott McMillan)

I recently had a discussion via email with Matana Roberts about her extraordinary new album, Coin Coin: Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libres. Read the rest of the piece over at The Liminal.

You’ve played in band situations in the past – have you always had in mind something as ambitious as the 15-piece band you assembled for the various chapters of Coin Coin? Could you tell us a bit about how you came up with the idea for the project?

Yes, Coin Coin represents a segment of my work that I had been piecing together before I even realized it was what I was doing. It has been a very organic process. Coin Coin is multi-segmented because I have about that many areas of enquiry based around the historical subject matter of the American South as in it relates to my own ancestral history as well as a continued an interest in spooks, ghosts and spirits and the universality of humanness outside of boundaries of race, gender and class.

Matana Roberts - Libation for Mr. Brown: Bid Em In

Posted by poacher in music interviews at 19:48 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)