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This Week's Free Song Download This free download is taken from James Blackshaw's upcoming new album, All Is Falling (Parts 1-8), out next Tuesday, August 24, on Young God. This 8-and-a-half-minute edited version of "Part 7" is a stunning preview of the brilliant, 12-string innovator's latest piece of music, a gorgeous ever-shifting song cycle that ebbs and flows from delicate string and wind instruments accenting Blackshaw's guitar work to cascading waves of overtones, slowly leading the listener to sonic transcendence by album's end. This Week's Featured Downloads Given what we already know about Prurient, Dominick Fernow's long-running and thoroughly intense noise engagement, and Cold Cave, Wesley Eisold's approachable but still grim synth pop project, one would be forgiven for expecting Stars Explode, a collaborative release the pair first hatched for a UK tour, to be some sort of hybridized noise pop. Surprisingly, that's hardly the case. Originally presented as a cassette-only release and then as a super-limited vinyl edition (which we carried at Other Music for a minute or two), it's great to find this available for the masses via this download version. Over the course of three tracks, Fernow and Eisold explore deep, dark ambient textures, reveling in dronescapes that have heretofore only been heard in the context of the occasional, more contemplative Prurient release. While there are no beats or hooks to be found through tracks like the almost 12-minute "Gravity's Victory" and the taut "Presomnal," the distortion is kept at a minimum, too, as the pair take the scenic route to establish a mood that, while reminiscent of each player's own work, is cut from almost an entirely different cloth. -Michael Crumsho
Trunk re-releases this uber-obscure slice of funky post-punk from the early '80s by Cambridge's Jellies, a group who only pressed 30 copies of this single, yet through the years have found fans from Thurston Moore to Optimo. Catchy avant-disco with a slippery, minimal groove that would have sounded at home on 99 Records' roster, with additional remixes from Johnny Trunk, Lemon Jelly's Fred Deakin, and Georges Vert (Jon Brooks of the Advisory Circle).
I am so happy to see these records (expanded editions!) available here for download. Scottish band Arab Strap's first two albums, released in 1996 and '98, respectively, were undiluted shots of quiet, tense, uninhibited bile; they combined sparse instrumental beds that follow the paths set by bands like Slint and Palace Music, and combine them with frontman Aidan Moffat's oft-spoken monologues about the perils of everyday life, overflowing with sexual mishaps, drug- and booze-fueled nights out and headache-and-vomit-saturated mornings after. These recordings are filled with black humor, hypnotic grooves, a bit of experimental flourish, and above all else, a unique sound that no one has really touched since. Moffat's thick Scottish brogue can be a bit tough to decipher at times, yes, but his delivery is brilliant -- these recordings sound less like confessions than they do the constant inner declarations and ruminations of a debauched man's conscience, like a sick Frankensteined collusion of Leonard Cohen, Charles Bukowski, Robert Ashley, and some of Jarvis Cocker or Morrissey's most ego-crushing ruminations, minus the melodrama. These remasters and reissues include bonus material drawing from the group's first two Peel sessions and a live gig for each record -- the debut tacks on their first ever concert, while Philophobia appends their T in the Park gig from '98; all of these feature a more musically aggressive, almost punk-like delivery, not to mention a broader instrumental palette, providing a great contrast to the uneasy calm which precedes it. First album The Week Never Starts Round Here features some of their most crunchy production, with sonics that are at times as barbed as Moffat's words. There's a crisp emphasis on percussion and single, wiry guitar lines, with occasional string, organ, and piano embellishments, all topped by tales of pub workers, lackluster boyfriends, weekend binge fests, and Kate Moss. Highlights include "The First Big Weekend"'s chattering rave drum machine set to a folky bedroom strum, "Blood"'s lament to a crimson-stained condom and the woman who soiled it, "The Clearing"'s blown-out beat and dark string work (set to one of Moffat's most twisted monologues), and "Phone Me Tonight"'s seasick cello and drumbox bittersweet ode to drunk dialing. It's an excellent album, filled with autumnal, twilight dread cast over a brutally realistic landscape of man's natural tendency to be a complete moron.
Arab Strap followed that up, though, with Philophobia, one of the most tense, uneasy, and bleak records ever made, set to music with an overall more soothing and gentle sensibility, though lacking none of multi-instrumentalist Malcolm Middleton's subtle yet gripping touches. The album's opening couplet is perhaps one of the most brutally memorable in recorded history -- "It was the biggest c**k you'd ever seen/But you've no idea where that c**k has been" -- and the rest of the album matches that shocking frankness with a series of barbed-wire tales of domesticity's quiet pitfalls. The music is overall more lush yet still sparse, and Moffat's delivery sounding like an empty one-bedroom flat on a gray Saturday afternoon, or like an episode of Six Feet Under recast as a Gainsbourg-penned musical production. This record is all killer, no filler, with every note and each breath perfectly placed. I highly recommend finding the lyrics on the internet and reading along as you listen to the album, Moffat's writing is brilliant -- thank goodness for Google and thank goodness for songs like "I Would've Liked Me a Lot Last Night." It's enough of a feat to write an entire album where one of the most optimistic lyrics is "At least I'm not sh**ting blood again;" the fact that Moffat and Middleton take these moments of unease, private despair and coupling catastrophe, and imbue them with deft wit, sharp truth, and total candid discourse, not to mention hypnotic arrangements, makes their output even more worthy of reexamination. Everyone should hear Philophobia at least once before they die. I can't give a record much higher praise than that. -Mikey IQ Jones Better known as Sleepy John, John Adam Estes was a sharecropper's son from Tennessee who made the transition from field hand to entertainer in his early twenties and never looked back. He didn't so much sing the blues as cry them, wailing his way in a straight line from your ears to your heartstrings, recording sides for the Victor, Decca and Bluebird labels between 1929 and '41. Even as a young man, he possessed a ragged, well-worn voice of someone much, much older; by the time Estes reemerged after an almost two-decade hiatus from the public eye (now completely blind and living in poverty), many blues revivalists were surprised to find him still alive, having assumed that Estes passed away long ago. He returned to the touring circuit as well as the studio, cutting a handful of latter day masterpieces including this album at hand, accompanied by his longtime musician companions Yank Rachell on the mandolin and Hammie Nixon on the harp (not to mention a few contributions from a young Mike Bloomfield on guitar). Featuring a collection of classic country blues cuts like "Black Mattie" and "So Glad I'm Livin'," Broke and Hungry is an essential addition to the libraries of any serious blues enthusiast, and not a bad place to start if you want to sample the styling of a man who moaned the blues with the best of them. -Andrew Siskind
Robert Ashley is an American genius, a brilliant composer, writer, and reorganizer of the English language. His many operas (though people irrationally tend to use that term quite loosely when describing his work) and his early pieces were some of the first to incorporate the usage of electronics, extended techniques, and sound synthesis into compositions which effectively complicate often deceptively simple means of construction. He's a master storyteller, and if that weren't enough, he has one of the most soothing, hypnotic speaking voices ever put to tape and a wicked sense of humor. "Automatic Writing" is often cited as one of his masterpieces, though in some ways it is also perhaps the most unique of all of his speech-derived works. The piece was written during a five-year period when Ashley discovered he had mild Tourette syndrome; in researching the connections between the disorder's sound-derived manifestation and his tendencies as a composer, he attempted to essentially compose and organize his involuntary, uncontrollable Tourette's-derived utterances. After many failed attempts to "force" or imitate these utterances, he finally managed to capture the 48 minutes of unconscious speech heard as one of four main voices in the piece, the other three being a French translation of his utterances, a synthesized manipulation of the utterances, and subtle interjections by a Polymoog synthesizer. The piece is, appropriately, almost inaudible at "normal" volumes, staking out new territory in the world of "ambient" music, but it actually can be better appreciated when played at very high volumes. His soft, clipped speech ends up sounding like a cubist version of itself, and underneath it all, about one-third of the way into the piece comes a muffled, womblike dub bass tone that careful listeners might recognize as fragments of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" played from seemingly four rooms away. Gentle will'o'wisp organ drones flitter about the soundfield, and the whole thing successfully refigures speech as being able to demonstrate and express meaning and emotion without actually being able to understand the majority of the speech being uttered. "Purposeful Lady, Slow Afternoon," on the other hand, is very much its opposite -- a recording of vividly descriptive words detailing an uncomfortable close physical encounter between a woman and an aggressor, spoken without emotion, rationalization, or contextualization. The woman reciting the description is accompanied by high-pitched bell tones gently twinkling and cycling through the stereo field. It takes the same concepts demonstrated in the first piece and drastically re-contextualizes them. I highly recommend reading Ashley's liner notes (hosted on Other Music Digital) to this piece before listening, as the concept, purpose, and execution of the work (as well as the others included) are all explained in detail. The set closes out with a brief coda, "She Was a Visitor," an aural rumor centered around a lead voice repeating the title phrase as a chorus of vocalists surround him in groups. These groups then catch and repeat sustained phonemes from that phrase for one natural breath. These sounds are then picked up by outside groups and sustained until the lead voice is surrounded by what sounds like a thick cloud of bees. The effect is stunning, and again, the piece's simplicity only makes the music that much more effective. In all, this collection of works displays many of Ashley's talents as a composer and demonstrates his separation from peers in the "minimalist" school. Ashley's recognition by a wider, younger audience is long overdue, and this is a great entry point into his unique soundworld. In short: essential listening. -Mikey IQ Jones
What would you say if I told you that you could tune into a Nashville rhythm and blues show from 1966, and hear the Hoss himself, William Trousdale Allen III, introduce artists ranging from Clarence 'Gatemouth' Brown to the Mighty Hannibal? This album is a dream, folks, a bona fide listening experience worthy of your time in a way that other, lesser records could ever hope to be. These recordings were made live for the short-lived Nashville TV show The !!!! Beat, hosted by famous WLAC Disc Jockey Hoss Allen and featuring a house band led by Gatemouth himself. If you love soul, don't wait a minute longer, paradise awaits. Be the first kid on your block to twist to Roger Martin's smoking rendition of that Otis / Aretha classic "Respect," or hear Gerri Taylor, Bobby Powell, and Cleo Randle perform heart-wrenching, finger-snapping, hip-shaking music live in the studio. Twenty-four magic tracks just waiting for your ears -- a solid hour of golden soul, what's not to love? -Andrew Siskind |
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We're very excited to welcome Ramona Gonzalez (a/k/a Nite Jewel) back to Other Music tonight, who will be celebrating the release of her new EP, Am I Real, with an in-store performance. We'll have copies of the 12" for sale at the shop (an Other Music exclusive for the next two weeks) and you can also download the new record off our 
