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This Week's Free Downloads
Sharon Van Etten is certainly a staff and customer favorite at Other Music, and her Epic full-length from last year was one of our top picks of 2010. She recently recorded this beautiful rendition of Glass Ghost's "Like a Diamond" (off of Glass Ghost's 2009-released Idol Omen on Western Vinyl), offered here as a free download. We already loved the original, and Sharon's voice perfectly channels the haunted falsetto of GG's Eliot Krimsky while adding her own emotional heft over the band's gorgeously sparse arrangement of electric piano, drums and strings. Don't miss this one.
Free download of "Candyfloss," taken from Jonny's eponymous debut full-length, out now on Merge Records. Featuring Teenage Fanclub's Norman Blake and Euros Childs from Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Jonny is the perfect mix of both bands, weird, twisted psychedelic pop that is, actually, more than the sum of its parts.
This free download of "Jagged Dance" is off of the new album, Wicked Work It Out, from Zac Nelson (Hexlove, Chll Pll, Trawler Bycatch). Nelson's music is dense, cerebral and endlessly listenable, towing the line between pop and experimental music, as layers of vocal melodies and tumbling drums, guitars, electronics and wind instruments zigzag through proper song structures, drones and freak-outs. Wonderfully unpredictable, visceral and imaginative from start to finish. This Week's Featured Downloads Other Music Exclusive Advance! Featured on an ultra-limited, now-sold-out Record Store Day 12", Bear in Heaven and Lindstrom swap two similarly named tracks, resulting in these two killer remixes. BiH turns the slinky electro-funk of Lindstrom & Christabelle's "Lovesick" into a propulsive, synth-heavy workout, while the Oslo producer puts his cosmic fingerprints all over the Brooklyn band's "Lovesick Teenagers," transforming the original into a spacey nine-plus minute exploration of slo-mo disco.
French sound poet and multi-media artist Anne-James Chaton's new release for Raster-Noton is dizzying, funky, and hugely impressive in its simplicity. Chaton creates sound poems out of his collection of everyday "disposable" texts which he dubs "low intensity literature," culled from shopping receipts, bank slips, business cards, bus and train tickets, promotional flyers, and most importantly, newspaper headlines. Following a noteworthy current event, Chaton picks up a newspaper the following day and creates a piece based around that event's headline and the textual ephemera he collects for the rest of that day. From there, he cuts up and restructures elements of his recitation of that headline into a rhythm until a particular phrase works for him; then, he recites his low intensity literature in what is in actuality a rather ardent fashion. "Vendredi 26 Juin 2009 - Événement N°23" crafts a piece around the passing of Michael Jackson, with a vocal loop pumping a beat out of the phrase "the King of Pop is dead;" as the rhythm percolates in the foreground, Chaton's recitations spill forth at lightning speed, like a bastardized hybrid of early Steve Reich pieces like "Come Out" or "It's Gonna Rain" with hip-hop beatboxing, the high-octane Detroit club music and Chicago house of DJ Assault or Green Velvet, and the textural crirhythms of sound poets Francois Dufrene and Henri Chopin's Revue OU. The album is comprised of nine of these recorded "événements" and, as a tongue-in-cheek nod to the rhythmic nature of the pieces, includes a series of "bonus beats" at the end of the disc for each corresponding event. To listen to the beats taken out of context is both humorous and startling as to display the gob-smacking simplicity of the DNA of the pieces contrasted with their textual complexity. To hear someone craft a jacking house beat out of the words "Barack Obama," "Pina Bausch," "pop is dead," or "Taliban" is unsettling; in total, this stands as one of Raster-Noton's best releases, as it balances both a startling confrontational listening experience and a hugely satisfying rhythmic accessibility in 34 short, razor-sharp minutes. Consider this one of my favorite releases of 2011, most highly recommended to all adventurous listeners, and rock-solid proof that the voice is still the most powerful instrument known to man. -Mikey IQ Jones
"City Ablaze" announces the first album by New York's Beauclerk with a low rumbling that sounds like a gathering storm, as James Bradley's sweeping saxophone tones glide across this vista like a plane experiencing a fair amount of turbulence. It's an engaging debut crafted from Bradley's variety of approaches using the sax as the only sound source, with City Center's Fred Thomas providing the expert production. Though many different textures share the palette within each piece, the record is remarkably coherent; "Pecking Order" consists only of chaotic rhythmic popping noises while "Becalmed" and "Dance of the Stars" are two lovely ambient studies that recall the sound achieved by running one's finger around the rim of a wine glass. Elsewhere, clouds of melodic, yet reverb-heavy sax abound on "Clara Hale" and the incessant thump of closer "Gegenschein" sounds like the skeleton of Kate Bush's "Cloudbusting" re-imagined as a horror movie score. A well-crafted and auspicious debut. -ning nong
Now available on Other Music Digital. Six albums in, Dylan Carlson's Earth is no longer trafficking in the epic drone that helped pave the way for groups like Sunn 0))), Boris and Corrupted to pray at the altar of doom. Still, at Earth's core is the speed of its music and its scale: an inexorable slow slide across an American landscape. Gone here, however, are the organ and Southern Delta feel of 2008's The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull, now replaced by a plaintive cello and the snow-covered fields of Minnesota -- more Fargo than In the Heat of the Night. Five tracks that together total over sixty minutes, let this one slowly seep into your consciousness and you will be richly rewarded. -Dan Maharry
Charlie Tweddle's album The Fantastic Greatest Hits by Eilrahc Elddewt is an outsider folk gem. Try to imagine Bob Dylan's unreleased basement tapes with the Band accompanied by French musique concrete composer Luc Ferrari's masterpiece of natural sound Presque Rien, and you'll get an idea of the brilliance to be found on this privately pressed, head-scratchingly amazing opus of Appalachian psychedelia. Originally from Kentucky, Tweddle found himself ensconced in the Haight-Ashbury scene in the late '60s where he experimented with a good deal of LSD. His album was primitively recorded in San Rafael, California in 1971 with a gang of guys that look like ex-Burrito Brothers. But when I say primitively recorded, I don't mean to say that it isn't strikingly original. Tweddle had a great love for nature that he was able to perfectly marry to his downer folk songs through the use of exquisitely recorded field recordings. Only a lysergic attention to detail or a degree from INA-GRM could have produced such a wonderful cornucopia of seagulls, frogs and crickets. He's got a John Cage sense of Zen silence, with patches of tape seeming to descend into a physical nowhere. On side two, he even provides about 25-minutes of beautiful nighttime ambience. I don't think I've ever come as close to hearing a record sound as still as a pond, but the whippoorwills are quietly cooing to the sounds of a hootenanny gone adrift in the distance. I'm thinking he may actually be right on with his proclamation on the back of the LP's jacket: "Eilrahc is to music what Christ is to religion." He must share my pantheistic tendencies. Fantastic Greatest Hits was released to little fanfare and even less acclaim, but it's aged quite well for an early-'70s artifact and should sit quite nicely with your Michael Hurley and Holy Modal Rounders albums. The reissue has six extra bonus tracks that weren't on the original record -- all are great. In the decades since this album was released, Charlie Tweddle has found fame as a maker of completely kick-ass cowboy hats worn by the likes of Kris Kristofferson. Check 'em out on his website. -Michael Klausman
Luie Luie and his Touchy may not have changed the music scene of the '70s, but you would be hard pressed to say that he never tried. Through this eleven-track reissue brought to us by Companion Records, Luie Luie's world of the Touchy does come to light and it is an impressive story of good versus evil, and touching versus not touching. In the early 1970s, Luis Johnston began making a name for himself in the nightclub and restaurant circuit playing the trumpet, marimba, keyboard and drums while allowing members of the audience to sing. "The greatest single act of the world," as described by the president of Penstar Productions, Luie seemed at the top of his game. But apparently being a sassy and successful multi-instrumentalist was not fulfilling enough for him. He wanted to give back to the people, which is where the touchy came into play. After years of watching human interaction on the dance floor diminish and couples dance moves replaced with solo inventions and improvisations (as well as a pesky "ego indulgence", which Luie writes was caused by the popularity of LSD and the after-effects of using the drug), he wanted to make a music and dance combination that would bring people back together. "Out of that inward mystical realm and...back to earth-reality." And so the "touchy" is the simple idea of people touching each other while they dance. More specifically, their "touchy buttons" (pin-buttons that had a drawing of Luie's face on it) together while they dance. Now as provocative as this dance sounds, it is actually quite the opposite. Luie wants this to be considered a divine touch and not a sensual one. Based on the tracks recorded for this album, most of the touchy would be far better suited for a church social than any nightclub. However, Luie has actually already come up with appropriate settings and moods, which he describes in the introduction before starting every song: making tortillas, being with your grandchildren, being in love, worshipping the Lord -- he covers a lot of subjects pretty swiftly. Although the concepts do not always translate into the actual music nor are the tunes particularly easy to dance to, I do think hidden beneath the ideology lies a great sense of creativity in what Luie recorded. That blaring trumpet, hitting every note flawlessly and paired with the kooky found instrument sounds (hammer, pans, pipes, screwdriver, etc.) results in something that is undeniably kitschy yet slightly progressive. "A Touch of the Pharaohs" has a fuzzed-out guitar that even Andy Votel would sample in a mix and "Touch of Light" layers so many droney trumpets that it disorients you from the entire idea of touchy fun. Above everything else Luie Luie really stands out for his charisma. He has a lot of philosophies about how to live life and he is perfectly capable of cheerfully explaining them all to you in one or two minute fragments between songs. This man is all about love and feeling things, and really isn't that what life is about? Maybe we all need a little touchy in our lives -- with or without the buttons. -Amanda Colbenson |
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This Wednesday, Portland's oddball party starters 
