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Other Music & Dig For Fire's 2011 SXSW Lawn Party
 
This Week's Free Downloads
Free song download of "I Let the Telephone Ring" off the Eternals' new full-length, Approaching the Energy Field (out now). Recently trimmed down to a duo, this Chicago group's mysterious, often dubby brew incorporates many diverse elements, from Adrian Sherwood-inspired production to post-punk, funk, soul, hip-hop. The new album also finds the Eternals tapping into Sun Ra's spiritual jazz and moving into further "out there" territory. Good stuff!
This free download of Svarte Greiner's "Halves" is taken from the first volume of SMM: Context (also available). This new annual series from Ghostly International features a diverse array of exploratory and experimental sounds from a list of notable, boundary-breaking composers and producers, including: Goldmund, Leyland Kirby, Manual, Peter Broderick, Aidan Baker, and more.
This Week's Featured Downloads Jeremy Barnes's new album as A Hawk and a Hacksaw finds him and partner Heather Trost jettisoning a bit of the Balkan gypsy flavor of past releases in favor of sounds echoing the group's roots in the American Southwest. New Mexico's desert plains provide equal landscapes of inspiration for the band, as this is one of the most straightforward, hard-hitting releases that AHAAH has recorded. Flamenco, Turkish belly-dance motifs, Yugoslavian kolo dance, and even a bit of raga collide with pumping mariachi brass and Mexican melodies, making for a collusion of styles that looks odd on paper but which sonically dance as a complete whole, thanks in no small part due to the talent of the musicians involved. Barnes's accordion playing in particular displays a wild mix of traditional chops in a number of styles, not to mention an impressive use of more avant/experimental techniques; there are moments all over the record where his microtonal lines in the instrument's higher registers sound like musique concrete electronic manipulations, adding further to the dizzying opium head trip this record provides. Special mention should also be given to Stephanie Hladowski's impassioned vocal performances as well; her voice dances around the serpentine bouzouki and dumbek rhythms with a grace and beauty that makes Transylvania and the Balkans not really seem so far away from New Mexico. That's really the whole message of this record, in essence -- we're all wanderers, looking for passion and inspiration, and hopefully a good time or two while we're at it. On Cervantine, A Hawk and a Hacksaw bring the party and the pain, and deliver what may be their best record yet. -Mikey IQ Jones
On the heels of his slow-burning Fabric mix, Shackleton returns with two new releases on Honest Jon's. The title cut of the three-track "Deadman" single (also featured on the aforementioned mix) is typical Shackleton, deep and spooky, with a haunting build-up of sparse percussion coupled with stuttering and repetitive, paranoid-sounding vocals that lead you further into the darkness. Here, Kevin "The Bug" Martin turns in two separate remixes of the song, the one under his King Midas Sound guise giving the track the biggest re-working, with additional vocals provided by Hitomi lending a much needed live presence into the barren soundscape. While the official remix from the Bug was not included on the vinyl version, it seems to use the King Midas Sound mix as the blueprint to dub things out further into a thick and hazy stew of rumbling bass and cavernous snares.
"Deadman" also gets two more re-workings on the Fireworks single, here renamed "Undeadman." Shackleton's own mix shifts the scope by switching everything to higher registers, and what results is still haunting but somewhat brighter in overall effect, with the beat becoming more forceful and four-on-the floor. This version is reworked yet again by the unsung Mordant Music, who stretches the already lengthy track close to the ten-minute mark, creating an expansive and heady sandstorm of cymbals, thundering bass, and scratching, until the whole thing spins sharply into focus. The title track of this single is a brand new cut, and starts off with some eerie, spoken word detailing the uses of light, which leads into escalating filtered synths that sound like crackling fireworks taking off into the sky. Rolling bass and staggering percussion eventually strut in, swaying and tumbling in effects like the rolling waves of an ocean. T++'s remix of this track utilizes a choppier and dissonant rhythm pattern, with echo and reverbed synth flattening out the percussion hits and giving it a mechanized and robotic feel. All together these are two great companion singles of new-school, ethno-dub-techno from some of the more academic producers working within the electronic scene. Head music at its best. -Daniel Givens Trunk Records' stellar campaign reissuing the sounds of innovative UK jazz and tape music pioneer Basil Kirchin has reared its awesome head once more for one of the label's greatest offerings yet. Primitive London offers up two never-before-released film scores for the 1965 movie of the same name and 1971's The Freelance, both UK exploitation/mondo/Euro-sleaze productions that feature heavy amounts of horror and nudity, not to mention wife-swapping and a handful of beatniks, all set to Kirchin's swinging, esoteric dark alley jazz motifs. Heavily reverbed saxophones, moaning strings, creepy organ drones, and shuffling brushed drums evoke haunted, shadowed streets in neighborhoods your mother probably warned you to stay out of, yet here we are, with the main melodic theme eerily foreshadowing Bernard Herrmann's theme to Scorsese's Taxi Driver by nearly 10 years. Other tracks use studio tricks like back-masking and musique concrete-inspired tape splices to further disorient, and by the time you get to the free-jazz funk atmospherics of The Freelance's cues, you're stumbling into a room thick with the smoke of incense and other exotic "herbs," nodding your head to a British take on the more sedate moments of the Art Ensemble of Chicago's score for Les Stances a Sophie, with David Axelrod swinging a conductor's baton at the bar, hoping that the orchestra on the other side of the room can see through the haze. This stuff is brilliant, groovy, moody, and is quickly becoming some of my favorite of Kirchin's music. Fans of '60s British jazz, the aforementioned Art Ensemble and Axelrod, and those who like a little snuff with your stuff will find much to love here. -Mikey IQ Jones
Just as we've finally gotten the confidence to set our sights on spring, Peaking Lights make us crave full-blaze summer. With music influenced by the untamed Wisconsin wilderness where they make their home, and recorded to tape in a barn that used to host artistic happenings back in the '70s, Peaking Lights scrape together richly-textured, beat-heavy psychedelic music that fuses their experimental pop background with a deep love for dub. After the break-up of Indra Dunis' post-punk-prog trio Numbers, Dunis and Aaron Coyes played together in the San Francisco trio Rahdunes before moving to the Madison area and starting up a vintage clothing shop / art gallery / d.i.y. venue. The intriguing "f-ed pop" that the couple have created in the time since, released on the likes of dark experimental Iowa City label Night-People and Woodsist affiliate Fuckittapes, has been inspiringly fresh, deeply soulful and instinctively raw, created with hand-built and scavenged instruments and gear. This is the duo's most fleshed-out, cohesive release to date, and the pop sensibility of 936 is strong, with songs like "All the Sun That Shines" assembling bass, synth, and guitar hooks into masterfully mellow yet driving, danceable dub with Dunis' voice drifting atop, melodic but detached, sure to appeal to fans of Anika or Broadcast. Come to think of it, her vocals are wonderfully prominent on this record; during the intimate, delicate "Key Sparrow," a soft synth echoes Dunis' quiet sing-song melody, with '70s sci-fi oscillations spiraling off into the ether, and psychedelic, wandering guitar piecing together another one of the duo's immersive dreamscapes. These are no single-bite snacks; Peaking Lights invest and explore each one of their partly-improvised songs to the fullest -- about half of the tracks are seven or eight minutes long -- but they never tire, there's just the right balance between looseness and structure around a theme. It helps that 936 was so painstakingly recorded -- all the layers of guitar and synth are spatially separate, with equal respect given to each essential part. A slow-burner that locks into the groove for a full 50 minutes, this might be the strongest release yet on the Not Not Fun label, and a great discovery for fans of Woods, Sun Araw, Gang Gang Dance, and Dirty Beaches. -Karen Soskin
French experimental guitarist Noël Akchoté turned a lot of heads when he first issued this album on the Winter & Winter label in 2007. Known for playing with the likes of Derek Bailey, Luc Ferrari, and Evan Parker, his last solo record prior to this one was a lovely, knotty tribute to free jazz fretman Sonny Sharrock which found Akchoté deconstructing Sharrock's back catalogue in raw, stripped down quietude. While that record was a surprise, it was nothing compared to So Lucky: twenty tracks of solo guitar instrumental covers of songs made popular by Kylie Minogue. Yes, you read that correctly. As ludicrous a concept as it sounded to most of the avant-garde stuffed shirts at the time (if they even knew who Minogue was, for starters), Akchoté gains the upper hand, as it's not only the most lovely record in his catalogue, but it also ends up being one of the most stunning solo guitar albums ever recorded. You don't need to be familiar with Kylie's back catalogue to appreciate what's going on here (nor does such a familiarity distract from the enjoyment of the quiet etudes played), but I love playing this record in the presence of pop-conscious listeners and watching their enjoyment get complicated when the riff from "Can't Get You Out of My Head" gets recognized. Akchoté turns that pumping electro ditty into a soft bossa nova lullaby, sounding like some outtake from Joao Gilberto's legendary 1973 solo album, and he tackles similar hits of hers with equal aplomb, transforming each into a pure representation of its greatest parts. The record's not as much of a shock when you look at the songwriting credits and realize that Kylie had some of the best hitmakers of her time writing for her; hell, Akchoté even tackles "The Locomotion" and "The Crying Game" because, hey, Kylie's covered it. The "Crying Game" actually closes out the album, and its transformation into a soft electric blues lament solidifies the realization that when you strip the gloss, the glamour, and the bullshit away from a good pop song, all that you've got left is a tune. This album provides a damn good argument on the power of good pop music, and it came out on a German avant-garde label best known for its releases by Mauricio Kagel and the soundtracks of recent Werner Herzog films. Buy this immediately if you know what's good for you... this record is a revelation that I listen to almost every Sunday morning. -Mikey IQ Jones |
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