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Free download of "Curses Fired" is taken from Natureboy's eponymous debut album, which was first released overseas in 2010 and recently issued stateside by Bleek Records. The album is a gorgeously stark yet entrancing collection from Brooklyn-based Sara Kermanshahi, whose songs are crafted from her haunting melodies and languid strumming, with subtle adornments of crystalline slide guitars and brushed percussion. It's an excellent introduction to an up-and-coming artist who'll have a 7" out next month on Bleek featuring a track with Sharon Van Etten, and a new full-length to follow.
Also from the Bleek Records camp comes Masterface which features Natureboy collaborators Cedar Apffel and Rory O'Connor (who also drums in Com Truise). Unlike Natureboy, however, this duo's music is far more lush and atmospheric, fusing dream-pop with dubby electronic production via rich layers of synths and guitars, samples, live drumming and programmed beats, and weaving through shimmering ambient interludes. Enjoy this free download of "Excuse Me Girl" taken from Masterface's Freedom Tower, available now on Other Music Digital. This Week's Featured Downloads
An extraordinary collection of harmonium recordings by Russian-born mystic G.I. Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff was a controversial figure in esoteric circles in the earlier part of the 20th century. He counted Rene Daumal and Frank Lloyd Wright amongst his disciples but was alternately disparaged in the press as a cult leader and even caricatured as a phony baloney in Leanora Carrington's surrealist masterpiece The Hearing Trumpet. Noted British director Peter Brooks made a great dramatic film about the earlier part of his life called Meetings with Remarkable Men, and I most recently saw his name pop up in Daniel Pinchbeck's Breaking Open the Head, a study of modern shamanism and psychedelic drugs. His philosophies continue to have adherents around the world and there is even a Gurdjieff foundation located right here in New York. The earliest part of Gurdjieff's story seems to be shrouded in mystery. What is known is that at some point in his late-teens or early-twenties he went off on an extended quest throughout Persia and the Far East looking for religious mystics, ascetics, and holy men. Through these individuals he believed he discerned certain truths about the condition of man. He discovered that the vast majority of mankind is sleepwalking through life, unable to reconcile the various splits in their psyche. Through dance, music, and literature he formulated specific practices that would condition a person to awaken to their surrounding reality. His "novel" Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson was purposefully very densely written to require the utmost concentration, for it is only through hard work and concentration that mankind can awaken from its slumber. While Gurdjieff wrote a good deal of piano music that has widely been available for some time, the harmonium improvisations presented here have been much more difficult to find. I'd been lucky to have discovered several battered privately issued LPs a while back and was immediately struck by what is surely one of the most enigmatic accomplishments of Gurdjieff's life. Comprised of improv sessions recorded in 1949, this album seems instantly familiar yet quite unlike anything I've ever heard before. There is a certain "old world" quality to the pieces, with melodies deliberately exuding airs of mystery. The music is languorous and haunting; never droning on for too long nor getting shrill as the harmonium is wont to do. One gets the feeling in these performances that Gurdjieff is very consciously attempting to distill his soul through music and I'm sure that there is a case to be made that these pieces constitute a little discussed forerunner to ambient music. -Michael Klausman Minimal Wave offer up another high watermark release in their catalogue with this compilation of phenomenal unreleased material by Yosihumi Niinuma under his Sympathy Nervous alias. Niinuma released numerous albums and singles in Japan on small labels throughout the '80s and '90s, and he suffered greatly during the recent tsunami that devastated his nation; this collection of archival material is a simultaneous tribute and benefit to him, as he lost his entire archive of recordings, custom-built and modified equipment, and worst of all, his home. This album had been in the works before the disaster hit, and all proceeds from it will now go directly to Niinuma. Musically, he's working in an excellent blend of gritty post-punk sequencer hypnosis a la Cabaret Voltaire (it's telling that one of the LP's tracks is actually named just that!), spiraling synthesizer psychedelia that sounds ripped right out of Haruomi Hosono & Tadanori Yokoo's Cochin Moon album, and the stately classicism of the Sky Records catalogue out of Germany. He takes these sounds and tweaks them into a rather unique vision; everything pumps, throbs, and shimmers with just enough grit and dirt to keep things from glossing over into background music or faceless dance beats. This is without question one of Minimal Wave's best, most important releases to date, and is most highly recommended to fans both casual and completist. If anything I've said here tweaks your eardrums in any way, grab this post haste and help support a true talent who deserves wider recognition. Mikey IQ Jones This is a seriously excellent blend of melodic synthwave and industrial that could only have happened in Greece and only in its relatively late release year of 1989. Why? Because this duo obviously had a knack for cherry-picking choice elements from all of the quality synthpop and industrial that came before and arranging it in a way quite unlike the typical late-'80s copycats who were flourishing in the UK and US at the time. This record is chock full of styles that didn't quite exist before -- I hear strangely hit-worthy sounds of early Front 242, Nitzer Ebb and D.A.F. (but only more tasteful and without any overdone clunkiness or macho posturing) combined with a very song-oriented Visage/Depeche Mode (but without any candy coating or overblown melodrama). Add to that a pro-sounding, yet no less sincere Vangelis/Aphrodite's Child haze and compositional sense (that I can only attribute to the duo's Greek bloodline) and you have one singularly great LP. -Scott Mou The Advisory Circle's Jon Brooks was a busy fellow this past year, offering up a number of excellent self-released digital EPs and albums that saw him expand upon his earlier works, from a sound that had him sitting somewhere between the collage-based spectral bricolage of Julian House's Focus Group project and the more melody-driven analogue synth odysseys of Jim Jupp's work as Belbury Poly, to an absolutely breathtaking piece of beauty with his most recent album, As the Crow Flies. Brooks moves away from past tendencies to rely on ambiences and tone-poems, instead offering up a much stronger rhythmic interplay and some lovely melodies as well; he's able to conjure images not only of the pastoral English countryside that the Hauntologists often reference, but also to the classic UK techno palette of the early Warp variety, bending those tools to fit a more "grown-up" mentality, and adding some darker colors to the palette as well. The noted increase in craft here is really just mesmerizing; "Ceridwen" is a gentle etude for acoustic guitar and fizzing synthesizer textures, while the title track brings some echoplexed flute into a slowly arpeggiating spiral of hypnosis. "Modern Through Movement" goes into a proto-techno trance via a nice John Carpenter (in Berlin) rhythmic template, and the gorgeous lullaby "The Patchwork Explains," dedicated to the late Trish Keenan of Broadcast, blends a German motorik pulse and cold synth spirals to warm, delicate melodies. This is perhaps the defining track on the album, and one which displays both gentle beauty and commanding power simultaneously. This is without question one of Ghost Box's finest releases, one which sets the bar high for those who enjoy the likes of autumnal sound alchemists like Broadcast, Leyland Kirby, Boards of Canada, et al., and also happened to be one of my favorite records in 2011. -Mikey IQ Jones Fantastic overview of Michigan garage, R&B, rock, and psychedelic acts from the years that mattered for this sort of thing. Every group and recording presented here -- the Scot Richard Case (later SRC), the Apostles, the Thyme, the Frost, and more -- were managed, produced, booked, had released records by, or otherwise were affiliated with the late Jeep Holland, teen titan of Michigan music, and his A-Square label. While the presence of Scott Morgan's Rationals is missed (conveniently featured below), as is the first single from MC5 which is included on the CD version, here the selection will no doubt open eyes not yet familiar with Michigan rock dominance. Furthermore, it frames the life of a true rock obsessive, and the groundwork he laid for these bands, as the template for so many other independent labels that managed to put dents in the machine. Outstanding stuff! -Doug Mosurock Unless you grew up in the Michigan area, the Rationals are most likely not a household name. It's a shame because from 1965 and into the early '70s, they were truly one of the greatest rock 'n' roll bands, not only amongst the great local talent (MC5! Stooges! Bob Seger! SRC!), but in all of the United States. From their humble beginnings as a competent Zombies/Kinks-informed dance band, they developed into a full-blown American garage soul equivalent of the Small Faces and Spencer Davis Group, thanks in great part to the golden pipes of Scott Morgan, who could occasionally out-sing even Steve Marriott. Primarily known as an R&B and soul covers band, the Rationals' versions of some of the staples of the time are truly incendiary (their unconventional and mind-blowing take on "Temptation's 'Bout to Get Me" is hot as fire!). Fortunately the originals are just as rocking, if only there were more of them. Still, this fantastic retrospective is a godsend and will hopefully go some way in restoring the status of the Rationals as rock 'n' roll royalty. -Andreas Knutsen
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