Colin Stetson - New History Warfare Volume 2: Judges

Admittedly I didn't really get this the first few times around. I had it on in the background and thought it was just another dude making some abstract noises electronically. There were some spoken word bits that sounded an awful lot like Laurie Anderson. It sounded interesting, kinda Aphex Twin-y, but with all the tools available to musicians today, it didn't sound like anything mind-blowing.

Which is why it's a good idea to read a bit about stuff sometimes. What's going on here is mind-blowing on both the inhale and exhale. It turns out these songs are done by Colin alone with no overdubs or loops. It's just him, his saxophone, and about 20 well-placed mics. So in a sense the only manipulation here is in the mixing.

So now knowing that, I wish I could go back to ignorance and try to listen to the music just for what it is. Now when I hear it I have difficulty getting past the question, "how in the hell..."

I'm not too familiar with the sax but what he's doing must destroy the reeds. So witness the music of destruction:

Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells

The theme for The Exorcist is one of the most recognizable movie themes in American history. But it's not as well known that the theme was from an early album of prog rocker Mike Oldfield. Oldfield came out with Tubular Bells in 1973; it was used in The Exorcist in the same year. So the first few minutes of this album, at least, are already familiar. The rest of it, perhaps not so much. Tubular Bells is nearly ubiquitous at used record stores, so I decided to give it a try.

What a treat! At first, the unusual time signatures and general repetitiveness of the music reminded me of Steve Reich and other classical acts. With time, though, the way various instruments are introduced, the way things culminate, peak, decay, soar, and disappear reminds me more of prog rockers like Soft Machine. It's rock, it's kinda jazzy, it's well-composed. Tubular Bells is only two tracks; each spans the entire side of a record, much like Soft Machine's Third album. So it's not surprising to see that Oldfield has some connection to Kevin Ayers. (The surprising bit is that he was 16 [16!] when he went on the road as part of Ayers' touring band.)

There are about 50 different instruments that come into the mix here, and Oldfield is playing the vast majority of them. It seems in the early 70s there was this trend of a self-made album, like Paul McCartney's McCartney, Stevie Wonder's Music of My Mind, Roy Wood's Boulders, and Todd Rundgren's A Wizard, A True Star. There's a level of ambition and talent in those albums that seems absolutely inconceivable today.

Really, the more I dig into this album the more amazing it seems. For instance:

Tubular Bells, originally dubbed Opus 1, grew out of studio time gifted by Richard Branson, who at the time was running a mail-order record retail service. After its completion, Oldfield shopped the record to a series of labels, only to meet with rejection; frustrated, Branson decided to found his own label, and in 1973 Tubular Bells became the inaugural release of Virgin Records.

Yowza.

Yellow Magic Orchestra

Coming across something like Yellow Magic Orchestra vindicates this dumb effort to keep finding new music.

As much as I enjoy Krautrock, I never really want to listen to much Kraftwerk; I find it too uptight. YMO is like a Japanese Kraftwerk, but fun to listen to. This, their self-titled debut, is considered the first computer-themed album. This came out in 1978, the same year as Space Invader!

I came to YMO in a fairly roundabout way. Basically I got to this through Destroyer, via Japan. Destroyer came out with Kaputt either early this year or late last year. In an interview with Dan Bejar about the album, he mentioned something about David Sylvan records. So that got me to his solo career as well as the band Japan. On some of those records, Ryuchi Sakamoto was listed as a collaborator and YMO in general was considered an influence.

Pitchfork: Back in your twenties, would you ever imagine that you'd make an album like Kaputt?

DB: No, not at the time. When I got into the American scene, I put aside a lot of stuff that was dear to me. There was this 10-year period where the idea of putting on a David Sylvian record was ludicrous because it was just too lame. I banished Morrissey from my life in favor of Sun City Girls, so I only really discovered Your Arsenal in my thirties. It's embarrassing.

Pitchfork: Do you think your 25-year-old self would think Kaputt sounds lame?

DB: For me to bother with it at 25, someone would have had to sit me down and said, "No, you should actually listen to this." Maybe I'm selling myself short. At that time, I was almost exclusively listening to classic rock records from the 60s and 70s.

Yeah, that's where I am, or where I have been for the past five years, listening to classic rock records from the 60s and 70s, really in need of someone to sit me down and tell me to listen to stuff. You'd think the internet would make it relatively easy to find where to go next, but it's not that simple. If anything, it provides access to too much. It would be overwhelming to take that much in.

Anyway, this is definitely one of the better finds. Last weekend I was giddy when I saw the translucent yellow vinyl version for under 10 bucks at the local record store. I fully expect to check out some more YMO and related stuff like Sakamoto's solo work.

Psychic TV - Force the Hand of Chance

OK, so this is instructive. Psychic TV's Force the Hand of Chance was a blind download. I knew nothing about this other than it was suggested in a thread I made about 'song cycle' albums. This, by the way, explains how I come across about 5 percent of the albums I try.

Van Dyke Parks' album Song Cycle is undoubtedly a top-10 album for me. Going by the definition I found on Wikipedia:

A song cycle is a group of songs designed to be performed in a sequence as a single entity. As a rule, all of the songs are by the same composer and often use words from the same poet or lyricist. Unification can be achieved by a narrative or a persona common to the songs, or even, as in Schumann's second Liederkreis, by the atmospheric setting of the forest. The unity of the cycle is often underlined by musical means, famously in the return in the last song of the opening music in Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte.

The term originated to describe cycles of art songs (often known by the German term "Lieder") in classical music, and has been extended to apply to popular music.

In that case, some of my favorite albums would be considered song cycles: The Clash's Sandinista, Todd Rundgren's A Wizard, A True Star, and perhaps Allen Toussaint's Southern Nights. (VDP's album, ironically, doesn't really fit the definition.)

I listened to this on repeat today, perhaps four or five times all the way through. I rarely do that with a new album, so this is what qualifies as excitement for me. I've been intrigued to research this album that I've never heard of before, but before I do that, I wanted to try something.

This is my guess: I'm thinking this album is from the UK and released in the span of 1988-1993. Influences include Television Personalities, Public Image Ltd., This Heat, and Bill Holt's Dreamies. I'm betting this was the band's only album. The genre is avant-garde post-punk, although it's a bit later than most post-punk albums.

So now I'll actually research it and see how close I got.



Update: Oh bruddah. I was right about the UK post-punk bit, so I should've known it was even earlier than I guessed. This was released in 1982, after Genesis P-Orridge was out of Throbbing Gristle (a band whom, despite their appearance on several post-punk compilations, I've never been able to get into). This album is as old as I am.

I was way off the mark thinking this was a one-off album. Then again, it appears Psychic TV is more of an audio/visual house collaboration among dozens of artists. They described themselves as a video group who does music, rather than a music group which makes music videos. In the mid/late-80s, they set the Guinness record for most releases in one year. Perhaps the rest of their work doesn't sound much like this one. Without digging too deep, it appears the rest of their work is more industrial and exotic before transitioning to house and techno in the 90s.

Something I don't yet understand is that Wikipedia describes this as a single album with 8 tracks. That's certainly what I've been listening to today. Yet AllMusic refers to a double-album with 13 tracks. I guess I've got to find the other five tracks.

The Art of Noise - Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise?

This is a bit frustrating, but I'm trying to remember how I came across this band. I know I had seen a few of their albums when flipping through the 'punk / new wave' sections of record stores, but unless an album has a very distinct cover and I made a note of it, that's typically not the way I find things that might be worth exploring.

Every now and then you come across something that sounds as if someone made a mistake somewhere and perhaps time and space are not one-way vectors, as surely for an album like this to have existed in 1984 is evidence of a rift in the space-time continuum. It's not that it sounds way ahead of its time; it's just that assigning this to any specific point in time seems arbitrary.

Who's Afraid is best described as a sound collage, two words that normally translate to 'stay away'. But what a mistake that would've been--I wouldn't have heard the full 10-plus minute version of "Moments in Love," a beautiful, chilling opuses of avant-garde synthesized goodness. Of course it has been sampled numerous times since then; even the band made dozens of different versions of the song.

(Ignore the video; it's the only full-length version of the song I could find on YouTube)



But really, most of the album isn't really like that. The remainder is closer to the other big hit from this album, "Close (to the Edit)." By no means is that a bad thing; it's just been copied so much that it's hard to separate the original from the cliche imitations. Witness the fables of the deconstruction:

Lizzy Mercier Descloux - Mambo Nassau

Out in some alternate universe, where old songs float around in space, there is a bridge that links Talking Heads' "I Zimbra" to the same band's "Born Under Punches." That bridge is formed by nine of the ten songs that make up Mambo Nassau, Lizzy Mercier Descloux's second solo album. Whether or not Descloux's severe yet foreseeable change in approach had anything to do with Talking Heads' own development is not (widely) known. It is known that she had become inspired by the traditional world music released on France's Ocora label, and in 1980 she took drummer Bill Perry down to Nassau to record at Compass Point, where she was aided by a number of people, including keyboard wiz, arranger, and -- ding ding! -- future Talking Heads associate Wally Badarou. The intent was to incorporate African elements into Descloux's existing vibrant mix of arty funk, disco, and film music, and the result was an album that nearly rivals just about any other rhythmically inventive release that came from the rock world at the time. Naturally, Mambo Nassau is even more adventurous than Press Color. The instrumental setup -- with the exception of some of the percussion -- is completely Western and rock-oriented, with Badarou's excitable synthesizer often figuring prominently, whether churning out squiggled melodies or affecting the mood of the song with sensitive accents. The interplay between all of the instruments is positively acrobatic, including off-kilter time-keeping, wriggling guitars, and plump basslines that seem to twist in place. And, of course, there's Descloux's voice at the center of it all, adding even more life to the material with infectious wide-eyed exuberance. Eight of the album's ten songs are originals. Once you hear the cover of Kool & the Gang's "Funky Stuff," you'll realize that no one has ever had as much fun as Descloux had playing that song.

(Lizzy Mercier Descloux - Mambo Nassau)

Durutti Column - LC

After some abortive collaborations, Reilly hooked up with a regular drummer, talented fellow Mancunian Bruce Mitchell, to create LC, Durutti's second full release. Self-produced by Reilly but bearing the unmistakable hints of his earlier work with Martin Hannett, LC, named after a bit of Italian graffiti, extends Reilly's lovely talents ever further, resulting in a new set of evocative, carefully played and performed excursions on electric guitar. Mitchell's crisp but never overly dominant drumming actually starts the record off via "Sketch for Dawn I," added to by a simply captivating low series of notes from Reilly that builds into a softly triumphant melodic surge, repeating a core motif again and again. His piano playing adds a perfect counterpart, while the final touch are his vocals -- low speak-singing that sounds utterly appropriate in context, mixed low and capturing the emotional flavor at play via delivery rather than lyrical content. As great as Return is, this is perhaps even better, signaling a full flowering of Reilly's talents throughout the album. Mitchell proves him time and again to be in perfect sync with Reilly, adding gentle brio and understated variation to the latter's compositions. Nowhere is this more apparent than on "The Missing Boy," the album's unquestioned highlight. Written in memory of Ian Curtis of Joy Division, on it Mitchell adds quick, sudden hits contrasting against the low, tense atmosphere of the song, while fragile piano notes and Reilly's own regret-tinged, yearning vocals complete the picture. For all the implicit melancholy in Durutti's work, there's a surprising amount of life and energy throughout -- "Jaqueline" is perhaps the standout, with a great central melody surrounded by the expected Reilly elaborations and additions in the breaks. As with the rest of Durutti's mid-'90s reissues, the expanded version of LC appears full to the brim with intriguing bonus tracks galore. The first three capture an abortive collaboration with another Manc drummer, funk performer Donald Johnson. A contribution to a holiday album, "One Christmas for Your Thoughts," finds Reilly back with drum machines, while the very first Reilly/Mitchell collaborations, "Danny" and "Enigma," round out this excellent release.

(Durutti Column - LC)

Bark Psychosis - ///Codename: Dustsucker

An interesting post-rock album, perfect for background or headphones, that is remarkable for being almost entirely unmemorable, despite some very agreeable music. Hard to describe, but worth checking out.

A longer review: Dusted

(Bark Psychosis - ///Codename: Dustsucker)

The Residents - Meet the Residents

The Residents are true avant-garde crazies. Their earliest albums (of which this is the first) have precedents in Captain Beefheart's experimental albums, Frank Zappa's conceptual numbers from Freak Out!, the work of Steve Reich, and the compositions of chance music tonemeister John Cage -- yet the Residents' work of this time really sounds like nothing else that exists. All of the music on this release consists of deconstructions of countless rock and non-rock styles, which are then grafted together to create chaotic, formless, seemingly haphazard numbers; the first six "songs" (including a fragment from the Nancy Sinatra hit "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'") are strung together to form a larger entity similar in concept to the following lengthier selections. The result is a series of unique, odd, challenging numbers that are nevertheless not entirely successful. The album cover is a fierce burlesque of the Beatles' first U.S. Capitol label release, sporting puerilely doctored photographs of the Fab Four on the front and pictures of collarless-suited sea denizens on the back (identified as Paul McCrawfish, Ringo Starfish, and the like). This is an utterly bizarre platter that may appeal to very adventurous listeners.

(The Residents - Meet the Residents)

John Cale - Fear

Right from the start, Cale makes it clear he's not messing around on Fear. If his solo career before then had been a series of intriguing stylistic experiments, here he meshes it with an ear for his own brand of pop and rock, accessible while still clearly being himself through and through. Getting musical support from various Roxy Music veterans like Brian Eno, Phil Manzanera, and Andy Mackay didn't hurt at all, and all the assorted performers do a great job carrying out Cale's vision. He himself sounds confident, sharp, and incisive throughout; his playing on both various keyboards and guitar equally spot-on. The almost title track "Fear Is a Man's Best Friend," starting with focused, steady piano into a full band performance before ending on a ragged, psychotic note, makes for as solid a statement of artistic purpose for Cale and the album as any. There's everything from slightly (but not completely) lugubrious ballads to bright, sparkling numbers -- "Ship of Fools" alone is a treasure; its steady, sweet pace and beautiful chorus simply to die for. Cale's own bent for trying things out isn't forgotten on the album, with his voice recorded in different ways (sometimes with hollow echo, other times much more direct) and musically touching on everything from early reggae to, on "The Man Who Couldn't Afford to Orgy," a delightful Beach Boys pastiche. As for sheer intensity, little can top "Gun," the equal of Eno's own burning blast "Third Uncle" when it comes to lengthy, focused obsession translated into music and lyrics. Having earlier experimented with his own version of country & western, "Buffalo Ballet" finds him creating something close to meta-country: stately piano and backing singing mixing with gentle twang. It practically invents Nick Cave's late solo career all on its own.

(John Cale - Fear)

Laurie Anderson - Big Science

There was a backlash against Laurie Anderson in "serious" musical and artistic circles after the completely unexpected mainstream commercial success of her debut album, Big Science. (The eight-plus-minute single "O Superman" was a chart hit in England, unbelievably enough.) A fair listen to Big Science leaves the impression that jealousy must have been at the root of the reception because Big Science is in no way a commercial sellout. A thoughtful and often hilariously funny collection of songs from Anderson's work in progress, United States I-IV, Big Science works both as a preview of the larger work and on its own merits. Opening with the hypnotic art rock of "From the Air," in which an airline pilot casually mentions that he's a caveman to a cyclical melody played in unison by a three-part reeds section, and the strangely beautiful title track, which must feature the most deadpan yodeling ever, the album dispenses witty one-liners, perceptive social commentary (the subtext of the album concerns Anderson's own suburban upbringing, which she views with more of a bemused fondness than the tiresome irony that many brought to the subject), and a surprisingly impressive sense of melody for someone who was until recently a strictly visual artist. For example, the marimba and handclap-led closer, "It Tango," is downright pretty in the way the minimalistic tune interacts with Anderson's voice, which is softer and more intimate (almost sexy, in a downtown-cool sort of way) than on the rest of the album. Not everything works -- "Walking and Falling" is negligible, and the way Rufus Harley's bagpipes intentionally clash with Anderson's harsh, nasal singing and mannered phrasing in "Sweaters" will annoy those listeners who can't take either Yoko Ono or Meredith Monk -- but Big Science is a landmark release in the New York art scene of the '80s, and quite possibly the best art rock album of the decade.

(Laurie Anderson - Big Science)

23 Skidoo - Seven Songs

A more descriptive title would have been "Seven Panic Attacks," but even a bland title isn't able to prevent the undeniably savage, pungent impact of Seven Songs, a half-hour long album that plays out like a soundtrack to being bounty hunted in an expansive jungle. Following "Kundalini," a hectoring brain shake that hardly resembles the dormant energy it's named after, "Vegas el Bandito" enters and doesn't imply the James Brown of "Cold Sweat" so much as the panic of night sweats, churning out a taut groove of slap-happy bass, pattering drums, horn trills, and a scratchy-scratch guitar line that chases its tail. An echoing trumpet carries through the end of the song and drifts right on into "Mary's Operation," an anemic drone of even creepier horns and tape loops. "New Testament" is an industrial death lurch of rusted metallic sheets, giving way to "IY," a cluster of conga acrobatics with needling saxophones and frenetic chants thrown on top. "Porno Base," the real knockout, contains little more than a series of abysmal bass pluckings placed just far enough apart to induce chronic paranoia, sounding less like a smut-film score than "Welcome to the Terror Drone." The finale, "Quiet Pillage," despite its exotica reference, could only be played in the ruins of a lounge post-carpet bombing. This is post-punk at its most invigorating and terrifying.

(23 Skidoo - Seven Songs)

Jim O'Rourke - The Visitor

If there are more interesting albums that have come out this year, I haven't heard them. As intended, this is not available for download. The link takes you to Drag City, where you can have this delivered to your doorstep for $16 or $12 (LP/CD). AMG hasn't reviewed it, so I have excerpted another review.


O’Rourke wrote all the music, performed all of the instrumental parts, and recorded The Visitor in his home studio in Tokyo—and the finished product is a mile wide and several miles deep. Drums, bass, guitars (electric and acoustic), piano, organ, clarinet, banjo, and more steer one montage into the next, via slow transition or direct segue (important side note: according to O’Rourke, there are over 200 tracks on this record).

If your first reaction to the notion of an all-instrumental "pop" album is confusion, you have every right to be apprehensive. Prior experiments by lesser artists have produced results that usually splattered on the "dreadful" and "self-indulgent" parts of the spectrum. But O’Rourke is not a lesser artist: his awareness of minute details and the trump card known as "form" are in perfect balance, and it is because of this that The Visitor becomes more intriguing with every listen. Although it may be indexed as one continuous track, this album harbors variety in spades.

If you aren’t sold on this record yet, I would like to make a bold statement: you should buy it solely because Jim O’Rourke engineered it. The Visitor is sonically divine, a fact that should come as no surprise to fans of earlier O’Rourke recordings. Each individual instrument is allowed to breathe, and each layer provides the right support for every other one. If there must be one recent album to serve as an example of how glorious recorded instruments can be, The Visitor gets my vote.

--Jeremy Podgursky, NewMusicBox

(Jim O'Rourke - The Visitor)

The Durutti Column - The Return of the Durutti Column

More debut albums should be so amusingly perverse with its titles -- and there's the original vinyl sleeve, which consisted of sandpaper precisely so it would damage everything next to it in one's collection. Released in the glow of post-punk fervor in late-'70s Manchester, one would think Return would consist of loud, aggressive sheet-metal feedback, but that's not the way Vini Reilly works. With heavy involvement from producer Martin Hannett, who created all the synth pieces on the record as well as producing it, Reilly on Return made a quietly stunning debut, as influential down the road as his labelmates in Joy Division's effort with Unknown Pleasures. Eschewing formal "rock" composition and delivery -- the album was entirely instrumental, favoring delicacy and understated invention instead of singalong brashness -- Reilly made his mark as the most unique, distinct guitarist from Britain since Bert Jantsch. Embracing electric guitar's possibilities rather than acoustic's, Reilly fused a variety of traditions effortlessly -- that one song was called "Jazz" could be called a giveaway, but the free-flowing shimmers and moods always revolve around central melodies. "Conduct," with its just apparent enough key hook surrounded by interwoven, competing lines, is a standout, turning halfway through into a downright anthemic full-band rise while never being overbearing. Hannett's production gave his compositions a just-mysterious-enough sheen, with Reilly's touches on everything from surfy reverb to soft chiming turned at once alien and still warm. Consider the relentless rhythm box pulse on "Requiem for a Father," upfront but not overbearing as Reilly's filigrees and softly spiraling arpeggios unfold in the mix -- but equally appealing is "Sketch for Winter," Reilly's guitar and nothing more, a softly haunting piece living up to its name. The 1996 reissue is the edition to search for, containing six excellent bonus tracks. Two are actually solo Hannett synth pieces from the sessions, but others include an initial tribute to Joy Division's Ian Curtis, "Lips That Would Kiss," and "Sleep Will Come," featuring the group's first vocal performance thanks to Clock DVA member Jeremy Kerr.

(The Durutti Column - The Return of the Durutti Column)

Bill Holt - Dreamies

Inspired by the aural collage of the Beatles' "Revolution Number 9," as well as the musique concrete of composers such as John Cage and Terry Riley and Bob Dylan's conscientious rock lyricism, Bill Holt quit his straight job in 1972 to follow his musical muse, hoarding various electronic gadgets and an acoustic guitar and holing up in his basement. He emerged a year later with Dreamies, one of the finest pieces of experimental pop from the era. Unlike the Beatles' White Album collage, though, the pair of sidelong, 26-minute epics -- "Program Ten" and "Program Eleven" (as if progressing directly from "Revolution Number 9") -- that Holt created were much more than symbolic representations of the chaotic times. At its heart, the album is a blend of folk and pop/rock, and in many respects, Dreamies fits in with the singer/songwriter scene that flowered in the early '70s. Instead of relying simply on the juxtapositions of his sound samples to impart subjective meanings, Holt composed lovely, downhearted melodies (very much recalling John Lennon) and trippy lyrics as a jumping-off point for each collage and then let acoustic guitar guide them through the gauntlet of sound. In fact, "Program Ten" is a combination of two identifiable songs, "Sunday Morning Song" and "The User," the two melodies weaving in and out of the cacophony of noise-crickets, atmospheric sounds, a John Kennedy speech, NASA chatter, news reports, glass breaking, a thunderstorm, sports broadcasts, and gunfire while a synthesizer spits out spacey alien sounds or cuts like a kettle whistle, and an ominous bassline oscillates beneath it all. "Program Eleven" exchanges that white noise for airport sounds, creepy Sgt. Pepper-style chants that bubble up from beneath the single melody fragment ("Going for a Ride"), game show catch phrases, and popping corn. Of the two pieces, "Program Ten" is the more socially charged commentary, setting the innocent recollections of youth -- the sounds of summer and nature -- against the misanthropic confusion of war and politics to powerful effect. "Program Eleven" is more psychedelically eerie and haunting, aurally dense, and thick with bad vibes, but wonderful nonetheless. The spoken samples are mostly more buried in the background and difficult to make out. It adds both intrigue and mystery to the piece, a foreboding end to what began optimistically. The music, in other words, ingeniously mirrored the sort of evolution of consciousness that was so much a part of the era. Dreamies went virtually unheard when it was released, perhaps because it was the antithesis of commercial rock at the time, but, despite its grounding in the ambiance and issues of the '60s, it still sounds outstanding decades after the fact.

(Bill Holt - Dreamies)

The United States of America - The United States of America

Despite releasing only one LP, the United States of America was among the most revolutionary bands of the late '60s -- grounded equally in psychedelia and the avant-garde, their music eschewed guitars in favor of strings, keyboards and haunting electronics, predating the ambient pop of the modern era by several decades. The group's lone self-titled LP, produced by David Rubinson, was recorded for CBS in 1968, its unique ambience due largely to their pioneering use of the ring modulator, a primitive synthesizer later popularized by the Krautrock sound.

Originally released on Columbia in 1968, The United States of America is one of the legendary pure psychedelic space records. Some of the harder-rocking tunes have a fun house recklessness that recalls aspects of early Pink Floyd and the Velvet Underground at their freakiest; the sedate, exquisitely orchestrated ballads, especially "Cloud Song" and the wonderfully titled "Love Song for the Dead Che," are among the best relics of dreamy psychedelia. Occasionally things get too excessive and self-conscious, and the attempts at comedy are a bit flat, but otherwise this is a near classic.

(The United States of America - The United States of America)

Ash Ra Temple - Schwingungen

Ash Ra Tempel's second album featured the first of several personnel changes, Klaus Schulze having departed for other realms and replaced as a result by Wolfgang Muller. A few guest players surfaced here and there as well, with one John L. taking the lead vocals -- another difference from the self-titled debut, which was entirely instrumental. The general principle of side-long efforts continued, though the first half was split into two related songs, "Light" and "Darkness." "Light" itself sounded halfway between the zoned-out exploration of "Traummaschine" and bluesy jamming, a weird if not totally discordant combination that still manages to sound more out there than most bands of the time. Gottsching's fried solo, in particular, is great, sending the rest of the song out to silence that leads into "Darkness." Said song initially takes a far more minimal approach that bears even more resemblance to "Traummaschine," fading out almost entirely by the third minute before a full band performance (including Uli Popp on bongos and Matthais Wehler's sudden alto sax bursts) slowly builds into a frenetic jam. John L.'s vocals become echoed screams and yelps not far off from Damo Suzuki's approach in Can, and the overall performance is a perfect slice of Krautrock insanity, sudden swirls of flanging and even more on-the-edge solos from Gottsching and Wehler sending it over the top. "Suche & Liebe" takes up the entire second side, the performers this time around concentrating on the quiet but unsettling approach, Gottsching's massive soloing kept low in the mix but not so much that it doesn't freak out listeners. The song concludes on an almost conventionally pretty band jam, something that could almost be Meddle-era Pink Floyd, only with even a more haunting, alien air thanks to the wordless vocal keening.

(Ash Ra Temple - Schwingungen)

This Heat - This Heat + Peel Sessions

This British group could neither be called post-punk nor progressive rock, yet This Heat was one of the most influential groups of the late '70s. They created uncanny experimental rock music that has many similarities in approach to German pioneers such as Can and Faust. Other groundbreaking independent groups such as Henry Cow and Wire may be their only peers, and much later This Heat also became profoundly influential on the '90s genre known as post-rock. Their angular juxtapositions of abrasive guitar, driving rhythms, and noise loops on the opening cut, "Horizontal Hold," preempt much later activity in the electronica and drum'n'bass scenes. The outstanding "24 Track Loop" is based around a circular drum pattern that could have been a late-'90s jungle cut were it not recorded in late-'70s London, long before such strategies were even dreamed of in breakbeat music. This album is a great example of ahead-of-time genius, work that draws on elements of progressive rock, notably "Larks Tongues in Aspic"-era King Crimson for all its abrasive, warped rhythm, as well as Can, Neu!, and Faust's pioneering work -- though there is little else that comes close to the unique and distinctive avant rock sound, an entirely new take on the rock format. Their self-titled debut is a radical conglomeration of progressive rock, musique concrète, free improvisation, and even -- in a bizarre distillation -- aspects of British folk can be heard in Charles Hayward's singing. There are very few records that can be considered truly important, landmark works of art that produce blueprints for an entire genre. In the case of this album, it's clear that this seminal work was integral in shaping the genres of post-punk, avant rock, and post-rock and like all great influential albums it seemed it had to wait two decades before its contents could truly be fathomed. In short, This Heat is essential.

(This Heat - This Heat)
(This Heat - Made Available)

Van Dyke Parks - Discover America

Van Dyke Parks is one of a handful of artists possessing a purity of vision that graces every project he is involved with. Very few could pull off an album titled Discover America -- with all the themes and motifs befitting such a moniker -- done entirely in the style of the Caribbean, most specifically Trinidad circa the 1940s. The songs weave together in a sonic tapestry that connects the untiring Yankee spirit of ingenuity with the opulence and romanticism of the islands. While tomes could easily be devoted to dissecting the album's multiple layers of meaning, to call it an eclectic masterpiece of multicultural Americana might be a start. While the contents of the album as a whole are tropical in flavor, there are numerous examples of Parks' trademark swaddling arrangements and unique perspectives -- such as odes to his favorite vocalists ("Bing Crosby" and the marvelous "The Four Mills Brothers"). Just as he had done with the "Bicycle Rider" suite on Brian Wilson's Smile, Parks has the uncanny ability to incorporate various active musical story lines at once. "John Jones," for example, is the saga of a pioneer-era gunslinger set to a laid-back reggae beat. This brilliant technique is likewise incorporated into "FDR in Trinidad" -- featuring the distinct instrumental backing of Little Feat replete with electric guitar punctuations from fret master Lowell George. The band is flawless in their interpretation of Parks' quirky and addictively potent chord changes. The sheer breadth of musical approaches on Discover America may take the uninitiated a few listens to truly absorb. These idiosyncrasies range from the artificially added vinyl surface noise heard during the diminutive opening track "Jack Palance" -- which mentions the actor's name in referring to a woman who shares the same facial features (yikes!) -- to the irony and humor-laden saga of the crime-fighting "G-Man Hoover." Another track worth mentioning is the spoken-word "Introduction," in which presumably Parks portrays a bus tour-guide. The heavy and purposeful tape editing is highly reminiscent of Captain Beefheart's "The Dust Blows Forward ..." or the introduction to "Pena" from his epic Trout Mask Replica. Discover America is a pop music history lesson that is without question one of the lost classics of the early '70s. Likewise, it may as easily have been several decades ahead of its time.

(Van Dyke Parks - Discover America)