Orphic Oxtra: “Skeletons Having Sex on a Tin Roof”
February 3, 2012
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Reviews
Reviews
Ask anyone what they think an Icelandic act usually sounds like, and they’ll likely be thinking of something like a Brueghel landscape soundtracked by Scandinavian minimal ambient. On the other hand, Orphic Oxtra, a collective of 13 musicians from Reykjavik, draws inspiration far away from that more typical scene, laying out thrusting grooves of Balkan and klezmer-influenced orchestral music, while carrying all kinds of both traditional and unusual free-form jazz sections. “Skeletons Having Sex On a Tin Roof” is a loose reinterpretation of Icelandic hardcore band Swords of Chaos’ track of the same name. The video stars the band’s clarinet player showing off unorthodox dance moves in front of a psychedelic background, along with curiously conveying hallucinatory textures with quirky locomotion in an almost burlesque fashion. After watching this video, we’re thinking that dancing to the sound of a Balkan orchestra isn’t such a bad idea after all. Well, perhaps just as long as it’s all part of a memorable acid trip.
Orphic Oxtra’s album Kebab Diskó is out now on Record Records
Written by Pierre Lestruhaut
Tags: Europe, iceland, orphic oxtra, Reviews
Reviews
Abysses open up a chasm of deformity and, at times, beautiful malcontent on their first, handmade cassette simply entitled First. What strikes initially as a snagging obsession with pathology opens up into surprising avenues of melody, slowly evolving over both of the side-long tracks. There are both history and novelty here: Abysses is the work of Johnny Scarr and Daniel Ward, who each seep out of Nottingham in various guises, often in improvised noise form (in the case of Scarr) as Spoils and Relics but always under the Mantile Records umbrella. As a show promoter and as a label, Mantile is a vital blip on the radar of untrumpeted, outsider music in the UK. Abysses is a new beginning, however, one in which the human voice isn’t viewed as a pathogen, and one in which the obscure sounds that have populated Mantile’s noise recordings are used to make wonderfully absurdist forms which touch on song and rhythm. The breadth and precision on First makes it a complete work in a very real sense and a tantalizing signpost to subsequent emissions. A taster of their future is posted above in the cryptic, Harry Smith-esque video and below is another excerpt from First.
Abysses – Excerpt From “First”
Mantile can be corresponded with through their blog
Written by Michael Kasparis
Tags: Abysses, England, Mantile, Nottingham, Review, Reviews, United Kingdom
Reviews
Tóth Kína Hegyfalu is the Budapest, Hungary based duo of Kinga Toth and Gergely Normal. The pair has a strong performance art bent, with Gergely’s sparse, often minimalist instrumentation serving as counterpoint and complement to Kinga’s poetry, which takes the form of aggressive growls, and wails. Gergely also contributes the artwork for the releases, which also reflect the ever present themes of alienation and violence. Tollasbál represents a fervent desire to capture the disruptively awkward and often unsettling feel of an art house performance. Standing in contrast to most of the record, “it hurts (kapar)” forcefully prods the listener into an uncomfortable state with thick slices of noise and distorted vocals, rather than leading them there via teases and the occasional backhanded threat. It’s a sludgy oil slick of guitar that’s definitely not easy listening, though it is rewarding in its own very specific and slightly sadomasochistic way.
You can hear more from Tóth Kína Hegyfalu’s Tollasbál on Soundcloud
Written by Luke Carrell
Tags: budapest, Europe, hungary, Reviews, Tóth Kína Hegyfalu
Reviews
Tokyo’s Elen Never Sleeps specializes in palatable and clever pop, delivered straight from his bedroom to yours. “Spinning Wheel” begins simply enough, with a straightforward drum machine beating out over breathlessly plaintive back to back verses, before launching into a refrain that’s as uber catchy as you could hope for. The vocal harmonies circle each above the intertwined guitar parts gain momentum, allowing the melancholy nature of the charmingly delivered lyrics comes into clearer focus. It’s a proven formula for pop success that’s been effectively repackaged into an interesting song structure that plays up the strengths of the music, rather than exhausting them. It’s really fun stuff with that’s reminiscent of the new romantics and some of the more lyrically profuse Swedish studio pop of the last few years. Warning: repeat listening may result in spontaneous pajama dance parties.
Elen Never Sleeps: “Spinning Wheel”
Check out more from Elen Never Sleeps on Bandcamp
Written by Luke Carrell
Tags: Asia, elen never sleeps, Japan, Reviews, Tokyo
Reviews
Cyrus Moussavi and the Raw Music International crew sat down with Peter Logono, a refugee from Kenya’s embattled Turkana region. Raw Music International, a TV show that seeks to illuminate underground music in overlooked corners of the world, features 23-year old Cyrus’ travels to new locales and his process of meeting and recording with local artists. Cyrus met Peter Logono in a busaa (Kenyan homebrew) club off the Busia road, the main road between Uganda and Kenya. Peter, a refugee from Turkana, a community destroyed by drought and tribal violence, had come south to make a living playing music for day-drinkers.
Peter’s song “Erol Akol” is a traditional song from the Turkana region. “Erol Akol” is played using a makeshift kick-drum and a homemade Adungu, a nine-stringed arched harp resembling that silhouette of a sail-boat at sea. The adungu, as well as the Turkana people originally traveled to Kenya from the Karamojong region of Northeastern Uganda. Through the process of musical diffusion, the Adungu has come to be a traditional Turkana instrument. Peter’s instrument is entirely his own creation, featuring a Ronald Mcdonald figurine, an American flag, and hand-painted embellishments. His adungu serves a symbol of the modernization of traditional musical forms and culture and a reminder that as economic tides shift, so does music. His thumb and forefinger of each hand play out counterpoints, interlacing with the natural ease of clasped hands. His vocal style relies phrases in separate units, easily distinguished from each other. His is a song about missing home; his vocal texture is filled with a longing that gives form to Peter’s tribulations, while shrouding them in melodic grace.
Watch Raw Music International’s blog for more music and news about new episodes. Check out their Bandcamp for more one of a kind recordings from Kisumu, Kenya
Written by Anna Rushford
Tags: Africa, kenya, Peter Logono, Reviews, Turkana
Reviews
Little did we know that as we were posting about Branches’ release on UUU Tapes last week, the Portuguese drone impresario was releasing another tape, Ninguém É Como Tu, on Solid Melts that same day.
The video for “Canção para o Luís” is another self-produced foray into found footage recutting, though with an explicitly more nostalgic feel that complements the intertwining melodies of the track to create a half remembered but uncannily familiar fugue of ads, video games, soft edged geometric shapes, and oversexed gym bunnies. We all had different childhoods, ok? The overall feel is warm and the track itself seems especially well suited to the cassette medium. Hopefully Branches will continue to bombard us with accessible drones, other types of sounds, and dreamy composite vids into in the future.
Ninguém É Como Tu is now available from Solid Melts
Written by Luke Carrell
Tags: branches, Europe, portugal, Reviews
Reviews
Working at the brighter, gentler end of the lo-fi spectrum, this track from Finland’s Ous Mal crackles and writhes in all the right ways. It appears on one of the final releases from the young Olli Aarni under his most familiar moniker, a split cassette with Russia’s Bedroom Bear on the fantastic Full Of Nothing label.
Aarni’s sample-based tracks may use a production method similar to that of hip-hop, with cut up vinyl, cassette and radio samples jammed together to form a new whole, but the result mixes spaced-out drone with an intimate, folky warmth. As with all of Ous Mal’s music, everything is happening under the surface or behind a thin veil. Single piano notes ring out in the mist, disconnected from the the bed of beautiful noise. Sounds are reversed and a tiny beat creeps in, just loud enough to sweep you along with it for a minute. There is no rush. Just wait and listen to it unfold.
With a new album due in February under the name Nuojuvo, there’s plenty to look forward from this particular Fin.
Full of Nothing is reportedly planning a reissue of the Bedroom Bear/Ous Mal split tape. Valot kaukaa is now available for pre-order from Preservation. And be sure to watch Olli Aarni’s Tumblr for more news
Written by Ian Maleney
Tags: Europe, finland, Nuojuvo, Ous Mal, Reviews, russia
Reviews
Coming out from his highly hedonistic, block party-infusing, and tightly crafted debut album Super Vato (roughly Mexican slang for super dude), “Aire Caliente” sees Xalapa’s Mauricio Rebolledo dropping anxious synth atmospherics and unsteady beats in order to shape what’s easily his darkest and most tense track on the album. Released through the Matías Aguayo co-founded label Cómeme, the album features many collaborations from that same collective of Latin tech house musicians and stays true to the label’s affiliation with Kompakt, minimal techno, and his early days as a DJ (always laying danceable drum patterns on top of his dense atmospherics), while also channeling Rebolledo’s own personal obsessions with the past in the form of brooding EBM textures, infectious disco bass lines, and John Carpenter movie theme tracks.
Super Vato is now available from Cómeme
Written by Pierre Lestruhaut
Tags: Mexico, Rebolledo, Reviews
Reviews
With a career now spanning 40 years — and nearly double that on disc — Miami’s own Joe McPhee is still a woefully underrated leader here in his native land. So perhaps that’s why his latest free-wheelin’, forward-thinking quartet is three-fourths Scandinavian. Taking their name from that Don Cherry tune, The Thing is reed specialist Mats Gustafsson, idiophone extraordinaire Paal Nilssen-Love and the heady low end theories of one Ingebrigt H. Flaten. Gustafsson you’ll know from high-profile gigs with l’éminence rousse Thurston Moore and a cadre of other Jazzmaster masters, but it’s Nilssen-Love who truly makes The Thing. A bleeding heart percussionist, if you can beat it, chances are Nilssen-Love’s already bested it. (Need proof? Peep what he does here behind The Ex’s Terrie Hessels at the jookiest azmari-bet in all of Selassieland.) With McPhee jumping back and forth from sax to pocket trumpet, The Thing + his white-hot take on tunes by the late Frank Lowe and my crush majeure,Mistress Polly Jean Harvey , makes for one god-awesome racket.
Of course, even at its utmost, improvised music often becomes experimental music. And many times more, especially where there’s music devoid of form, the end results fail to yield anything qualitatively good. Despite Zappa’s credo, it’s not enough anymore to simply make a jazz noise here. By trade, The Thing & McPhee are not required to boldly confront centuries of tradition before assigning order to their sound series. We’d never want them to. The quartet forges within a form; they do not create one. For any artist, be he Swedish, Norwegian or from the southern tip of Florida, there’s a long and taxing gestation period to ultimately decide what best comes next.
To wit, improvisation ‘on the fly’ does anything but. It’s beyond anyone’s cognitive capacities to fathom, instantaneously, the repercussions of a user-defined musical event — unless it occurs within the axioms of a pre-determined, well-defined network. Herr Bach was able to improvise fugues because of his familiarity with the form. Miles could solo convincingly on “So What” because he understood the Dorian mode. And it was Stevie Ray’s intimate knowledge of the blues — as theoretical abstraction — that allowed him to speak so candidly within it. And while assimilation methodologies are perhaps less familiar for the hip-hop practitioner, someone, somewhere at least knew which song to sample.
Nonetheless, there comes a time when even the most seasoned improviser can no longer improvise beyond what he already knows. It was for this very reason that the composer Lukas Foss abandoned his efforts with the Improvisation Chamber Ensemble in the late 1950s. It may also explain why completely improvised pieces such as the ad hoc work of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestras remain merely the sonic sum of its aggregates’ proclivities. In short, at some point, improvisation will reach a saturation.
Fortunately, this time is not nigh for The Thing + Joe McPhee. These four gentlemen are still taking frijazz to places it’s never been before. There’s a vigor and bite to their collective skronk that, while hinted at a priori, have only recently come to the fore. Moreover, whatever vestiges of stale and stolid forms their practice, practice, practice left lingering have finally been vanquished. “Remember restless deep sea dancers submerged beneath the will of God,” pens Joe McPhee in his poem “Eroc Tinu.” Remember, too, The Thing that lies beneath McPhee’s most advanced ensemble in the last decade. Were it not for them, he might just be another improviser.
Written by Logan K. Young
Tags: florida, Norway, Reviews, Sweden, The Thing + Joe McPhee
Reviews
2012 is shaping up to be a busy year for Memo Guerra. Apart from serving as the brains behind Austin, TX based label Abstrakt Muzak, the Monterrey, Mexico born factotum is also crafting music under a trinity of freshly minted monikers: dreamy and lyrical pop tunes as Memo, ambient experimentalism as Cristo, and dancefloor bangers Cheap Talk. Memo’s take on gently phased out and thoroughly dreamy pop is in full effect on “Separate Leaves/This Is the Line.” The melodies and textures are complex, but the song manages to avoid feeling overly constructed, with a simple drum line beating out in a steady whisper, even as tight vocal harmonies and guitar picking ride over and eventually submerge beneath miniaturized swells of synthand strings. Gentle atmospherics abound. There’s some sort of not so psychedelic sitar thing happening here, too. And it all works. Recommended as the soundtrack to your next slow motion dream sequence.
Memo: “Separate Leaves/This Is the Line”
Watch for more from Memo G. and his various aliases on Abstrakt Muzak and his always trusty Souncloud
Written by Luke Carrell
Tags: austin, memo, Mexico, monterrey, North America, Reviews
