Bent Music

The psychedelic Big Bang - Paul Kidney Experience with Mani Neumeier

2012-02-19T20:57:00.000+11:00

These days, we are pretty well used to the idea that the universe started with the Big Bang, and that before the Big Bang there was nothing, and the colour of nothing was black. But when you hear the latest release from Melbourne’s Paul Kidney Experience, their collaboration with legendary German krautrocker Mani Neumeier, you begin to wonder if that was right and if the colour of nothing was not in fact psychedelic.

Paul Kidney Experience with Mani Neumeier begins quietly, as if a cosmic orchestra is tuning up. But even here, in this empty space, millions of colours seem to be stirring. And then slowly, throughout the 11 and a half minutes of the opening ‘Ocular Orbit’, those colours emerge out of themselves into an inter-galactic light show, where everything from the primal groans of Paul Kidney to the alien squalls of a theremin, blend and blaze together, until they cool down and die out, leaving nothing but a solitary piano tinkling, hanging in the middle of nowhere.

‘Phospheniac’, the album’s second track, is about half as long and goes in the opposite direction. It begins with an explosion of discordant vocals, drums, guitar, and electronic mayhem and then fades into and out of little snatches of a disturbed quiet – like a psychotic beast catching its breath before its next assault. But, given what’s gone before, you can’t help feeling that this beast isn’t just some wild thing prowling in the jungle, but that it’s the universe itself – furious and violent.

Everything settles down for ‘The Canal of Schlemm’ – a long, slower, almost elegiac meditation, gentler and yet still somehow unsettled, like the troubled dreams of the beast that just tore you apart in the previous track.

The album ends with ‘Chromatic Aberration’, where strange voices – part tribal, part warrior, part animal – quietly but frighteningly chatter amongst themselves. The cosmic beast, it seems, has grown grumpy and now stalks and skulks, muttering to itself, all around you. It is unsettled, unstable and ultimately only fades away rather than finishes.

You know that everything that sprung into being from those first psychedelic drones of the beginning, now totters on the edge, and you with it. Despite the album’s short 33 minutes, this music has taken you a long way and you are left with a strange sense that isn’t ever going to really leave you alone.

Paul Kidney Experience with Mani Neumeier represents the very best of improvised experimental music, where ideas grow and mutate out of, and into, one another; where diversity and unity, chaos and order are all just different ways of looking at, or hearing, the same thing.

The album is produced by Iceage Productions and is being launched in Melbourne on 1 March at Bar Open.

Solvent Cage - and the apocalypse within

2012-01-07T19:18:00.001+11:00

Solvent Cage’s 2011 album The Day of the Locusts begins with a rumble. Not so much the rumble that happens underneath you when the earth is about to crack apart, but more the sort that happens within you when you begin to face your own dislocation from the world and from the things that people imagine hold it together – the beliefs, the hopes, the bonds. Here all of that is shaken and shattered by almost an hour of dark, harsh noise, taking you on a nihilistic journey that begins in those first moments of inner turmoil and finishes in a titanic battle between the inner self and the outer world and in which, you feel, both will be locked forever.

In The Day of Locusts, Peter James’s solo noise project, Solvent Cage, takes you on the journey in spite of yourself. You are drawn into its vortex long before you are even aware that you have moved at all. What at first seems like a black, unshifting, void, dense with its own nothingness, is in fact always moving somewhere: the sounds dragging you along, drowning you and deafening you, like a tsunami might do, with all its garbage and debris. It’s aggressive, angry, always restless and yet the thickness of the sound can disorient from the movement that is happening within it. At first you feel perhaps a little unsettled, maybe even overwhelmed – but, before long, you realise how frightened you have become. And by then it’s too late to get out.

By time you have arrived at the album’s title track, its fourth, those sounds have grown into something much bigger than what the stifled, subliminal thunder of the beginning would have led you to expect. Now it seems like the whole of humanity, the voices of everyone that has lived, lives and will live, are clamouring around you. Or within you, if truth be told. You can’t help but notice the biblical associations of its title here – but here the apocalypse rages within, and the fire is the fire of internal combustion.

By the following track, ‘Swallowed by the Sun’, this sense that Armageddon lies within, rather than without, becomes even more acute, as you begin to notice that the music has become populated not so much with more and more sounds from outside, but with its own overtones. These ring and echo and pulsate throughout the music, everything bouncing off, and then absorbing, everything else. The sun that is swallowing it is its own destructive energy.

‘Insurrection’ is the album’s longest track and, not surprisingly, its most violent. Here the noise is at its harshest, its most dense – impenetrable and frighteningly defiant.

The album doesn’t really end. Its final track, ‘At War with God’, is an aggressive interplay between the right and left channels, each upping the ante on the other with snippets of noise, growing in brutality, but neither ever getting the upper hand on the other, until both are faded out, without really finishing.

The Day of the Locusts is grim, terrifying music. But it’s also powerful – strong and assertive and because of that, even with all its nihilism, finds its own way to be affirming. The music leaves you feeling that the war it describes is going to rage for a long, long time. But then it is, after all, a war of minds – because minds are the only place, in this music, where gods or apocalypses or locusts ever really existed.

The Day of the Locusts is produced by Iceage Productions, and you can get more information about obtaining the album by contacting its producer via email.

Getting inside your head on New Year's Eve - Yoshi Wada's 'The Appointed Cloud'

2011-12-31T13:17:00.000+11:00

New Years Eve is a time when most of us tend to reflect on the year that’s passed. Usually that involves a mixture of thoughts and reflections – of happy things, of sad things, of successes and frustrations, of achievements and mistakes.

For me, I have for years sought to characterise that in music – to find some piece of music that somehow captures my year.

Probably there is nothing that could do that as well as music can – music, which is so good at expressing the contradictions, the heights, the depths, the trivia; the big, conglomerate mix and match that goes to make up most of our years.

This is not a blog about me – it’s a blog about music, so I’m not going to spend time here describing my year; but I will spend some time describing the music that I picked this year to portray it.

Yoshi Wada is a Japanese sound artist who is now mostly settled in the US, and his mammoth work for computerised pipe organ, The Appointed Cloud, was performed on 8 November 1987 in the Great Hall of the New York Hall of Science and recorded on EM Records.

It’s a work that plays as a single arc, a work where everything emerges from the single, quiet drone that opens it. It moves from moments of dark mystery, where you are not quite sure if the rumblings and murmurings beneath you are going to comfort you or destroy you, to moments where the whole universe seems to be blasting a doomsday trumpet at you. There are moments where sounds swell and recede, where celebration gives way to terror and takes it back again; where you feel embraced and held one minute, and then claustrophobically lonely the next. Everything feels new and old at the same time, as if you have always been in this place and yet are still discovering it for the first time, this place where chaos and order, emptiness and bigness, are one.

The music itself revolves around the sounds of a pipe organ, but one that has been electrically charged and produces an amazing array of colours and shades and noise, bashing like percussion or whispering like a dying day, whatever Yoshi Wada and his music ask it to do. There are sirens that could have been put there by Edgard Varése, huge Messiaen-like discords, massive explosions of apocalyptic bagpipes, and gentle, pulsating chords that may have Philip Glass punching them out at the keyboard.

The Appointed Cloud gives you the sense that everything, however disparate and odd and confused it might seem, somehow ultimately fits together – not so much in some great, predetermined plan, but just simply because that’s how it has always been – the happiness, the sadness, the comfort, the terror: they’ve always blended and morphed into one another and they always will because, ultimately, that cloud is nothing greater or less than what goes on within us. The world around us can change, for the better or the worse, but it’s still the same old you and I experiencing it all.

It is perhaps this introspection writ large that makes this music so compelling. It has to be played loudly, and you have to listen to it alone. And when you do, maybe you too will feel that, within its massive but all-too-short hour, that not just your year, but your life, has flashed before you, leaving you with that strange mixed sense of defeat and victory that life is, after all, all about.

A journey through experimental Melbourne - The Shape of Sound, volume 2

2011-12-06T21:58:00.001+11:00

There are lots of exciting things about new and experimental music, and not least is the way it always takes you into something uncharted. But it can be easy to forget that even uncharted territory has a history and a story to tell. And sometimes when we listen to new music we can become so absorbed in the moment, so engrossed in the strangely shaped tree in front of us, that we stop noticing the whole curious, amazingly connected forest around us.

But it’s impossible to do that when you listen to a new compilation of experimental Melbourne music just out on Iceage Productions, and being launched in Melbourne, at the Grace Darling Hotel in Collingwood this Friday, 9^th December, from 9 PM.

The album is the second instalment of The Shape of Sound, and it takes you on an incredible journey through some of Melbourne most innovative creative new music artists.

But it’s not just that each piece on this album is fascinating in its own right. The Shape of Sound Volume 2 assembles its parts in a way that really does seem to tell you a story, the story of the beginning and end of things from the perspective of sound.

Arthur Cantrill opens the album with ‘Island Fuse’, a piece where the sounds of nature are blended with and mirrored in distorted noise, so the two worlds – the organic and the electronic – sit side by side, as if this is how they had always been. It’s a fitting start to the album’s journey, like a kind of rewritten version of Genesis.

Barney Oliver’s ‘Plutonium Theft’ keeps that journey moving, with its sense of vast, horizonless stretches of electronic space, built out of single notes that pulsate and echo into a boundless distance. It’s a short piece and yet somehow creates a feeling that it is bigger, and longer, than it is.

With ‘Toil’ by Penguins, things get heavier, where deep, pounding guitar driven blocks of metallic sound rumble beneath the earth that the previous track had only so fragilely created. This is no longer an empty barren world, but rather one teeming with dark, threatening creatures that creep and crawl, unseen, below the surface.

But then we move onto Galactagogue’s ‘Have Lawn Chair Will Travel’, and our journey is now airborne. A two-way radio dialogue is imposed on a noise loop that lifts you up and thrusts you forward. It’s breathtaking stuff.

There is then an almost krautrock sense of momentum to Mad Nanna’s ‘Just Before The Sun Hits Down’, with guitars that twist and drone their way over the motorik drumbeat. There are shadows here, with dark harmonies and notes that wince and whine as they are forced onwards, and yet you feel you are in safe hands.

The heaviness continues to hang in the air throughout Bonnie Mercer’s ‘Blau’, but here the pace is slowed down a bit, giving you time to look around you at the shards of electric colour with which the guitars and distorted noise are setting space ablaze.

Then comes Screwtape’s ‘The Fall Of Persepolis’. Persepolis is an ancient Persian city, destroyed by Alexander the Great a few hundred years BC and here, in this music of dense noise, you can feel its stones and sands crumbling to dust but somehow staying mighty, even in its destruction.

Dark Passenger’s ‘Ancient Extraterrestrial Pipe Organ Unearthed’ keeps us in that foreign, alien world, with its long drones submerged in a sea of soft, almost soothing, noise. After the destruction that has gone before us, this restores a sense of peace, a sense of hope that there is always something emerging from the ashes.

The pace is revved up again for ‘Nine’, the music of Admin Bldg. But we’re still in the Far East, with tribal winds and beats dancing in a frenzy with one another, like the music John Zorn might have played for Scheherazade.

But ancient history of another sort then takes centre stage with an extract from Undecisive God’s ‘At Uluru’. Here, atop long, primeval, drones, indigenous to the Earth itself, a guitar picks notes out of eternity, leaving you still, meditating on the enormity that is before you. If I was told I had to have one quibble with this amazing album, it would be that I could not get to hear more of this incredible piece.

There continues to be a feeling of connection with ancient things in Oranj Punjabi’s ‘They Thought That They Had A Purpose There’, where things start out with a kind of distorted pentatonic tonality, giving you the feel that you are in a some oriental dream, but it is soon invaded by Western banality, still distorted, as if to remind you that you are still in the same dream, but now brash and brazen. We have come a long way since the beginning of the album, where it is no longer nature and electronics sitting together, but cultures clashing and jarring.

It is a clash that then seems to bleed into the dark ambience of Monolith’s ‘Control Room’, sounding almost apocalyptic after all the bizarre, unsettled energy we have just had.

Things could have ended there, but they don’t. There is still Ernie Althoff’s ‘Jila 9’, and the percussive busyness of handmade sound machines, leaving us with a different, drier world than the one we started with, but one that still moves, one that is still vibrant – and one that we feel, thanks to the kinetic vitality of Ernie Althoff’s music, always will be. It’s a good note, an optimistic note, to finish on.

The Shape of Sound Volume 2 is a very, very impressive journey through some of the really interesting things being accomplished in Melbourne’s experimental music scene right now. You have a chance to see some of these artists – Arthur Cantrill, Ernie Althoff, Undecisive God, Oranj Punjabi, Barnaby Oliver, Dark Passenger, and Penguins – at Collingwood’s Grace Darling Hotel in just a few days at the album’s launch. The album itself is also available, in a very limited edition, from Shamefile Music.

Listening to the music between sanity and madness - Salvador Dalí's 'Être Dieu'

2011-12-04T21:43:00.002+11:00

It is sometimes claimed that there is a fine line between sanity and madness, between reality and dreams. But when you throw yourself into the art of Salvador Dalí, and especially into his incredible but rarely known opera-poem Être Dieu – or Être Dieu: opéra-poème, audiovisuel et cathare en six parties (Being God: an audiovisual and cathare opera-poem in six parts) to give it its full title – you begin to see just how all-encompassing that space really is. Être Dieu is a piece of surrealist theatre literature with music by French avant-garde composer Igor Wakhévitch in which the world is recreated by Dalí into a place where disorder, madness, perversion and illogic reign. It’s a place where all the elements of a once familiar world are rearranged into a new, sometimes alluring, sometimes terrifying, sometimes comical absurdity.

There is certainly a story to Être Dieu, just as there is a story to most dreams, and to most madness. But it doesn’t have a linear, logical narrative and that, really, is its point. There is Dalí creating the world but becoming bored with it; there is Brigitte Bardot dressed as an artichoke; there is Catherine the Great and Marilyn Monroe doing a striptease; there is Mao ruling the world from a united China and USA; there’s a Divine Dalí, an androgynous male Dalí and an androgynous female Dalí; there’s an angel destroying millions of religious paintings; there’s Santa Claus as a beggar and Niagara Falls invading the Vatican and the cardinals turning into sea fish.

The music of Être Dieu very much fits with all of this. Everything is thrown into the mix – banal tunes from musicals, electronic noise punctuated with improvised percussion, operatic melodrama, rock riffs, Gregorian chant: everything displaced and disconnected but then replaced and reconnected into the new world of Dalí’s dreams, delusions and designs.

You have to really immerse yourself in Être Dieu – much of it is spoken word, and much of that by Dalí himself, and almost all of it in French, with the music integrating itself into the world created by the poetry. It helps to follow the words, and their translation, but then it helps even more to then let them wash into you, whatever they say and mean.

The music, like the poetry, shifts into every corner of imagined reality, moving from era to era, a collage of Western music, scrambled and delivered to you on an oddly shaped platter by a waiter who looks like an orchestra conductor one minute, a rock lead the next, and an eccentric avant-garde experimentalist the next after that. And you haven’t even finished the entrée yet.

Être Dieu has never been staged. In a sense, it never could be because its theatre is really in the mind rather than on the stage and yet, in another sense, that is exactly what would make it so sensational, so fascinating, to see – that special, amazing privilege of glimpsing into a mind not fettered by the strictures of logic or reason or sense and yet still somehow connecting with something that each of us can relate to, even hold onto.

To create a musical expression of Dalí’s creation is an amazing feat. Igor Wakhévitch achieves it here, remarkably. The job was first offered to Krzysztof Penderecki, who knocked it back. I suspect he probably wouldn’t have captured the spirit, the mish-mashed mind, of Dalí in the way that Wakhévitch has – the kaleidoscope of concepts, the smorgasbord of styles, the surrealism of the senses. And all of it feeling, even when it's banal and trivial, that something great is happening. Just as dreams do.

The whole thing goes for about 145 minutes. It is spread over three CDs or, if you are lucky enough to be able to get you hands on a copy of the original, three LPs. But that’s a short stretch of time in which to capture so well, to crystallize so perfectly, the bold, bizarre, barmy world of Salvador Dalí – a world which, thanks to Être Dieu, we can see is a whole lot bigger than what the sane and the rational would have us believe.

Attracted and repelled by Lulu - Lou Reed and Metallica

2011-12-02T11:05:00.002+11:00

Ever since she first appeared on the stages of German theatres at the turn of the twentieth century, Lulu has created controversy. Frank Wedekind’s Erdgeist (Earth Spirit) and its sequel Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box), with their depiction of prostitution, lesbianism and raw sexuality, outraged their first audiences. As did W G Pabst’s silent film adaptation of the second of these plays in 1929, not just because it offended the morality of the day, but also because it seemed so disconnected and obtuse. Alban Berg’s opera Lulu, fully written but not fully orchestrated upon the composer’s death in 1935, but completed some forty years later from the very extensive sketches Berg had left, still empties auditoriums with its atonal attacks.

And then there’s the Lou Reed/Metallica collaboration, released a few weeks ago. Neither Lou Reed nor Metallica are unfamiliar with bad reviews, nor are their fans unfamiliar with the feeling that their idols have abandoned them. But not since Metal Machine Music for Lou Reed, and never for Metallica, has the response, from public and critics alike, been so resoundingly negative as it has for Lulu.

It some ways, it’s easy to see why. Lulu doesn’t sound much like anything else that either Lou Reed or Metallica have done. Reed barks his way through the album’s ten songs, the lyrics sounding as haggard and hacked as the voice itself. Metallica deliver heavy half-formed jams from squalid basements rather than the gymnastic black brilliance that twists and turns its way through so much of their earlier work.

But Lulu is not Transformer, nor is it Master of Puppets. It’s Lulu – a cabaret dancer who femme-fatales and fucks her way through weak men and rich men, through high life and low life, through lesbians, artists, schoolboys and princes, until she meets her end in the back lanes of London at the hands of Jack the Ripper. Men see her as the source of their destruction but always, and ultimately, they are the ones who destroy her. The world in which she lives, from her luxurious Paris home to her fetid London garret, is shabby, dim and dank.

This is the world in which you have to be ready to be immersed when you listen to Lulu. In fact, you would probably like it a whole lot more if you read Wedekind’s plays, or saw Pabst’s film, or heard Berg’s opera, or even if you wandered through the London alleyways or somehow found your way into the German nightclubs of a century ago, than if you tried to ease yourself into it through the more celebrated albums of either of its procreators.

Lulu tells its story pretty much in the third person – with Reed himself taking on much of her part throughout the album. It makes a kind of sense, given Lulu’s alienation from the world around her, and from the people who inhabit it. She is always seen through the eyes of others and that’s how this album tells her tale. It’s a brutal, unkempt tale, rough and unpalatable, unattractive and alluring, seductive even with its gaping sores and scabs. But the ugliness is not hers, it’s the people telling her story.

The feeling that we are being told a story begins with the album’s opener, ‘Brandenburg Gate’ with its acoustic, almost fireside introduction of scrambled reminiscences. But then the metal smashes in and Metallica’s wall of iron imprisons the story, letting in hardly a chink of light for the rest of the album’s almost 90 minutes.

But that’s where this story belongs – held captive, yet attracting and repelling its captors, to paraphrase ‘The View’, the album’s second track and its first single.

The result is that the music always has a kind half-stifled, half-defiant, edginess to it – a caged wild animal, subdued, yet wily enough to entice you to within striking distance.

While the heavy barrage of Metallica guitars is an imposing backdrop for Lulu, this is really Lou Reed’s album. Metallica are playing his music, not theirs. The lyrics’ bile is rooted in Reed’s rock noir much more than in Metallica’s powerful defiance.

But what Metallica do here is underscore that sexy, sleazy, violent vulnerability, giving it muscle, so that the deathly struggle with Jack the Ripper really is a battle to the end – but “in the end it was an ordinary heart”, as ‘Pumping Blood’ puts it, and one that ultimately only allows itself to mourn for all it has lost, for all that it never had, in the long, sad closing track, ‘Junior Dad’, a song of almost perplexing simplicity.

These are the contradictions of Lulu – the character as much as the album, and in many ways you have to understand the first before you can really begin to embrace the second.

Lulu might never win accolades from the long-time fans of Lou Reed or Metallica, or from many others for that matter. But somehow, I suspect, Frank Wedekind is applauding and maybe somewhere – god knows where – Lulu herself feels that at last someone has understood her.

The gritty lure of the dirt - Gravel Samwidge's 'Gas Girls Funeral'

2011-11-21T22:20:00.000+11:00

Gravel. It’s rough, it’s coarse – but it’s part of modern life and it makes the paths and roads that take us places. We might like our journey through life to be soft and downy and straightforward, but sometimes we need to take time out of life’s comforts and rub our faces in the things that lie in its guts. The bits where the edges are not smooth; the bits that get into your skin and stay there until they rub you raw.

Gravel Samwidge is a Brisbane based band that has been making music since 1989. Their original drummer died tragically while the band was on tour not long after their beginning and, since then, they have formed and reformed from time to time, producing now a kind of off-centre grunge, as on their latest album Gas Girls Funeral, where blood-stained guitars play razor sharp, atonal riffs and almost Lou Reed-esque vocals half sing and half declaim stories of sleaze and disenchantment, while raucous drums bash the music, and you, further and further into the dirt.

But it’s the off-centredness of the music that makes it so unique, that makes you so willing to let it rub its rough edges into you until you bleed. Like the way the guitar seems to waver in and out of tune on ‘Told You’; or the way you can feel the electronic wind howling through the garage in ‘Take it Seriously’; or the way guitars twist and distort themselves around wailing noise, rock solid squares getting spun inside out by the grimy, gritty stuff that crawls out from the underground.

There is always an incredible amount of stuff going on in this music so that you are never really sure if the stars you are seeing are from the psychedelic, spun-out whirlpools of sound or from the beats and riffs that pound you like a mallet.

You’ll come away from Gas Girls Funeral a little raw and sore – but you’ll go back for more because you will have learned that you can never have soft smooth roadways without the roughness and ruggedness of gravel.

ADHD in music: John Zorn's 'The Bribe'

2011-11-16T23:23:00.000+11:00

Brilliant music, like brilliant children, can have ADHD and can drive you spare and yet can still be awesome. It sends you running in all directions, chasing it, being chased by it, this way and that, and then, just when you think it has finally run out of puff and you’re going to have a chance to sit down and catch your breath, it runs off in a completely different direction again, and off you go, after it.

Welcome to the world of John Zorn’s The Bribe.

John Zorn has composed, performed and produced a truckload of music and it’s always, always interesting – drunkenly staggering between the boundaries of free jazz, classical avant-garde, experimental klezmer, and unmedicated madness.

The Bribe is in three parts and was created for three radio plays produced in 1986 by the New York avant-garde theatre company Marbou Mines. The music, for the most part, is in small bursts of restless, erratic energy – 26 of them, no less – over almost 80 minutes.

It utilises Zorn’s usually eclectic conglomeration of instrumental sources – in this case, Zorn’s alto sax, plus reeds, trombone, harp, guitar, piano, organ, turntables, bass and percussion.

Some tracks are less than a minute long. Most are no more than two or three. A handful are longer. But whether they’re short or longer, the music is always shifting its pace, never resting anywhere for more than a couple of seconds, one moment sauntering beside the sleaziest of New York’s street crime, the next marching alongside a carnival parade of visiting freaks.

Zorn subtitles The Bribe as ‘variations and extensions on Spillane’: Spillane itself an iconic sonic drama that John Zorn produced in 1987 in tribute to Mickey Spillane, the bad boy author of American hardboiled crime fiction.

It is that fast, fleeting world of sex and violence, of dark streets and smoky lights, where everything is in black and white, where forbidden fun and guns thrust their pelvises into one another, that world where banality is art and where nothing needs your attention for more than fifteen seconds – and thank god for that because in twenty you might well be dead – it is that world that is so brilliantly, so darkly, so uproariously celebrated here on The Bribe.

Whatever vices you have overcome, The Bribe will make you take them up again. By the end of it you will have a cigarette hanging out of your mouth, a glass of cheap booze in your hand, and you will be standing on a dark, dingy street corner waiting for your next fix – of sex, of drugs, of anything: it doesn’t matter really because, ten seconds later, you’ll be done and looking for, and lusting in, something else.

The Bribe is released, like all John Zorn’s music, on Tzadik.

The sound of silence - Nurse With Wound's 'Space Music'

2011-11-09T22:36:00.000+11:00

Imagine, if you can, the enormity of space – not the stars, but the space between the stars: the darkness, the cold, the silence. And then imagine, if you can, something moving somewhere around you, rumbling at first and then crashing, exploding: flames and rocks hitting something dead and barren, somewhere in the middle of the nothingness. And then imagine, if you can, the cosmic debris catapulted, drifting endlessly and forever in the vast emptiness, and the silence returning amidst an infinite expanse of emptiness.

Imagine it, if you can. And, if you can’t, listen to Nurse With Wound’s Space Music – because that, like nothing else, will tell you what it’s like.

Often, when we think of space, we think of the billions upon billions of things that live and grow and die within it – stars, and planets, and moons. Galaxies, and asteroids, and comets. But, really, most of space is empty – incomprehensibly vast stretches of nothing, other than the distant glimmers of stars, or of stardust, that pulsate faintly now and then through the soft, strange hum of silence.

And that’s the space of Space Music. Nurse With Wound have almost always done incredibly interesting things with their music, right from when they released their surrealist debut album Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella in 1979. But Space Music, commissioned by the Melbourne Planetarium, came 30 years later, and is a very different piece of music altogether.

While Chance Meeting abounds with strange, disconnected sounds, with music untimely ripped from its mother’s womb, unsettled, on edge, Space Music spends most of its 55 minutes hanging in suspension, moving imperceptibly, infinitesimally, with only the subtlest shifts of colour and light floating across the cosmos.

The music is very, very cleverly structured. Its first few minutes, like most of the rest of it, are thin electronic drones – cosmic noise, if you like – but with the persistent hint of something breaking, cracking, beneath the surface. And then you get the explosion – asteroids assaulting a planet, perhaps – sounds that can and do destroy speakers if you’ve let the quiet of the opening minutes lull you, and your volume knob, into too much complacency.

It’s a shattering effect, and you never really recover from it. No matter how many times you listen to Space Music, no matter how well you know what’s coming and that, for the rest of the music, everything stays quiet with only the barest hints of disturbance every now and then – no matter how well you know all of this, the music leaves you nervous, waiting for the unexpected, utterly at the mercy of the vast and empty space around you.

And yet the music is somehow always on the move. Beneath it there is always an unsteady, unquiet, rumble. Above it there is always a thin drone that gives birth to another thin drone, and then to another, and then fades away.

Space Music needs your attention. You have to absorb yourself in it, listen to those subtle shifts of light and colour, allow yourself to be carried away by the subspace rumble, and let yourself be taken to wherever the ‘subliminal effects’, of which the album cover warns you, want to take you.

Otherwise, if you just listen to it casually, you might scarcely notice it, like when you glance up at the stars on a clear, cloudless night, and miss seeing all that deep and wonderful blackness in between.

A story in skin - Slocombe's Pussy's 'Tattoo'.

2011-11-03T22:28:00.001+11:00

I got my first tattoo at 45. Tony Cronin, the one-time bodyguard and chauffeur of Chopper Read, got his at 13. I now have six of them. He has more than it is humanly possible to count and, in fact, if you Google some pictures of him you’ll see that it’s pretty hard to say where one finishes and the next one starts.

But they tell a story, as tattoos always do – and it’s the story, the story of Tony Cronin’s tattoos, that has been captured and distilled into music and imagery in an amazing new CD/DVD release from Melbourne’s psychedelic rock band, Slocombe’s Pussy.

I first encountered Slocombe’s Pussy – Are You Being Served notwithstanding – just a couple of weeks ago when I heard their incredible improvisational collaboration with the Paul Kidney Experience. But Tattoo (or Tattoo: Slocombe’s Pussy Play the Tattoos of Tony Cronin, to give it its full title) is another thing entirely.

For almost an hour, it takes you on a journey into a darkened psychedelia – a kaleidoscope of blacks and greys, the restless beat of disenfranchised youth, the lure of disfigured art, the relentless drive of rebellion.

It’s all here in Tattoo, music that moves in and out of crowded quagmires of noise and wild riffs of psychedelic rock and plaintive laments of acid guitars: music that gathers energy, contemplates it and then releases it, and then gathers it all over again, all the while taking you on its journey through dingy tattoo studios, dingy streets, dingy lives, but always driven by an energy that unabashedly revels in them all.

You can experience Tattoo in either of two ways. You can watch the DVD, where the band’s performance is painted over with images of Tony Cronin and his tattoos, or you can just listen to the CD and let the music paint its own pictures for you. In either case, this music will take hold of you and drag you into its orgasmic sordid world, its explosive tribute to everything everyone respectable frowns upon.

But ultimately it’s the journey, and the story, that is the most compelling thing about Tattoo. It doesn’t rest anywhere: not in the yearning heartache of ‘The Land of Darkness’, not in the defiant resilience of ‘Je ne regrette rien’, not in the surly, sexy sax of ‘”O” Negative’ – always, this music makes you feel it has somewhere to go, somewhere to take you.

Tattoo is a unique melding together of music, art and a life – not just the life of one man who started to have his body tattooed when he was 13, but the life of any person who stands a little to the side of everyone else. There are times when you might feel more than just a bit unsettled by this music – but, really, it is only a mirror. And when you look into it, you see yourself, and you see that you are dancing to its beat.

Slocombe’s Pussy will be launching Tattoo at the Workers Club in Melbourne, Australia on 26 November.

The beat of different drums - Steve Reich's 'Drumming' and Daniel Menche's 'Concussions'

2011-11-01T20:54:00.000+11:00

Drums, it seems, have been a part of music for as long as there has been music. There’s just something about the lure of the beat that has always resonated with us – summonsing us sometimes to the dance, sometimes to the hunt, but always connecting somehow to that bit within us that, no matter how young we are, is as old as the hills.

It’s perhaps a bit surprising, then, that there has been relatively little music devoted solely to the power of drums and drumming. But two musicians have done just that have, in doing it, unearthed the power of the language not only of drums speaking to us but, perhaps even more, of drums speaking to one another.

Steve Reich’s Drumming was written in 1970-1. Daniel Menche’s Concussions in 2006. Both are amazing works that, with all their similarities, give us very different perspectives on the productive power of rhythm.

Steve Reich is one of minimalism’s most important composers and Drumming is one of his most important works. But don’t confuse minimalism for simplicity, because Drumming is anything but simple. Its four Parts are all structured around a single 12/8 rhythmic bar, which is repeated over and over and over by the music’s dozen or so percussionists, each varying the speed just a little, so that the rhythms are constantly moving in and out of sync with one another.

The instruments vary from one part to the next – small tuned drums in the first part; marimbas and percussive voices in the second; glockenspiels, whistling and a piccolo in the third; and all of them together in the fourth.

The effect is staggering, hypnotic. From its very opening notes the music takes you to the edge of your seat, as you wait and anticipate the next shift in the players’ sync, and settle yourself into the new rhythm it creates, while waiting for it to change again and morph into something new: all the time the music’s core DNA staying steadfastly the same. It’s like looking at an image through a mass of mirrors – everything reflecting everything else.

The technique is called ‘phasing’ and Steve Reich used it in a lot of his music, but probably nowhere more compellingly than here, where you see a fascinating kaleidoscope of rhythm, where everything changes and everything stays the same.

While Daniel Menche’s work is the later of the two, it is also the more primal. Its incessant beats build and shift over and on each other with an unrelenting intensity, like the sounds of primordial rain pelting on the inert rock of a new Earth, before life had appeared – or perhaps of the vengeful nuclear rain that will fall when everything is destroyed and gone. The pulses cross each other and form new pulses, the echoes of beats bouncing off the echoes of others; electronic drums pounding, pounding in a thickly, densely harmonised chorus of rhythm. Sometimes the sounds are like the thump of hammers on drums, sometimes they thrash like the clang of metal on metal, but always, always, their energy is unyielding, uncompromising, driving the music onwards in an unstoppable frenzy.

The music is spread over 2 CDs, twenty tracks and almost two hours, but it plays as a seamless whole, as if each beat, and each chain of beats, grows out of the one before it and into the one that follows it. The album’s inside cover tells you to ‘flex your muscles’ – but, really, this music does it for you. You can feel your biceps tightening as you listen.

Both Drumming and Concussions are commanding testimony to the endless, fathomless power of rhythm – to the vibrant, towering life that rhythm creates when it is set free to breed from itself. Those drums that have beaten since time immemorial are just the seed. Steve Reich and Daniel Menche have given just a glimpse of the tremendous, terrifying lushness of the fruit.

The comfort of loneliness, and the power of frailty - William Basinski's 'A Red Score in Tile'

2011-10-26T21:49:00.000+11:00

One of the many, many wonderful things about music is that, even when it takes a long time to say something, it can seize you in its grip, stare you in the eye, and keep you there, while it says it. It can speak slowly to you, unfold its story in soft, drawn-out whispers, in breaths that brush against you; each whisper, each breath, a soft, tired shadow of the one that went before it, each one almost silent, all of them holding you spellbound.

It is this very special power of music that

avant-garde composer, William Basinski, exploits like no one else can or could in his amazing 1979 composition A Red Score in Tile.

Imagine, if you can, a little stretch of music, a few minimalist notes drawn out of a piano, a vague ghost of a drone cushioning them as they fall downwards and die, the whole thing recorded on an old tape, indistinct, fragile, no more than 20 seconds long. And then imagine the tape looping 136 times, at times the tape, and therefore the notes, stretching, distorting just a little, the tonality and pitch wavering now and then, as if at any moment the tape could disintegrate altogether and forever. It is as if those soft, drawn-out whispers are the breaths of an old and dying person who has just one more thing to say before they leave you.

This is the moment, the eternity, that William Basinski captures so sublimely in this incredible 45 minute composition. The tape itself seems to come to you from far away. It sounds old and tired but incredibly beautiful and at peace. And as it plays over and over and over, its subtle changes wash over you until, slowly, you can feel yourself sinking, drowning in them.

But the beauty of this music lies not so much in its astonishing stillness as in its heartbreaking fragility. You feel that you are listening not really to music, but to the memory of music – and a memory that could fade at any moment. It is music coming from far away, from long ago, from a place and time that hardly anyone knows anymore; and, as you listen to it, to its bare handful of notes, slowly everything else around you seems to die away and you are aware of nothing else – nothing other than this old, worn out tape, playing over and over, embracing you in its unfathomable loneliness.

There must surely be a vast, vast ocean between the ability to create something like this well and creating it badly. It could so easily be something that would bore the bejezzers out of you, or else make you think that all those narcotics you took in your youth have perhaps affected you more than you realised.

But here, in the hands of William Basinski, the effect is staggering. The music is quiet but it fills every corner of your room, your mind; it is slow, but it sweeps you up in itself and you can’t escape its unrelenting flow; it is still and almost unchanging, and yet you feel something within you has been shifted and changed forever after you have heard it.

There is really only one way to listen to William Basinski’s A Red Score in Tile, and, regardless of how you try to listen to it, the music itself will take over and make you listen to it as you should: it will make you shut out everything else, turn out all the lights, turn off all the phones and settle into its frailty – a frailty that somehow has the power to take you as its prisoner, and then to take you with it as, in its final seconds, it fades away into nothingness.

This is music that makes you feel, when it has finished, that if you hit the “PLAY” button again, it might no longer be there.

The chaotic cohesion of improvisation - Slocombe's Pussy Vs The Paul Kidney Experience

2011-10-22T22:29:00.000+11:00

Many of us – maybe even most of us – like to think there’s a bit of a plan to things: our day, our grocery shopping, our future, our universe. But the reality is that most of these things happen in their own way and, more often than not, all of them surprise us. Things always seem to happen arbitrarily – the person who drops in for a visit without notice; the extra block of chocolate that we accidentally buy; the new job that comes our way went we’re not looking for it, the old friendship that finishes without us noticing it; the star that darts across the sky when we just happen to casually look up.

But what’s amazing is that, with so many big things and so many little things all happening so randomly, it all somehow holds together and, when we stand back from the chaos, it looks as though it might have all been meant to be that way all along, after all.

That’s how you feel when you listen to the music of the Paul Kidney Experience – a multi-coloured Melbourne band who improvises everything they do but whose efforts build themselves into the kind of chaotic cohesion of which only the very best music, like the very best universes, is made.

I have written about the Paul Kidney Experience previously on this blog, but their new album, where they are joined by members of Slocombe’s Pussy, is quite a different beast. Things are not quite as terrifying here and you get the impression, except perhaps for the final track, that it could be safe to listen to Slocombe’s Pussy Vs The Paul Kidney Experience reasonably close to bedtime without risking nightmares.

The music might be less scary this time, but it’s no less weird, no less daring. Still unidentifiable sounds mix with those that are, or have been, familiar; still instruments and voices push themselves in strange directions; still old worlds and new worlds clash and coalesce. And here, just as on Radio Transmissions, the incredible improvisation skills of these musicians take you everywhere other than the places you expect to go.

Things kick off perfectly with ‘Emulsion’ and its sense of unbridled, unrefined celebration – a bunch of primordial freaks waking up, unkempt, unclothed, and dancing the day to life. Nell Day weaves her half-rustic, half-medieval, violin through the pagan pounding of drums, guitars and Paul Kidney’s vocals-in-tongues.

The mood quietens down, and spookens up, for ‘Albuminurophobia’ – the sounds here are more dense, more drone-like, as dissonance swells and howls: an ocean that heaves to the choir of all the souls that have ever been lost to it.

A more solid, insistent, almost tribal, beat invades the music for ‘Wet Kidney’, and everyone else responds as they should – roused to the dance again, fuelled by blood pumped from the heartbeat of an ancient and angry earth, the vocals now animalistic, the guitars and electronics whirring and whizzing each other on. It is impossible to stay still to this music.

There is a contemplative, almost dreamy, respite with ‘Velocity Addition Formula’. The guitar sings you through a melody that is somehow searching, somehow yearning, and yet somehow at peace too, despite the bed of noise on which it seduces you, and makes love to you.

But it is only a respite. And the screeches and chaos of ‘Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Errors’, which closes the album, awaken you from any complacency, from any urge to see, in the old, old roots of civilisation, an opportunity for nostalgia.

In its 40-ish minutes, this album, in its amazing single arc of improvisation, takes you to many places in a universe where everything is happening for the first time and where nothing is every really at rest.

They are places where all the elements of creation are in harmony, but they are not the harmonies of a settled, civilised space – rather they are those harmonies where one bit does something crazy, and all the rest become crazy with it, in perfect, crazy sync.

Outrageously limited to just 100 copies, Slocombe’s Pussy Vs The Paul Kidney Experience is issued through Supercriticality Records.

Post-punk avant-garde Judaism - The Alter Rebbe's Nigun

2011-10-20T00:12:00.001+11:00

While religion might have had a lot to answer for over the centuries, the millennia, one thing that it will always be able to put forward in its defence is the music it has inspired. Whether your mind’s centre of gravity is being shifted by the alien sounds of Hindu quarter-tones; whether your innermost self is weeping to a Bach Passion or leaping to some black American gospel; whether the history of everything you are is being wedded to the red earth by the drone of an Australian Aboriginal didgeridoo – whatever it is, the human search for something bigger, something deeper, something universal, has always found, in music, a lush fertile ground in which to sink its roots.

Judaism is no exception. It, too, has found a place for itself in music – not least (as I discovered in a fascinating presentation a couple of months ago at my local music group) in the Eastern European tradition of “klezmer”, with its sense, in its wavering ornamentation, of always searching for a home. It is music that somehow seems to give a voice the tradition of Judaism, and to the culture of the Jewish people, in a way that is instantly identifiable as “Jewish”.

But the voice that Australian avant-garde post-punk Hasidic Jews, Oren Ambrachi and Robbie Avenaim, give to that tradition, and to that culture, is something that surely no one could ever have expected. Their 1999 album, The Alter Rebbe’s Nigun, produced under the unfathomably creative oversight of John Zorn, brings together what feels like a world of irreconcilable musical differences – free jazz, punk rock, Japanese noise and, somewhere in the midst of it all, klezmer.

The Alter Rebbe’s Nigun is in four parts, and is based on the philosophical and ethical compositions of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi (1745 – 1813) who was known amongst his followers as ‘The Alter Rebbe’. The parts correspond to the four main stages in the ‘tzimtzum’ – a sort of Alter Rebbe version of the Big Bang: Atzilut (Emanation), Yetzirah (Formation), Beriah (Creation), and Asiyah (Action).

With ‘Atzilut’ – the highest, most God-like, stage – the music opens with notes plucked out of timelessness and spacelessness, and yet with a tired, old, vulnerability, as if the music is being played on an ancient, priceless, but dilapidated music box. It gives way to heavy post punk guitars and drums that drench the music, and you, in a dark, imposing density.

It’s an arresting start to this strange, eccentric, cosmic musical journey. From it emerges the chaos of an unformed mass, with ‘Yetzirah'. There is a barren darkness here, but within it, and around it, you can hear light flickering, pulsating, in its birth-throes. The music is minimalist – just electronic notes stretched and throbbing in the middle of nowhere – and yet it has a sense of bigness about it until, right near the end, you could swear that a lullaby is being sung to lull the baby earth to sleep.

'Beriah’ bursts into life with a fanfare of sonic madness – brass-like sounds blustering out as if the whole universe is caught in a traffic jam, blasting a million horns. It’s a rallying cry and, after a few minutes, we hear the empty dark cosmos again, breathing, stirring in its sleep, woken, in spite of itself, by the alarm, as dissonant guitars and drums at last pound it into shape.

In the final and longest part, ‘Asiyah’, we hear, for the first time, the voice of Rabbi Yankel Lieder, narrating some of the Nigun text, underscored and punctuated by rumbling, trembling noise that slowly creeps in on the spoken word, giving it life and strangling it at the same time. The voice gives way to a kind of spectral, choral chant, with drums beating and tolling within it, driving it forwards into the unknown, the unknowable, until everything suddenly stops and is unexpectedly put to bed by an almost unsettlingly gentle, homely, klezmer ditty.

The Alter Rebbe’s Nigun is an extraordinary piece of music – earnest, passionate and daring beyond all boundaries, creating a uniquely Jewish universe: ancient, oppressed, but strong and formidable and, above all, enduring. It leaves you shattered but resolute, and full of all the contradictions that music, and religion, do so well.

The Alter Rebbe’s Nigun is released on Tzadik – one of those recording labels where you can pretty well pick anything, and it’ll be worth listening to.

The creaking sound of rigging on the Mary Celeste - Takehisa Kosugi's 'Catch Wave'

2011-10-13T21:38:00.001+11:00

If you could hear the sound the sea might make, when every living thing has gone from the Earth and nothing remains other than a few stranded ghosts; and grey water laps against abandoned shores under endless grey skies; or if you could hear, as Julian Cope describes this music, the creaking sound of the rigging on the Mary Celeste after all human life had vanished from it; if you could hear the last bird left on Earth, soaring through a measureless and sullen sky, you would find, I am sure, that it would sound just like Takehisa Kosugi’s extraordinary album from 1975, Catch Wave.

Takehisa Kosugi is a Japanese experimental composer and violinist, born in 1938 and and has worked with musicians as diverse as John Cage and Sonic Youth. His music, usually associated with the neo-Dadaist ‘Fluxus’ movement, a word that derives from the Latin word for ‘flow’, is liberated from all the conventional notions of structure and boundaries and instead flows, aimed nowhere but not aimless, in a limitless, timeless space.

Catch Wave is undoubtedly his most famous recording. Its opening piece, ‘Mono Dharma’, is built on a single, barren drone above which hovers a distorted, oscillating solo violin sliding in and out of notes that have no name. It is music that conjures up an unspeakably haunted loneliness, music that speaks of abandonment, emptiness, the end of things. There is a minimalist vastness in its textures, like you are hearing the trapped souls of things that have long gone – the cry of a whale from a hundred thousand years ago, still echoing from the cliffs.

The second of the album's two pieces is ‘Wave Code’. More unsettled than the earlier track, this music, too, is rooted in a long, forlorn drone; but what grows from it here are strange, alien groans and grunts and chants: voices in the dark – perhaps the new bud of grotesquery that grows, slithers, out of the abandoned apocalypse of ‘Mono Dharma’.

It’s that drone – that empty, thin, desolate drone – that brings these two very different pieces together and leaves you feeling that they are perhaps just showing you different sides of the same picture, telling you different versions of the same story.

The simplicity of this music is in some ways what makes it most remarkable, and most haunted. Stripped of every ornamentation, of every convention, of every bit of structure, you are left wondering, horrified, that this godforsaken place might be how things really are.

The whole thing goes for just under 50 minutes, but this music makes you feel that you have been immersed in something much more timeless than that. It is music which, despite its avant-garde experimentation, feels like it could have been dug up from underneath the earth, where it had laid buried – perhaps a secret, perhaps a prophecy – for millions of years.

Catch Wave is music that you feel has been around long before you ever were and will stay around long after you ever will be. Your place in it doesn’t even create a bleep on its endless, empty heaving sea.

Thanks to Paul Kidney at PBS FM's Ear of the Behearer for introducing me to this stunning piece of music.

The loving songs of hate - Boyd Rice's 'Music, Martinis and Misanthropy'.

2011-10-06T21:59:00.001+11:00

There is a dark side to everything. We all know that. And most of us are at some stage or another fascinated by it, and at some stage or another we stare into it and take a sort of reassuring relief when we see how horrifying it is. It somehow restores our faith in the established order of things – good is good and bad is bad.

But what is much more unsettling is when we stare into that abyss and find a comfort, a peace, an embrace, in there – a sense, even, of coming home.

This is the side of darkness that Boyd Rice shows us in his classic, and very, very unsettling 1990 album, Music, Martinis and Misanthropy. It is a piece of terrifying musical blackness – the sort that presents you with hate, clothed in soft velvet, its ice-cold arms stretched out to enfold you. Here hell really has frozen over.

The music itself is a richly textured neo-folk, with lush guitars, opulent keyboards, and fertile electronic noise, all blending into a dark and alluring molasses of sound that, like quicksand, absorbs the nihilistic, hate-filled lyrics of Boyd Rice delivered, usually spoken, sometimes sung, without even a neutron of emotion. The effect is shattering, jarring, but irresistible.

This strangely evocative, deeply horrible, stage is set in the album’s opening ‘Invocation’, a grotesquely morbid cover of The Carpenters’ song of the same name. It’s a somehow fitting mirror – The Carpenters’ angst-filled lives clad in sunlight and roses, reflected here in songs of hate clad in a soft, Kashmir black.

Whether it’s the musings on killing all the weak and ugly people, to a gently strumming guitar and rich, comforting chords, as in ‘People’; or the haunted soprano vocals that sing, ethereal and lullaby-like, behind ‘Disney Land Can Wait’, where the fantasy funpark is a distant dream, and shooting all the shuffling soullessness of modern life with AK-47s and B-52s is the immediate mission; or whether it’s the ghostly toe-tapping rhythm of ‘An Eye for an Eye’; or the trippy, druggy, ditty of murder in ‘Down in the Willow Garden’; or the barren, deadpan, invitation to rape in ‘Tripped a Beauteous Maiden’, Music, Martinis and Misanthropy constantly draws us into everything we want to be repelled by.

This is not music you want to be left alone with for too long – and not just because it is so disturbing (and it is certainly that), but also because you just can’t trust it. And that means, when it takes you so totally into its embrace, you can no longer trust yourself either. Is the music trying to lure you into its lair of hate, or is it trying to warn you, arm you, against a world dressed in majesty but drowning in mediocrity?

Ultimately, at the end of its 50 minutes, Music, Martinis and Misanthropy leaves it for you to decide. It has made a big black bed for you, with soft silk sheets, but you’re the one who has to choose whether or not to lie in it. All that the music, in all its dark, lulling richness, has done is show you what a comforting, loving place hate can be.

H P Lovecraft's Unnameable cosmic horror of the mind

2011-09-25T13:00:00.000+10:00

H P Lovecraft wrote stories of cosmic horror. And they weren’t just stories of horrible things that happened in the cosmos – but, even more, they were stories of the horror of being part of it all: stories of the horrors of humanity, dwarfed by a big, bad, black universe. A universe twisted and distorted by alien malevolence, where humans are nothing and blackness, bleakness, are everywhere.

It’s the sort of universe that springs out of xenophobic paranoia – big and dark and full of foreign threats, but closed and claustrophobic too, where every breath is stifled and scared, endangered, alone.

H P Lovecraft wrote mostly in the 1920s. But, since then, his influence on literature and art and even on music has been profound, with traces of him popping up especially in bands like Metallica, Black Sabbath, the Black Dahlia Murder and Dream Theater.

But all of that plays just lip service to the real terrified, terrific, horror of H P Lovecraft. There’s something much more profound, much more disturbing, going on here than what a bit of black metal nihilism, however good it is, can show you.

And it wasn’t until Melbourne avant garde musicians Clinton Green and Andrew McIntosh released their 2001-2 album But of that, I will not speak …, under their moniker The Unnameable, that the real ghastliness of cosmic horror was, at last, captured and preserved.

Inspired by Lovecraft’s writing, the music of But of that, I will not speak … takes you deep into the dark and troubled regions the human psyche, the real place where his cosmic horrors were born and bred. It is the music of a haunted soul, much more than of a haunted cosmos.

The album opens with ‘This, no human creature may do’, where primordial groans and drones, chanting like an ancient ritual of the wind, draw you into the loneliest, most frightened crevices of your mind. The music is big, but entrapped, and there is no light, no escape.

It’s an uninviting place, but it is the right one for this music because, in this blackness, when you hear the lifeless, lumbering heartbeat of ‘You fool, Warren is DEAD!’, or the yawning, cavernous rumble lurking beneath ‘Life is a hideous thing’, you know that it can really be nothing other than your own blood, throbbing, congealing, within you. There’s nothing else here, other than you.

There is a grim megalomania in ‘Space belongs to me, do you hear?’, a sustained drone that seems to have every tone and semitone and quartertone drawn into it – like a psychic black hole that takes everything, every bit of light, hostage.

Were it not for where this music has already taken you, you might think that something really was hovering around you in ‘The Orbit of Yuggoth’, where a strange, sinister whistle dives down and creeps up again, in and out, backwards and forwards, like a spacecraft circling you, waiting to pounce – but, by now, you know that it’s not out there, it’s in here and, no matter how much you block your ears and try to hide from it, it won’t go away.

The first real hints of melody come in the album’s final track, ‘Only the most accursed rites of human blasphemy could ever have called Him…’, where wraithlike notes are plucked out of the gloom to make a little tune, a macabre lullaby, perhaps, singing you into the endless sleep of loneliness and paranoia to which you were doomed from the moment the music started.

The Unnameable’s take on H P Lovecraft is fascinatingly outlined in Andrew McIntosh’s liner notes essay, and brilliantly captured in this unique music, where Lovecraft’s bigotry and racism and conservative nostalgia for a fabled past are seen not as incidental deficits to an otherwise brilliant creative mind, but rather as the essential and only real way of understanding the dark and unfriendly universe that he created.

But of that, I will not speak … takes you into that universe in the most unexpected of ways: by turning out the lights, closing the doors and the windows, and leaving you alone.

Available, once again, from Shame File Music.

Star Wars on acid: Tomutonttu

2011-09-23T21:38:00.001+10:00

I was born long enough ago to have been around in the days when computer games first started to appear in pubs and arcades and, even then, I was enough of an oddball to have been at least, and probably more, fascinated by the noise they made than by the aliens you could shoot with them. Those beepy, bleepy noises. They didn’t do much but, even back then, I remember thinking that someone could probably do something pretty interesting with them.

And, I guess, lots of people did. Just listen to anything by Kraftwerk and follow your nose from there.

But one thing that you might not find, unless you know how to sniff out the really rare, delectable treats that are buried in far away corners, is the music of a contemporary solo Finnish project, called Tomutonttu, the work of Tampere-based Jan Anderzén, musician and artist and leader of Finland’s avant garde freak-folk band Kemialliset Ystävät.

Tomutonttu, I am told, means ‘dust gnome’. And if you can imagine a peculiar little alien gnome, shooting freaky little bits of cosmic dust through space, like he is playing some little intergalactic video game, then you might know a little of what to expect on the two freakily titled Tomutonttu albums, Tomutonttu (2007) and Tomutonto (2009), that I happened to stumble across, quite by accident, a few days ago.

There is a toy-like innocence to this music, with its electronic, psychedelic notes that bounce and pop and skip amongst the noises of animals and birds and ancient chants, like a child’s kaleidoscope of time and space, especially in Tomutonttu, the earlier album.

But it’s a child who has, perhaps, stolen a tab of acid, because there’s an unsettling uncanniness about this music, too, like its playful naïveté is just a sham, and the music, despite how it sounds at first, is having not fun but hallucinations. Rhythms that started out squarely and steadily disintegrate into a dizzy free flow; melodies that were full of sunlight, without a care in the world, slowly become just a little creepy, even while they’re still shining and glistening. It’s like one of those mechanical child toys that you begin to think might be possessed by something.

Tomutonto, the later of the two albums, is also the more aggressive, the darker. Its sounds are more deconstructed, more noise-based, and there is less of Stars and more of Wars in the feel of it all.

Both of these albums are fascinating explorations of that strange place where old things and new things, where innocence and corruption, laughter-filled playgrounds and empty voids, where music and noise, intersect.

Just like today’s adults who, as yesterday’s children, shot thousands and thousands of aliens, to the sound of bouncy computer bleeps, in the arcades of their local shopping centres.

Available through Fonal Records.

The industrial sleep of the Earth - Spectres by Monolith

2011-09-21T21:04:00.000+10:00

If you can imagine the sound that the Earth might make when it’s sleeping – if you can imagine its pulsating, heaving breaths, its snores, its slow, dark dreams – if you can imagine how it would grumble and groan when it turns and stretches in the night, and then goes back to sleep again; and if you can imagine how every sleep is a billion centuries old, but still new and now – if you can imagine even a little of that, then you might have a sense of what the Melbourne –based solo ambient drone project Monolith sounds like on his 2011 EP release, Spectres.

But only a sense. Only a bit. Because there is much more to Spectres than an old, sleeping Earth.

Spectres is a bit over half an hour of dark industrial hums and whirs, where the sounds pulsate and resonate, sometimes creating the feel of a thousand harmonic overtones bouncing off infinite walls, sometimes pared down to a single thread: but always, somewhere, you can hear the music’s heartbeat, slow and strong, as old as the hills.

But, even with its roots in a subterranean past, the music of Spectres is very, very new. It gives you a different take on minimalist drone music, relying less on those ground-rumbling bass lines where the guitars are tuned down to Q flat, and instead building its droning throb out of today’s world, like a spectre, if you will, of a factory siren held in suspension. It’s a sonic world kicked into being by the nerve and mettle of modern life – and kept alive by the sounds of the blood that flows through cities.

And when you hear the relentless sound of that blood, pumped through the music’s veins, and are hypnotised by it, so that those hard industrial sounds take on a spirit of the eternal, the picture Monolith paints becomes an unsettling one. It is a picture of that sleeping Earth made not out of rock and water, but out of steel and cement: cold, harsh, inhospitable.

Creating these deep, enduring images through long arcs of music that are moulded out of the barest of elements can only ever be done by someone who knows how to pace and shape sounds, as minimalist as these, in a way that gets your body to beat to its beat. This is music that slows you down and draws you down; it lowers your heartbeat and your body temperature until you, too, find yourself curled, foetus-like, not in the Earth’s womb, but in its bowels.

Just a few minutes before Spectres ends, its sleeping rest is disturbed by what could be the sound of dozens of metal sheets pounding into a concrete floor. It's a haunting portent of what this music seems to have been warning you of all along - this sleep is not a peaceful one, and it lulls you only to make you captive to its nightmares.

Thanks to 3 PBS FM's Ear of the Behearer for introducing me to this amazing piece of music. Available from Shame File Music.

The post-punk tribal new-world focussed chaos of Scattered Order

2011-09-14T21:52:00.000+10:00

I think I used to think that being ordered meant being predictable. Being neat. Being unadventurous. That’s what I used to think – until today, when an EP called A Solar Rush Towards a Treble Heaven by a Sydney-based trio called Scattered Order arrived in my mailbox and I popped it into the sound system, and I heard layers of strange and unpredictable sounds, billowing and blowing in all directions, raising the roof with their adventure and energy, but all of it ordered. Coherent. Belonging. Fitting in.

If you had to put Scattered Order into a genre box, you would probably choose post-punk, given their use of repetitive krautrock-esque beats, their use of synthesisers and electronic experimentation, but they would be a hendecagonal piece in a heptagonal hole, given all the dimensions and shapes and shades that abound in their music.

A Solar Rush Towards a Treble Heaven begins in a blaze of cosmic energy with ‘Babble Fridge’, sounding like all the nations of all worlds of all times have come together in a celebration. Everywhere you look there is some colour; everywhere you listen there is unbridled festivity – primitive tribes dancing with new world androids. This is music that seems to be able to find a place for everything.

‘This here loop’ is more earnest, more determined, but no less full of drive and vigour. It feels like music with a purpose, a point, music with a mission, where snaps of spoken vocals intermingle with electronic whirs that bombard the music with an ambiguous energy, dance-like, war-like, amidst the incessant life-force of tribal beats.

Those beats are underscored by a more menacing bass in ‘April Which’, and overshadowed by a high, harsh treble wail, like alien woodwind pushed to its extremes, while the vocals chant their haunted, freaky, post-punky chant. And yet, amongst all of it, the music still feels like it is celebrating something. No matter how severe it gets, this music never stops having fun.

A Solar Rush Towards a Treble Heaven finishes with its longest track, ‘Trafficeternityleftlegout’. Here, there is something happening everywhere. Frenetic, unending traffic. Maybe it is the title, or maybe it’s the music doing it of its own accord, but this track conjures up for you those film images of multi-level mazes of highways, with sped-up footage of traffic bustling in every direction. Smooth, relentless, organised lasers of chaos.

This is an album that, in its 26 minutes, does exactly what you would expect music, so packed with contradicting, conflicting energies, to do – it leaves you exhausted and exhilarated. It leaves you feeling the new and the old have always shared the same space, crammed so close, that the only sensible thing for them to do is to procreate and produce some scattered order.

Make sure you check out Scattered Order’s website.

The real sound of music - The Wizards of Oi

2011-09-09T22:25:00.000+10:00

It might seem like stating the obvious, but music would be nothing without sound. And yet it’s not really stating the obvious because, perhaps of all the bits and pieces that go to make music, sound is the one that is most overlooked of all. We know to look for rhythm, for melody, for harmony, for structure, for timbre, for colour. But we forget, without even knowing we’ve forgotten, to notice the sound.

The Wizards of Oi is a New York-based art and sound project that brings together Germany’s Brandstifter (Fire starter) and Britain’s Aaron Moore in a sort of pan-national sound treaty, where different artistic cultures, different artistic histories, shake hands and, as one, explore the roots and shoots of sound from which all music has ultimately grown.

And so you find, on Wizard of Oi’s double album, In Space, Brandstifter and Moore digging beneath the electronic pulse of Krautrock and the anarchistic minimalism of No Wave and taking the strands of sound that lie below, and examining them, with their guitar and drums and trumpet and vocals, magnifying them, multiplying them, laughing at them, concentrating on them and sometimes just leaving them to their own devices and letting them grow. It’s like a lecture in sound, where the music teaches you about itself, and about its genetic makeup.

The tracks on this album are put together very, very cleverly. You get tracks like the opening ‘Long Man-Go’, or ‘Freejatz’, which seem to sit staring at this or that sound, looking at it from every possible angle, pushing it from side to side and then, a track or two later, the sounds come together, and the music is driven by them, and it flows with life and grim vitality, like it does on the 28 minute ‘Tremolusion/Drone Suite’, or on ‘March of the Eddie Van Halen Monster’, or on the closing ‘Pets & Animals’, for example, and you find that you no longer take its nuts and bolts – its sounds – for granted anymore. The whole thing is like putting the ingredients of something under the microscope and, seeing that they pass muster, then mixing them into something new and weird and wonderful.

And then there are the moments of black, even gross, humour, like in ‘The Belchium Track’, a minute and a half of burps that leads into the strange, mock-tribal percussive dance of ‘July or December’, a song that ruminates about whether something happened in July or in December; or in ‘Fat American Woman’, almost a schoolyard ditty, that then leads you into the funky, off-beat jazz of ‘Crayolish Oisters’.

This approach, this way in which In Space lets you look into the ugly, unglamorous guts of its music, and then takes you along the wild ride of the music itself, makes you appreciate how little space there really is between the sophistication of music and the raw elements of sound.

If you can track down some of the music of The Wizards of Oi, and you really should, and if you’re prepared to let yourself be taken on its trip – and it really is a trip – then you might just find that you notice the things you see along the way in ways that you never did before. And you might just notice that you appreciate the sound of music a little differently, a little better, a little more.

My thanks to my dear friend Marty, and his sister Barbara, for the introduction!

A Russian call across time and space - Asian Women On The Telephone

2011-09-04T21:37:00.000+10:00

Given my dual penchants for all things Russian and for most things weird, it is a little odd that it took a tip-off from Magdalena Solis, only a few weeks ago, for me to discover a very freaky avant-psych-rock band from Moscow called Asian Women on the Telephone (AWOTT).

AWOTT is a band that, ideally, you need to see. And you can find a few clips on YouTube that allow you to do that, but they only serve as enticing teasers for what the real experience of seeing these strange, Dadaist, oddly-clad performers must be like. The music itself is part of a bigger whole, where musicians in weird, alien-like costumes and masks bash away at their instruments and their bits of odd percussion and noise, in what looks and sounds like a junkyard ritual from another world.

But, for those of us who can’t get to Moscow, there are a few downloads and a CD available if you know where to look. And it’s worth the effort because, if you let this music get into your head, you will find it creates some pretty amazing images in there, pretty much as wild and weird as seeing it done for you on stage.

The music, in the best Dadaist way, takes a bit of this and a bit of that, and puts it together in a way that turns it all into something else entirely. There is a tribal ritualistic beat to much of the music, a sense of naïve primitivism, but it might be mixed with the motorik pulse of Krautrock, with collages of noise, wailing vocals and grotesque giggles; there might be psyched-out electronics, and stray notes that howl and slide around their centre, all coming together in a sort of partly primal, partly space-age orgy of sound.

The album ICanT is the one that I managed to find – a generous 78 minutes of amazing music that kicks off with “Pleasure Dome”, a dark, drone-like march that leads you, blindfolded, into the mystery world that holds you captive throughout the rest of the album.

In “Отверстие-Учитель” (hole-teacher) the first images of pagan ritual are painted on your mind’s canvas, but splashed with electronic twinges and twangs that linger and waver in the air.

It’s this uncanny coming-together of everything old with everything new that permeates much of this music – its brilliant use of ostinato rhythms, of other-worldly tonalities, of haunted animal-like yowls, and of sounds from another galaxy. And, because they bring it all together so well and so easily, AWOTT creates in you a sense that it is your time-world, rather than theirs, that is out of sync.

By “Похотливая горбунья ищет и находит” (Lustful hunchback seeks and finds) this whole effect becomes positively scary, with those lingering, wavering twangs becoming longer and creepier, as maniacal laughs infect the music and the air and which, even while they’re sending shivers down your spine, could almost be in parody of themselves. Nothing in this place makes sense, at least not in the usual way.

The weirdness comes to an end, of sorts, in the album’s closer, “White Rabbi Motorcycle Dub” – a gentler track, but still an unsettling one, as if you are at last being led out of this strange world that has held you in its grip for the last hour – led out, but not entirely released.

Generally, each of the eight tracks on ICanT is quite long, but their persistent, ruthless beat always underpins other sounds and noises that change slowly and subtly, giving you the feeling that huge creatures – dinosaurs crossed with aliens, perhaps – are striding, slowly, but relentlessly around you until you, too, in spite of yourself, join their parade.

AWOTT’s music is proudly low-fi – it is the music of the post-Soviet urban underground, music from dark places that repel and allure with only one hand.

It is certainly worth hunting down ICanT, or anything else you can find of AWOTT – music that can plug you into that shadowy, seductive, schizoid world that lays lurking, somewhere deep in all of us.

The band’s MySpace page is a good place to start.

Music for when the music stops - the electronic chemistry of Plastikman

2011-09-01T21:31:00.001+10:00

In my younger days, which were a very long time ago, I was constantly befuddled at the discussions that would go on after all-night dance parties about the music that had been played. Some felt there had been too much house. Some felt there had been too little techno. Some wanted more acid (often referring to both the music and the chemical). It meant very little to me and, at the time, I didn’t like any of it so the whole house/techno/acid balance was pretty insignificant as far as I was concerned.

I now wonder, years later and after the Road to Damascus has opened up so many different new musical vistas for me, if the music of Plastikman might have been amongst those sounds that I unfortunately allowed to blend amorphously into one another back then.

I still don’t really fully understand the different genres of dance music – or the different genres of any music for that matter – but I do know that there is something hauntingly familiar about the sounds that Richie Hawtin created under his Plastikman moniker. There is something in their ice-clad, barren minimalism, their empty, soulless, but irresistibly hypnotic beats, that conjures up for me strange, uncanny images of near-empty dance floors in the near-empty hours of the morning where a few drug-soaked figures would still be dancing.

I had always, even quite recently, thought of dance music as somehow inferior to real music – it served a great purpose, and it was great at serving it, but that was all. As music in its own right, as music to just listen to, it had, I thought, little to offer.

In a way, even looking at music in that way is missing the point – music always has some sort of place, some sort of purpose, some sort of thing that it’s trying to do: and it’s pretty nonsensical to criticise it for not being good outside of what it’s there to do. But, in any event, the criticism is kind of turned on its head here anyway. It’s not so much that you can’t take the music of Plastikman away from the dance floor – it’s more that you can’t take the dance floor away from Plastikman.

This is music that, no matter where you play it, brings the dance floor to itself. But not the boppy, celebratory dance floor, not the place where people sing along to Kylie or Madonna or the Pet Shop Boys: but rather the place where shadows creep and crawl, weaving in and out of lonely, spectral bodies; bodies pumped with energy and sweat, but drained of blood and tears.

When you hear this music, it is impossible not to see and feel those dark places surrounding you – but they entice you, they draw you into their cold, empty clutches; you are frightened by them, and yet you don’t want to escape them.

This is the music that plays when the music has stopped. In that sense, it reminds me of the third movement of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony – a piece which Mahler himself described as being like watching a dancehall from the outside looking in, where you can no longer hear the music, and it all looks bizarre, absurd, grotesque, out of normal sync.

In Plastikman you find a whole lot of things come together – the robotic, relentless beat of Krautrock, the analogue synthesizers and drum machines of Detroit techno, the trance-like rhythms of acid house, the barren economy of minimalism – but here they come together cloaked and conspiring, and forge an unholy, irresistible alliance.

My new absorption in Plastikman was spurred on by the release, only last week, of the very lavishly produced Plastikman Arkives – a massive 15 CD compilation of the original Plastikman albums and a whole lot of other remixes and rare or unreleased material, with all the production gimmickry that typical goes with these things and that somehow manages to suck me in every time.

There is just too much music in the Plastikman Arkives for me to be able to even begin to cover it in any detail here. And in an y case, it is the overall and overwhelming spell of the music as a whole that has hit me so forcefully over the past few days as I have waded my way through it all.

Plastikman is the music of electronics, of chemicals, of a robotic new age – music which, even in the darkness and the silence, never stops.

There were always times when, back then in my youth, very, very late in the night, those dance floors really freaked me out. At the time I thought it was the chemicals. But now I think, perhaps, it was Plastikman.

Shards on the turntable: Undecisive God's RPMs 3-4

2011-08-30T22:14:00.000+10:00

I think I was about eight years old when the first turntable appeared in my family household. It was at least a couple of years later that I was allowed to operate it myself and then a couple more years after that that I began to discover, left unsupervised and alone in the house, the amazing things you could do with a turntable. You could play records forwards or backwards, and at different speeds; you could stick bits of paper into the grooves and get different sounds. You could even have two bits of paper in two grooves and get two sounds at the one time.

But it wasn’t until another 40 years after that, when I saw my first Clinton Green turntable installation at Melbourne’s Overground Festival in 2011, that I saw what could really be done with half a dozen turntables: the rhythms you could create out of broken or warped records; the spooked hypnotism of tracks looping endlessly; the music of bumps and scratches; and the strange, almost ghostly, chorus of it all coming together.

So it is not particularly surprising that I approached the turntable-driven latest release of Clinton Green’s solo experimental music project, Undecisive God, with a fair bit of anticipation. RPMs 3-4 actually represents the third and fourth instalments in a series of turntable-based releases – but the early bits are on cassette and so I am stuck with Parts 3 and 4 on their own. A most disconcerting thing for an obsessive completist such as myself, as you can imagine.

But there is nothing undecisive about what Clinton Green does on this album. Here bits of broken music are grabbed and hammered back together in a way that brings a strange but remarkable new unity to them. The turntable settings are gradually sped up or slowed down, and what would otherwise have been the ugly noise of needles, and at one point even a nail, scraping across sharded and scratched vinyl, becomes here a mesmerizing rhythm, amongst which snippets of disembodied voices and instruments play themselves over and over, coming together in a mountain of sound that grows and tumbles, grows and tumbles, but never falls apart. It’s as if the innards of damage have become the glue that holds everything together.

Parts 3 and 4 of the RPMs series are the bread of this album’s sandwich, and its filling is made up of two fascinating explorations of noise, first in ‘Turntables Are Wrong’, where some turntable improvisations were mistakenly recorded at the wrong volume and ended up producing some distorted noise that, despite the mistake, sound fantastic, and then in ‘Summer Holiday 2010-11’, which is a bit of fresh air of summer noise in Melbourne, before the full and epic onslaught of the 43 minute ‘RPMs 4’.

The deconstruction and reconstruction of music and noise is not an easy thing to pull off without it becoming – pardon the pun – little more than a very self-indulgent wank. But in the right hands it not only makes you rethink how the bricks and mortar of music are put together, it not only makes you see things, everyday things, differently because of the way they are placed and organised in non-everyday ways, but, in the right hands, it actually also sounds good. In the right hands, it builds its own tensions, its own harmonies and counterpoints, its own sense and structure, its own music.

And, in Undecisive God’s Clinton Green, it is very, very much in the right hands.

RPMs 3-4 is available from Shame File Music.

When things no longer go bump in the dark - Tangerine Nightmare's 'Synthicide'

2011-08-13T13:08:00.003+10:00

Often it’s not the things you see in nightmares that scare you the most, but rather the things you don’t see. The things that lurk in the shadows; the things that are shapeless, faceless, unconvincingly quiet.

Germany’s electronic, ambient krautrock band, Tangerine Dream, produces in you the sort of psyched out, psychedelic experiences that you just know, after a few years, are going to catch up on you. And in the one-night only, one-album only, avant-trio of Melbourne based Clinton Green, Andrew McIntosh and Lloyd Barrett, Tangerine Nightmare, all those trippy chemicals finally meet their destiny.

The album is called Synthicide, and it brings you, veiled in its ambient laptop noise, the sounds of things, scary things, that are too crafty, too clever, to go bump in the night. Instead, they slither and rumble along, behind you, around you, just enough to let you know they’re there, but not enough to let you know how to find them or hold them.

The result is unnerving. Your blood drops a few degrees when you hear this music, but you know you can’t escape it because it’s not really slithering and rumbling around you at all – it’s all happening within you: bits of your brain and your life at last seeing the dark side of the things that you had once painted in the colours of fluorescent rainbows.

The five tracks of Synthicide flow into each other with that same kind of coherence you get when you half wake from one nightmare and fall back into another. Things are different, but you know it’s the same dream, exerting the same hold on you.

It’s easy to describe music as ‘dark’ these days, and it is often the word you use when you don’t know what else to say about something that’s vaguely disturbing or sinister. But Synthicide is dark in its much more literal sense: the absence of light, the place where things creep around and wait to pounce. It’s the sort of dark where everything is in camouflage, where demons wear soft-soled shoes, and talk in whispers.

Albums like Synthicide are especially exciting for people who, as I do, live close enough to Melbourne to be able to call Tangerine Nightmare a local musical project - even if it was just a one-off. But it's still a great reminder of what a thriving, vibrant underground music scene we have here. Things like this are popping up all over the place - or, to be more correct, all under the place - if you just know where to look.

Discovered, for me, on 3PBS 106.7 FM's Ear of the Behearer, Synthicide is available from Shame File Music.

The Do-Re-Mi of noise: Merzbow's 'OM Electrique'.

2011-06-21T22:19:00.002+10:00

As Fräulein Maria may have said to the von Trapp family kids, had she wanted to introduce them to Merzbow instead of to music more generally, “Let’s start at the very beginning – a very good place to start: when you read you begin with ABC, when you listen to Merzbow you begin with OM Electrique”.

Not that OM Electrique is by any means the best or even the easiest piece of Merzbow to listen to, but it is the first thing Merzbow recorded, back in 1979, and you can always learn a lot from the beginnings of anything.

OM Electrique is Merzbow stripped bare: an austere, minimalist piece of music that nevertheless tells us a lot about his art and his greatness. It consists mostly of a long droning electronic bass note: vaguely, disturbingly, pulsating. After a while it is joined with short, urgent, but feeble spurts of electrical, metallic sound. These tap and beat away throughout – at first sporadically, and then more insistently, always seeking to find a rhythm and a life but never quite mustering enough energy of their own to rise above the dead, dry drone. At best, they are dragged along by it but, really, the rhythm is never entirely settled – beats are missed here and there, and its pace never stays in the one place. And it seems somehow smothered by the relentless drive of the drone.

About a third of the way into Part One, the bass drone is suddenly interrupted by a high, piercing siren, as if the music is trying to awaken you from itself. It shrieks at you, not enough to deafen you, but enough to make you uncomfortable. It seems to be trying to ward off the menace of the drone, or at least to warn you to steer clear of it – but its attempt is half-hearted, as if it has done this a million times before and always, as now, after only a few minutes, the drone returns, reasserts itself as master, and the metallic beat that takes you nowhere strikes up again.

The sounds build in momentum and yet, at the same time, remain static. It’s an incredibly disorienting feeling that is somehow brilliantly intensified when Part One fades out only to give way to the fuller onslaught of the same sounds, the same drone, the same dead dance of electronic beats, in Part Two.

The whole thing is a marvellous study in minimalist noise. There is no more than a handful of sounds in the almost 40 minutes of OM Electrique. But listen to the way Merzbow mixes and blends those sounds, changes their rhythms and their pulse, gets them to converse with one another, build on one another and then collapse again. The incessant drone that threads through everything, even when it’s not there: it’s all a magnificent demonstration of what noise can do, of what noise can be.

Merzbow gives the noise a kind of austere, severe life – a life with the blood drained out of it, an electric, robotic life the seems to be going everywhere and nowhere at once. It is like a meditation that has been feeding you disturbed subliminal messages throughout. It leaves you feeling strangely unsettled when it’s over, as if you have spent those 40 minutes hovering, teetering on the edge of stillness and motion.

Accepting the harsh austerity of OM Electrique is central to appreciating it as music. And, ultimately, this is central to understanding noise as music more generally too. Western music has trained us to listen for quick grabs of themes – melodies, and phrases of melodies, that can be captured and held and sung. But noise is much more about being immersed in the sound itself – like learning to admire a colour because of its colour, not because of the things it colours.

OM Electrique, if it was a piece of pictorial art, would be a mostly barren canvas of blacks and greys, with little speckles of cold, smudged silver throughout and, here and there, cracks of savage white. And, when you look at it, you would see a richness, an unsettling richness, in its stark, monochrome world. And blacks and greys and silvers and whites would never be quite the same again.

OM Electrique shows Merzbow’s genius in taking a word and turning it into a paragraph; his genius in shaping and moulding and crafting noise from its rawest elements into a picture: not one that tells you a story, but rather one that captures you, grabs you, in its own infinitely brief, infinitely long, moment.

The shattering star of the night - Magdalena Solis and 'Hesperia'.

2011-03-19T21:32:00.002+11:00

The final part of the trilogy of my great musical discoveries from the last couple of weeks, which began with The Gruntled and then was followed by the Paul Kidney Experience, doesn't come at all from my local musical underground, but from Belgium, in the form of an amazing and daring musical project called Magdalena Solis, who last year shared a Belgian jam with some members of The Gruntled and so, one thing led to another, and now their music, too, is being celebrated on this blog. This, too, is music built through the sheer energy force of musicians who connect and improvise and create, music made from the dregs and dross of organic chaos.

On their new album, Hesperia, Magdalena Solis create a wonderful world of pagan grandeur through music that feels rooted in the spirituality of everyone and no one. Its droning, often pentatonic, tonality at times sounds like an echo from the Far East, like in the album's opening 'Wake up and start to dream'. Hesperia's sounds come to you on a thick, unrelenting, unforgiving wave of electronic sound - the sounds of dense guitars, a spectral harpsichord, an apocalyptic organ, electricity stirring and groaning underneath the Earth - the notes sliding and dancing around each other in a hypnotic heathen ritual. It is mysterious, seductive - something to be feared in the way gods expect to be feared.

The music of Hesperia has an incredible sense of place - places that are darkly spiritual, places where Magdalena Solis plunge into black, gloomy chasms and then build monoliths of music, casting huge grim shadows on you and in you, as if you are standing alone and alarmed at the end of the world.

This is music that towers over you. It leaves you feeling small and frightened and, by 'Lunar Sunrise', at the album's haunted end, where a chilling, child-like tune is hammered out on percussion borrowed from another world, like an alien nursery-rhyme, you find yourself left hanging and helpless in a space that is huge and empty and where the only light is cold and grey, a dying sun reflected by a dying moon.

Hesperia is released on the Dying for Bad Music label and you can check out the album on the label's website, or have a sneak preview of the album's penultimate Prophetic Dreams. This is not music to calm or reassure you - but rather to remind you who you really are.

The spectral disgruntled night of the Paul Kidney Experience

2011-03-18T22:16:00.000+11:00

After discovering the sensationally original sounds of The Gruntled just a couple of weeks ago, it only took a hop, step and a jump from there to find myself immersed in the vastly different, but somehow strangely kindred, sound world of the Paul Kidney Experience. PKE's centrepiece is, of course Paul Kidney, The Gruntled's sometime vocalist. Both projects share the guitar of Richard Walsh and both use the incredible improvisation skills of all their members to build their own unique universes of sound, were music and noise mingle, where colours clash and blend, where light and dark caress each other and then beat each other to death.

But the music of PKE is very much its own thing, light years away from The Gruntled, despite their shared ingenuity, despite the bonds that tie them across the universes. In PKE, we find ourselves dragged into a freaky, creepy world, a world where you are scared not just by the things that go bump in the night, but also by the things that don't. It is music that can be very quiet or very loud. But it is never music that goes unnoticed, nor fails to let you know that somewhere, somehow, sometime, it is walking on your grave.

The music is built out of distorted guitars, the freaked-out violin of Nell Day, the insane, guttural, grunting vocals of Paul Kidney, a screeching sax, the unsettlingly soft tinkling of a piano, out of sounds and noise: music that swells and recedes, never really relaxing, just moving its threats and menace around you, sometimes staring you in the face, sometimes lurking around a corner, breathing just loud enough for you to know it's still there.

Its quiet, haunted noises might build and surge, until they become a crazed, manic death march, stomping onwards and downwards in the night into an orgy of ghouls, as they do in 'Dustberries', from the 2010 album Radio Transmissions. Or there might be the irritated, unsettled slumber with which 'Tardigrades', from the same album, opens, as if it was the post-coital slumber following the Dustberry decadence. But it, too, builds into its own frenzy, almost like an Arabian bacchanal with its drones and middle eastern tonality, yet still spooked by the growls and grumbles of an alien night.

It is the daring use of sound in this music - pushing instruments and voice beyond their normal limits, distorting them beyond their normal comfort zones - that helps create its freakish other-worldness. But it is its improvised, unbridled soul, dark, chaotic, and yet somehow controlled too - the way it grows out of itself rather than out of a page or a program - that's what makes this music so authentic, so believable.

And that's what makes you not want to be left alone with it, late at night, when the lights are out.

Necks and Swans float into the murk and mud of Melbourne

2011-03-11T23:27:00.002+11:00

Mahler's Eighth Symphony demonstrated, arguably more than anything else in the history of music, that white comes in many shades. It's a massive, prolonged explosion of blinding light and yet, even when you're blinded by it, you can't help but notice its shifting hues, the ways that shadows, as much as dazzle, go to make up the glare. It's a work that can at first seem pretty overwhelming, too bombastic, just too much noise. But when you get to know it, when you delve into its density, you can see that its blaze is really a million billion different specks of white.

And what Mahler did a hundred years ago in Austria for white, the Sydney based Necks and the New York based Swans did last night in Melbourne for black.

The Necks are a drums, bass and piano trio - but the drums are decked with bells and bits of metal, and the bass is a cello/double bass hybrid, and the piano is hit by fists as well as fingers, and nothing these musicians do conforms to music's usual rules and genres. Their music is always organic - improvised from the tiniest thimble-full of notes and ideas, and growing, always growing, into things bigger than any sum or product of their parts.

But if you can imagine a dark lake where ash and smoke mingle, and where bits of molten rock, black and red, bubble and gurgle, where imperceptible simmers of quitely brushed drums and tinkling piano notes have the savage beat of a disgruntled bass plodding beneath them; if you can imagine stasis and motion fused together so that stillness moves to chaos without you noticing that either of them started or finished; if you can imagine music tremoring beneath you, weaving around you, seducing you and smothering you with its single 40 minute arc of darkness, at first hypnotically fine and sensual and then, before you realise what has happened, impenetrably dense: if you can imagine all of that, then you might have a sense of what The Necks created when they opened proceedings at Melbourne's Forum Theatre last night.

But if you can then imagine that hermetic rock, and you, being pounded to dust by a black fist of unspeakably horrible beauty, of unrelenting manic force, pounding and pounding with titanic moodiness, as if every god and demon of history is collectively pissed off: if you can imagine that, then you might also have a sense of what Swans did when it was their turn on The Forum Theatre stage.

Michael Gira - the creator and centrepiece of Swans - once noted that swans are majestic and beautiful creatures, but with very ugly temperaments; and when you listen to his band, with its droning, pounding, guitars; its pummelling drums, knocking at you from inside the doors of hell; with the mad smorgasbord of unimaginable instruments that Thor Harris plays and the worn drone of Gira's voice, then you see those fierce, splendid birds writ large.

It was a night of loud, very loud music - a night where everything was in a minor key, where chords and discords hammered and hammered into you, and smashed the concrete of your brain. But this was music that grows out of the bowels of humanity - music that has its roots in murk and mud. So, despite its dark grace, it can never pretend to tread lightly.

But that is not to say that this music is monochromatic. Like Mahler's white, Swans' black has many shades. But they're all dark and so, even when Thor swings his hammer into his tubular bells, the shaft of light that streams into the music hits you like an axe. It never comforts you. It never brings you relief.

It was a wonderful thing - as wonderful as it was unexpected - that Michael Gira reformed Swans after some 13 years without them. And to be able to see this phenomenal band on stage, to almost be able to feel the old, regurgitated, black acid of Michael Gira's spit land upon my skin when he sang, was something that I never imagined I would come to experience.

But maybe in a world where we want to be able to so quickly and easily decide who is right and wrong, who is good and bad, it is timely for us to be reminded that ugliness and beauty are never black and white.

The old new feeling of being undisgruntled

2011-03-07T21:33:00.000+11:00

It has been the lack of time, rather than the lack of great music, that has kept me away from this blog so much over the past weeks - but sometimes, even when there's no time, music appears that is so interesting and compelling, so original and creative, that you just have to make the time to write about it.

It's probably not an altogether good thing that we live in times when we are generally much more familiar with the notion of being disgruntled than being gruntled but, believe it or not, "gruntled" really is a word, and when you listen to the music of Melbourne-based quintet-plus-occasional-extras, The Gruntled, you wonder why so little is known of this very peculiar concept of being satisfied, content and pleased.

I first heard The Gruntled a few weeks ago on an amazing radio program of new music called The Ear of the Behearer, on Melbourne's perennially sensation community radio station, 3PBS FM, and it was one of those "wow, what is that?" moments, where you begin to at first feel a little intrigued, a little curious about the empty, droning, minimalist sounds you are hearing, drawn into them, even before they have taken you anywhere, just like the Earth must have felt when it was little more than inert rock and gas.

But then it builds, imperceptibly steady, beats and sounds from worlds past and worlds yet to come, bagpipes, a shawm, a hurdy gurdy, mingling with guitar and drums, rising from nothing into everything. That's when you sense the real magnitude of this music.

The Gruntled's music builds in massive swells of sound - improvised and yet remarkably formed and structured in a way that only happens when musicians are intimately connected with one another, taking their cues, it seems, as much from each other's souls as from each other's instruments. Its unique combination of new and traditional instruments; its weaving together of age-old drones and futuristic noise; its iron-clad grip, with one hand on the innermost soul of your innermost gut, the other on some remote, godforsaken nothingness; makes this music something that seems to span all the conventional notions of time and space.

The Gruntled's music is still very much on the fringes. The only way I could get my hand on more was by contacting the band directly and buying some of their absurdly cheap CDRs. Perhaps it's inevitable that music like this stays on the fringes because, after all, that's exactly the territory it explores so deeply, so thoroughly. But if being on the fringes means that it's not heard, then that can never be a good thing - because somehow, as you will see when you listen to the music of The Gruntled, the fringes is really where ultimately we all belong.

And ultimately that's a good thing; a satisfying, contenting, pleasing thing. A gruntled thing.

Noise plugged and unplugged - Metal Machine Music

2011-01-29T21:39:00.003+11:00

No one was ready for Metal Machine Music when Lou Reed released it in 1975 and, within three weeks, it was withdrawn from sale and had reportedly become the most returned album in recorded history. This from the artist who had already won over much of the world's musical underbelly, and even a good deal of its mainstream, with his work with The Velvet Underground as well as as a solo artist with albums like his 1972 hit Transformer. But you only have to listen a little more closely to the sometimes deceptive ease of much of his music of those years, with their unsettled tonalities, their shifting beats and rythms, to know that here was a rebellious, a restless, artist: the sort who would just have to keep branching into new territory, even if it meant taking himself to places where the record-buying public feared to tread.

And it was in the deepest, most inaccessible bit of that territory where Lou Reed rested one electric guitar against one amplifier, and another against another, and let the feedback loops mingle and transform one another, and scuplted them into a massive 64 minute monolith of electric rock called Metal Machine Music.

There has been a lot of myth about Metal Machine Music - some of it perpetuated by Lou Reed himself: that the music was never meant to be taken seriously, that Reed produced it only in defiance of his recording contract, that the complex list of specifications on the album's liner notes actually mean something.

There is, nonetheless, an undeniable sense of defiance in this music - music which even today, even after Merzbow and John Cage, sounds staggering in the sheer intensity of its distortion, its noise, its screeching, droning, wailing electronics, where melodies are buried deep in the mass of discord, where rhythms are beaten and smudged in a tsunami of vibration.

At first, it is hard to make any sense of it. But turn the volume up a notch or ten, allow the music to envelop you, and you will find yourself in its grip. It is, more than anything, physical music - uncompromising, unrelenting in its assault on you, built not in the four beats of a bar but in shapes bigger than Uluru. It is music that makes sense of Lou Reed's unabashedly arrogant claim on the liner notes: "My week beats your year".

If Metal Machine Music was a daring thing to do with some guitars and amplifiers in 1975, it was every bit as daring a thing to do with a violin, viola, cello, double bass, accordian, trumpet, sax and tuba - supported by prepared piano and percussion - in 2002. But that's exactly what the avant-garde German ensemble 'zeitkratzer' (time scraper) did: they played Metal Machine Music.

Creating an acoustic version of something as electronic as this makes the Kronos Quartet cover of Jimi Hendrix's 'Purple Haze' seem positively lame. It's a stunning achievement and, thankfully, one that was recorded live both for CD and for DVD so you can see, as well as hear, the ferocious vigour with which these artists attack the music - almost, it seems, about to saw their strings to shreds, or blast the reeds out of their saxophones.

zeitkratzer's version of Metal Machine Music is not, despite what is sometimes reported, a note-for-note transcription although, for the most part, it sounds very much like it. There are the droning open fifths, the clashing tonalities of oddly tuned strings, replicating Lou Reed's own idiosyncratic guitar tunings; there's the pulsating rhythms of reverberating electricity, all created through acoustic instruments that could have been used half an hour ago for Mozart or Haydn.

But zeitkratzer explain that they played, rather than transcribed, Lou Reed's music. Here, as there, is the sense of improvisation: of music built out of the same bare bones, and around the same metal framework, but left to germinate, to grow its own skin, in just the same way that Lou Reed did almost thirty years earlier. The result is a near identical twin, but one which, even though it has come from the same egg, has had its own history and developed its own personality.

zeitkratzer at first intended their version to follow the same four parts as Lou Reed's original - but it was Reed himself who intervened here and insisted that four parts would be too much, and to reduce it to three. And so, about two thirds of the way into Part 3, zeitkratzer jump into Part 4, just before Reed himself strolls casually onto the stage, picks up his guitar and plays a phenomenal solo cadenza, with new feedback, new loops of sound until, at last, the ensemble crashes in again, playing over and over again the final locked groove with which the original vinyl version of Metal Machine Music would, if you let it and if your player could hold the distance, take you into eternity.

The fact that Metal Machine Music can be played on violins and tubas does not make it more "musical", but it does show us that the lines we sometimes draw between different syles of music, and between music and noise, are not quite as clear, nor as meaningful, as we sometimes make them out to be.

Plugged or unplugged, Metal Machine Music is a staggering piece of amplified intensity - rock at its most pure, its most dense, monolithic, the black-white noise of a million different colours merging and exploding, somewhere at the beginning of time.

When you find yourself in times of trouble - Pissed Jeans

2011-01-17T22:12:00.000+11:00

Everyone has their own way of dealing with stress and hardship. You can drink, you can pray, you can sit quietly and meditate. Or you can listen to music like Pissed Jeans and their wild, no holds barred 2009 album, King of Jeans - which, to slightly plagiarise Simon from Melbourne's Polyester Records, is music that just doesn't give a fuck.

The music here is rooted very much in the grimy mud of hardcore punk, with its screeching aggressive vocals, its frenetic guitars and drums, its barbed wire glazed wall of sound. King of Jeans is music that lives and snarls in the not-nice suburbs, where the struggles are not about the existential angst of the disaffected middle classes, but the daily grind of living, where everything is drudgery, where nothing means anything, and where the only thing you can do with life that makes any sense is tell it to get fucked. It's music that is able to be ugly without for one moment craving beauty.

Nowhere is the grind more savage, more hateful and hostile, than in 'Spent', a song that drags itself along to dirge-like, twisted, dissonant guitars, through a day of frustrated nothingness - sleeping, but waking up tired; drinking cold water that doesn't satisfy; earning extra money but having nothing to spend it on; getting the car fixed, but now it just makes a different noise that it's not meant to make; and everything is in "a different shade of grey".

It might sound like pretty bleak stuff and, a one level, it is. But good music always manages to give a different hue to things and, here, Pissed Jeans, by the sheer force and ferocity of their grunge, transform those shades of grey from drabness to defiance. It is music that might indeed be revolted, repulsed, by life, sickened by it, but, in its sickness, rather than curling up in the corner feeling sorry for itself, it throws up all over you instead.

The songs on King of Jeans are sometimes so fast that you feel they are hammering you in the gut, sometimes so slow that you feel they are holding your intestines in their fist, twisting them. But when you listen to it, you don't want to hide for shelter - you want to be like it. You, too want to be able to say, as in the album's opener, 'False Jesii Part 2', "I could tell a joke and make the whole room laugh, but I don't bother/I could show up with the coldest six-pack, but I don't bother/No to everything".

You, like Pissed Jeans, want to be able to just not give a fuck.

Venus in Fur - Kira Puru and the Bruise

2010-12-29T16:50:00.003+11:00

After the seductive, slightly sordid allure of The Velvet Underground a few days ago, it seemed only right to now devote some blogspace to some more dark and dangerous music - this time a little closer to home in Newcastle based femme fatale, Kira Puru: Australia's own Venus in fur.

If bitch blues was a musical genre, Kira Puru would be its undisputed queen. Her voice has that gutsy granite sound, chiselled out by wine and cigarettes, a voice that can tease and deceive you while it licks its lips at you, from somewhere way up in the sky and then, the moment you look in its direction, drag you down by the balls, down into the hell you deserve, crushing them and you as it takes you there.

If you get to see Kira Puru and the Bruise perform live, you won't regret it - as long as you go armed. She will stand and sing to you, glass of red in one hand, fur stole around her shoulders, telling you what will happen if you cross her. It is music that is borne of the eternal, but deadly, liaison of pain, bitterness and a capacity for revenge that knows no limits. Music that caresses you while it is twisting its knife into you. And yet you fill her glass for her, and then come back for more.

I have seen Kira Puru perform twice now, and have bought both of her EP length albums. The first of each was earlier this year, when her band was called The Very Geordie Malones; the second much more recently, when their name had changed to The Bruise. I'm not sure why there was the name change but there is, in any event, something much more bruised and bruising about their music now - music which, even back then, was hardly sweet and sentimental. Now the voice is a little darker, the music a little starker, the assault a little more fatal.

Compare, for example, the tantilising tingles, the little hint of innocence, with which 'One eye open' lures you to your destruction, the song with which her first self-titled EP opens, with the brutal, no prisoners-taken, attack of 'The liar', the title and opening track of the second album. "Make peace with Mother Earth" the first song advises you, at least giving you a chance to save your soul before your death; "Don't talk to me about anger when I've got a loaded gun" the second song warns, giving you little chance to do anything other than, perhaps, to run.

The music, like the voice that sings it, comes from the veins that are left over when a heart has been ripped out - music that sits by the bar, drinking, late at night, plotting not just how to even the score, but how to win. It's music that still loves, but loves fatally, like in 'Ragdoll baby' with its heavy beat, like a ravenous heart, crying out, "you excite me when you bleed". It's music that knows how to deal with pain, like in the final song of the The Liar: "what's it gonna be/the devil said to me/you can keep the pain/or give your soul to me/take your pick".

The red wine, the fur and the terrorisingly good music of Kira Puru leaves you in no doubt as to what her choice will be.

Softly, sumptuously subversive - the Velvet Underground

2010-12-26T21:31:00.000+11:00

Velvet is one of those fabrics that always seems just a little bit naughty. It can be sensual, it can be sexual, it can be sumptuous: and somehow you always feel, before you let your skin rub against it, that you need to take a furtive look around you, just in case someone is watching.

It's not that the music of The Velvet Underground is always quite that smooth - it is music from the underground, after all - but it's music that, even when it is at its most ragged, its most sordid, has a lushness to it, softening the blows of the gritty netherworld, but never for a moment really protecting you from it.

Lou Reed's avant-rock band of the 1960s had a small output - but it was an output that was diverse enough to make pretty well every song on every album interesting; but also unified enough to leave a legacy that helped shape punk and post-punk in a way that the "Velvet Underground influence" is instantly recognisable, and almost always commented upon - the droning, monotone guitars; music absorbed in itself, narcissistic: the big bang of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

The Velvet Underground is sleazy and wonderful - whether it's hypnotically erotic, as in 'Venus in Furs', or whether it's shooting up and screeching in your face, as in 'Heroin', or outdoing Roald Dahl in grotesquerie, as it does in 'The Gift'; or whether it's buggering you with the big, bold, queer epic of 'Sister Ray', or seducing you with the disarming, deceptive, deluded simplicity of 'Pale Blue Eyes', it's all irresistable. It's all music to play loudly when you've got the house and the gin to yourself, music to win over the neighbours, and shock them, all at once.

I don't think Lou Reed ever did anything as good as what he did when he was with The Velvet Underground - or, at least, the really good stuff he did afterwards was mostly just elaborating on what he had already said here (except for Metal Machine Music - but that's going to be another story and another post).

In this music, Lou Reed planted a sumptuous, sensuous, subversive seed - deep, deep blow the surface. And it still grows, somewhere deep and dark in the forest of modern music. Cut your way through the quagmire of commercialism and you will find, hidden but thriving in the gloom, the fascinating fruits of what still lies below, deep below, in the velvet underground.

Wishing you a very bent Christmas

2010-12-24T22:47:00.002+11:00

I will admit, mostly only in moments when I am caught off guard, that I like Christmas carols. I like them in the way I like jelly beans and musk sticks and all those other things that you tend to enjoy in private because you don't want to admit that you've never really grown out of them.

But, even so, finding a new and interesting take, however freaky, on the old, the trusted and the familiar is always kind of nice. Like Mars Bars deep fried in batter. Or Christmas Carols performed by avant garde (mostly) Japanese musicians.

So, when I happened quite by accident to stumble across an album that opened with Japanese noise-punksters Melt-Banana doing an absolutely insane version of 'White Christmas' and closed with my revered noise icon, Merzbow, doing 'Silent Night' more creepily than anything even drug-induced nightmares could come up with, I just had to get it.

In between those two mad, mad bookends is a slimy, sleazy version of 'I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus' by Secret Chiefs 3, a sort of psychedelic grindcore band from California; 'Here Comes Santa Claus' in a no-wave hip-hop fusion from Japanese indie rock band Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her; a few moments of almost ambient peace, so much needed after all the craziness we've had so far, when Gastr del Sol perform 'The Bells of St Mary' with a stillness that, for me, sounds almost like the serenely beautiful louanges in Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps.

But it's only a short respite and we get a totally trippy 'Sleigh Ride' from avant-noise artist Masaya Nakahara, aka Hair Stylistics, where odd bursts and blurps of noise are interspersed with creepy bits of sleigh music that fade in and out and displace everything, like a poltergeist. Then there's the 'Parade of The Wooden Soldiers', turned into a haunted, whispered piece of hardcore horror by SxOxB, a weird experimental band that pioneered grindcore in Japan; and, finally before the Merzbow, an unsettlingly childlike rendition of 'Marshmallow World' by God is my co-pilot, a New York gender-bending queercore outfit that sings flat and turns everything, even innocence, into percussion.

The album is called The Christmas Album - so, if you Google it, you are going to get lots and lots of links before you get to this - which, in any event, seems pretty hard to come by. But if you're feeling you've overdosed on seasonal sugar, and you want your musk sticks and jelly beans to freak you out a bit for a change, then this is worth hunting down. The whole thing is over in less than half an hour - but Christmas will never be the same again.

Vale Captain Beefheart

2010-12-21T09:03:00.000+11:00

It's sad but true, and always has been, and always will be, that we don't think much about the roots of trees. We notice and marvel at what we can see, but so easily forget, or even ignore altogether, the dirty, murky tangle that lies beneath the earth, giving life to everything above.

It happens in music too. And so, when we marvel and revel in the rough and gruff music theatre of Tom Waits, or in the savage disregard for convention and structure of no-wave sensations like Sonic Youth or of post-punk icons like Gang of Four, or in the wild and whacky rhythmic counterpoints of The Minutemen, or in the experimental free jazz of Naked City, it can be very easy not to realise that probably none of it would sound quite the same had it not been for the work of a strange, slightly disconnected, despotic musician called Van Vliet, better known - to the still sadly cultish bit of the music world that knew him - as Captain Beefheart.

Van Vliet died just a few days ago - on 17 December 2010, aged 69 - after living with multiple sclerosis for much of his life. He grew up with Frank Zappa as his school buddy, and their friendship cum rivalry cum animosity cum partnership weaves its way through the music of each of them, of both of them: music that splashes and bashes in the deepest waters of the experimental avant-garde, so that the casual passer-by might be a little concerned for its safety, but which the more observant musical lifeguards will see as the artful displays, and sometimes the showy tricks, of a very experienced, dexterous, athlete.

Surely the greatest, and perhaps also the most notorious, work of Captain Beefheart is his 3rd album - his 1969 classic Trout Mask Replica. It is weird, freaky, music that at first sounds like drug-fucked chaos: as if a slightly crazed lover of blues and free jazz had taken a cocktail of LSD and red cordial and, with a bunch of mates, drunk on a little too much garage rock, and a bundle of home made instruments, had been given access to a recording studio for a few hours.

But the trouble with music like this is that the first sounds are often the only ones people stick around to hear. So, overwhelmed by the bedlam, they miss what the crazies are saying. They miss the order of the chaos: the intricate interplay of rhythms, the counterpoint of guitars, the conscious scorn of traditional melody, where winds and strings slip and slide from notes to non-notes, as if the nuts and bolts of music have been melted down and turned to soup; they miss the way conversation and music are brought together, sharing and comparing little anecdotes; they miss the brilliance of a language that has its own rules, its own grammar, its own syntax, but which is a language nonetheless.

Trout Mask Replica was reportedly produced under circumstances that today would surely have landed its creator in prison - its musicians locked up in a house, with windows boarded up, in suburban Los Angeles, for eight months. They were, so some of the survivors allege, subjected to sleep deprivation, food deprivation, ritual humiliation and abuse, beaten and battered into submission, quite literally, to Vliet's artistic vision. Every note, and every thought behind every note, was shaped, iron fisted, by the Captain. They rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. Some tried to escape. The drummer was beaten with a broomstick for playing some Zappa in his spare time instead of practising Vliet's music.

We can be, and we should be, shocked when we hear stories like this - outrageous, disgusting stories of musical megalomania. But they are stories that have littered music's history and, unless we are prepared to dismiss works like Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen or most of the symphonies of Mahler, then we have to find some way of divorcing great music from the less-than-great circumstances in which it was created. And, while that might be a divorce for our own convenience, our own peace of mind, the fact remains that that violent, vile union produced, in Trout Mask Replica, a brilliant, precocious, genius child.

Trout Mask Replica is one of those albums that sounds like nothing else, and yet its influence can be heard everywhere - more than anything else in the permission it gave for music to break out of even its more unconventional parameters, and to allow itself to be crazy.

Craziness can certainly have its frightening side at times: it can freak you out, it can intimidate you and yes, it can even assault and damage you. But then so too can sanity. So it really comes down to a question of which adventure you'd rather try. Try Captain Beefheart - he's really no more dangerous than the straight and narrow and a whole lot more interesting.

RIP Captain Beefheart - you will be missed, but it's good to still have you with us.

Savage Love

2010-12-07T22:08:00.003+11:00

There are some people who can tell the story of broken love so well that it almost makes you want to have your own heartbreak, just to see if that's really how it sounds. People who know how to wallow and rage, soaked in whisky, wrenching every entrail from their gut and heaving it into their throat, pouring out rough, ragged music, worn raw by the hard-living, fucked-up lives and loves of country-blues.

That's how Cash Savage sings her songs - music of the heartbreakers as much as of the heartbroken, and all of it is very, very good.

Her debut album Wolf, which she recorded with her support troupe, The Last Drinks, has only just been released, and it takes no prisoners. This music would kill you if it could get its hands on you - gutsy, guttural, unglamorous music, unsentimental stories of lost love.

Cash Savage has that rare and remarkable ability to start a song in the gutter and then keep taking you deeper and deeper into the depths, with her bleary, bluesy voice finding limitless stores of brutal, bestial energy.

I first discovered this album when the 3 PBS FM Breakfast Spread, my constant source of musical inspiration and the constant undoing of my bank balance, played 'I'm Doin' So Well' a few days ago - a track that, for me, is still the best on an album where every track is exceptionally good. It builds and builds its cries and its heartache, unrelenting, unforgiving, uncompromsing. But then listen, too, to songs like 'For the Goodtimes' or '19 Years', and you will see how consistent a talent this is - music that plies you with the very best whisky while it stabs you in the heart, over and over again.

And, for me, it is no small extra bonus that these are love songs sung by a woman about women. Same sex love songs still don't get anywhere near the airspace that they should. We are, after all, about a fifth of the population but our stories certainly don't seem to occupy a fifth of the love music. Yes, we know that Rufus Wainwright and kd laing are mainly singing about their same sex loves, but you know that from their biographies not from their songs. But these songs of Cash Savage are unambiguously, unfetteredly, unpretentiously queer, and this only adds to their strength.

Wolf is an absolute stunner of an album. It won't break your budget if you buy it from the Cash Savage website, but it might break your heart, and maybe even your balls.

In tribute to the old and the new - Hendrix

2010-11-28T20:09:00.000+11:00

A couple of weeks ago, the only child of my only sibling became a father for the first time and they named their son Hendrix.

It'd be pretty nice, I think, to be named in tribute to someone great; but, when it's someone whose very name is as recognisable as Hendrix, a name that everyone knows and in some way or other respects, it'd be hard not to grow up feeling at least a tiny bit cool.

But this is not a blog about names - it's a blog about music, and it's the music of Jimi Hendrix that I wanted to talk about today.

Jimi Hendrix is arguably the Luciano Pavarotti of the three big Js of the 27 club - Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, who all died at the tragically, obscenely young age of 27 - all of them great, but Hendrix the one who, from where many people see things, still towers above the others. He was the one who, more than anyone else, seemed to take music in his blood-stained, sweat-stained grip, and twist and turn it into bits of barbed wire, into shapes that can slice your skin to shreds, yet leave you asking for more. He was the one who did things with music that anyone else could only have done with knives and shards of glass, and yet still made it sound like music.

The Hendrix guitar is unmistakably his. The way he slides to notes that seem to be aching, screaming, crying, to go one step further, leaving you on the edge, unresolved: sexual music that holds back its orgasm, music that makes you writhe with grief but then denies you closure.

There's not much that can be said about Hendrix that someone hasn't already said, but when someone can make an instrument speak with the passion and guts that bleeds out of the Hendrix guitar, it's worth saying things more than once.

And yet, despite the instant recognisability of Hendrix's music, there's enormous diversity there too, and you are left in that unique place where you can hear the screeching pychedelic rock of something like 'Purple Haze' or the Rhythm and Blues of his music with the Band of Gypsys, where at times he almost turns his guitar into an electric banjo, or the rock blues of his compilation album Blues or of his posthumous First Rays of the New Rising Sun; you can hear any of that, and still know it's Hendrix.

Perhaps that has something to do with the actual sound he gets out of the guitar, his attack on the notes, and the way he drips them in acid and emotion with the wah-wah pedal; perhaps it has something to do with the way he phrases things, with long lines of music that somehow manage to sound airy and breathless at once, music that hyperventilates on itself; or maybe it's because of the way he finds notes in places where you wouldn't expect them to be, and puts them exactly where they should always have gone, those flattened blues notes, those notes that seem to be contemplating something, hesitating, then rushing into a wild, harsh frenzy, rugged and ragged.

But like all great artists, Hendrix is so much more than the sum of his parts and, ultimately, it's his soul, his tattered, tortured, troubled, triumphant soul that we latch onto most of all when we hear his music. Hendrix is one of those unique and extraordinary musicians with whom you have the best communication, the best conversations, and maybe even the best sex, when you listen to his music. He's one of those artists who is never more himself, never more honest, never more passionate, eloquent or erotic, than in his music. It's not just that he talks to you through his music, but rather that he is his music.

That, I guess, is why Hendrix will always sound like Hendrix, no matter what you hear him doing - it's because he will always be there; because whatever colour he shades his music with, it's still him.

Insatiable honesty and musical brilliance is a pretty awesome union to have and, whatever tragedy may have befallen Jimi Hendrix's personal life, we can, thanks to that union, continue to have him live and love and lust amongst us even today, forty years after his death.

And to have a new life named in tribute to that honesty and brilliance is a pretty nice message, even to those who have not gone deliriously ga-ga at the birth of my grand nephew, that good things really do keep on keeping on.

The cool and trippy avant hip hop of Flying Lotus

2010-11-20T12:11:00.000+11:00

If you could take a bit of DNA from Tricky, mix it with a bit from John Zorn and temper it with a bit from Marice Ravel, you may well end up with something pretty much like Cosmogramma. Not that the latest full length album from Flying Lotus (aka Steven Ellison, and great-nephew of John and Alice Coltrane) sounds anything like any of these, but their genes are definitely there.

There's the electronic trippiness of Tricky; there's the crazy, comfy experimental jazz of John Zorn; and there's the subtle, dappled, fluid blends of colours and rhythms of Ravel. I can't imagine those three musicians in the same room together, let alone in the same music - but then, by any rekoning, Cosmogramma is an extraordinary album.

It represents quite a leap from Flying Lotus's previous work, Los Angeles, and even that was a pretty amazing show of what can be done when you take music off the mainstream dance floor, and bend it and break it a bit with Latinish, Africanish, Alienish beats.

Cosmogramma, however, takes you into freakier territory - some of it quite dark, but always with just enough stability there that never feel you're losing your footing entirely. It's like looking out of a slightly scary trip onto a dance floor that still lures you, even though its lights and beats are not predictable anymore, and the cool blues and greens get broken every now and then by flashes of red, and the steady beat beneath you seems to rumble once in a while, as if there could be an earthquake stirring in its sleep somewhere down there.

With guests vocals from Thom Yourke, Thundercat and Laura Darlington, and a guest sax from Ravi Coltrane, this is a pretty star-studded piece of work - but star-studded in the way that a distant galaxy is, where it's not so much the individual points of light you notice as their combined brilliance. And that's becase of the way Flying Lotus fuses his sounds - sounds of winds and strings amongst the laptop electronics - the way the disparate worlds of his guests and his influences all come together, blended but still themselves.

Comsogramma seems to invite you into the future and, when you listen to it, you may begin to feel that it could be tricking you just a bit - seducing you with the familiar but then holding you captive in a place that is alien and strange. You laze back into the big comfy chair of its lush and luxurious sounds, while creatures with two heads and blue skin serve you your drinks. You're a bit freaked, but it's too late - the drinks were spiked, and now you belong to Flying Lotus for the night.

The OED of Noise - Merzbow's Merzbox

2010-11-09T22:35:00.002+11:00

The Oxford English Dictionary is a pretty amazing piece of work. If you get the full thing, it's 20 volumes - 20 massive volumes telling you everything about the English language, the different ways words have evolved and have been used, and how they have come to mean what they mean today - all with copious examples, painstakingly collected and assembled, to illustrate the point.

Language is worth that sort of obsessive attention because it is, after all, a fascinating thing. But whenever you hear another language spoken - especially a language that is totally unfamiliar, a language that structures and expresses itself in entirely different ways to the one you speak yourself - it can be incredibly difficult to believe, at first, that it could possibly make sense. When you first hear the highly intonated languages of Asia, for example, it can be almost impossible to imagine that those sounds can really be saying anything - hard to see where words start and finish, hard to even imitate the sounds.

The complexities of a language can be fascinating, though, once you dive into it. And once you stop expecting it to behave and sound like the things you are familiar with you begin to discover its riches and that, ultimately, it communicates the same ideas, the same feelings, the same hopes and fears, the same banalities and profundities, the same crudeness and elevation - the same everything - that you do.

Music is the same. And yet, while in much of the Western world we have become accustomed to training our ear to hear new words, new syntax, new versions of old sounds, we have still, to a large extent, stayed within the territory we know and understand - like learning French or German or Italian in an English-speaking school.

It's not surprising, then, that to many ears, the music of some of the extreme Japanese noise artists comes across as pretty daunting and leaves many of us wondering how, with all that screeching and distortion and rasping and grasping, it can possibly be music at all.

Surely the greatest musician of this genre, the greatest linguist of the language of noise, is Japan's Masami Akita who, under the name of Merzbow, has produced some of the most diverse and yet unified body of noise music so far.

He is incredibly prolific too - and, while that's a bad thing for an obsessive completist such as myself, it's an incredibly good thing for noise music because, when you immerse yourself in what he does, and begin to hear the meaning, and not just the strangeness, of his language, you see what a massively rich and varied lexicon he has to share with you.

I have already posted here about his amazing 13 Japanese Birds. That enormous work is just the teensiest dot in his output so far and, from what I can gather, he is far from finished yet. But, if you want a pretty comprehensive survey of his work up until the end of the 20th century, and if you've got $500 or so to spare, then I think you should unhesitatingly lash out and buy his ridiculously massive MERZBOX. The MERZBOX is a collection of 50 CDs, plus a whole lot of slightly cool, slightly gimmicky, paraphernalia, such as T-shirt, a medallion, some stickers, some cards and a very, very good book - all giving you a fascinating tour of his evolution as an artist and of the diversity and variety of his art.

There is no pretence that the MERZBOX is any sort of "best of" compilation of Merzbow's artistry - anymore than there is an intention to make the OED an overview of the best words of the English language. Rather, it is a massive historical tour of its first two decades - covering Merzbow's first recording of 1979, through to the 1997 compilation Annihiloscillator. It is a glimpse of the music's its highs and its lows, its grandeur and its glitches, and explanation of how things now formed from things then, a presentation of the language as it is, a description not a prescription.

And music, like language, finds its meaning on its own terms. It moves from being incomprehensible to being eloquent when you let it speak to you in its way rather than in yours. That's why, if you expect music to come to you from guitars and keyboards and strings, and to speak to you in tones and semitones and quavers and semiquavers, then you will be as bamboozled by Merzbow as would someone who expects Cantonese to have a handful of vowels sharply bordered by a another handful of consonants.

So, if your initial inclination, when you hear Merzbow's distorted electronic feedback, his manipulated sounds of radios and drums and random objects being tossed in metal cans against a subtley shifting hum of white noise, is to think that this can't possibly be music, then try to make yourself listen to it a little longer, and then a little longer still, until you forget to look for the consonants and vowels and instead discover and appreciate this very new, very different, way of saying things.

Everything is there - the music has structure and shape, it has harmony and rhythm and melody and counterpoint: but just not of the things you are used to hearing harmonised, rhythmised, melodised and set in counterpoint. Here it's not violins melting into cellos, pitted against pianos, but rather screeching static entwined with scraped metal, hovering above a distorted, droning mis-tuned radio signal.

When you listen to this music, and listen for the ways themes build and blend, the way tension rises and recedes, the way the music confronts you, plays with you, seduces you, attacks and, yes, even at times comforts you, you will begin to feel that your initial inclination to dismiss it as unbearably harsh and uncompromisingly unmusical was way, way off the mark. It's just music in a different language.

This is not the place for me to go through the 50 CD MERZBOX in anything like the detail it deserves and, in any event, that has already done by one of the most impressive labours of Merzbow love I have ever encountered, in a fantastic disc by disc review of the Merzbox that you can read for yourself. Still, one day, when I have lots and lots of time, I would love to write about every nook and cranny of this amazing collection, this uncensored, unadulterated survey of one of the most interesting emerging languages in modern music.

Merzbow's music is often seen as the music of the extreme. But, really, music is every bit as vast as the universe itself and, in something of that magnitude, the question of what lies at the extremes, and what lies at the centre, will always only be relative. If you allow Merzbow's music to become your centre for a while, as this MERZBOX invites you to do, then you may just find that it's the violins, the pianos, the vowels and the consonants that all start sounding just a little freaky.

Rhythm driving melody - Beethoven, grindcore and PIVIXKI

2010-11-02T12:34:00.004+11:00

PIVIXKI is unfortunately a relatively unknown duo of musicians, from Melbourne, who do some incredible things with a piano and a set of drums. Comprising avant-garde classical pianist Anthony Pateras and grindcore drummer Max Kohane, they have a pretty small recorded output - a self-titled EP and, more recently, a full-length album Gravissima - and seem, as far as I can gather, to perform a bit, but not a lot, in public. It's a shame that they don't get heard more often and more widely because what they do with music has captivated audiences ever since Beethoven started doing it at the start of the 19th century.

When you listen to Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata, which he composed in 1804 and 1805, you might not recognise with today's ears how outrageous something like that must have sounded back then - the way he uses dense, pounding chords with such force and power, especially throughout its first movement and in the final moments of the last, so that the piano becomes almost more of a percussion instrument than something lyrical and melodic.

But it's not just about beat - it's about rhythm, too: about the way the beat grows into something that has a shape, a structure, a story, so that the narrative of the music seems to be told there first, with melody providing the embellishment.

The primacy of the beat in music is something that we find in a lot of modern music - especially, and most obviously, in some of the frantic and ferocious bashings and smashings of metal, industrial and grindcore. It can be awesomely commanding stuff and the fact that it might make you want to bang your head against something very, very hard and harmful is surely only testament to its power.

But it's less common for us to see rhythm in the driving-seat; complex rhythms, central to the music's drama - as it was for Beethoven in that massive, ground-breaking sonata - and it probably wasn't until Pateras and Koehne decided to bring together the innovation of the classical avant-garde and the frenetic belly-fire of grindcore that we could ever have expected it to have again come off so spectacularly as it does here in the music of PIVIXKI.

Pateras bashes the extreme ends of the piano's register with fists and palms, and races his fingers over the keyboard, in music that has one foot firmly planted in the wild and daring domain of composers like Messiaen and Xenakis, while the other foot stomps and stamps in perfect sync with Koehne's grindcore drum-kit.

Most of the music is muderously, mercilessly, fast. It has the energy and spontonaeity of free jazz and yet, in its chaos and its sense of improvisation, there's a discipline, of sorts, there too.

It's music that stops you in your tracks, makes you go "wow", and then leaves you thinking, in the way it melds so much together, spanning centuries and genres and techniques, how closely knit even the most diverse music can be.

The shattered, shattering tale of D

2010-10-18T22:42:00.005+11:00

Probably there's a lot of people who know that experience of hearing a piece of music that grabs you, totally out of the blue, and makes you stop whatever you're doing and listen to it. I remember it happened to me once, driving the car, when I first heard Björk and Antony Hegarty singing 'The Dull Flame of Desire'. And it happened again, just a few days ago, albeit in a very different way, when I was once again driving the car, and Melbourne's 3PBS FM Breakfast Spread program played Melbourne-based indie rock group The Drones' lead, Gareth Liddiard, performing 'The Radicalisation of D', the massive 16 minute closing track from his debut solo album Strange Tourist.

It's hard to think of music that could be more shattered, more shattering, than this. 'The Radicalisation of D' is a long, unadorned story, loosely based on the life of David Hicks, told in music of voice and acoustic guitar, where neither strays hardly more than a few notes here and there from their half sung, half chanted monotone, both always ever so slightly off key, hard, bruised, achingly naked.

The story of a boy who grows from a hard childhood, through a hard adolescence, into an adulthood borne out of a ménage à trois of aggression, bitterness and loneliness, is told in stark poetry where the subtleties of its rhythm and rhyme are masked by the arrant intensity of its story. It's a narrative, starting as a coldly dispassionate chronicle of D's life, but then swelling with almost unbearable passion and anguish as D's hard, meaningless existance is juxtaposed with the glamour and glory of other people's success: success, where even black people, who had once bashed him in the streets of working class Australia, find an American brand of happiness in the credit financed luxury of Brooklyn. You can feel the hate stir and spin out of control in D as the line 'You are living in a nightmare' seems to pound and sound and resound in his head until suddenly all is quiet, and the story is cut short with the words, 'But now we interrupt this broadcast/To bring you breaking news/There is a building in Manhattan/And it's burning'.

And that's where the story, and the song, ends. But it leaves you hanging in the air, aghast, for a long, long time after that. You feel you have been immersed into the darkest of souls, and for a while it's hard to find your way out. And yet it has got there despite breaking so many rules along the way: over a quarter of an hour of music, without a melody; a bare, even ugly, voice; a guitar that sounds at times almost like it is going out of tune; a lyric that is stripped of even the hint of a shadow of sentiment.

It's music that reminds me of the song 'Der Leiermann', the devastating end to Schubert's unrelentingly tragic song cycle Winterreise, where a story of a lonely, decrepid man, grinding his barrel organ in the snow, is told with the fewest of notes against the barest of accompaniments.

And that's what Gareth Liddiard achieves here, too. Every now and then, the unsettled quiet of the music is interrupted by a few bone-crushingly harsh bursts from the guitar, only for it to subside again into that incessant monotone strum, relentlessly tap, tap, tapping you with its music and its message, deadpan and doleful, until you are smacked in the face by all that raw rage near the end.

There are few times when I have been as affected by a single piece of music as I have been by this. Matt - half of the Matt and Jenny duo who bring us the PBS Breakfast Spread every Monday to Friday - said that this is one piece that really does deserve that now rather hackneyed word, 'epic'. And it does. It's epic not just because of the way it can hold you so totally in its grip for 16 minutes, but also for the way it shakes you so profoundly in the process.

When 'The Radicalisation of D' is over, you are left with a disturbing, different understanding of where the real horror of 9/11 truly lies - not in the rough and rugged sand of the Middle East, but much closer to home, in the carefully cultivated soil of the West, soil so rich and fertile for the growth of hatred, intolerance and terror.

The rest of Strange Tourist is pretty stunning, too, but it's this album closer that really is Gareth Liddiard's tour de force, showing just how powerful music's shattered, shattering bare bones can be.

The intimate beauty of an Antonyiade

2010-10-12T22:48:00.002+11:00

In the early 19th century, Franz Schubert - who composed probably more songs, and more beautiful songs, than anyone else anywhere ever - used to occasionally gather with his friends, in his home or in theirs, around a piano, sometimes with another instrument or so, and share music. These wonderful, intimate evenings became known as 'Schubertiades' - a word that even today still conjures up images of music shared, softly, privately, lovingly.

That whole sense of music as community - music as a place where people gather and tell their stories to each other, gently, unadorned and yet infinitely eloquent, music that is spontaneous and personal - is something that we don't often encounter any more. Music is often so big that it feels like it could encompass everything, or else it is so small, so inward looking, that you feel almost voyeuristic listening to it.

But in Antony and the Johnson's latest album, Swanlights, we again have something of that feeling of music as a thing that people share with one another - something that is part private, part public, but always authentic, always growing, like a seedling, from something buried, tentative, from darkness into the light. Here the music wafts from moments that are austerely sad, like the the hesitating sorrow of 'The Spirit was Gone', to others that are playfully joyful, like a child discovering love for the first time in 'I'm in Love'. The music grabs a few fragile threads, a piano, a cello, a harp, the broken, shivering voice of Antony Hegarty, weaves them together, sometimes reinforcing them with the stark power of some brass, as in 'Thank You for Your Love', or underlining them with lush, droning strings, as in the title track, and builds it into a warm, embracing tapestry of beauty, frail and yet somehow strangely enduring too.

Joining that warm, intimate, sanctified community, on 'Flétta', the ninth song of the album, is Björk - she and Antony singing a strange, cold, wandering tale in Icelandic, so foreign and yet so at home on this album where everything feels like it is being improvised, but not just by musicians - by hearts and souls that have smiled and cried, loved and lost, lived and died.

And what they create is both simple and delicate - but not in the pure, perfect way of say, a snow crystal but, rather, in the heartachingly vulnerable way of a child born too soon, weak and defenceless, quivering, gasping for breath even when it is laughing and happy.

The 46 minutes of Swanlights felt like an eternity on the edge to me - music where you feel like you might be standing around that naked, broken, bent little child, silently sharing your hopes and fears for its future, your happiness and sadness for its life, your love, your loss, your wonder at how something this vulnerable could live at all: sharing it all with that special handful of people you love the most.

Swanlights is probably the least immediately accessible album from Antony and the Johnsons so far - but that's because the territory it canvasses is so uniquely personal: an intimate gathering that this album invites you to be part of. Listen to it a few times, and you will feel that same kind of privilege that Schubert's friends must have felt when they, too, gathered around a piano and listened to a great and fractured man tell them about love.

Making mountains out of molehills - minimalism in music

2010-10-06T19:40:00.002+11:00

Like a lot of people, I first heard minimalist music long before I knew what it was. In fact, I suspect that minimalist music was composed long before anyone knew what it was, too. That simple phrase, repeated over and over through gently, subtly changing harmonies, in the opening Prelude of the first book of Bach's Wohltemperierte Klavier would surely meet pretty well any definition any modern musicologist might try to give for minimalism.

But, of course, like all musical genres, minimalism is not something you can neatly define because it describes an overall style in an art where the boundaries are never all that tightly guarded, and where little bits of one patch of land are always slipping through and leaving their mark on another.

But, insofar as minimalism involves taking just the barest handful of notes, or of musical ideas, and building them into something big and interesting, by making them multiply and grow, it is something which has featured to striking effect in all kinds of music, from all kinds of places, in all kinds of times.

If you don't find it in Bach, then maybe you might find it in Schubert, like in his creepy, haunting, song Eine Altschottische Ballade, where, against a stark, naked piano, with empty minor chords, cloning and mutating in a steady, horse-trot rhythm, a simple, barren, hollow melody, gathered together from just a few notes, is repeated over and over and over as a son and a mother talk about murder. It sends shivers down your spine - more than anything because the music moves so little, because it is so icy cold as the son tells his mother that the blood on his sword is not from his hawk, not from his horse, but from his father. It's a story which, told in nineteenth century music, you would expect to swell with passion and drama but instead it just repeats its cold, callous handful of notes, again and again, and you are left both horrified and awestruck by its chilled severity.

But, of course, minimalism is really a term that came into its own in second half of the 20th century, largely through the music of people like Steve Reich and Terry Riley - but, for me, I first noticed it, and found myself looking up dictionaries to see what it meant, when I saw a performance of Philip Glass's opera Einstein on the Beach in Melbourne in 1992. It was a staggering work - something like five hours without an interval with little phrases of music, sometimes funereal, sometimes frenetic, that seemed to be being repeated a zillion times and yet you couldn't even tap your feet to it for more than a couple of seconds because the beat was changing so constantly - three beats to a bar, and then four, and then five, and then six, and then seven - music that hypnotised you by the very same breath that it used to keep you awake and alert.

Since that time, I have slowly learned to develop an enormous respect for the ways in which musicians use this concept of minimalism - this concept, that is, of making much out of a little - in so many different and interesting ways. Like the barren austerity of Arvo Pärt's Passio where a single sombre Aeolian chant weaves its way, serious and sullen, through a 75 minute piece of music, building around you its vast landscape of unrelenting sadness and gloom. Or like the way The Beatles, in 'Tomorrow Never Knows', which closes their album Revolver, allow a droning, unshifting tonality to draw everything back to it, like a gas giant. Or the way Krautrock icons like Neu! and Kraftwerk produce music that takes the tiniest fragments of rhythms and notes, repeats them again and again beneath a slowly, smoothly, subtly changing soundscape, until you begin to notice that it is the journey, not the destination, that is fascinating you so much.

Or Terry Riley's iconic In C, where the score consists of 53 little phrases, each anything between one note and 25 notes long, and the performers play them, repeating each as often, or as little, as they wish. They can drop out for a while and come back in later, but everyone has to listen to what everyone else is doing, so that no one is ever more than two or three phrases ahead of, or behind, anyone else. It can be performed at any speed by any number, or any kind, of instruments, although Terry Riley himself suggests that a group of about 35 performers works best. The idea is that a couple of times throughout the performance, which can last anything beteen about 45 and 90 minutes, all the musicians will come together in unison, and then veer off again, as their own individual choices of the number of repeats of each phrase varies. The end result can be absolutely mind-blowing, a fantastic celebration of sound, a great testament to the way minimalism can take such teensy-weensy little bits of music, multiply them, throw them in the air, and allow you to marvel at the kaleidoscopic intersection of melody, harmony and rhythm they produce.

Minimalism has probably had more than its share of bad press over the years, where critics have seen it as lazy music for lazy audiences, music lacking in ideas, the music of the machine age. And yet that somehow belies the enormous influence minimalism has had across music genres, being able to touch on everything from classical to 1990s electronic dance. And it belies the endless variety, the million and one different ways in which minimalist composers and musicians take the tiniest of molehills and, throwing in a mountainload of invention, turn them into things with so many more sides and facets and colours and textures than you would ever have thought possible.

It's amazing how complex simplicity can be sometimes.

The ancient lure of drone

2010-09-29T13:09:00.001+10:00

There is probably something sadly apt about choosing to write here about drone music on the first couple of days of Australia's new Parliament. Just as something primal and at times ugly seems to emerge from Canberra's House on the Hill, and just as our elected representatives turn it into hours of inept, inane, waffle, we can all be thankful that we can still rely on music to show us something great, powerful and eternally alluring in the ancient art of drone.

Drone has, indeed, been an underlying foundation to music for hundreds, for thousands, of years. You only needed to have noticed the awesome rumbles of the didgeridoo during yesterday's Welcome to Country ceremony to have seen that. Or the steady, unwavering purr and whirr, murmuring beneath the modal chants of the geat 12th Century composer Hildegard von Bingen.

It shows us how, even in the earliest music, from opposite ends of the world, drone was much more than just a steadying base - it was a foundation, a cornerstone, a landmark, in its own right. It didn't just help the other musicians stay on the line: rather, it gave the music a primeval core, the earth's very first call to life continuing to reverberate in music centuries, millennia, later.

I wrote about drone a few times in my earlier blog, focussing there especially on bands such as Sunn 0))), Boris, and Grey Daturas. Just those bands alone were enough to bear testimony to the enormous diversity of drone - the different ways in which they shape music upon, or around, those massive, earth tremoring, sustained bass notes, with instruments tuned 97 octaves below their usual pitch.

Then there are others, heaps of them, that I have discovered since then, like the sensational Melbourne-based band Whitehorse, which I heard for the first time only a few nights ago at Geelong's National Hotel, and was staggered by the way they were able to weave energy and urgency into the drone, giving the music a sense of direction and drive, reminding me at times of the grumblings beneath and above Mahler's inert primordial rock at the beginning of his Third Symphony.

Or the music of American noise artist Daniel Menche, like in his 2005 album Sirocco, which grows at first from formless static and then slowly, imperceptibly, takes shape, morphs into huge blasts of electronic drone, covering every level, every frequency, it seems, of the sonic spectrum, before it slips back again into the static, all through an incredible, single, epic arc of sound lasting over 52 minutes.

Then there are the English avant-garde experimentalists, Coil, and their fascinating 3 CD work, ANS, which I have already written about on this blog: music where the drone is not so much in the bowels of the earth as in its ether, eerie and alien.

All of this, of course, only goes to make a bit of a tip of the massive drone iceberg - an iceberg that is as old and as elemental as the earth itself. But it's enough to show that the mesmerising magentism of those long, sustained sounds can manifest itself in a whole lot of ways, producing music that, from the ancient sounds of indigenous Australia, to the avant garde of Japan, resonates with something deep and fundamental in us, and in our connection with music.

I am certainly loving this expedition into the many ways in which drone is used, both old and new, and would very much welcome any of your own stories or discoveries about this ancient, alluring element of music.

Balancing the extremes - noise and silence in music

2010-09-23T17:34:00.001+10:00

We all need a bit of balance in our lives. But balance isn't created in the middle of the scales, it's created at the ends, and if ever I needed to learn the truth of that in music, it came for me yesterday when Hijokaidan and Morton Feldman both entered my music collection for the first time.

Hijokaidan is one of the earlier, and still one of the more extreme, Japanese Noise artists. His music is intense, ferocious, uncompromising - music with no gaps in it; music where white noise, black noise, distorted static, screeching guitars and screeching vocals, are hammered and bashed together into an insane cacophony which you would probably still hear, even with the mute button on.

His album Polar Nights Live was recorded over two January nights in Oslo in 2006. It's music that belts you between the eyes, knocks you to the ground, and leaves you winded, before its first minute is up. Yoshiyuki Hiroshige's demented guitar claws its way over the broken glass of ferociously loud hissing, sending out shards of electric light and blood in all directions, while his wife, Junko, shrieks noises that must surely leave my neighbours thinking I am torturing my dogs. It's brutal, like nuclear rain pounding on metal, falling from the black clouds that shut out the sun once the holocaust is over.

Morton Feldman is a 20th century avant-garde American composer, associate of John Cage (whose famous 4'33" changed everything we used to think about silence in music), and writer of some of the most quiet music you will ever hear. His Rothko Chapel, written in 1971 for soprano, choir, viola, celeste and percussion, moves slowly, imperceptibly, between still, static sounds, blending silence into the soft, seamless, fabric of quietness. Rhythm, melody, harmony all step into the background and instead the abstract, bare purity of quietness whispers its way through the music. There's not even the barren modal chants of Arvo Pärt here - just notes, growing unobtrusively from the silence and falling back into it again. It's music that leaves you almost afraid to breathe because you feel you might unsettle the perfect stillness of this music, music that takes you out of space and time and yet, for all its minimalism and silence, is never empty.

We so often forget to notice the power and importance of both noise and silence in music because, for the most part, music blends the two, watering one down with the other. But the music of Hijokaidan and Morton Feldman shows us that each of the elements is worthy of its own place in the limelight, and reminds us that balance is only ever possible because somone is prepared to place themselves on one end of the scales, and someone else on the other.

Does music have a shape?

2010-09-21T21:41:00.001+10:00

I hadn't thought much about the shape of music until quite recently when I happened to stumble across an octagonally-shaped CD, with the rather puzzling name of xAj3z by a relatively obscure duo called Soisong. And then, when I played it, it did strike me that there was something oddly octagonal about the music, as much as the CD itself.

Of course, suggestion can be a pretty powerful thing, and maybe if the CD was triangular, or nonagonal, or in 3D, or shaped like a clothesline, that's how the music would have sounded to me too (presuming I could get my CD player to play it, which was challenging enough even with an octagonal CD). But, still, it raises the question about the shape of music - whether there is any and, if there is, how we recognise it.

xAj3z, even without the power of suggestion, seems to abound with straight lines and obtuse angles. Soisong is the collaborative work of Throbbing Gristle's Peter Christopherson and Coil's Ivan Pavlov - two artists who are well used to doing interesting things with music. Which is what they do here, but in a simple, rather beautiful, sort of way. More interesting, say, than a square; more jagged, say, than a circle; but somehow still geometric, balanced, formed. The music is the product a mix of electronic and acoustic sounds, strings and keyboards and percussion, with the occasional slightly alien sounding vocal; angular melodies, squeezed harmonies; all of it soft, pleasant even, and yet more than just a little bit creepy too, like a union between children and devils. Bach on LSD, perhaps.

It's a unique, irresistable sound and, even without seeing the shape of the CD, it's hard not to notice the bare, simple, startling lines that this music draws in the air.

The geometry of music is just one of the million and one things that make it so interesting - the angular music, the rounded music, square music, cubed music, music in symmetry, music that gets its shape and form from its chaos.

The seemingly endless shapes and sizes of music are created by the permutations and combinations of what is actually a relatively small stock-pile of elements: rhythm, melody, harmony, tone. There's only so many notes you can play to make a melody, only so many different ways of dividing and ordering their durations to make a rhythm. But, like the lines and angles and empty spaces that coalesce into shapes, there are so many more sums to music than there are parts. Music seems to be able to take on so many more forms than its rather lean skeleton would ever suggest could be possible.

But does any of this mean that music really does have a shape? Or is the geometry of music just another way that our minds, which always need to put everything in its place and space so as to make sense of it, play tricks on us - tricks that only serve to make people like me feel better about spending that few extra dollars on buying an octagonally shaped CD, because we think it's something profound, rather than just another marketing gimmick?

The art of dissection - Nurse With Wound's debut album

2010-09-14T22:15:00.003+10:00

You could be excused for thinking, from reading this blog, that all experimental noise music is dark and creepy. But sometimes noise and sounds are interesting and good to listen to just because they're interesting and good to listen to. The question is, however, just what makes sounds interesting, and just what makes them good to listen to.

That question seems to be somehow crystalised, and maybe even to some degree answered, on what must surely be one of the most fascinating and daring debut albums ever: Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella, released in 1979 by British avant garde-industrial-ambient-drone-noisests, Nurse With Wound.

Everything Nurse With Wound does and did is interesting, but probably nowhere have they been more prepared to take risks, and to take them confidently and convincingly, than here on Chance Meeting. The title itself conjures up some sort of strange union between Salvidor Dali and Oliver Sacks.

The story behind the album's creation rivals that of the drug-infused Eddie Hazel, being told his mother had just died, playing the guitar on Funkadelic's Maggot Brain, or Mozart writing his Requiem because he thought Death had personally asked him to do it. Nurse With Wound came together because a relatively unknown songwriter, Steven Stapleton, bragged to his recording company that he had his own experimental band, which he didn't, but they thought he did, and so they booked him some recording time. He cornered a couple of friends, told them to grab whatever instruments they could get their hands on and, less than a day later, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella was committed to tape.

Eddie Hazel's mother hadn't died, nor had Death knocked on Mozart's door, nor did Steven Stapleton have anything vaguely like a band ready to make a record - but sometimes some of the best things are born from lies, and this album is testimony to that.

Dissection really does seem to be much of what this music is about - pulling apart and pulling out sounds from the places where you usually find them, and allowing you to examine them bit by bit. So you hear guitars and pianos and electronic bleeps and blips, and bits of metal scraping against each other, and harmony pitted against discord, and notes against noise, and all of it thrown into some sort of food processor, where the blades are set at the point where all the bits are chopped up, but not beyond recognition - so what you end up with is not an amorphous stew, but a startling, fascinating, if utterly bewildering, degustation.

If you can listen to Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella without expecting it to sound like anything else you've listened to before; if you can let yourself wallow in its strange, strained sounds and without expecting them to make you feel this or that, or to see that or this, but rather to just let yourself listen to them, then you might just find that this album gives you a perspective on music that you hadn't had before - that, while much music is great because it is bigger than the sum of its parts, sometimes the parts themselves are what make it great.

This abum is a great tribute to the deconstruction of traditional music and each of its three tracks, each more than doubling the duration of the one before it, creates its own sound-world, utterly disrespectful of every convention that has gone before it. So the freaked-out guitar riffs of 'Two Mock Projections' twist and turn, struggling and strangled, amidst weird electronic noise; and the wild spurts of distorted beats lash their way through 'The Six Buttons of Sex Appeal' without any regard for rhythm or order, interspersed with dismebodied, disembowelled vocals; and noises that grate like fingernails on a blackboard grind themselves into noises that haunt you with their emptiness in 'Blank Capsules of Embroidered Cellophane'.

This is surely the most confronting piece of work the Nurse With Wound have produced, even though nothing of their later work could exactly be described as easy either. But Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella goes beyond just being difficult or challenging - it pulls apart everything that once seemed neatly knit and, try as you might, you just know you'll never be able to get it back together again.

So what makes the sounds interesting and good to listen to? Ultimately, Nurse With Wound leave that question hanging in the air but, even so, this music leaves you feeling that it has much more to do with the bits and pieces than with the different ways convention has put them together.

Had it not been for Steven Stapleton's brash brag about his non-existant experimental band, we would never have had Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella.

But sometimes, to get what you need, you just have to bend things a bit.

Australian Krautrock - rediscovering early Hunters & Collectors

2010-09-07T17:32:00.001+10:00

It was back in 1981, at a time when I thought myself broad-minded in my music tastes because I liked early Wagner almost as much as I liked late Wagner, that I was dragged along by some friends to an obscure pub in Melbourne for a gig by an obscure local band called Hunters & Collectors. In those days, my ears were closed to anything that didn't have a leitmotif and a few umlauts and yet, despite the fact that there were shadows of both in the early music of this krautrock-influenced pub-rock/art-funk band, the striking originality of their music was lost on me and, even today, I can remember my relief - and my friends' regret - when the gig eventually came to an end.

But now, as I listen again to their music - and especially to their early music - the even bigger regret is now my own: that I didn't give this incredibly interesting band more of a chance when I had all those opportunities, way back then, to walk into a pub and hear them live.

The early music of Hunters & Collectors was undoubtedly much more interesting and groundbreaking - although much less popular - than their later music. With a name that was inspired by a track from an album by German experimental krautrock band Can, Hunters & Collectors started their career with music that was characterised by the most unlikely mix of ingredients: the motorik beat of krautrock, the industrial clatters of metallic percussion, the nihilistic post-punk vocals of Mark Seymour, and the blazing brass of the Horns of Contempt, kicking into the music here and there to give even this sweaty pub music a kind of bold, blistering nobility.

The first two albums - their self-titled debut in 1982 and The Fireman's Curse, under the inspired guidance of German krautrock producer Conny Plank, in 1983 - are, I think, Hunters & Collectors' best. It's there (despite the comparisons my friends made back then, and my nephew makes now, to Talking Heads) that they were at their most original, their sound most distinctive and daring in the way it broke ranks with the more traditional rock that was playing in Australia's pubs and gig venues at the time.

Music like this had not been played very much in Australia at the time and even in other parts of the world it was heard much more on the fringes than in the mainstream. It was music that produced different sorts of sounds because of the instruments and tones it brought together, and because of the role it gave to percussion - not just to drums - and the way it let those unrelenting, ostinato beats drive things along. It was music that belonged, no doubt, to pubs - but to pubs where people came to hear interesting music, not just loud music.

It is, at least for me, a bit of a disappointment, then, that most of the work of Hunters & Collectors after these first two stellar albums, became rather more geared towards the popular market, albeit still with the band's original stamp very much there - rather like a rebellious idiosyncratic child who has grown up to be a quirky, but nevertheless compliant, adult.

I suspect it's the pressures of a commercially driven music industry, rather than any lack of original inspiration, that leads bands like Hunters & Collectors to trade the fascinating chaos of their underground origins to the more predictable safety of their careers in the limelight - and it's a shame, in both senses of the word, that they are commercial interests that so often end up dictating the directions of music.

I would love to be able to go back to that pub, wherever it was, and shout my approval for the fantastic boldness and innovation of Hunters & Collectors that night back in 1981. It wouldn't have made one iota of difference to the direction of their music, obviously - but it would have at least meant that I wasn't inadvertnetly contributing to the collective indifference to originality and innovation, and a love for the fringe, in modern music.

13 (no, 26) birds - Messiaen and Merzbow

2010-08-31T23:07:00.000+10:00

50 years is a long time in music, and for birds, and much has changed for both of them since Olivier Messiaen wrote his mammoth and amazing piano epic Catalogue d'Oiseaux in 1958-9. So when Japanese noise artist Merzbow (aka Masami Akita) paid tribute both to Messiaen, and to birds, in his own epic 13 Japanese Birds in 2009-10, the story that his music told us was a very different one.

Neither of these works sound in the least bit similar to one another and yet there is a lot that they have in common, too. First, and most obviously, both of them pay tribute to 13 different birds. Second, both of them are mammoth works, Messiaen's taking nearly three hours to perform, Merzbow's around 12 hours. Third, both are conceived out of a deep, passionate love for birds and both want to show you not only the birds themselves but also the world they inhabit. And fourth, both are immensely confronting in their musical language.

Messiaen's music is stark and atonal - its melodies and rhythms are shaped by nature more than anything else and, despite what the 19th century romantics would have had us believe, birds don't sing in D Major or to a tidy 4/4 beat. Messiaen captured the chaos of birdsong, stylised it with an almost obsessive precision, and, breaking away from everything traditional in Western tonality, harmony and rhythm, created music that converted into sound the raspness, the shrillness, the relentlessness, of birdsong; the granite of cliffs, the colours of ponds and of skies - all in the way notes are picked out, or chords bashed out, discordant and uncompromising, on a piano. But, even so, this is the music of birds in their natural habitat and while, even to 21st century ears, Messiaen's music can sound confrontingly modern, this is music about an idyllic time, set in an idyllic space - until, in the final moments of the final piece, 'Le Courlis Cendré' (The Curlew), a devastating chord that seems to bash down every note of the piano keyboard, ushers in the first human intervention of the whole cycle - a lighthouse siren that breaks into the peace and darkness like a hammer blow.

It's the perfect segue into Merzbow whose music, in many ways, picks up where Messiaen left off - telling us the tale of what happened to the birds after humans intervened. Merzbow's music, with its ferocious electronic noise, generated by distortion and feedback, and driven forwards by Masami Akita's insanely wild drumming, is angry and aggressive. It's music in revolt, and loud enough to blast even your neighbours' speakers. Here the birdsong is still there, but now it is crying out, screaming out, amidst all the atrocities that modern development has built around it. Here Messiaen's birds, and their habitat, have been brutalised, beaten and battered and Merzbow pours forth his rage in music that is harsh, savage, grinding.

Both Messiaen and Merzbow achieved incredible things in this music - music of titanic proportions conveying titanic worlds to us: one bright and full of hope, the other dark and full of disgust; both, in the end, overpowered by that unrelenting, underlying, force that keeps life and music going.

Nature and music have changed a lot since Beethoven wrote the gentle, although still eternally engaging, melodies and colours of his 6th Symphony - music that still makes me feel somehow at peace when I listen to it. Beethoven taught us how to bask in nature, how to lie back and doze off in its dappled sunlight. Messiaen taught us to respect its wildness. Merzbow taugh us to fear its vengenance.

Try to get hold of both of these pieces of music. The Messiaen is a little more easily obtained than the Merzbow - but both are worth whatever you have to wait, or pay, to get them.

Searching for bent heroes

2010-08-28T12:22:00.000+10:00

I’m going to do the unthinkable here and talk about two of my favourite artists in the one post – not because I can’t think of enough to say about them in their own right, nor even because I think they are even remotely alike in their music, but because I didn’t want to let too much time pass without paying homage to them both. But I also want to use their music as an excuse to ask you a bit about what YOU look for in new music.

Despite being poles apart musically, both Diamanda Galás and Einstürzende Neubauten have had a very similar impact on me – one of seeing musicians take the bare bones of their art, reconstruct it with their own raw energy, infuse it with their guts as much as with their soul, and shake you to the core in the process.

I have written about both artists quite a bit on my earlier blog and, while it was not usually my practice there to write about an artist more than once, with both Diamanda Galás and Einstürzende Neubauten it was unavoidable, so varied and yet so undisappointingly interesting their music always was.

My admiration for musicians who break out of traditional boundaries and try new things is, of course, the whole purpose of this blog and yet, even against the backdrop of that love of the new, I find that these two stand out. Which, inevitably, leads me to ask why.

It’s not that either Diamanda Galás or Einstürzende Neubauten are necessarily more outlandish in the sounds they produce, nor in the messages they convey, than some of the other musicians that will be discussed on this blog – although it would be hard to go past something like Diamanda Galás’ frenzied journey into madness in ‘Wild Women With Steak-knives’, or anything at all on her album Schrei X, for sheer visceral brutality; nor beyond the guttural screams of Blixa Bargeld on Einstürzende Neubauten’s ‘Armenia’ or the harsh industrial sounds of power drills and scrap metal in their debut album Kollaps, for unmitigated audacity in making music out of non-music.

But it’s not quite that. Maybe it’s something more about the honesty of their music – music which, you feel, they would perform exactly the same way, regardless of whether anyone was listening to it or not. Whether that’s authenticity or arrogance, I don’t know – and maybe it doesn’t really matter anyway.

Both Diamanda Galás and Einstürzende Neubauten performed an enormous wide range of music – some of which, in both their cases, was much more accessible than some of the examples I’ve mentioned here. But even when they were accessible, even when they were treading more known territory, like when Diamanda Galás sings more traditional music like ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord’ or even ‘Gloomy Sunday’, or when Einstürzende Neubauten sing their gentler, later, work, like on their album Silence is Sexy, even there these artists are very much themselves. And so, when she sings the great BB King classic, ‘The Thrill is Gone’, Diamanda Galás starts it off with a wild, anguished, piercing scream, and takes you through the four octaves of her phenomenal voice; or when Einstürzende Neubauten sing something as gently melodic as ‘Morning Dew’ on their album Fünf auf der nach oben offenen Richterskala, it is still punctuated by hammers bashing on metal barrels, and by Blixa’s trademark screams.

But then it’s not entirely that, either. There are certainly plenty of other musicians – many of whom I hope to discuss on this blog – who always inject something of their inmost selves into everything they do, no matter how way out or way in it might be.

Maybe ultimately what makes these artists so great to me, so much my heroes, is something much simpler, and yet also much harder to define, than any of this – something beyond their amazing originality, beyond their passion, beyond their primitive energy, beyond their guts and their souls – something as simple and as complex as just sounding great.

These two heroes of mine – these two great icons of bent music – never stop sounding new to me: never stop sounding original, powerful, raw and wonderful. And it is probably that, as much as all the rest of it, that makes me admire them so much. But ultimately, I guess, that only brings me back to my original question – why?

I never stop being fascinated by the ways in which music speaks differently to different people – and, in some ways, new music highlights that fascination more than anything else does, if only because of the strange way that its newness somehow connects with something known and familiar too.

Sorry for the long ramble of this post – a post which is as much a call for you to write something here about what you look for, and love, in new music as it is a tribute to the new musicians who have impressed me, and made me think, so much as have Diamanda Galás and Einstürzende Neubauten.

Post-rock, post-apocalypse - Godspeed You Black Emperor!

2010-08-26T21:23:00.001+10:00

Just to prove that not everything I write about here has to sound edgy and inaccessible, and that I am just as happy to write about music where the innovation is more in the edginess and inaccessibility of where it takes you, I thought today that I would write about Godspeed You Black Emperor! - a group of Montreal musicians who I discovered only a few days ago, thanks to the response of one of my musical mentors, Lucas, to my plea for something to listen to in times when the world, and its politics, seem to be falling apart.

Apocalyptic music can be immensely powerful if it is done well and GYBE! - with their long, sprawling tracks, built out of bricks of dark, tragic harmonies and melodies - do it very well indeed. Their music is characterised by massive, bleak landscapes of sound that open out before you in long, measured crescendos, until they are staring you in the face with their intense, dead eyes, before moving back into the distance again to the forlorn, lonely place from which they came.

The music itself is played on a blend of instruments that works perfectly to give the music its haunted, unsettled colour - strings that slide down from one note, from one octave even, to another; ghostly keyboards, like marimbas and harpsichords; and long, sustained electric guitars that play single notes that wobble and quiver and hang in the darkness. Sometimes the music is embellished with a vocal narrative, like the evocation of a derelict, dead city under the rule of a corrupt government, at the start of 'The Dead Flag Blues' on their debut album F#A#∞; or the ramblings of disconent on 'Blaise Bailey Finnegan III', underscored by long, desolate harmonies on Slow Riot for New Zerø Kanada. But, more often than not, the music speaks for itself, or even not at all, as in the three and a half minutes of silence towards the end of 'Providence', also on F#A#∞.

The sense of a apocalypse of these first two albums blends in with one of melancholy, sometimes quiet, sometimes passionate, on the third, double, album, Lift yr. skinny fists like antennas to heaven!, such as in its majestic opener, 'Storm', where the music's pulsating strings and drums swell as much within you as around you, and the shifts from darkness to light, from harmony to sustained dissonance, and back again make you feel that all are there together, in the same place. It is like you are being confronted with a world in ruins, and every now and then being reminded of the things that once made it beautiful.

That sense of loss and desolation for a fragile, vulnerable world is perhaps strongest of all in the fourth, and so far latest, album Yanqui U.X.O. ( a name derived from the Spanish word for 'Yankee' and the acronym for an unexploded ordnance, or landmine). Here the shifting sounds and tensions and dynamics seem even more extreme than the earlier recordings: cello and violin blending with a phalanx of electric guitars and drums, to devastating effect, where you really do feel the horror and terror of a world tottering on the edge, like in the slow, fightening build up of what could well be the planet's funeral march in 'Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls'.

Sometimes some music's power, especially experimental music, lies in its courage to trust its strengths and stick to them - to resist the tempation to put too many ideas into the mix. In some of the music I've been discussing here on Bent Music over the past few days, that has been a readiness to rely on unique sounds, and let an entire album be built purely on that. For GYBE! the reliance is on the power of strong, measured arrangements of a few simple elements to create a sustained and incredibly potent emotional space - one that is able to rest where it is, rather than feel the need to take you from one place to another, because it knows it paints its landscapes so well, that you don't want to look away anyway. It's rather like a post-rock incarnation of the music of 20th century classical composers such as Henryk Górecki and Arvo Pärt, who built both emotional and musical richness out of just a handful of notes.

The easy harmonies of much of this music, and the simplicity of its melodies, which are given their character by the way the build and colour themselves, will inevitably draw comparisons with film music - and, while that can often be a disparaging, trivialising way to talk about music, in this case it's quite the opposite. GYBE! produce music that evokes its pictures - crying out, almost, for a film to accompany it, rather than the other way around. Here it is the music that creates the images, gives them life, dark as it is, and then ultimately lets them go.

This is powerful, hypnotic, unrelenting music - sonically accessible, yet still musically inventive and always emotionally confronting, draining even. It is grief writ large; grief made cosmic.

The quiet edgy noise of Kevan Revis - 'Sollicitudo'

2010-08-25T15:49:00.001+10:00

Sometimes we discover new music in the most unexpected ways and, almost always, those unexpected discoveries are the best. It was only a week or so ago, when I was trying to hunt down some music of the freaky and ferocious Japanese noise artist, Merzbow, that I happened to stumble across a small on-line music store that had the best array of experimental music I had ever come across (including the Merzbow - which I hope to discuss here in the next few days). Its sole owner/operator, Kevan Revis, also happens to be a composer and producer of experimental noise and so I decided to add his debut, and so far only, album, Sollicitudo, to my order.

Sollicitudo is in two parts, each clocking in at just under 18 minutes. Each is built out of a kind of quietly unsettling mixture of sounds - sounds which Revis records and gathers and then electronically manipulates into his music. They are sounds that are a little other-worldly, and yet occasionally sounding a little familiar, too, like those indistinct, undefinable sounds you hear at night. They are sounds that often seem to come from different universes, like deep, droning rumbles from one direction, strange distant clatters from another, the sound of alien water from another. And yet Revis somehow manages to blend them all together into an amazing synthesis of sound, giving it unity, and leaving you wondering why someone hadn't thought to put those sounds together before.

But it's destabilising, despite all of that - music that leaves you on edge, unsettled, and more than just a little bit freaked, despite its almost deceptive quietness. This, at least as I see music, is an incredible achievment - music that can manage to shake you and shatter you, without needing to blast your eardrums or your speakers in the process. But, even so, play it as loud as you can, because it deserves to be heard and to be heard well.

The two parts of Sollicitudo belong very much together, and yet they are very different, too. One plays with a kind of gentle creepiness, as if you are frozen somewhere, listening to the sounds of a spectral night cascading around you. The other is more edgy, with short and sharp bursts of sound that never let you alone, never let you rest.

I very much hope that Sollicitudo is not the only work that Kevan Revis produces, because it's a great example of the interesting and engaging things that are happening all over the place in contemporary experiemental music. It's music that deserves to be encouraged and that demands to be heard.

You can visit Kevan's store, and get his music, at: http://www.boxer-records.com/

Bending the straight and narrow - Throbbing Gristle and Trotsky

2010-08-22T21:39:00.004+10:00

On a day like this, where, at least in Australia, we are all drowning in a soupy quagmire of political inanity and conservatism, a day where the mundane fights the mundane for its day in the sunlight, the need to listen to music that grabs the mainstream by the throat, and strangles it until it gags, is, for me, acute.

Britain’s Throbbing Gristle formed in the mid 1970s, performed mostly between then and 1981, and then reunited again every now and then since 2004 for the occasional retrospective on their music. TG are usually described as belonging to some sort of avant-garde industrial genre, but I prefer to think of them as the Trotskyists of modern music – fusing together different stages of musical development, leading change, forthright and aggressive, recognising the need for revolution in music to be permanent and confronting and international, like Trotsky believed it to be in politics.

And just as Trotsky saw the importance of co-opting the grassroots – the workers and the peasants – into his bigger picture, melding them into shape, taking them in the direction he knew they needed to go, so too do TG take the nuts and bolts of daily life – daily noise, daily conversation – and transform them into a formidable force that changes the way you think about how things were, and how they’re going to be.

TG intend their music to be confrontational, and it is. Whether it’s loops of distorted noise, with snippets of random conversation interweaving around it, punctuated by strange, haunted clangs and clatters, or the single, unrelenting beat of a note on a bass guitar, like much of the music on their album DoA: The Third and Final Report (which was neither their third nor their final album), or more mainstream music, with the lifeblood sucked out of it, and aggressive industrial acid injected into it, like much of the music on 20 Jazz Funk Greats (which has 13 songs, and none of them are jazz and none of them are funk, although the ghostly remnants of both are undeniably there), this is music that takes the straight and narrow, bends it and distorts it, in a way that unsettles and frightens you, but somehow still leaves you thinking that maybe this was how it was all meant to be after all.

The vocals, when there are any, are intentionally off-key; the beats, when there are any, are minimalist, driving, stripped down to their bare essentials; musical instruments appear almost in mockery of themselves - like the flattened, distorted brass that opens their fourth album, Heathen Earth; the sound is low-fi and unglamorous, harsh and unmusical. Nothing here is meant to be easy to listen to – but it is built out of the sounds and machines and music of ordinary life, beaten into a new shape, and even though the face it shows you is riddled with warts, it is undeniably your own, and so you keep looking at it.

TG’s debut album, The Second Annual Report (needless to say, not their second album) – which includes several versions of a thing called ‘Slug Bait’ and several of another thing called ‘Maggot Death’ (none of them sounding even remotely alike) – is a great place to start, if you’re brave and don't mind music where distortion is the anti-hero of the day. But 20 Jazz Funk Greats is probably safer, if no less confronting in the long run.

It’s hard to imagine what Trotsky would have thought of Throbbing Gristle – but, with his sense and breadth of vision, he might just have seen something powerfully symbolic in the way they take what was once ordinary and benign and turn it into something terrible and terrifying; the way they distort what was once comfortable and make it confronting and, in the process, somehow show it for what it really is; the way they take risks, even unpopular risks, because they, like he, know that’s what you have to do if you’re really serious about moving forward.

In the deep dark creepiness of election eve ... Coil ANS

2010-08-20T21:42:00.001+10:00

Election eve is always an anxious time for me, as it probably is for a lot of people and, on a night like this, where Australia’s future rests on a knife edge, with the conservatives on one side and the ultra conservatives on the other, I can do little other than retreat into a dark corner and seek, Linus-like, comfort from my security blanket.

Which for me, of course, is music. And what better security blanket on a night like this than some creepy ambient drone music, played on a Soviet synthesiser that has been standing in the bowels of the Moscow State University since its construction began under the direction of the Red Army in the 1930s?

It is called an ANS (named, incidentally, in honour of the Russian composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin) and, in a nutshell, involves images being painted onto a glass plate, inserted into the machine, which then converts the images into electronic sound waves. So it doesn’t play tunes, and it doesn’t have a drum kit, but instead omits eerie, long, slowly morphing tones, sometimes pulsating, sometimes not, generally high or highish pitched, in harmonies that are harsh and indeterminate, in tones that pierce you while they massage you, and with a deep, almost subliminal, bass that you feel rather than hear beneath it all. If you've got a decent sub-woofer, the floor will vibrate underneath you, while your ears seem to register almost nothing below middle C. It's a frighening, unnerving feel.

The music changes and takes shape, and loses shape, in the way that you might expect the colours of a nebula to do: slowly, imperceptibly, in the space where stars are born and die in far, far-reaching darkness. The only shape here is the shapelessness and, when you can learn to accept that, you find you are agog at the beauty, cold like the markings on a snake.

The ANS is being ‘played’ here by Coil, a British avant-garde group who formed in the early 1980s but who produced this amazing piece of work in 2003, when the Russian government allowed them access to their ANS for just a few days. The results are stunning. But they are by no means what everyone would like, or even what everyone would call music – sounds that you might expect to hear in the darker, deeper recesses of your brain, in the bits that are deep inside you but that somehow connect with the outer regions of space, too – which is exactly where the great Soviet film director, Andrei Tarkovsky, put them when he used the ANS in his film Solyaris, a sci-fi epic that takes you to a planet that reflects back at you the most hidden recesses of your mind.

Coil’s ANS is a 3 CD/1 DVD set – the DVD displaying electronic graphics that are every bit as weird and spaced out as the music they aim to express – and, from what I can gather, it’s a set that is generally pretty difficult to find, and sometimes pretty pricey when you do. But if you like your music to challenge not only your concept of what music is but also your sense of psychic stability, your sense of things being as they should be – and, after all, how else could you feel on election eve? – then this is music worth hunting down.

The rebel family of rock - music of the 1970s

2010-08-19T09:51:00.001+10:00

It would take at least a book, rather than a blog, to do justice to the history of music – the ways it develops into new directions, and the reasons it does it at this time rather than that time – and so, at the risk of being ridiculously simplistic, I thought I’d kick off this blog with an observation about the incredible number of new branches that seemed to sprout from the musical tree trunk in the 1970s.

Once rock had so stormed the public psyche in the 60s, with the Beatles and the Stones blasting through every household and every car radio, and even the more alternative, more subversive musicians, like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, becoming commercialised and popularised, clearly music, and especially rock music, had to do something new and different if it was to survive. After all, Charles Darwin showed us, over a hundred years before, that things that don’t change, die.

Of course, music has always changed and grown but, in the 70s, it seemed to branch off into more directions, copulating with more genres, producing more diverse offspring, than even the most liberal-minded, sexually-liberated, drug-dazed, 60s psychic could have imagined.

There was rock’s romantic affair with high art, and the elevated invention of prog rock – listen to the sprawling sounds of King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King, or the earlier albums of Pink Floyd with tracks that lasted a whole LP side without even one word being sung, for example, to see what an interesting, schizoid child that union produced.

It had its aggressive fling with blues, a liaison so driven by the need of both partners to vent their fury at the world, that its riffs and rhythms were battered and beaten into the distorted shapes of heavy metal, where bands like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath brought sex and death together in a way that only sadomasochists and Wagnerians would ever have thought possible.

And then there was its sordid one night stand with the disaffected rebels of America’s and Britain’s streets, and the raucous horde of punk rockers that ran amok in the rock household for years to come; or its doomed anti-affair with nihilistic youth in New York’s underground, and the morose, grumpy No Wave child that appeared in the work of people like Lydia Lunch and bands like Suicide as a result – a short and tormented life, but one that left us with ghosts that haunt us still; or its more cerebral encounter with German avant-garde experimenter Karlheinz Stockhausen, and their staggeringly precocious lovechild, Krautrock. Listen, for example, to Autobahn, and remind yourself that it was produced in 1974.

When you remember that all of this music emerged in the 70s, you can’t help but feel pretty amazed at what a fertile time it was. All of it, in one way or another, seemed to involve rock moving out of its own comfort zone into new territory, seeking new lovers and producing the most incredibly diverse and rebellious gang of kids you could imagine. It turned the home of music – which admittedly had never been entirely quiet and still – into a place noisier and crazier than it had probably ever been before.

All of those children, of course, went on to have their own lives, their own affairs, their own offspring. But that’s always a good thing – because to stay in your own boundaries, and to procreate only with yourself, can never really be more than a wank.

Welcome to Bent Music

2010-08-18T14:54:00.004+10:00

Thanks for dropping by this, my next and newest music blog. It is really meant to complement rather than replace my somewhat neglected, but not abandoned, other blog, http://whatmusicareyoulisteningto.blogspot.com/ where, wherever possible, I talked about whatever album was blasting through my speakers at the time.

It was in the process of that musical journey, described throughout that blog, that I began to marvel at the zillions of ways in which music rediscovers and redfines itself - new things being tried in new ways, basically from the day someone, thousands upon thousands of years ago, first banged a couple of sticks together and decided it sounded good.

It's the willingness to test the boundaries, to trip over the margins of the mainstream into uncharted territory, that this blog is all about. I'm keen to talk here about the things I discover, and hear about the things you discover. It's a place to discuss ideas, to put forward whatever your latest theory or observation about music.

Of course, music can be new at any time and in a whole myriad of ways. It's not just about modern experimentalism. The music that Bach wrote in the seventeenth century, when he first showed how harmony and counterpoint work, took as many risks as when some of today's noise extremists, like Japan's Merzbow, smashed all the traditional concepts of what makes music musical.

Some of the newness sticks, and some of it is forgotten. Some of it sounds dated little more than a decade after we were all bamboozled by it, while some of it seems fated to always sound new and radical, to always inhabit music's outback.

These are the things I hope we can discuss on this blog - not just a place for me to ramble on with my own ideas, nor just for me to write about the latest oddity to fill my music collection and bewilder my neighbours and fellow train passengers. Post your own comments whenever you can - whether it's relevant to what I've posted or not - or, if you like, email me with your thoughts and I'll hopefully be able to post them for you.

I'm looking forward to your involvement!