The industrial sleep of the Earth - Spectres by Monolith

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

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

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

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

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

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'

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.