What better way to move on from all the dreadful crap below than by laying down some brief thoughts on new or re-issued things that have caught my ears in the first six weeks of 2019?

These blurry-eyed winter months are always a bit weird when it comes to music-listening. I’m not sure why, really. Does anyone else find that? They tend to find me scrabbling around here and there in the wake of the big, end-of-year cut-off point, grabbing hold of bit and pieces of sound that seem to appeal to me, but without really having the time to fully unpack anything before life steamrollers it out of the way and I find myself crawling back to something familiar instead. Maybe it’s just me?

Anyway, on the rare occasions that I haven’t been falling back into the comfort zone of ‘80s Bevis Frond, Motorhead or ‘70s James Brown, I’ve found myself willing to cautiously commend the following to your attention.


Pye Corner Audio.



After giving a tentative thumbs up here to some of his earlier records a few years back, I’ve subsequently lost track of Martin Jenkins’ recordings as Pye Corner Audio, but his new ‘Hollow Earth’ album finds me back on the case, simply because these Ghost Box LPs with the Julian House design work are so pretty and reasonably priced, it almost seems a crime not to buy them. After all, they won’t be around forever.

In a sense, Pye Corner Audio strikes me as the hauntological electronica equivalent of, say, a mid-table thrash metal band, or a jazz group who play at local pubs on a Sunday afternoon, or something like that. By which I mean, his music doesn’t send me off on ecstatic reveries or leave me slack-jawed with instant revelation or anything, but it’s solid. It’s there when you need it, it ticks the boxes and does what it does. It’s reliable, like that super-strong wood glue from B&Q.

Listening to the woozy, out-of-sync synth line that opens this LP, you might be inclined to think, well, we already have one Boards of Canada, how badly do we need another? But, as things crack on and Jenkins gets stuck into his trademark MO – essentially stripping the BoC idiom back to its strongest core elements, replacing their somewhat dated break-based drum programming with some throbbing 4/4 mutant techno and adding a heavy dose of John Carpenter style dystopian sci-fi dread – I think you’ll be hard-pressed not to give him the nod. Bits of this even remind me of Goblin’s music from ‘Tenebrae’, which I love, and the whole thing sounds great through my amp and speakers for whatever reason [“PROBABLY BECAUSE I MASTERED IT PROPERLY,” yells the underappreciated mastering engineer somewhere in the distance]. So, yeah – awesome.


Durand Jones & The Indications.



Although the revival of classic soul / jazz / funk sounds that’s been picking up steam over the past few years has undoubtedly been a happy thing to witness, I’ve not fully engaged with it thus far, simply because, well…. there’s still no shortage of actual 60s / 70s soul records available at competitive prices in the second hand record shops I frequent, so why would I feel the need to dive head first into what is essentially a retro reconstruction of those sounds, when there is still so much of the “real thing” I’ve yet to become fully acquainted with..?

Which brings us neatly to my experience of turning on the radio one Sunday lunchtime a few weeks back and hearing ‘Morning in America’ by Durand Jones & The Indications, convinced that I was listening to the best, most f-ing epic, socially conscious ‘70s soul jam I’d heard in years. Real “HOW have I not heard this before?!” territory, y'know. Just, wow. In truth, by the time the (excellent) fuzz guitar break kicked in toward the end, I’d twigged that this was probably one of those new, fangled retro soul groups, but, for a few minutes there, they had me fooled pretty good.

Although I am currently only able to listen to three tracks from the band’s forthcoming ‘American Love Call’ LP on the Dead Oceans label, they are so good that I’m willing to consider the possibility that they mark the point at which the retro-soul movement not only matches but actually threatens to surpass the benchmark set down by Curtis Mayfield, Bobby Womack et al, officially breaking the back of recorded history and causing 2019 to blur straight back into 1972 as if the horrible, intervening years had simply not happened.

Given that it has basically been life-long dream to live in a perpetual replay of the early 1970s, this is fine with me I suppose, and, given the intimidating level of technical and vocal expertise required to make good soul music, I think we can hopefully be reassured that we won’t be looking at a repeat of the Great Garage Rock Collapse of the early ‘00s a few years down the line, with a cut-price version of the Detroit Spinners sloppily banging it out on every street corner, expecting us to be knocked out by their vintage threads and dues-paying cover versions.

Basically I think, it feels churlish in these dark times to turn yr nose up at sounds as essentially good and wholesome as these, regardless of vintage, so why not take this opportunity to get on board? (With apologies in advance is the unlikely event that the other nine cuts on the record turn out to be rubbish.)


Farce.



One of the more exciting new bands I’ve scoped out recently on London’s DIY punk scene, Farce bravely move beyond the doggedly grooveless, second-practice level bleating h/c that sadly seems to form the inheritance of so many of these one-word-name, mayfly lifespan ensembles. Naturally this means embracing the grind, which they do in earnest, punching and tearing their way toward something approaching a multi-gendered, multi-ethnic reclamation of the early Napalm Death / Extreme Noise Terror sound – which is just as much of a fucking brilliant idea as it sounds, to be honest.

Well, I say that, but -- I’m not sure that that feeling, which I took from watching the band live, is quite captured on their demo, which takes a more of a straight-down-the-line crust / hardcore approach (not to mention some weird separation on the recordings, vocals are too high in the mix for my liking, and that bass sound on the bits where the other instruments drop out – jeezus). But, still, the sheer energy on this thing just kills, and the more grind adjacent tracks (‘Another Lie’, ‘Death By 1000 Cuts’) get where they need to go and then some.

True to form, the lyrics (as dutifully transcribed on the tape insert) sure ain’t subtle, but they certainly hit hard, getting straight to the point with a raw fury that snaps the neck of my middle-aged condescension. Great stuff. I hope this lot manage to hang around long enough to develop their sound and make a bit of an impact. Catch them playing amid the tear gas on a flatbed truck near you, should things really go Worst Case Scenario later this year [nervous laughter].


David Behrman.



On the reissues front meanwhile, I’ve been very much enjoying this exceptionally nice example of what I suppose you’d call early electro-acoustic improvisation, in which analogue synth, flute, bassoon and cello find themselves playing side by side with ‘harmonic responses’ generated by a series of sound-generating algorithms programmed into whatever passed for a ‘microcomputer’ in 1977. (Just imagine the quantity of Bakelite involved!)

As Behrman evocatively puts it in his sleeve notes for the current reissue on the aptly named Lovely Music label, the ‘On the Other Ocean’ sessions grew from a collective enthusiasm for “..homemade electronics with its mysterious knobs, its lexan enclosures with the screw holes drilled not quite in the right places and its hand-wired circuit boards inside; for idiosyncratic brews of electronic timbres that were not trying to imitate the sounds of the real world.” Nice.

Regardless of the processes that brought these recordings about however, the results are serene, oceanic and absolutely delightful, veering away from academic, pure tone minimalism toward what I suppose may have been seen as the more cerebral end of the ‘new age’ spectrum. Drawing on my own listening experience, they certainly put me in mind of Emerald Web’s silicon valley laser show conjurations, Arthur Russell’s neo-classical ‘First Thought, Best Thought’ recordings, and some sort of perfect, shimmering dream of driving down through the hills to San Francisco harbour in a silent, pastel-coloured Cadillac powered by sunbeams. Rare and mirage-like 20th Century American Utopian vibes can be found here in abundance – an impossibly precious dream of compassionate, technologically-mediated progress, shining forever on black wax.

Speaking of which….


Headroom.



Headroom was formerly a solo project of Kryssi Battalene, lead guitarist of New Haven, CT’s Mountain Movers (see review in my botched end of year list below), but it has seemingly been expanded to a full band line up for ‘New Heaven’ (see what they did there?), a new 12” of sprawling, loose-limbed psychedelic rock on the Ever/Never label.

Reviews I’ve read have all pulled Bardo Pond out of the bag as the go-to reference point here, and, though I would contend that Bardo’s approach is significantly removed from anything found here (cf: far thicker guitar textures, flute, structured / dramatic song construction etc), I can nonetheless see where they’re coming from.

I mean, there’s (sadly) very little else in the canon of Great American Rock Music that you can reach for to get a bead on this sort of thing, wherein slo mo bass and drum hits groove away in perfect, quaalude-fucked unison whilst a small fortune’s worth of dearly beloved pedals are fed to the gaping maw of Battalene’s speaker cabinet, conjuring weirdly bucolic, green-tinged swathes of fungal, feedbackin’ magnificence, occasionally accompanied by breathy, wordless delay/reversed vocals, like music to accompany the sensation of gazing at bacteria through a microscope in Biology class, a day or so after your first ever acid trip, whilst the sun is shining outside, and really you just want to go and run around and stick your face in the grass.

Or, that’s what I get out of it, anyway. I could listen to music like this forever basically, so I’m happy to have it. For all the excess inherent in this kind of guitar-playing, there’s an admirable avoidance of bombast here, a sort of laidback, accidental feel, and a warm, analogue distance to the recordings, which feels very appealing to me, coming as it does at a point in time when all forms of heavy music seem to be constantly upping the ante in terms of volume, compression and general mind-buggering immensitude. As with the Mountain Movers albums, it feels a bit old fashioned in that regard. In a good way, I mean. It’s just a nice record to hang with, if you like psychedelic guitar music. No expectation, no pretence. Just enjoy the sounds, cos they’re pretty sweet.

Labels: David Behrman, Durand Jones & The Indications, Farce, Headroom, Pye Corner Audio

I suppose it makes sense that as the whole Ghostbox thing starts to get a little long in the tooth, the label should begin to expand its aesthetic remit slightly, welcoming in a slightly younger generation on music-makers for whom newly-excavated shadows of the ‘80s form the primary source material, as the hallowed ‘70s fall deeper into the semi-remembered past. Hence: Martin Jenkins, whose work here thankfully rises above his somewhat twee recording moniker, building a familiarly Ghostbox-y nest of retro-spook comforts from… well, you can guess where he’s going be going with this, right?

Yes, cry out in delight or bury your head in your hands as you will, but I’m afraid he’s going to John Carpenter town, and there’s nothing you can do about it. As my Umberto review in the last post will have hopefully made clear, my own reaction to such things is still very much in the former category, so I’m good. To reduce ‘Sleep Games’ to the horribly reductive, “in-a-nutshell” style summary it seems to be crying out for, what’s essentially going on here is Carpenter/Howarth synth action put through a Boards of Canada filter. Obviously there’s more to be pulled out of it should you wish, but basically if that sounds like your idea of a fun time, you’ll probably enjoy it, and if not, well, never mind.

And so things progress exactly the way you might expect: simple, hard-hitting synth lines in the foreground, gradually contaminated and warped by that oh-so-familiar brand of comforting, ordered unease, seeding the clean, sharp angles of the neon & PVC riffs with mossy, overgrown beds of artfully corroded electronic texture, sounds that seem to have been planted by some benevolent library music father way back in the mists of time and left to breed and spread within the depths of some forgotten room-sized analogue instrument… ready for when an ambitious horror movie director finally powers it up again and sits at the keyboard to kick some minimalist ass.

Like those old Boards of Canada records, it’s hard to put your finger on Precisely what it is that makes Pye Corner Audio so compelling – there’s a kind of oblique, impersonal quality to the music, a recognition of the fact that he/they isn’t really doing anything that wouldn’t be wholly expected, given the place and time from which he is broadcasting, and yet, for whatever reason, it works, where so many other contenders breakdown, mired in cheese.

Several track titles (‘The Mirrorball Cracked’, ‘Underneath the Dancefloor’) seem to invoke the kind of ‘curdled rave nostalgia’ / haunted dancefloor aesthetic that so many electronic artists have hooked onto in recent years, but in actuality ‘Sleep Games’ bears very little resemblance to any kind of music people ever danced to – it’s lineage is lonely, bedroom-dwelling electro through and through, with even the zombified Detroit techno of ‘Into The Maze’ coming to us via several brick walls at the very least. The Precinct 13 pulse of ‘The Mirror Ball Cracked’ is unmistakable, with only distant, disembodied groans serving to remind us of the time & intent separating Jenkins from his master, whilst ‘The Black Mill Video Tape’ leads us on precisely the kind of Stone Tape-style ghost hunt the title would suggest, perhaps relocated to some mid-80s LA backlot zone, perhaps overseen by…. yes – ‘Prince of Darkness’! You’re one step ahead of me! And we could play this game throughout the album’s fifty minute duration, right until the distant sirens and ominous synth oboe on ‘Chlorine’ take us outside the city, closing on the more familiarly pastoral Ghostbox stylings of ‘Nature Reclaims The Town’.

Now that Ghostbox have caught up with the era of VHS and Snake Plisskin, who knows what delights await as the reconfigured nostalgia wagon rumbles on? Things are moving quickly, as advance guards in the states are already plundering the most lamentable forgotten corners of the ‘90s for inspiration, and a pertinent question for a few years down the line might be: what the hell do we do when it catches up with now?

Labels: best of 2012, Goat, Lantern, Peaking Lights, Pye Corner Audio, The Caretaker