musica

The latest post in Egon’s NPR series Funk Archaeology follows him on a trip to New York as he attempts to find five great records for less than $100. Well, we shouldn’t write “attempts:” since the column has been published, it’s obvious he succeeded. With that in mind, we’re offering an additional download by the Swedish psych-weirdo Prefix below – his altogether mind-blowing “Duke Of War.”

Link: It’s a Buyer’s Market: Digging For $100 A Day – Egon’s Funk Archaeology at NPR Download: Prefix: “Duke of War.” More: Egon’s Funk Archaeology at NPR.

Found this on Dangerous Minds. Fifty minute concert film of an August 8, 1970 performance at the Saint Tropez Music Festival, originally done for broadcast on the French TV program Pop 2. Another example of the magic pre-Dark Side era of Floyd.

mp3: GORILLA VS. BEAR JANUARY 2012 MIX (94 mb)

[right click-save as to download]

tracklist after the jump »

[directed by jerome d. hurd]

Another day, another new track from Harlem’s more-ubiquitous-by-the-minute Azealia Banks. This one’s titled ‘Bambi’, it’s produced by Paul Epworth (who’s supposed to have a big hand in Banks’ forthcoming major label ventures). If it sounds like something you’d expect to hear in a fashion show, then that’s because it is: it was premiered at a Mugler Mens FW 2012 runaway show in Paris.

 

Following the Big Chill’s recent cancellation, news has broken that another festival will be giving 2012 a miss.

The annual Lake of Stars festival in Malawi will be taking a year off to”support local initiatives”, though it promises to be back next year. The festival’s director and founder Will Jameson has issued a statement, saying that “Lake of Stars has always been about much more than just an annual festival. It’s a year-round project to promote arts, travel and development, but staging the festival consumes all of our small team’s time and resources making it difficult to focus on our other goals.”

“After eight years of the festival, we have decided to take stock of our experiences in putting the festival together, and spend some time supporting local initiatives in Malawi. We also want to take time this year to incorporate the feedback from Malawians and international festival goers, artists and sponsors to help us build a bigger and better event in 2013″.

Lake of Stars had previously taken place every Summer since 2004, on the shores of Lake Malawi.

Last September, we broke the news that Blunted Robots’ Shortstuff had changed his name to Mickey Pearce full-time (he’d previously been using the alias for edits of Cassie, Wiley, Ms Dynamite and more) and was readying a single for Swamp81. Pearce has now put audio of that single, ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Get’ b/w ‘I Am’ online; it’s available to preorder from Swamp through their Surus store.

Naturally we’re big fans of the Wiley sample on ‘Don’t Ask’.

“Last year I went on a road trip to Marfa, Texas, a small town in the middle of nowhere,” Pete Swanson recalls.

“The artist and designer Donald Judd owned half of it, and one of the last places we hit was his library, which was just incredibly big and included such diverse books. I found myself considering how one man could consume such an array of information and end up making such austere and individualistic work.

“As an artist, I relate to that: the continuous pursuit of information, whether or not it works its way back into your own work. I’d rather spend my life pursuing enhanced knowledge and perspective than being satisfied with being canonised in some sub-genre. I’ve got a very solid sense of self but I’m always chasing the next thing.”

“I’ve got a very solid sense of self but I’m always chasing the next thing.”

This constant chase has had the no doubt flattering side effect of making Swanson one of his generation’s most admired cult musicians. Over the past decade, both solo, and as one half of the now defunct Yellow Swans (with Gabriel Mindel Saloman), the Oregon native has built up a vast body of work – a veritable mountain of limited vinyl, CD-Rs and cassette editions – that documents his dynamic, open-minded approach to sound-making, and moreover to his own creative and personal development. “I’m restless, and I’m always experimenting with new ideas. Most of these ideas get scrapped, some turn into tapes, some get developed into albums. I’m more into big picture continuity than I am the small stuff. “

With his most recent solo album, Man With Potential, Swanson has produced his first solo masterpiece. Its core is instantly recognisable as Swanson: wild, entirely improvised electronics wrought out of erratic hardware, then looped and edited into a whole of preternatural depth and musicality. “There’s no overdubbing, no post-production as such,” Swanson confirms. “Just a lot of cutting and fading, a little EQing and a great mastering engineer.”

Swanson’s grasp of narrative and ability to impose it on even the most jarring, chaotic of sonic elements is one of the qualities that makes him so much more than just a noise or “experimental” artist. Still, his grounding in noise and the extremes of punk comes across in the physical presence of his music, which borders on the oppressive, the punishing. You have to first consent to being crushed by the sheer force and weight of it before you can get close enough to glimpse its glorious detail, and to discern the stories being told.

“I don’t really have a hierarchical approach to sound,” he continues. “I don’t place noise above melody, tonality above atonality, rhythm above no rhythm.” Nonetheless, it’s precisely an emphasis on rhythm that makes Man With Potential so distinctive, and has seen it cross over to an audience beyond the regular Swanson faithful. A thumping, techno-style 4/4 kickdrum – something that has never been explicit in his previous work – runs through all six tracks on the record, albeit with some variation. Though Swanson acknowledges a techno influence, talking passionately and knowledgeably to me about Underground Resistance and Andy Stott among others, he suggests that the use of the kick wasn’t a gesture towards the grammar of dance music so much as a musical necessity.

“The kickdrum – which is a kick module on my synth – really needed to be there on all of the tracks,” he says. “Everything on the record is edited down from these hour long improvisations on out-of-synch loops and without the kick, the pieces don’t really make sense. The kick really determines the centre of the music, and creates tension.”Without it,” he concedes, “It’s all just sort of mercurial synth and tape loop washes.”

“I don’t really have a hierarchical approach to sound. I don’t place noise above melody, tonality above atonality, rhythm above no rhythm.”

Certainly the more you listen to the record, the less you notice the kickdrum, and the more you realise it’s there principally to anchor, and make accessible, the agitated, squalling, livid walls of synthetic shrapnel that seem to press on you from above, below and all sides. His canny use of a basic techno framework to buttress his more violent sonic investigations reminds me of Surgeon’s description of techno as a “carrier wave”: a medium for transmitting extreme elements, Trojan-like, into the ears of listeners who might otherwise not be open to them. ”I think my music needs elements that are accessible to listeners, because the general vibe is so dense and foreign.”

How did Swanson arrive at this “general vibe”? He was born and raised in Corvallis, Orgeon, a small college town two hours south of Porland. His parents were both volcanologists, and a lot of family time was spent “camping and hanging out in forests”.

“Portland is pretty remote geographically,” he goes on to explain, “and you can definitely feel it in the nature and the culture. There’s not a lot of wealth there, but living is very cheap. There’s also very low church attendance and a very strong libertarian or anarchist streak. Often you’ll find yourself seeing a doctor or lawyer who’s covered in tattoos, or meeting a normal parent that just happens to be a stripper. Ultimately, I think that this sort of anti-authoritarian streak comes out in my music.

What made the young Swanson gravitate towards more esoteric and obscure forms of art-making?

“From an early age I knew that there were underground cultures that existed and I did what I could to find out about them. I can’t explain why my 7-year-old self really was obsessed with Run DMC, or why I would stay up late when I was 12 on Sundays to watch a TV show produced by Mike Lastra (from Smegma) that featured a lot of music videos and video art.”

Though Corvallis wasn’t exactly a musical mecca in its own right, it was a convenient stop for bands making the journey on tour up from San Francisco to Portland, and so Swanson got to see the likes of Unwound, Karp, Jawbreaker on his doorstep.  There were an interesting local metal seen too, with musicians who would go on to form cult outfits like Atriarch and YOB, and a number of fanzines floating around at the time that apprised Swanson of goings-on beyond rural Oregon. “I particularly liked this paper, Snipehunt, that covered everything from the most out experimental musicians and performance artists, to pop-punk and DIY comics.

“My early rockist references were really very primitive and rudimentary.”

He had picked up his first instrument – an off-label, red hollow-body bass – aged 13, bought for $150 with money he’d saved from doing park maintenance between 8th and 9th grade. Perhaps even more significantly, he got hold of a distortion pedal at the same time (“some Ibanez piece of junk”). Having spent most of his childhood immersed in hip-hop, a foundational interest that perhaps accounts for his interest in, and aptitude for, looping and editing techniques, his acquisition of guitar and pedal coincided with a mounting interest in rock music – favourite bands included Karp, Boredoms, godheadSilo, Mukilteo Fairies, Bikini Kill and Butthole Surfers. “My early rockist references were really very primitive and rudimentary,” he says now, a little modestly.

Alive to the possibilities of punk and alternative rock music, Swanson formed a band called Assspasm with three close friends and someone with similar tastes from a neighbouring town. This rough and ready combo was particularly influenced by a Japanese hardcore/grind, Slap-A-Ham Records and related slime. Swanson still has a demo tape they recorded. “It’s 11 songs in about 4 minutes. Real screechy, tinny stuff. Definitely very ‘noise’ by accident.”

 

Nothing serious took off until Swanson moved to Portland after graduation, when he founded the furious hardcore band Murder. “In that project I really wanted to push it, and try and break out of the typical punk modes, but I was young, a poor musician and in a band with a lot of people who didn’t totally care about that sort of thing.

“I brought in all of these effects, tried weird tunings, really anything that seemed out of the ordinary, but we just ended up sounding like an nth-generation Gravity Records band. We had a lot of fun with it though, and played a lot of shows.”

“I was obsessed with the idea of electronic music, but I couldn’t find anything that was as intense as the punk music I was coming from.”

Portland’s chilly bohemia inevitably introduced Swanson, at this point 19 years old, to a wider range of music. Of particular influence were Ethan Swan, who went on to form synth-punk outfit Silk Flowers, and Paul Dickow, who for some years has made experimental dance music as Strategy (a record on 100% Silk is forthcoming) and also runs the Community Library label. Dickow and Swan lived together, and had amassed a formidable collection of outre vinyl than Swanson was all too glad to explore. At the same time, he’d begun rehearsing with a gang of older musicians – people with serious, highly refined taste all too glad to impart their knowledge to their young bandmate via mixtapes and conversation. The band, though, didn’t ultimately amount to much. “We suffered from having too many cooks in the kitchen and we were always playing with new ideas, trying to incorporate weird Ligeti-inspired breaks in the middle of a sort of goth/Dead C-style psychedelic burner, and tweaking 15 minute long songs for months on end.  We never recorded, but I took away a lot from that project and I believe the other guys did as well – they went on to do stuff like Glass Candy, Rabbits and Get Hustle.”

Swanson took a short break from music-making, but continued to listen with all gates open. He became increasingly fascinated with experimental electronic music, zoning in on new releases from the likes of Pita and Autechre. “I was obsessed with the idea of electronic music,” he recalls today, ” But I couldn’t find anything that was as intense as the punk music I was coming from.  The records sounded too hermetic and inhuman and I really saw an intriguing void in culture there that I wanted to explore…So I bought all of this cheap electronic gear  and started messing around with it.”

Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35, can now be heard twice, every Friday – Noon EST with an encore broadcast at Midnight EST. SIRIUS 230: Jean Michel Bernard – Generique Stephane ++ Destroyer – Leave Me Alone (New Order) ++ Trailer Trash Tracys – Candy Girl ++ White Hinterland – Requiem Pour [...]

Gang Colours has been making waves in recent months with his sepia brand of isolationist pop music, and will release his debut album The Keychain Collection on February 27. That will be preceded by a new single ‘Fancy Restaurant’, which features remixes by Machinedrum, Ifan Dafydd and Deft. You can stream Machinedrum’s remix, a breakbeat-heavy burner in line with the rest of his recent material, below.

Legendary minimalist Steve Reich will perform a new piece in London next year, based on Radiohead.

Last year, Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood – alongside Aphex Twin – performed at a Steve Reich tribute performance in Poland, which according to Andrew Burke, chief executive of the London Sinfonietta (13 musicians from the orchestra will be performing the piece with Reich), got Reich “seriously interested in their [music].”

The piece will be based on ‘Everything in its Right Place’, from Radiohead’s classic 2000 album Kid A, and the later ‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place’ from 2007′s In Rainbows. However, Burke doesn’t think that Reich “will be quoting these songs directly – I don’t think that’s his style. How he uses the songs as a starting point for what he does is going to be part of the excitement. But ultimately I’m most excited by the fact that we’ve got a new work by Steve Reich.”

The performance will take place at the Southbank Centre on March 5, 2103 [via Pitchfork, via The Guardian].

Martyn will follow last year’s sophomore album Ghost People with a new single for Brainfeeder.

The Dutch producer signed to Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder label last year, releasing the well-received ‘Masks’ before taking his explorations of vintage house and techno full-length on Ghost People. His new single for the label is titled ‘Hello Darkness’, and although there’s currently no audio available to hear [Update: you can actually stream samples here], the label’s press release promises “a flux between 2-step, driving techno and old rave.”

On the single’s B-side, fans of Ghost People will find two of its tracks remixed. Night Slugs’ Bok Bok and L-Vis 1990 get their hands on ‘Bauplan’, while album closer ‘We Are You In The Future’ is treated by techno masked man Redshape, whose next single will be released on Martyn’s label 3024.

Brainfeeder will release ‘Hello Darkness’ on March 19.

A video of Azealia Banks performing at Karl Lagerfeld’s home has been posted on YouTube.

Having designed for Banks a version of the Mickey Mouse sweater she wears in the ’212′ video – but depicting his own silhouette rather than Mickey’s, naturally –  the Chanel figurehead Lagerfeld invited the Harlem rapper to perform at his house in Paris. She accepted, and this is how it went down:

Below is a selection of the tracks and albums that we’ve been listening to in the FACT office this week.

Some of them are old, some of them are new, some of them are as yet unreleased. All are very good.

 

Evian Christ – ‘MYD’ Atom TM – Cold Memories (Sahko) Patrice and Friends – Champagne Saunas (Sulk) Mala (pictured) – ‘Enter Dimensions’ (DMZ) Black To Comm – Earth (De Stijl) Stephen O’Malley & Steve Noble – St. Francis Duo (Bo’Weavil) ASC – various tracks (Samurai Red Seal) Prurient - Bermuda Drain (Hydra Head) Beneath – various tracks (No Symbols) Black-Ty – Best of Both Hoods Ice Burgandy – ‘Wake the Game Up’ King Felix - Spring (Liberation Technologies) Pete Swanson – I Don’t Rock At All (Three Lobed Recordings)

[video by Benjamin Shearn. Rangers' Pan Am Stories is out now on Not Not Fun]

Yes, really. Wrestling icon Hulk Hogan has claimed that he almost joined heavy metal icons Metallica. Can you imagine?

In an interview with The Sun [via the NME], Hogan – who these days also stars in his own TV show, Hogan Knows Best – revealed that he used to be close with Metallica’s Napster-hating drummer Lars Urich in his pre-wrestling days as a session musician.

In the Hulkster’s words, “I used to be a session musician before I was a wrestler. I played bass guitar. I was big pals with Lars Ulrich and he asked me if I wanted to play bass with Metallica in their early days but it didn’t work out.”

All of a sudden Lulu looks pretty normal by comparison.

Roughneck Welsh house duo Doc Daneeka and Benjamin Damage have released their first video.

Lo-fi and intimate, it’s fitting for ‘Halo’, a honey-coated collaboration with Abigail Wyles from the duo’s debut album, They! Live. You can stream it below.

It’s funny that today’s album review of Lil Jabba’s Swisher should reference Evian Christ, because his/her/their YouTube channel has been soundtracking FACT’s office this week. Despite the fact that Evian Christ’s anonymity – nobody on the Internet seems to know much about him/her/them at this point – will doubtless play a part in people’s interest in the act, the music’s pretty straight-forward. It’s minimal, ice cold 808 house in a similar vein to the sounds that Throwing Snow and Becoming Real spent various periods of 2011 pushing, but Evian Christ’s a bit less forgiving with the sampling; on ‘MYD’ he brings half of a Tyga line through loud and hard, building up anticipation until dropping the whole sentence at the song’s climax.

Evian Christ – ‘MYD’

Available on: Bandcamp download

The last two years has seen juke and footwork shift gears from a cult, localised dance music to something more globally recognised, with Planet Mu’s genre compilations and artist albums for the likes of DJ Diamond and DJ Nate leading the charge. Just as interesting though, are artists outside Chicago bending juke and footwork’s 160bpm drum-driven dance template into new forms. And those forms are getting weirder.

Enter Lil Jabba. I don’t know anything about Lil Jabba, bar the fact that he’s originally from Australia, and now lives in Baltimore. Swisher is a six track mini-album, available to buy via Bandcamp, and by God it’s good. When you think of lo-fi footwork, you usually think of DJ Nate’s twisted hyperspeed r’n’b, often accompanied by unintentional compression via YouTube, but Jabba’s stuff is far more sonically interesting and, well, sonically pleasant. It’s still hard – ‘Chaos Charge’ lives up to its name with elephantine horns and snapping snares, and ‘Get Up Bitch’ says exactly what you’d expect from its title – but ‘Maven’ is pure honey for the ears, with a marble bassline that recalls Actress, and twisted jazz licks akin to Madlib.

‘Bruiser’ takes things deep underwater with shimmering highs and a gently bobbing bassline, and is the case with several of Swisher’s tracks, although it’s driven by typical footwork percussion – 808 hi-hats and heavily reverberated claps – the drums never dominate, and sometimes they completely disappear into the middle distance. Jabba’s strength lies in his melodies and the way he flips samples, and he knows that sometimes drums can get in the way of that. Even on ‘Skala’, which rides a pretty straight drum grid, the percussion’s quiet; the emphasis on the track’s seaside ambience.

Swisher isn’t perfect; even after one listen, a noticeable gap in quality emerges between its best moments (‘Maven’, ‘Skala’, ‘Raiders’) and its more average ones (‘Get Up Bitch’), but for a a debut record – it’s actually been on Jabba’s Bandcamp page since June 2011 – it shows serious amounts of promise. Most importantly, Jabba already sounds completely unique: unlike other recent footwork appropriators like Machinedrum, Philip D. Kick and Evian Christ (not a slight at any of those artists, I should add), it’s hard to tell where he’s taking his cues from; where the fuck he’s actually coming from. And that makes his music all the more absorbing.

Tam Gunn