Twittering Machines

Wicked Messenger
Officium Nocturnum

From the Plague Recordings website:

Biography

Martin Kränzel, born 1972, lives in Hamburg/Germany. Started Wicked Messenger in October 2006. Instrumentation: voice, electric guitar, flute, violin, bells, percussion, samples…

Pump
Sombrero Fallout

From the same source:

17 years later, mythical album sees the light of day! Recorded between 1988-1992. Mixed at ICR by Colin Potter. Dedicated to Andrew Cox.

I was fortunate enough to receive these two records as a ‘digital preview’ due in part to my scribblings herein and all’s I can say is sometimes what goes around comes around and sometimes what comes around is fucking amazing.

Wicked Messenger is dark. As in the absence of light. In its stead is a pulsating labyrinth of ritually diseased chants. Brain pounding, thought melting, waxing poetic while getting medieval on your ass Latin infused funk. A monastery in spiritual decay musical. A symphony foraging the devil.

Pump’s Sombrero Fallout straps on some propulsive beat for a ride down tortured industrial memories lane (you think I’m kidding?). This record is a musical trip in the widest sense, a journey, and its one I plan to take on over and over when my mind needs cleansing (when don’t it?). Pump was Andrew Cox and David Elliott and these guys rack.

Someone is clearly mining the kind of gold that feeds my darkest musical soul. Thanks be to him.

Horsebladder
Not I’ll Not

Horsebladder is poet & musician Elaine Kahn and this is her third release and her first release on Ecstatic Peace. Simple keyboard-based nursery-rhyme melodies overlap with each other until they get downright creepy and Elaine adds the cherry on top with her dreamy nightmare vocals. Limited to 300 copies.

horsebladder – not i’ll not (album preview) by experimedia

Guelewar
Halleli N’dakarou

Guelewar were from Banjul, Gambia and this record comes courtesy of a new label Tarenga Beat. A 2 LP live set recorded in 1982 at the Canari Club de Kaolack, Senegal this’ll smoke your soul funk but good.

Aquarelle
Sung In Broken Symmetry

Ryan Potts is Aquarelle and he plays acoustic and electric guitars through vintage effects pedals, adds percussion and washes everything in layers until it comes out clean and dreamy. Usually said in the same breath as Fennesz and Tim Hecker. Nice, tasteful. From Students of Decay in an edition of 300, first 50 on clear vinyl (sold out at source).

Aquarelle: “Sung in Broken Symmetry” by Students of Decay

Jonathan Halper
Leaving My Old Life Behind b/w I Am A Hermit

Gray area 7″ reissue of Jonathan Halper’s super-freaky folk songs. Kenneth Anger was so taken with Halper’s tunes he kicked Verdi out and put Halper into his film Puce Moment. Think Syd Barrett less restrained.

Speaking of Social Media and behavior, we recently saw a spike in traffic on Twittering Machines. Just a quick but significant bump over a two-day period and a leveling back to normal (actually lower than normal since my posting volume has slowed which hopefully isn’t the new normal). Thanks to Google Analytics I was able to see the source – in a response to a post of a video on bildschirmarbeiter.com which has nothing to do with Joanna Newsom or her music, someone put a link to this page because he thinks Joanna Newsom is graceful. I can’t argue with reason.

Here’s the original unrelated and totally gratuitous video from the post in question to return the favor.

(more…)

Worth a read. And in a related story:

As announced yesterday at the f8 conference, MOG has integrated into the Facebook Platform to create a new social music listening experience.

With this new integration, it’s now easier than ever to share posts of your activity on Facebook, and discover new music based on what your friends are listening to.

The greatest part is, people who connect MOG with Facebook will now see MOG’s music recommendations based on both personal listening habits and the artist “likes” of a listener and their friends on Facebook.

Music is a social phenomena. Who woulda thunk.

(more…)

in the first degree.
unopened, unplayed

They’re starting to talk among themselves. I coulda swore I heard the word revolution!

Tape
Revelationes

Brothers Andreas and Johan Berthling along with Tomas Hallonsten are Tape and Revelationes is their 5th studio album and it is simply lovely. Lovely in a slow restful calming and soothing way like lying in a cool stream on a stiflingly white-hot day.

Layers are built with care from simple melodic pieces, delicately maybe a tad too much so which is the only thing challenging about this music – its lack of challenge. Sometimes, like this time, that can be a good thing.

Leyland Kirby
Eager To Tear Apart The Stars

Beautiful, sad and cinematic. Piano, sampled strings and other things amid layers of static. I have this record sitting waiting to be played thanks to a very good friend. From History Always Favours The Winners. Cover art is an original painting by Ivan Seal.

“We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the
sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and
forgetting this nightmare : pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us.
Work strengthens us. Let us choose.”
Charles Baudelaire

leyland kirby – eager to tear apart the stars (album preview) by experimedia

Mark McGuire
Get Lost

Beautiful, happy and telegenic. Mark McGuire is from NJ of course he makes lovely music. From Editions Mego – “Electric and acoustic guitar, vocals, and guitar-synthesizer recorded digitally between June 2010 and July 2011 in Westlake, Ohio and Portland, Oregon.”

Clams Casino
Instrumentals

Beautiful, dark and danceomatic electronic beat from, where else, NJ. Mike Volpe is Clams Casino and Type put out this blistering set of “Rap instrumentals”.

Clams Casino – Instrumentals by _type

Key Of Shame
S/T

Beautiful and broken noise shards from Mark Morgan (Sightings) and Pat Murano (NNCK, Decimus). A double LPs worth to tear at your tweeters and wrestle with your woofers. “Four threnodies for Judas Iscariota…Jesus answered and said ‘You will become the thirteenth, and you will be cursed by the other generations – and you will come to rule over them. In the last days they will curse your ascent’”. Released by PLANAM in a hand stenciled and silkscreened edition of 270.

Key of Shame Outdoor performance 6/12/11 pt 1 by pat773

Anthony Braxton
In The Tradition

Oops. Remember last December when I said we’d heard Volume 2 of In The Tradition at Monkeyhaus and JD said we’d heard Volume 1 and I responded I heard Volume 2? (I don’t really expect you to remember it just read better that way) I didn’t and as JD pointed out we did hear Volume 1 and I think we heard Braxton blowing that contrabass clarinet on Mingus’ “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”. What a great tune and what a perfectly other sounding instrument that contrabass clarinet is. It sounds almost digital.

Anthony Braxton alto sax & contrabass clarinet, Tete Montoliu piano, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen bass and Albert “Tootie” Heath drums. What a group, what a record.

“I am really happy with the music on this record” ~ Anthony Braxton. So am I. And in one of the oddest dedications that I’ve read, Braxton closes his liner notes, “with the last couple of years being as difficult as it’s been I would like to dedicate this record to the Roche Pharmaceutical Company.”

Jackie Gleason Presents Lonesome Echo

Mandolins and memories. Romance whispered through an oboe d’amour.

“This is music that says relax . . . close your eyes . . . remember . . . Listen to the lonsesome echo . . .”

OK, so I bought it for the cover which was painted specifically for this record by none other than everyone’s favorite celebrity surrealist, Avida Dollars. That’s the anagram Andre Breton cooked up for old Salvador Dali and it translates roughly as “eager for dollars” which is pretty funny, very true and oh so clever.

The music on Lonesome Echo is smoother than river rocks and much less interesting. The perfect soundtrack for that deserted pizzeria with the awful mural. Why do so many pizza restaurants have those awful hand-painted murals anyway? If only Avida Dollars designed wallpaper . . .

Marcel Duchamp
Avoir l’apprenti dans le soleil [To Have the Apprentice in the Sun], 1914

beer glasses by eva solo

From Unica Home, come these drunken beer glasses “developed in close collaboration with professional brewers”. While I prefer a generic pint glass or some long gone corporation’s logo, these various sizes are specifically designed for specific beer types including wheat, ale and schnappsglas. They are also mouth-blown and pricey (but you already knew that) at $48 – $58 each. For the connoisseur.

Fennesz
Instrument

Some rules, I like. Like – if I see a used record by Christian Fennesz that I don’t own – buy it. And this is the kind of rule, maybe it should be a law?, I should never question. Instrument is Fennesz’s first release (which I didn’t know when I saw its slightly water-damaged cover marked at $9.99 which is why the rule came in extra-special handy). It’s also a scorchingly tasty piece of electronically manipulated crush – moody, harsh at times, atmospheric, machine-driven and achingly human.

I’m sure Fennesz can make some awful-sounding music. I just haven’t heard any.

Rajdulari Aliakbar Khan
Raga Kirwanu, Raga Imni Bilawal

I knew this would be great but I didn’t know it would be enchanting (even though Nat Hentoff’s liner notes say so). Rajdulari Aliakbar Khan was Ustad Ali Akbar Khan’s second wife (of three with 11 children among them all) and he joins her magical vocals on swarmandal a kind of Indian lute along with Pandit Mahapurush MIstra on tabla with tamboura accompaniment.

We’re talking just one raga per side both evening ragas and both concerned with “love as a verb”. Between that and the number of times Nat Hentoff refers to Rajdulari’s voice as “sensual”, I’d say we’re singing and talking about sex. Slow, side-long sex. In any event this was a sealed copy for $5.99 and I don’t have to tell you where I got it unless you’re new here in which case I’ll leave it a mystery. From 1967 on Connoisseur if you see this, buy it.

From the liner notes:

This recording was made with four Sony C37A condenser microphones feeding into specially designed low-noise mixers and custom-built Ampex 350 tape recorders utilizing 1/2-inch tape operated at a speed of 30 inch/sec. on wide track two channel heads. The master disc was cut directly from 1/2-inch, two track 30 inch/sec. master tape copy and no additional equalization, compression, or artificial reverberation was employed, assuring a virtually perfect match to the original master tape. This recording was audited through AR-3 loudspeakers.

No compression. 1967. Ah, the good olde days.

The Beat Generation According To Jack Kerouac

From Abraxas Italy comes this 4-LP set collecting Poetry For The Beat Generation (1957) featuring Jack reading and Steve Allen tinkling the ivories, Blues And Haikus with Zoot Sims and Al Cohn (1959), Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation (1959) featuring just Jack improving on himself and The Last Word which is comprised of outtakes from the Blues and Haikus sessions. Dig it.

Shin Joong Hyun
Beautiful Rivers And Mountains: The Psychedelic Rock Sound Of South Korea’s Shin Joong Hyun 1958-74

Light In The Attic digs deep into the genre-bending catalog of Korea’s grooviest guitarist Shin Joong Hyun. Surf, swamp, and soul. Are you experienced?

Haunted House
Blue Ghost Blues

Haunted House is Loren Connors: guitar, Andrew Burnes: guitar, Suzanne Langille: vocals and Neel Murgai: daf. Named after the Lonnie Johnson tune and taking their inspiration from far and wide and inner and outer grooves, you’ll want this on your turntable (it’s a Tip Of The Tongue too). I already have my copy (thanks S.). Feed your head…

Haunted House – White Rabbit [Bonus Track] by Northern-Spy Records

A Winged Victory For The Sullen
s/t

Adam Wiltzie and Dustin O’Halloran deliver some acoustic-based ambient drone through a series of grand grand pianos, string quartets, guitars and other machines. From Kranky for those peaceful moods and moments. “All songs were processed completely analogue straight to magnetic tape.”

a winged victory for the sullen – a winged victory for the sullen (album preview) by experimedia

Motion Sickness Of Time Travel
Dreamcatcher

Beautifully packaged and sounding cassette-only release from Motion Sickness Of Time Travel on Hobo Cult Records in an edition of 200. Add this to the embarrassment of riches column. You can watch part of it here.

motion sickness of time travel – dreamcatcher (album preview) by experimedia