Société Etrange – Chance

Listening to NTS as much as I do, I think I can now confidently say that you don’t very often hear the same songs in a short space of time. At least, the shows I’ve listened to a lot don’t seem to repeat themselves and I frequently just leave it on and the same seems to be true elsewhere on the station as well.

So it’s quite notable when a particular song appears even as much as 3 times! The first one such is one that does my head in but this isn’t a negative review blog. The second tune closes this album – the first time I heard it I noted it as very good and put the album on my wishlist. Having subsequently listened to the album in full, hence it didn’t get deleted from my wishlist, Futur then got played twice more over the next fortnight or so and after the third play I gave in and bought the album.

The whole thing is full of wonderful rhythm and movement though. I noted when I was listening to Harmonia the other night that some of the melodic progressions were ‘very German’ and listening to this again as I type this I’m reminded of that because my thought is that this sounds melodically French. And yet, if you asked me to expand on what I mean by this, I simply wouldn’t be able to. There’s a feel to the progressions maybe? Maybe someone properly tuned in to all the world’s wonderful music would be able to place the origin of any music just based on the melodic progressions.

Sula Bassana – Loop Station Drones

Sula Bassana is part of Electric Moon and therefore needs no introduction, and yet what you have just read is an introduction, albeit quite a lazy one.

Sula, or possibly also known as Dave, put the first track of this out a bit back with commentary on the page that this would just keep getting added to until finished, and now it is finished. Well, it was that one track that did it for me, but the fact that it’s now an album, and a nice long one, well, what’s not to love?

So when he do solo he do motorik, electronic, kosmische-y stuff with loops and drones an’ ting, and when he do solo, I do like to listen. It’s very possible that I’ve missed posting some of his stuff from the last few years; not purposely but because I just keep forgetting I have this blog thing. The point is, though, that all the things are worth listening to.

Nova Express – Twenty One

I have a colleague at work with whom we discuss music fairly frequently and through each other we have discovered some good stuff over the years, although some of the stuff I’ve tried him on has been a bit hard for him to bear – he described Gnod as Pink Floyd having a bad trip after I played him Tony’s First Communion (one of the best pieces of music ever, imo), and said he’d rather pull his own teeth out than listen to Oneida again.

Anywho, a success story was a band called Appliance, who I’m sure you all remember from the beginning of this cursed millennium. He said to me that he couldn’t believe he’d missed them as he was well into that type of music then and he was familiar with all their contemporaries yet Appliance completely passed him by.

I feel somewhat that way about Nova Express, who I now know to have been around at that time too, though I didn’t then. And whilst I’m not going to claim that my journey into repetition and minimalism was complete by that time, it had certainly started and I’m convinced I would have done the listening equivalent of feasting on this stuff.

Be that as it may, I know it now, and I know it gladly.

Autotelia – I

I love this album whenever I listen to it, but it’s bang on perfect for these semi-hypnagogic states that my first couple of hours of each day tends to be.

This is that kind of mellow motorik kosmiche type music that is just totally trance inducing. An altered state all by itself.

I understand one half of Autotelia is no longer with us, which is very sad. This is some legacy, however.

Thee Telepaths – The Velvet Lounge

I have something in common with Thee Telepaths. I’ve also recorded music at Far Heath recording Studios. I did it with the old blues band I was in. We recorded a demo. It is a marvellous place to record music, surrounded by fields, devilishly difficult to find, lovely spacious vibe.

Bit like this music, really. Music that is also dense. Difficult trick to pull off, but they do it well. My only nark is that they’ve split what is essentially 3 long tunes into separate pieces which mean that when you listen digitally – as I have to – you get a gap at what seem like quite arbitrary intervals.

As someone who has no intention of ever buying a vinyl player due to not having money to waste on relics of our imperial greatness (face it, people, it’s over), I get rather annoyed by the snobbery shown towards those of us who focus on the digital music.

Sula Bassana – Brainwash

The funny thing about working from home is that when you have a ‘holiday’ and then return to work, it feels… weird. Still, it was some kind of normal in a way – I had 473 emails awaiting. Most were on librarian lists debating various librarian things, which I’ll have you know is not at all uninteresting. I dare you to disbelieve me.

Well, maybe they’re a bit uninteresting.

Still, there were a significant amount require that I actually do stuff, usually involving spreadsheets. Thank the lord or whoever it is you usually thank for the always reliable Sula Bassana, he of Electric Moon, and his almost neverending plethora of mighty music adding to his/their bandcamp.

I’m sure its just as good without editing spreadsheets. (I hope he uses that as a quote…)

 

Solar Corona – Saint​-​Jean​-​de​-​Luz

That Julius Gabriel fella just keeps on delivering, no?

There aren’t many artists that predominantly produce instrumental music who nevertheless keep me interested. It’s a very difficult approach to music to do consistently well (albeit quite easy to adopt a phone-it-in approach). Whatever well he’s tapped, it is one deep well. I was very regularly feeling that ecstatic feeling I get when I listen to music that is so perfectly put together that it could be thought of as a self contained universe in its own right, albeit – and not actually paradoxically – also open-ended. Like life.

As is always the case when I sit down to do a post, my words dry up and lose any sparkle that I might have thought they had when they raced around my head. It’s not all bad, though. Just press play and enter the trance enfolded into the music – all the sparkle you’ll need is there. And we all need sparkle in these times.

 

 

Verstärker -Aktivität

In order to ignore the woes of the cricket for, ooh, some seconds, let’s type a random paragraph that bears no relation to the almost indescribable music that this post is bringing to your attention.

Of course, using the word ‘indescribable’ is in fact a description of sorts, albeit a meaningless one. Much like most music reviews (/snark).

1000 monkeys at a typewriter, etc. Dancing about architecture and all that.

Having said that, one of my posts that was filled with non-sequiturs when I was going through that phase of copying stuff out of my ramblings document was quoted on the release of that artists next release on his Bandcamp page by his record company. Now, to post that album I feel obliged to find another bunch of such ramblings. Takes my mind off the cricket, I suppose (all out for 67! Fucking woeful!)

Culto al Qondor – Electricidad

I just noted the time and the second day of the Ashes is about to start, plus my tea break is probably up now, so I really should just get on with it.

Funny sport, cricket. More of a game, really, but then people have actually died doing it. Does that make it a sport? I mean, people possibly die during games of chess, too, if they drag on long enough.  Would that make it a sport? Do mayflies play chess?

Or is the risk of dying not enough to make something a sport? I should just look in a dictionary and see if the definition of sport is something along the lines of ‘a leisure activity that contains risk of death.’ After all, this would then rule out politics, war, commuting, etc from being considered sports.

But then, there are people who think that the entire ‘life’ thing is just a game (usually rich people who don’t value other human beings very much) – what if they’re right? Ugghh. And with that I’m off to see if England collapse as predictably as they have been doing recently in tests.

Vago Sagrado – Vol. III

The theme for this week is buses, as I have a week off work just because. This means I get to ride many more buses than usual.

The first of this weeks buses comes from Santiago, Chile, a country rightly famous for Follakzoid and also for sounding like a cold place whilst simultaneously  sounding like one of my very favourite hot foods of all time. Almost all of my stir fries have chopped chillies in them. I particlarly like the ones called Birds Eye Chillis though they do not look like birds eyes, or even mass produced frozen food. Maybe a native of Santiago would find my attempted humour even less funny than my usual peer group do.

This is what comes of looking at many buses.

So this bus has a picture of some old ruins on the front. I don’t know what to make of them. Nothing, I suppose. They’re ruins. Let them be. Let them fade with all those other failed constructs from past times and spaces, a reminder of something you never knew in the first place.

This bus sounds like it’s motoring along smoothly, and the journey it takes you on is a pleasant one. It doesn’t get in your face with how much of a good bus it is, it just drives along at an appropriate speed for the environment in which it travels through.

I heartily recommend this bus to all who would take a bus journey.