Although that there image you see is a picture of yer actual cassette, I suspect such a thing is not available to us now as the page itself only sells the digital album. I don’t have a working tape player anyway.
THis is quite earlier in his career but I heard one of the tunes on a show that Bokeh Versions did which took me to the album, and this did really impress me, it did. I think this may be the first artist to whom you can apply the term ‘glacial’ that I have posted here. I may be wrong; my memory tends to be less reliable these days.
So it’s dark, cavernous dub/dubstep/dubtech/dub techno/ambient dub (call it what you will) and it knows where its groove is, particularly in the latter half.
I have occasionally listened to some of his other works and they’ve always intrigued me. I think this may be the prod to dive in a bit deeper.
So my epic wishlist on Bandcamp has exploded since I re-discovered online radio late last year, but every now and again I need to remind myself of the stuff that’s been on there for absolutely ages.
So I was listening to the radio show that Golden Ratio Frequencies do, and it wasn’t doing a lot for me. It was full of the more new-age-bromide-y ambient music that I ultimately find a bit cloying. So I went to the aforementioned wishlist and scrolled right down to look for stuff that had been there ages and that I couldn’t really remember what it was, and I saw this, so I clicked on it and pressed play.
And got turned into a monged out vegetable. This is a very powerful piece of immersive and rather intense drone. I love it.
And then I noticed this was on the Golden Ratio Frequencies label, and I suspect is the man who does Golden Ratio Frequencies himself, who also is part of the Gnod family. They get everywhere!
When I was doing my Music Tech course those oh so many moons ago, one of our tutors did a quick demo of Steve Reich’s Clapping Music and got me to be the second person. It took hella concentration but it was really cool to do. I have, subsequently to the course, always retained a soft spot for Reich’s works (along with Terry Riley), so when I saw this I had to have a listen.
Despite the brevity of the EP, it is a fully immersive listen. I’ve moved my little studio around just a bit which has changed my speaker orientation to what I think is probably absolute perfection and as a result I can sink in to the music much deeper. Trancey works like this are, therefore, absolute heaven.
There’s about 10 shows I listen to regularly that make my wishlist increase every time, and so much enjoyment am I having going through their old shows that I haven’t actually listened to the full albums in question yet…
So I did this one, and despite it being at the more expensive end of the digital albums available, I’m still seriously considering bumping this to the head of the queue. It ticks all those buttons that make music conducive to catatonia, I mean, it’s trancey as all fuck.
This is one of those albums where you actually can just refer to each track by its number. I mean, the whole thing works as a cohesive whole, but say you wanted to highlight, say, track 5, you don’t have to worry about remembering the title.
There may be a whole academic treatise available to someone in this observation – back when I bought vinyl, I used to know the name of every song on every album I bought, same with tapes. Once I moved into CDs, that became slightly less perfect. Now I’m digital only, I struggle to remember song names at all until I’ve heard them about 20 times unless the name jumps out, and that’s just the albums in English. Quantity may have something to do with it, but there’s something else at play as well. I remember reading some while back the suggestion that human memory started to atrophy with the advent of writing because before we could write things down somewhere we needed to have epic memories in order to remember things. As the amount of storage for memory has increased over the years, with books and then TV/Film, and then digital with all dem server farms, so we don’t need to remember anything any more, we can all just look it up. And then forget what we just looked up. Did someone say progress?
Anyway, ignore my ramblings and listen to the music.
This one came from the bandcamp feed, someone I follow had bought it and I salute them. They have impeccable taste.
Looking at the blurb, there is a connection to the wonderful Haress, but there is very little similarity between their sound and this. This comes under umbrella term of ‘jazz that I like,’ which is a small but growing field. I think ‘jazz that I like’ is where jazz meets psych, drone, groove and repetition. In fact, any genre that has a party in that area will probably do it for me.
This fella’s catalogue needs exploring, I feel. Just as well I haven’t got much else to listen to at the mo… oh, wait…
And also, this is the first time I have used ‘Middlesborough’ as a geographical tag.
This was in my Bandcamp wishlist for years, literally. I finally bought it a couple of months back after playing it again, and it has done seriously hard labour on my speakers since then.
I want to type the phrase ‘Marlene used to be in Gnod’ because I haven’t seen her listed on their more recent stuff. BUT – you listen to Faca do Inberno on this here album, and then you listen to Faca de Fogo from Gnod’s recent collaboration with João Pais Filipe and you tell me that the one isn’t a proto-type for the other. Go on. Can’t do it, can you? So maybe she’s still in Gnod.
I will never, ever, in my life consider myself a jazz fan. That said, this blog has featured contributions from Valerio Cosi (regularly), Fire! Orchestra, Pharoah Sanders and The Comet is Coming, all of whom hail from the jazz corner of the room we call the musical world (and that’s just off the top of my head – if I wasn’t too lazy to search, I imagine I’d find quite a few more).
And now we can add Run Logan Run, a duo from the ever fertile metropolis of Bristol. I listened to three of their releases so far and this is my favourite but I like them all.
Of the names mentioned above, I suppose the nearest reference point is The Comet is Coming; certainly, they have that contemporary take on their material which makes it not just jazz, there’s loads more to it than that. It’s a good maelstrom to completely lose yourself in.
This is a lockdown album, which is making me feel a bit lazy, as loads of artists have put out lockdown albums now, and my two or three are still being faffed over (albeit I did quietly re-record 6 albums and replace the previous versions on Bandcamp). The first is nearly done though.
Whereby ‘Success’ is defined as doing what you do really, really well. By me, at least. And this album lives up to the title.
My love for Oneida – which I still don’t know how you pronounce – is a long-lasting one. One of my very favourite pieces of music ever is ‘Sheets of Easter.’ One of my very favourite albums ever made is ‘Rated O.’ These boys have form, and here do they bring it.
Stylistically, this is more like their early, garagey stuff, kind of a return to earth from their incredibly out-there explorations in the post ‘Rated O’ era.
Million Brazilians is probably a better artist name than Three People in Maine. There may be those who don’t like surprises, though, so I feel it only fair to warn you that a) they are (probably) not Brazilian and b) there are not a million of them.
This is an early album by them. All their subsequent ones, except for one I found on Juno Download, can only be listened to in excerpts and I’m not one to buy things I’ve only heard excerpts from. The excerpts do sound good, but I’d need to be better off than I am before I start buying things I’ve only heard excerpts from.
There may be genre descriptors relevant here but if there are they are words I am yet to hear. This album sort of vaguely puts me in mind of 936-era Peaking Lights, but only sort of vaguely. Track 2 is frankly legendarily good. It’s vaguely tribal, I suppose, vaguely jazzy, vaguely soundtrack-to-a-film-that-doesn’t-existy, vaguely trancey, vaguely droney, and very good.
I’m probably the last person to comment on the incongruity of artist name versus album title. I actually have nothing useful to say, other than that, to me, the combination is incongruous.
Meh. Regardless, the album is really rather good, and by really rather good, I mean excellent. My only minor quibble is that the short pieces are good enough ideas in their own right to be fleshed out further than they are, but as long as they’re good, right? Right.
The longer pieces are well trancey, which is something I’ve rattled on about loads before so I won’t again, except to say that if you want to lose youself in some monging drone, then this here is for you.
I actually meant to post this the other day with those other two posts I did, but my mind went blank. There was also another one too, but that isn’t actually released til the 23rd of this month and you all know how I feel about posting stuff that isn’t actually available yet. I’ll try and remember on the 23rd.
Soundbergs 