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Tag Archives: voice

Grouper Takes Dead Moon’s “Demona” Literally

A punk favorite goes through the ambient pulper

Grouper has covered an old punk-rock song. Grouper has channeled has an old punk-rock song into something akin to a deep drone. Grouper has accomplished this task not by undermining the original but, in fact, showing it deep respect — by, in essence, taking the song’s lyrics literally, especially the lines about how the title figure “comes in shallow light and disappears” and, later, the cryptic vision of a “silent chamber.” The song, “Demona” by Dead Moon, is in her rendering (Grouper is one person: Liz Harris) a deeply fuzzed out figment, less a song than the song equivalent of the illusion of water that results from hot tarmac being viewed at a distance on a sunny day. The melody and chord structure and overall shape are retained, but they’re produced in a way that makes the term “shoegaze” insufficient — this is “shoehaze” or “shoedrone” or “songdrone” or what-does-it-matter because trying to place the song in a tidy box is very much at odds with the ephemeral quality of the sound that it aspires to (MP3). It sounds like you’re hearing it through a thick wall. It isn’t wall-of-sound; it’s wall-as-filter.

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The track was made available for free download by Yeti, the magazine in whose latest issue it appears as part of an enclosed 7″ (along with three other songs, apparently not available for free promotional download).

Found via xlr8r.com and thefader.com. More on Grouper at her site. The original can be heard on youtube.com. It is redolent with a particular quality of guitar playing, one that is at once lackadaisical and jarring, and is distinct to a certain realm of non-hardcore punk

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The Long Listen (MP3)

Free MP3: French duo's extended improvisation

The so-called “long read” is a symptom of our time. It isn’t called the “considered read,” because anything, long or short, can be read with determination and attention. And it isn’t called the “long write,” because for one thing short pieces can take longer to write than do long ones, and for another phrases like “long read” are more likely to take root as common utterance if they flatter the audience.

In any case, the concept of a long read begs the question, What is a “long listen”? Arguably, the thing doesn’t exist — at least not as a willfully anomalous media form. Long-format is the longstanding format for music, in the mode of the full-length recording. Even if the “album” is fading in favor of individual songs, the fact remains that the majority of those songs are still being released as part of a larger parcel. Most singles are still tails trying, in vain perhaps, to wag a full-length dog. In other words, while long reads stand out as peculiar objects in our written-soundbite time, music continues to appear on the market in a manner that is inherently time-consumptive.

And that’s speaking of commercial music. In experimental improvisational music, the long performance is the norm. Pieces often veer toward the realm of an hour in length, in order to give the musicians space to get lost in. Take Crash Duo, a French duo, whose “Crash au Pôle” recently appeared on the netlabel Amplified Music Pollution, which is based in Guadalajara, México. It’s a sprawling work, moving from spare techno dread, through guitar-drenched reverb, to freeform space of broken radio signals, to folktronic reverie (MP3). It’s to the piece’s credit that it manages to both retain a certain dub flavor throughout, and still wander through impressively varied subsections. Crash Duo consists of Orléans-based Ayato, who plays “prepared guitar, cassettes, turntable, sanza,” and Paris-based Anton Mobin, who plays “prepared chamber, tape head, cassettes, radio, axololt,” and whose name looks like a play on Amon Tobin.

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Track originally posted at archive.org and amp-recs.com. More on Crash Duo at crashduo.blogspot.com, on Ayato at ayato-sn1984.blogspot.com, and on Mobin at antonmobin.blogspot.com.

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‘The Search Engine’ Is Complete

Free MP3: Ninja Tune stalwart on his redeployment

The Search Engine is the first album from Strictly Kev, Ninja Tune regular (and the label’s art director), in over a decade. Recording as DJ Food, Kev welcomed guests Matt Johnson (The The) and J.G. Thirwell (Foetus), among others, to the project. In an extensive podcast interview, hosted by the label, he talked about the intersection of sampling and songwriting. “The phrase ‘keep it real’ in hip-hop just makes me despair,” he said, expressing no interest in sonic reality and everything in a studio-production basis for the manipulation of sound and for the construction of tunes (the file is available not as an MP3 but as a sizable M4A). He also discusses the complexity of working under the name DJ Food, since it has been used by various people over the course of the history of Ninja Tune Records. And there’s plenty of music from the record. More on his Search Engine album at ninjatune.net. And while on the subject, here’s an interview with DJ Food from back in 1997, when that name was employed not by Kev but by Ninja’s Patrick Carpenter: “Anatomy of a Remix.”

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Hairshirt Industrial (MP3)

The tribal, droning, fuzzy beats of Would-Be Messiahs‘ “Broken Teeth (Small Rock Movement)” move steadily between past and present as they proceed forward. The monotone quality, the prevalent white noise, the whip-fast sonic artifacts, are all quite of the moment, drawing from the danker realms where dub and techno intersect uneasily albeit with mutual benefit. Yet the track’s overall aura, especially the abraded spoken snippet (“Why? Why is this all so painful?”) and the willfully plodding beat, are all hairshirt industrial music from the 1990s, the heavily burdened vibe of Consolidated having come particularly to mind. The result is a song that for all its blissful stasis seems to undergo broader temporal phase shifts as reference points cycle by.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/would-be-messiahs. More on the Messiahs, aka John Ryan, at unlessyougotlostonpurpose.blogspot.com.

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Sonic Incense from Antwerp (MP3)

The music that comprises Dhūpa, the new release by Dirk Driesen under the name BpOlar, brings rich texture to dark tones. The effect is appropriate for an album named for the word, in Hindi, for incense. The sounds are ritualistic and dread-inducing, and while the effect is monastic, the feel is entirely modern. Here, by way of example, is the second of its four tracks, “Nag Champa,” which mixes industrial drones, field recordings of uncertain provenance, and distorted verbal communication (MP3). Get the full set feedbacklooplabel.blogspot.com at and archive.org. More on Driesen/BpOlar, who is based in Antwerp, Belgium, at soundcloud.com/bpolar and his mac.com page.

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