What I’ve been most focused on, listening-wise, this past week:
(1) Monolake’s Ballooning Sound-Art Career: The man behind Monolake, which is to say the man behind much of what came to be known as minimal techno, is Robert Henke. And like any solo artist who inhabits a pseudonym, Henke is of two minds. Broadly speaking, the more beat-driven work that emanates from his studio is attributed to Monolake, and the more atmospheric gets filed under his own, given name. But as with anyone accustomed to multiple personalities, two modes of cultural participation haven’t proven sufficient for Henke, who has in recent years been expanding beyond electronic music — and into sound art.
The latest document of his gallery and museum work defines itself precisely as a document. It is titled Atom/Document, and it consist of nine tracks that exemplify the sorts of sounds one might hear if one attends the performance installation work, Atom, which he produced with artist Christopher Bauder. Atom is an eight-by-eight grid of helium balloons, each containing an LED, and each with its motion controlled by a computer. Henke’s music follows and pushes the balloons according a set of self-constraining rules: Anything percussive must trigger an LED, for example.
Of course, this is not a DVD, but a CD — just the sound, though what sound it is. “[First_Contact]” has repetitive piano parts amid clinking percussion; “[_Convex]” verges into that subset of white noise that’s either freeway or surf, or both; and “[_Flicker],” just to point to one more example, has the expansive dynamism of the final moments of some grand Hollywood epic, all wavering rumbles, but the drama is restrained by a sense that whatever is occurring is doing so at some significant distance — if the remixed metal of Godflesh perfected the “avalanche on pause,” then these are thunderstorms at a remove.
Speaking of acknowledged distance, each track on Atom/Document has brackets as part of the title, as if to say, “This is just a part of the whole.” For that’s what it is — just the sound, not the vision. And while this is a Henke, not a Monolake, outing, there is plenty of rhythm. It seems that Henke has found a percussive palette all his own, less echoed, less subterranean than Monolake’s, more alive with precision and counterpoint.
There are beautiful still shots (along with a video) of Atom in action at monolake.de, such as this one, of Henke and Bauder at play in the field of their making:
(2.) Quiet Noise from the UK: The choice Disquiet Downstream entry of last week is an in-studio recording by Baraclough, the UK-based trio of Paul de Casparis, Dale Cornish, and Eddie Nuttall. Together they build noisy latticeworks from little more than squiggly rumbles, choked static, rhythmic shorthand, gray drones, and other modest noises (disquiet.com).
(1) The X-Ecutioner Looks Back: Now, DJ Rob Swift‘s album Dust to Dust doesn’t have the swagger or intensity of his recent trio effort — the group Ill Insanity, which teamed him with DJs Total Eclipse and Precision, and debuted early last year with Ground Xero — but the set’s 17 tracks of old-school breaks is tasty, rich with surf rock, r&b, and more stripped-down percussion than you can shake your maracas at. And, for fun, the titles of the songs read in sequence as a sentence, which serves as the project’s manifesto: “Dust,” “To,” “Dust,” “Is,” “A,” “Collection,” “Of,” “Breaks,” “Inspired,” “By,” “The,” “B,” “Boy,” “Movement,” “Of,” “The,” “1970s.”
(2) South Boston’s Slow Burn: In what would make a good double feature with Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, director Brian Goodman’s What Doesn’t Kill You is small film about small-time hoods (both movies share a lead actor in Ethan Hawke), a group of South Boston thugs whose criminal pursuits unfold against an excellent score by Alex Wurman (Criminal, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind). Wurman brings an understated sensibility to the narrative, but manages to infuse it with enough melody to be true to the drama without edging it into melodrama. Especially strong are a “What Doesn’t Kill You” suite, built from minimal piano, sour strings, and tiny little sonic details that bring a tension-building undercurrent of gears that would benefit from a little oil. (The set is reportedly due for release directly to iTunes on the same label, Yari, that brought out Cliff Martinez’s music for First Snow.)
(1) Holmes Between Features: There’s a whole lotta pop on The Holy Pictures, the new full-length from David Holmes, the DJ better known as the composer of scores for films, many of them by Steven Soderbergh (Out of Sight, the Ocean’s trio). For example, both the album’s title cut and its “I Heard Wonders,” the latter of which opens the set, could be some dopey post-Bauhaus, pre-My Bloody Valentine lushness. That depiction holds also for the instrumental stuff on Pictures, like the upbeat, ’80s kick of “Melanie.” Fans of his scores will take comfort in the more atmospheric instrumentals, cuts like “The Ballad of Sarah and Jack,” “Hey Maggy,” and “Theme/I.M.C.” — all of them are heavy on melody, but are still more savory than sugary. And then there’s one truly serious expanse of sound design: “Birth,” Holy Pictures‘s penultimate cut, a thrillingly slow run of tide-pool placidity that briefly rouses itself, as if reflecting some brilliant object flying overhead.
(2) Rust Never Sleeps, the Remix: The Oxide that serves as the title to the recent album by Chop Shop, on the 23five label, is no figment, no metaphor, no mere familiar nod to natural, organic dissolution in our age of cold, digital meditation. It’s all too real, this oxidation. The title refers to the “damage. decay. loss.” — as the brief liner note puts it — that came to an archive of old audio tape belonging to Chop Shop, a pseudonym of sound artist Scott Konzelmann. To rectify the destruction by accident, time, and neglect, Konzelmann dove into the ruins of his archive, not to reconstruct the original material (it wasn’t, one imagines, salvageable) but to appreciate those ruins in their own right and on their own terms. The result is a CD consisting of one single track, divided into distinct segments of droning, noisy static that are the true sound of audio damage. There is white noise that sounds like the gaping maw of some malevolent spirit, and wisps of ether that are as soothing as an afternoon breeze. The lesson is clear, the passing of time brings both sorrow and comfort. That the album progresses from the desolate to the refined, from noise to quietude, suggests that Konzelmann has made peace with his loss. If nothing else, it has proven, as a result of this stark recording, to be our gain.
(3) Old Time Beats: Just last week (
In last Sunday’s New York Times, Jon Caramanica’s “The Mining of Hip-Hop’s Golden Age” covered a slew of newer bands aping the old sound (
(1) The seven tracks on Sand (Touch) by Philip Jeck were recorded live, but what the music consists of is all pre-recorded. These are no mere mash-ups, mind you. Jeck is about as far from the kaleidoscopic party music of a Girl Talk or a DJ Z-Trip as a DJ could find himself. The layers of music on Sand, as in much of Jeck’s work, are the result of atmospheric loops of manipulated turntables. Be sure to check out the ecstatic “Fanfares,” in which clips of orchestral grandeur (reportedly sourced from Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s “Fanfare for the Common Man”) echo into the distance as the reverberations gather enough richness to overcome the evident record scratches. Also worth spending time immersed in is the album’s “Residue,” a rice-paper-thin extension of light crackles and nearly sub-aural drones, with occasional, scene-changing alterations in volume and density.
(2) In our age of malleable media, listening habits can, at times, be less like playlists and more like recipes. Right now, my favorite recipe is as follows: the instrumental track of rapper Aceyalone‘s (aka Eddie Hayes of Freestyle Fellowship) “To the Top” (a single from last year, backed with “Jungle Muzik”), its naked Bo Diddley beat dropped to 70bpm, run through the Automaton plug-in (from the folks at Audio Damage) via Ableton Live, with Automaton’s Replicate function picking up random segments, glitching ’em all to hell, and repeating them at unexpected intervals atop the original.
(4) A little off topic, Metallica‘s Death Magnetic is, easily, the band’s best album since 1991, when Metallica (aka “the black one,” aka “the one with ‘Enter Sandman,'” metal’s closest approximation of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which Nirvana released barely a month later) hit stores. It isn’t just the return to Ride the Lightning-era riffs, thanks to judicious production by Rick Rubin, that makes the album. It’s that those riffs are often the majority of a given song, meaning Metallica has put the straightforward pop structures of Load, ReLoad, and St. Anger behind them. On Death Magnetic, which opens with a heartbeat reminiscent of … And Justice for All‘s “One,” those riffs churn with a bare-bones aggression, which means that rock’s equivalent to grinding gears are, for the moment, a mainstream sound. Yes, it would be great to hear more of Earth/Sunn O)))’s drone-metal in Metallica, and maybe some touches of Godflesh/Drumcorp-style digitally chopped’n’screwed beats, but simply for having taken the band back in time, Rubin has secured Metallica’s future. (Maybe we’ll be treated to some remixes?) I was in LAX a year or so ago, my plane delayed, and while wandering the mostly deserted halls, I ran into, of all people, Metallica’s lead singer, James Hetfield. I’d interviewed the band’s loquacious drummer, Lars Ulrich, on several occasions, but had never spoken with Hetfield before. I approached him, and he eagerly joined in conversation about working with Rubin (production was already well under way, and Rubin’s involvement was pubic knowledge). When I mentioned the great work Rubin had done with Slayer and Johnny Cash, Hetfield’s agreement was clear, but when I mentioned his then recent work with Neal Diamond, something changed, and he sort of closed down. The conversation was over. At the time, I figured that he took offense at being reminded that Rubin had resuscitated the reputation of the 1960s and ’70s singer’s recording career, as if Metallica had anything in common with that lovably cornball folk-pop — or he took it as a suggestion that Metallica needed something approaching resuscitation, which it did. But now it’s clear that Rubin did exactly the same thing with Metallica he’d done with Diamond and with Cash: located the place deep in the back catalog when the music still mattered, and then convinced the musicians to meet him there. (Maybe he can revisit the Beastie Boys now, and re-awaken the true old-school, tape-loop-based hip-hop production?)
Thomas Fehlmann‘s self-deflatingly titled Visions of Blah (Kompakt) is about half standard-issue, if masterfully textured, techno: all loungey backbeats and gentle grooves. But then there are the surprises, like the churning, gurgling, dastardly noise of “Rainbow Over Stadtautobahn” and the almost embarrassingly lush “Boheme Rouge,” on which layers upon layers of string samples, all as substantial as cotton candy but without a hint of sugar, summon up a cloud of epic proportions (save for density, which approaches zero), just in time for Fehlmann to undercut the elegant ether with an increasingly prevalent series of glitchy interruptions, which changes the whole tenor of the piece. Those two tracks alone are worth the price of entry.
In advance of his Absolute Value (Fat Beats) album, under-appreciated rapper Akrobatic released an eight-song Absolute taster EP — four tracks off the 14-song Absolute Value, along with their underlying instrumentals, each of which is a superb slice of studio-honed funk. Though each of the four are by different producers — “Be Prepared” (9th Wonder), “A to the K” (Illmind), “Put Ya Stamp On It” (the late J Dilla), “Beast Mode” (DJ Fakts One) — they share enough interests to make them work as a whole, including a rigorous emphasis on stripped-bare production and the employment of strings and old-school samples. “A to the K” has the heaviest bass line of the batch, and along with it some moody orchestration out of a blaxploitation epic. “Be Prepared” uses a warped r&b moan as its hook, to fun effect. “Beast Mode” is admirably monocular, just this ominously heavy beat, lightened with a bit of syncopation, a kind of considered response to the momentum of NERD.’s hit “She Wants to Move.” And the true keeper is Dilla’s “Put Ya Stamp On It,” which pushes tightly wound strings, all plucked and sawed, against lickety split drums; if a contemporary music ensemble like So Percussion or Alarm Will Sound were to do a hip-hop covers album, this is what it would sound like.
Former Talking Head lead singer David Byrne is busier than ever — with his musical building in lower Manhattan having just come to a close (