Mountain Man - "Sun Dog" (Underwater Peoples) EP

"All of them, all of them have pushed into the air"

The truth is that this record is absolutely beautiful. The other truth is that it was overshadowed by the release of the full-length LP "Made the Harbor" on Partisan. All the songs on "Sun Dog" are on "Made the Harbor" but they are recorded quite differently. Instead of drawing a comparison between the two records, I'm just going to talk about this one. The voices of Amelia, Alex and Molly come across through my speaker with the utmost clarity and texture. I can hear each one of them singing as individuals - which makes the collective sound (they sing all of their songs together, with idiosyncratic harmonies sweeping through each other) wonderfully rich. The sound of their voices is less "bell-toned" then dust, chalk and wood. Each word is distinct here. The friction breaks in an instant and a gust of song blooms. And silence explodes just as quickly.

Mountain Man formed at Bennington College a couple of years ago. Their story has been written about all over the place recently so I'm not going to cover it again here. This NPR interview does a good job though. The group consists of three women who sing songs about nature, sexuality, fear, hope and a sensation that can only be described as "summer in Bennington".

The Sun Dog record, released on Underwater Peoples last month, rescues into delicate oblivion of word and sound. "Let us sing a song to thee, oh my sweet honeybee. You are the one we've been waiting for. You are the dark, you are the buoy." Naked with chance from new voices singing old songs. Songs that don't exist but in the bodies of folks and family. From supple sexy pouting (Dog Song) to majestic yearning (Animal Tracks), this record delivers quite a range of material - sonically, lyrically, and spiritually.

All of those beloved traditionally American musical influences can be heard loud and clear. Sacred Harp, Lomax et al., The Carter Family, etc... And then you also have some Shirley Collins and a bunch of more contemporary influences like Joanna Newsom and Bjork. At the end of the day though, it is just Alex, Molly and Amelia in the Blue House singing and falling in love with each other. Emma is in the kitchen, Drew is at Mightyfood. Later we'll go to Paran.

It is very difficult for me to find the song that I am most taken by. Perhaps because each one feels so completely immersive and inescapable. All of the songs here are free. They drop reference point without hesitation, throw arms open completely, and quiver undying with crazy affirming surrender. Yes. That said, I would highly encourage a close listening of "Mouthwings", the first track on Side B. The version on this record is stunning. In fact, it is worth buying the record for.

Very limited edition of 300 pressed on 180 gram blue/green marble vinyl. Only available at Underwater Peoples and on tour. Artwork by Alex. Get it here.

Spine Scavenger - "Plays the Writings of Commander X" (Hanson) CS

Spine Scavenger (appropriately) comes at Commander X from a military point of view -- more or less claiming that he knows where the greys -- those small, nasty, aliens -- have made their homes. Some of their underground bases are located in the vast synthesized tunnel systems, while others are side by side with the underground facilities being shared with the New World Order* or Secret Government. This is an important addition to the ever-increasing library of subsurface material on subsurface activity.

*aka: generation of total blast-off from order-structure-structure : 1:2:2:1:2:2

After listening to this cassette, I became paranoid. I didn't realize it at first (which I guess is normal with paranoia) but after a while it became increasingly clear that I was not perceiving everyday anxieties normally anymore. They had become more like invasive psychic species, paranormal free radicals, here to convert and abduct me from the inside.

This hour long tape feels like slowly, but frantically ascending acu-pressure up your back, toward your skull. It is slow-burn, long-term dark infusion for real.

Spine Scavenger is Aaron Dilloway (former member of Wolf Eyes). Deep in the muck now. Remember that time we spotted Charles Burltiz off the coast of the 4th tip-center of the Bermuda triangulation vortex? Chuck leaned outta his UFO and strangled out a big "what-up" to the homies going about their confusing lives down below. We were still between earth and sky then. Thank you Spine Scavenger for liberating us, showing us that we are truly free beings. We are grateful for having our spines ripped out. How else would we realize our loose nature?

Highly recommended!! As Dilloway says on the Hanson Recs site, this is ambient.

Get it here: HANSON RECORDS

Schurt Kwitters - "Schurt Kwitters" (Open Mouth) LP

Offered here is a solo effort from Fat Worm's Jess Goddard. Goddard is the performative punctum of that band, dressing up in fantastic shape-shifting costumes at shows (often changing between several different ones throughout a set) and wiggling around amidst the rest of the band (who are all also wiggling usually) while conjuring up and laying down vocals from various subconscious realms.

Goddard's sounds, and structural creativity on this record however, reveal a patience and a discernability amidst the disregard and playfulness that so fortunately characterize Fat Worm as a group and Goddard's role within it in particular. This record feels concentrated and crafted. It is wonderfully stripped back, and full of energy all over the place.

Goddard has worked her way into the circuitry of her sewing machine(s?) and in conjunction with parts of analog synth boxes, manufactures all the sounds on this record. The variable pulse of sewing machine (in addition to whatever mods it is making on circuits of synthesis) is quite apparent throughout side A. It provides rhythm, cycles and a whole range of percussive opportunities which Jess explores thoroughly. The opening section rides along atop a minimal acid-houseish pulse of fat clip static. Small, manageable space-craft pass by each other and wave. Tone here, tone there, teleport. Next piece. A high pitch test whistle is blown from near and far before the seasons change. Autumn patchwork counting and "lets go look underneath these dead leaves" danger. Abduction. Still running - the machine. Etc... Water-soaked woodblocks like lonely buchla mods trying to find their way back to the family crawl, stumble, fall - it's a penetrating needlecraft massacre.

Intentionally or not, Goddard is raising ideas about domesticity, arts and crafts, utility, industrialization, gender, and agression. I would be curious to hear her thoughts on these associations.

Side B: Some silences surround tid bits of wisp-sound-wrangling to start, before making the move for more drilling territory. Sewing-machine ins and outs, static anticipations (that grow into chants), and vague erased and neglected melodies trying to be heard bundle up in short spontaneous compositions throughout the side. Eventually the material settles on a very satisfying, if not a little hesitant, slow cooker jam of sorts - interpolated by quick sew-burning and high-end analog whistling. The side ends quite beautifully, and I just want more and more.

Originally released in 2008 as a tape on Open Mouth, the Northampton based label run by Bill Nace.

Beautiful b/w screen printed collage packaging. Edition of 200. One time pressing. Get it while you can.

Keith Fullerton Whitman - "Generator" (Root Strata) CS

Jammed it long and hard with my bros last night. Interrupted by a flight cancellation phone call which resulted in my flight being rescheduled to later in the day. Needless to say, the long, hard jamming resumed. On the plane to Chicago now. From there I'll continue westward to Portland for a little over a week. Really looking forward to picking up some music there.
Lots of new stuff to review. Things have been pretty crunchy lately with the end of term here at the ol' skool. TIme to get back to it:

The first up is a relatively new tape from Keith Fullerton Whitman, synthhead extraordinaire, experimental & electronic music encyclopedia, and founder of Mimaroglu Music a vast resource of interesting music and non-music alike with one of the nicest merchant websites around. "Generator" is a selection of seven pieces recorded and composed last fall with Whitman's unique hybrid analogue/ digital modular synthesizer system.

"I have long been obsessed with the tenets of Process music & Systems music. These 'Generator' pieces all stem from a desire to produce an 'automatic' variant, with little in the way of 'performance' and/or any sort of mid-stream composer/ performer intervention." - Writes Keith in the blurb inside the tape.

I too have long been intrigued by the possibilities inherent in the Process music and System music credos. Actually I have been thinking about it a lot lately. I have been dreaming about systems that reach a certain level of internal complexity (a bunch of things all modulating, triggering, constraining each other) such that they grow and shift in ways that are utterly impossible to predict ahead of time (as in too many possible outcomes to even generate a list of probabilities). "Machine Music" as Keith calls it. Or labeled otherwise: "Frankenstein Music".

This tape is very exciting. Right away (with "Generator 1") we are placed in modular cruise nowhere mode. Hot and cold layers together - mixed up in a bubbling brew of syntha-fresca. Super fresca. I can't help being reminded of the first time that I listened to 'Music for 18 Musicians'. Whitman's constructions definitely evoke the cascading repetitiousness of minimalist composers like Reich, but his vibe is decidedly one-guy-in-a-room-full-of-music-machine. It is stripped back-er, genuinely spontaneous, much more unpredictable than those guys. He is working with much less actually. At times the frequency variation is closer to the micro-tonal mappings of Percy Grainger than the tight, yet expansive gushings of Reich or Glass. All of this is to say that his sound comes just as much (if not more)(yeah definitely more) from the academic computer science legacy(s) than the minimalist composer set.

The second side opens onto an impossibly pure-toned panning and half cycle exercise. The sounds here come across as inevitable, the variations necessary. It sounds like circuit therapy - the oscillators are working through some serious drama. But in the end, the particulars drift away and the send-recieve-send-receive message becomes transcendent. There is no hesitation here; no forced significance. This stuff just sort of grows from the deep end of a neglected swimming pool somewhere in Somerville or Newton. Hypnosis sets in quickly on this side and Morpheus rules with an iron fist. There is no making sense of what is going on; we are in zoner-ville now and it is very difficult to escape.

The blissful tone juggling does get subverted at certain moments along the way though. As Keith explains in the notes, the incidental sounds of preparations and alterations (patching etc...) have been intentionally left in. Instead of thinking of these as mistakes, Whitman embraces their quality and the connotations ("ad-hoc 'Acid' jam session") that they bring along. It is hard to place, but I suppose that this element assures me that this is not a closed system; there is in fact a man behind the curtain. ...But what distinguishes him from Oz is that Keith Fullerton Whitman is a real wizard. Only a man of magic could coax such precise and confused progressions (more like neurotic ruminations) out of a few dusty old boxes.

It is a subtle satisfaction that comes from hearing a side track or a crack in something that is (on the face of it) relatively procedural. The world of science music is usually very clean, often austere, and unfortunately often overworked. The world of 'psychedelic jam-town' - as we all know - is usually pretty under-worked, but nevertheless often expansive, emergent, and cosmic man! Perhaps one of the most enjoyable attributes of psychedelic music though, is how little there is at stake. It's easy listening chillers 1972. Take me to the valley bro. And then take some time offfffffffffffffffffffffffffff.

I don't know if meditating on these modular tunes will elevate you to a higher mind state, but you might end up meditating on the singularity that is really fucking near. This tape is nothing less than a record of the emergence of a new super-communicative species; with an ability to talk with and understand its fellow units like none before it. What if we take seriously the idea that this is music for machines? After looping it through on headphones a couple of times I am beginning to feel pretty damn programmed. But I am also in an airplane which probably doesn't help.

Smooth, rich synth lines, percussive electric sounds, spare textures and effects that seem to have leaked out somehow and sketch and dance throughout the rest of the sonic environment (which is nothing short of flocks of birds or schools of fish interacting. And then there are these wonderful excursions, after you have lost track, that take you across the land and into the old world "blow-the-battle-horn!" style. The bubbling pulse kicks it low-key-low in the mix, while these wonderfully pleasing long, triumphant tones ring out on top. Not to mention the empty parking lot jam in there. Pretty empty at one point. Overall a super tight tape. Perfect cover too.

Vic Rawlings/ Liz Tonne - "Truck Krone" (Semata Productions CS)

This split is apparently the first solo material to be released from these two (both long time members of the Boston Sound Collective). Both sides come from the same austere family, but are also very distinct from each other.

Rawlings' side listens like a to-do list of 'what is that coming out of my speaker?'. Entitled 'The Middle Of Three Days', the items delivered here are sparse, distinct, decible-defying detritus that seem to have been swept out of their pre-magnetic contexts and into the room. And there Vic's sounds appear, and appear, and appear. The stuff doesn't go anywhere, but it somehow doesn't accumulate either. Moment to moment, pieces occur in their fullness (or lack thereof) demanding the attention of the listener.

The room itself is ever present in the sonic vocabulary of this side. We hear coughing, the rustling of musical preparations, traffic (sirens) passing by outside. The result (paradoxically) is a phrasebook of sounds that seems as if they have their own agency, independent of the human being who is creating them.

Apparent in his choice to work with the circuitry of open-backed pedals, Vic seems to want the music to happen to itself, or perhaps even for it to argue with his intentions. One gets the sense that he is simultaneously 'hacking' and 'breeding' his electronics - ripping them apart in order to let them live.

Tonne's side is two pieces - 'B' and 'Arsonist' which run together into one stop and stark, extended vocal technique placement. Like Rawlings' side, Liz leaves room for the room to breathe. We hear a lot of 'other' sounds - from beginnings of beginnings to vocal pipes drying off. The result is a recording with a wonderful depth of field underlying cut cord, stutter-spurt singing that comes at you very directly. I'm sorry, did I say 'singing'?

Tonne's instrument is completely naked here. It moves, at times, to extremes and screams that push the fidelity of the tape, transforming the texture of her tones into hard brass or electronic territories. But for the most part we get to see and feel (up close) the small tensions that she is constructing. Her sounds are at once exceptionally precise and frustratingly incidental. Each short phrase lasts forever.

The material exported by the BSC (now 10 years old!) and the many projects in that projects orbit, always beckon to the ears that receive them. They put you on the spot, and elude the television zones that people have come to expect out of their excessively-stimulated sensorium. By no means a new kid on the block, this absolute way of making music is an oldie, but a goodie (at least the way that the these Boston based free-improv peeps serve it).

Black Hippies - "Laughing Sickness" (Animal Image Search CS)

Been jamming this tape a lot as of late. Two 17 year old explorers hailing from the great lakes region - Minnesota - blasting and frying their way through crucial groove after crucial groove.

Empty open metal roads toward the circle. From there you realize you left your left foot outside the vehicle before you embarked. It's a gutter-jam-fest from now on to track two (NO SUICIDE DUB). Chock full of Skaters-esque trickle-down percussion and brain mushin'. NO PARTY, enter: the vaguely worldly shaker with bloop-gone-thin but blown out synth collisions on top. The makings for a perfect i scream sunday… afternoon.

For lads as young as these ones are, they certainly have their points of contact pinned. As stated in this interview last month, they are consciously working a bunch of angles - from DNA and The Hospitals to Augustus Pablo to Nam June Paik and This Heat. Enumerating these notably because these guys are necessarily so distant from all of said artists/ bands that their connection to them is more than thread bare. That is not to say that these influences do not surface in the music - they do. And if anything, I think that the distance at which Black Hippies is associated with their antecedents makes them more compelling rather than less so.

These duders grew up in the mid-west, somehow getting their ears on a magical musical mystery history, and gleaning from it whatever they could - what they did - what we hear here. Some sort of transmission has taken place, despite the lack of a comprehensive immerger. = kosher basement jam-town.

For some reason these guys are pegged (apparently by themselves) as a "drone duo". I think - not so much. I am not trying to sort out a proper classification, but Black Hippies should not be considered comparable to any types of music where adjectives like: dense, slow-paced, or continuous are used. These guys are having much more fun than that. And the result is a tape that is a hell of a lot of fun to listen to. Lots of different zones, lots of fresh breaks of old broken potions. Perhaps most exciting of all though is the patience that is exercised here.

The tape is out on a new label called Animal Image Search - which I know nothing about, but from a glance they seem to have some cool stuff - notably a release from the swedish duo SMYCKEN.

BUY the tape! Check out the label. Support these up and coming gangsters.

Paul Flaherty & Bill Nace - "An Airless Field" (Ecstatic Peace LP)

Wow, more than a month since my last review. That's working full time at a bustling boarding school for you. Learnin' em good - yessir. This is a review that I have been meaning to post for some time now. Picked this one up from Nace at a show in Albany, NY at the Flipped Out House - aka "Helderberg House" (check out Flipped Out Recs if you haven't - especially if you live in the area). He and Flaherty put on a superb show with the Italian Jooklo Duo last month. The night ended with Virginia Genta (tenor sax) joining Bill and Paul for an all out gut ripping tumescence of brass and feedback. Killer vibes.

"An Airless Field" is a long awaited arrival from the ecstatic duo. Their last release together was a trio with Thurston Moore - which killed, of course. There is no question that these two guys are both pillars of the northeast free improv scene. The sound of Flaherty's sax bites hard into the tenor tradition of spirituals like Ayler and badasses like Brotzmann (though more on the Nipples side than the Balls), and Nace, well... fuck. = vampire belt, buddies, x.o.4, ceylon mange, nothampton wools, etc... Charms the electric gutair into many different far out territories.

The record opens with a cooled-out melodic drone from Nace that clears the space and beckons to Flaherty's tenor sax. After a minute or so Flaherty appears with a lullaby for the strong at heart, before taking the plunge.

These guys are amazingly controlled players. They deliver distinct sections of duet material here, moving from one zone to the next in a progression that is well-paced, fresh and expansive. Flaherty manages his notorious blow-your-brains-out sound on this release, while at the same time maintaining a distinct sensitivity. He seems to bring anything and everything out of the tenor sax - including sweats and smells. When he wants to, the childhood-repressed demons flood by the dozens and make the situation utterly airless - truly airless. But on this recording we get to hear Flaherty in a slightly different mode than he is in when he plays with - say - Corsano, where it is just balls to the fucking walls. With Nace, Flaherty picks his battles. One such battle starts just after Nace's solo midway through the first side. Their planes of sound collide together distorting and reorganizing everything that we hear. Though they seem not to lose track of each other for an instant throughout.

Side 1 ends with an abrupt stop. This time a full stop. The only thing left is a barking dog (presumably from the neighbors house). The lone wolf of Hadley, MA answering to the lunar call of this invincible duo.

Another such battle starts off side 2 of the lp. Silver screams and high dive pin-heads abound from Nace, while Flaherty digs "I think I'm gunna throw up" with his brass tool. The-One-With-The-White-Beard burns holes in the sky, never to return again. Global climate change. Two distinct sonic textures exist mainly apart from one another for most of the most here. Its brain stem glistening, kids. The abrupt endings on all of the pieces (there are 4 tracks in all) make for definitive statements. No matter how far out from each other's sounds they soar or sore, these players manage to land their tricks just before the drop-dead point.

...And who is that lovely young maiden on the cover?

Bill, Paul and Virginia @ Helderberg House