Bad Mood Rising

I am constantly amazed at the astonishing lack of imagination displayed by musicians, particularly those of a so-called avant-garde or underground stripe. I'm listening to the latest White Rainbow lp at the moment, and although it's a perfectly pleasant listening experience, it also sounds like it could have been recorded at any point in the last 30-odd years, and I sure as shit don't mean it sounds timeless. It just sounds like Fripp & Eno circa Evening Star with a drum machine and a hippy warbling over the top. It adds nothing to the canon of psychedelia/minimalism/drone/whatever that we haven't heard a thousand times before, it's just playing lego with the building blocks of other people's music and that bugs me to fuck. (I'm not singling out White Rainbow for a slagging here, it's just what was on and made me think of this).

Even just restricting yrself to the notes of the western scale and the range of human hearing gives you a combination of (132!-1)* note combinations for any single music event within a piece, without even taking into consideration variations in timbre/harmonic spectra, intonation, slurs, bends, and all the microtones between the notes of the (out of tune**) western scale. So given that the number of note combinations possible is in excess of the number of atoms in the entire fucking universe, and you never hear writers complain that there's only 26 letters in the roman alphabet***, could someone please explain to me why the majority of musicians are seemingly incapable of making a fucking sound that someone else hasn't made before.

*(132!)-1=[(132 x 131 x 130 x 129... x 3 x 2 x 1)-1] is a fucking enormous number. 10!=10 x 9...x 2 x 1=3628800, 20!=2432902008176640000 (or thereabouts). You get the idea. Anyone who says 'there's only 12 notes' is a lazy cunt.

**don't fucking get me started on the western (equal-tempered) scale, even the so-called perfect fifth is slightly flat. I'm next in line to give Pythagoras a slap after Tony Conrad.

***especially taking into consideration that the 26 letters cannot just be put together in arbitrary combinations and convey meaning, unlike musical notes.

Incongruous Album Covers No.1: Roger Dean Does Motown

The Global Migration Of Flying Shoes...

...is not a headline from The Onion, but one from Pravda Online, the site set up by former journalists of Russia's favourite party organ a few years after Boris Yeltsin shut the paper down. I highly recommend it, both as an insight into a very different culture and worldview, and for the complete insanity of some of the articles. Sample headlines from today's front page include:

Kosovo Needs To Put Up A Statue Of Bill Clinton Hugging Madeline Albright (lead story)
Russia's Criminal King Receives Pompous Funeral
Italian Millionaire Moves To Godforsaken Village To Marry Russian Woman
Bringing Fish-Tailed Women Home Strictly Forbidden On Pain Of Death

It's That Cephalopodic Time Again

This one's dedicated to the memory of the great Rashied Ali (July 1st 1935 - Aug 12th 2009) so expect some serious fireworks.

This month's jazz molluscs:

Illi Adato - Electronics/Percussion
Shura Greenburg - Double Bass
Andrew John - Electric Bass
Lee Knight - Guitar
David O'Connor - Baritone Sax
Cigar Tamlin - Drums/Trumpet
Colin Webster - Alto/Tenor Sax
Gareth Wilkins - Arp/Moog/Rhodes

more details here

20 Pieces Of Beautiful Mung

Tempera - Tempera (L'Animaux Tryst)
Noveller - Red Rainbows (Not Fun)
Eleh - Homage To The Sine Wave (Taiga)
Julius Hemphill - 'Coon Bid'ness (Freedom)
Verto - Krig/Vobulis (Pôle)
Deceh - Deceh (Important)
Flipper - Generic & Gone Fishin' (Subterranean)
Wet Hair - Glass Fountain (Not Not Fun)
Yob - The Great Cessation (Profound Lore)
The Deep Blue - Sun Worshiper* (The Church Within)
Pôle - Inside The Dream (Pôle)
Nackt Insecten - Futuristic Egyptian Space Temple (Blackest Rainbow)
Stellar Om Source - Rise In Planes (Black Dirt)
Elephant9 - Dodovoodoo (Rune Grammafon)
Flower Corsano Duo - The Four Aims (VHF)
Loosers - Natives Are Restless (Qbico)
Neokarma Jooklo Trio - Time's Vibes (Conspiracy)
Sun Araw - Heavy Deeds (Not Not Fun)
Bear Bones Lay Low - Djid Hums (Gypsy Sphynx)
Human Arts Enemble - Junk Trap (Black Saint)

*Yes, I know the spelling is wrong, bear in mind that the previous album was called Antartic Abyss. Make of that what you will...

Apparently, God Is Good. Shame About The Fucking Music Though

Anyone who knows me knows I fucking love everything Om had done up to and including Pilgrimage. I wasn't particularly impressed with the Gebel Barkal 7"*, but I thought ok, new drummer (Emil Amos) , needs a little time to settle in, he's a bit stiff but he's got some serious shoes to fill and coming from a band (Grails) whose music is far denser in both arrangement and instrumentation than Om's stripped to the bone minimalist doom probably isn't used to his playing being so exposed, and is possibly over-compensating for this by playing too damn much**. I also thought (hoped, prayed), that the clicky 90s drum sound was just down to the circumstances of the recording. Essentially, I'd heard a dodgy track by one of my favourite bands and was trying to convince myself that this was a temporary aberration, a brief lapse caused by a major upheaval in personnel.

It wasn't. At least not if the new Om album is anything to go by. It sucks balls. Badly. Almost everything that made Om beautiful seems absent. It's half-arsed, badly mixed and stinks of patchouli. Whereas the Om of old could weave magic from just a bass, a drumkit and the most ridiculous lyrics in rock history delivered in a monotone chant, creating an nonsensical occult otherworld of devotional doom, the new Om pile on the extra instruments like a hippy hot for enlightenment, trying out every guru in town in search of The Way. There's a fucking unspeakably shit flute solo at one point that sounds like it was played by the worst kind of classically trained twat trying to be "spiritual" (seriously, it's fucking horrible), and it's prissy funklessness sums up one of this album's three main faults; (what feels like) a lack of confidence in their material, buried under a mound of sitars and tambouras, bongos and tablas, guitar and piano in an attempt to cover up the fact that there are no new ideas on this record whatsoever.

Seriously, whereas Al's chant used to be unbroken throughout the verse, sounding like the meter of the words had been arrived at through a combination of the length of a breath and the rhythm the words rode on, now it's just sung like any other song, and the basslines that the songs would be carried by are buried in the mix, probably to disguise the fact that most of them are not just reminiscent of, but plainly identical to, the basslines on Conference Of The Birds*** with one note raised a semitone here or there. I've got nothing against repeating yrself, or reprising or quoting an earlier tune, but only if the new version adds something, lifts it into something higher or recontextualises it into something utterly new, all of which this record utterly fails to do. Al's weird quavering baritone is mixed far too high, draws too much attention to itself, sits on top of the mix instead of inhabiting it as an instrument, and he's just not got the voice for that sort of presentation. The vocals were always as much texture as anything else on the previous LPs, but here they're in sharp focus and it just don't work. Al Cisneros (somewhat disingenuously in my opinion) has always been at pains to point out the essential meaningless of his lyrics previous to this point, his ransacking of the world's sacred texts for words and quotes meant to evoke, not to preach, meant to evoke a flight from this plane to another, hence the huge number of allegories and metaphors for death, flight and rebirth that litter his lyrics, and when they were on equal footing with the music, it worked, conveyed a sense of the transcendent, the immaterial, a glimpse of the other, but upfront and leading the way they have the opposite effect. They become the focal point, no longer part of the holistic weave of the music, and it relegates everything else to background or ornamentation.

Coming back to the added instruments, what bothers me is so many of them sound like afterthoughts, the piano and guitar especially. The guitar playing is appalling. Stilted, souless, pointless. Amazingly, the piano is worse. It sounds like they were in the studio and someone noticed one of the rooms had a piano in it and said "oooh, let's put that on it" just because they could - I was a studio engineer for years, and this would happen all the time with instruments in the studio, but pianos, especially grands, seem to have a weird effect on some musicians, they had to have the big piano on the record even if they could barely play the fucking thing - it sounds like an afterthought, it's clunky and ham-fisted, ruins any atmosphere that was there before it's entrance (same with the guitar) and the way it's mixed completely fails to integrate the piano into the soundscape. Which brings me to the second huge problem wth this record: The mix.

It sounds like it was mixed by an idiot with no ears. And recorded by one, which is odd, because it was recorded by Steve Albini, who also did Pilgrimage, which sounded like the walls of Jericho falling in very slow motion, whereas this sounds like a revolting cross between Pink Floyd and Current 93. The drum sound, and this is one area I normally expect Albini to shine****, is just horrible, a halfway house between Scott Burns' patented clicky early Death Metal sound and Phil Collins' gated 80s horror. Now knowing Albini, he's probably just recorded the drum sound the way Emil wanted it recorded, but it's lifeless, cold and undynamic, and at points, sounds suspiciously like it's been brickwalled, a practice that's way too prevalent these days, possibly because these days there's less and less of us who actually understand the art of recording shit properly. As I've previously noted, the bass is often much lower in the mix than before, and for a band that (ignoring overdubs) is at it's heart a bass and drums duo that smacks of a lack of confidence, and it also robs the bass of it's overarching harmonic contribution to the sound which has previously been utterly essential, god fucking damn it, if someone is playing a beautiful old Rickenbacker bass, I want to hear that it's a Rick, that gorgeous combination of thrum and clank that only a horseshoe pickup equipped instrument can put out. But it just ain't there, the bass sound is anonymous and ignorable and that's a fucking sin. All the overdubs just sort of sit there, floating on the top like scum on a stagnant lake, starving the music of oxygen. It all just sounds so careless, like a couple of hopeless stoners***** sharing a pair of headphones mixed the fucker at home in about the time it takes to listen to after a couple of massive chillums.

The worst thing though? The really big problem? You've got the wrong fucking drummer Al. I've seen people describing Emil Amos as more jazzy, more complex than Chris Hakius. Please. The Hakius is (yes, we've been here before, many times) the jazziest drummer in Doom. Too many people confuse technicality with 'jazziness' (stupid fucking word). The beauty of the old Om was their ability to play the same thing in so many different ways without ever losing that rolling, loping groove that held it all down, and the sound of a beautifully resonant down tuned kit interacting with the bass, but with Emil's higher pitched kit, that sonic interaction is lost. Sure they play pretty well together, but it doesn't lock in, doesn't sound like one four armed beast. Listen to some early 70s electric Jazz; Old Om is like Michael Henderson and Al Foster in Miles' '75 group, new Om is more Rick Laird and Billy Cobham in Mahavishnu Orchestra - more complex, but sound and fury signifying nothing as opposed to an organic evolving rhymthic octopus. When others describe Emil's drumming as jazzier that just suggests to me that whoever wrote that doesn't know fucking shit about jazz. Most of his fills sound like slowed down thrash fills, all parade ground flams and paradiddles, and he just can't fucking lock into Al's groove. And for me that's the absolute crux of the problem, this Om has no flow, it's stiff, boring and desperate to overcompensate for those shortcomings.

And don't even get me started on the hippy christian clapping circle bit. David Tibet meets Iron John. No one needs that in their lives.

Rant ends.

*Sneaked out on the Sub Pop Singles Club because it sounds like a shoddy demo. Don't even get me started on the b-side 'Version'. Dub does not mean adding a crap melodica solo and rubbish echo, I know they're American, but please...

**Common drummer ailment, symptoms normally allevaited by beer, weed or being shouted at.

***Amazingly, this album isn't as bad as Live Conference - The new Om playing the old Om's finest moment and fucking it up royally. Don't go there.

****Albini can be a little lacksidasical with guitars and other stuff occasionally, but normally the drums sound a). like a drum kit - which is fairly unusual in itself, go and listen to someone playing a drum kit, then listen to almost any record from the last 30 years, there's not much resemblence - and b). wonderful; resonant, woody and clear. Go and have a listen to Rid Of Me by PJ Harvey for a record where the drums and vocals sound like heaven and the bass and guitars just.. lack something.

*****I may be a complete fucking pothead, but I never, ever mix battered. It's not worth it, you just have to mix again the day after when y're vaguely sober.

Coming Soon...

Lots of burbling, ranting foolishness including a couple of regular series of articles. I need to make myself write more than I have lately, and also just fucking post it as soon as I've written it, like I used to, instead of worrying about everything (then again, life's been a bit of a fucker lately to say the least) because there's an awful lot of shit I feel like yelling my head off about, 'cos I'm an angry fucker at the moment, and I might as well use the surplus bile in a constructive manner, i.e; writing an endless parade of riffs that make you want to bite yr own ears off and gleefully jumping up and down on the sacred cows of the avant-garde (see below), as opposed to whingeing about being single again and letting shit fester like I used too. So, like I say, constructive bile. Obviously the usual idiocy culled from the ether will, with a good deal more regularity than recently, still be posted here for yr edification and illumination. I'm not going to turn Dr Serious on you, my dear readers.

Anyways, the new regular articles are going to come under the following broad headings:

1. "The Most Over-rated Musicians On The Planet". Pretty self explanatory really. I get really fucking riled by the fawning attitude displayed by certain quarters of the music press* towards certain musicians and (god I hate this term) scenes. Keiji Haino's first up, expect the article in a few days. I need to buy more red wine.

2. "Journeys Through The Psychedelic Hinterlands". The first one of these is on the old blog here, but I never got round to finishing the next three parts I started, which I feel bad about, because there is so much fucking amazing music from the psychedelic side of things that only about three people have ever heard and it's just wrong. I've never understood people who jealously guard their little musical fetishes as just for the initiated, if it's good I want others to know the wonderment too, share the fucking love people, if you don't y're a weird little freak and I'm not sure I want to know you.

3. or possibly 2b. "La Galaxie Sensuelle". In most people's heads, the phrase "Frenchman with a synthesizer" tends to conjure up revolting visions of Jean Michelle Jarre. I understand this. As a child I remember being subjected to Oxygene Part 197 on the car radio***, particularly on long drives to Cornwall. Along with ELP's Fanfare For The Common Man, Oxygene provokes an atavistic loathing in me because of their ubiquity in the mid-70s. But I digress. For me, the phrase "Frenchman with a synthesizer" conjures up vistas of cosmic fucking awesomeness even the Germans never approached.

Go and listen to a Heldon album. Good ain't it? That's just the start. Neu!, Cluster, Popol Vuh, Can etc are bands that get mentioned in record reviews in the fucking tabloids these days, but what about Lard Free, Spacecraft, Pôle or Archaia? Or the astonishing Vertø, who may just be my favourite band ever after Chrome. Not mention the glory of Catherine Ribeiro's early stuff, the 2-Bis album sounds more like Pelt than anything else, except it's 40 fucking years old. Then of course there's Magma and Zeuhl, and that's a whole other fucking bag of awesome, but much more widely known than the wubbing womming insanity of the synth and guitar contingent. "La Galaxie Sensuelle" will be my attempt to rectify the balance a little.

Anyways, more soon. Oh, go here and enjoy the bass thunder! Then have a wash. You'll probably want one.

*This started as a footnote but, possibly because of the extreme goodness of the Barbaresco I'm currently drinking has become a rant. Bear with me, I like a tangent;

The Wire, supposed beacon of truth and beauty and artistic purity in a world gone tits-up, is particularly bad in this respect, often ignoring (for years on end in extreme cases) what's going on right under their noses in favour of musicians who talk a good game, or are perceived as somehow "exotic" in manner which frankly smacks of colonial-era orientalism, or use the "trangressive" template to excuse some deeply fucking unpleasant undercurrents/ideologies/whatever in their work.

There's a peculiarly unquestioning attitude often displayed towards the artists who fall under the latter two categories especially, an unwillingness to pull people up, which seems to either come across as 'they don't know what they're saying really, they are foreign after all' patronising crap that I'd expect from the late 1800's - the idea of the "noble savage", the displays of "primitive" music, society and culture at the Paris Expo that so enthralled Debussy at al - when applied to the first category, and an absolutely unforgivable unwillingness to call artists of the second category out on their views or material when it's presented under the banner of questioning taboo, or "pushing the boundaries" (ugh). Witness the relatively recent embrace of the music of Whitehouse or Ramleh, against the many appearances in the magazine over the last couple of decades of Non. Groups who, to the casual observer, may seem to share some common ground in aesthetic and imagistic terms, but as people** couldn't be further apart. William Bennett (Whitehouse) and Gary Mundy (Ramleh) are intelligent, articulate musicians, liberal realists who understand the value of disturbing imagery as a means to make the audience think, to feel, to question, to engage with themselves, and the world around them, as it really is and they really are. Boyd Rice (Non) on the other hand, is a self-confessed fascist, an oedipal misogynist whose neo-social darwinian aesthetic comes across loud and clear in his music as a sonic attempt to subdue, to subjugate, to establish (his idea of) order through volume and density. Yet who's had the most column inches in The Wire over the years? Just an example. But one that truly grates.

**And in my opinion, artists. More soon on this and why most "Noise" is shit.

***This was mid-70s England. The most popular colours were grey, brown and beige. And orange for the hopelessly overoptimistic. Companies had electricity for 3 days a week. Only really rich bastards had a cassette player (or 8-track!) in their car. And, dear American readers, British radio is not as eclectic, shall we say, as US radio.