Fabric: 1st.

Fabric has never had a month like this one for its ongoing CD series. James Murphy and Pat Mahoney (ie LCD Soundsystem) take the FabricLive commission, while Ricardo Villalobos handles Fabric. Both are absolutely sensational.

First up, the James Murphy, which is a set well versed in the arts of a good mix: breathing spaces, the sense of a journey, and unending shit-hot tunes. The first 25 minutes are shameless, joyful booty-shaking funk, before shifting into another gear with the more spacious, Chicago sound of the middle section. It then gradually slows down the groove, taking in early electro and classic disco before blissing out in some a capella Love Of Life Orchestra.

What's really interesting (to me anyway) is seeing how influential this whole period has been on a whole range of DFA acts. The rolling, hypnotic synth in Junior Byron's "Dance To The Music" is the roots of the similarly repeating line in LCD Soundsystem's "Get Innocuous!", while the voluptuous basslines of G.Q., Baby Oliver and Chic are potential progenitors for The Juan Maclean's most addictive moments. The shuddering, mildly acidic effects used by Babytalk have been updated by Hercules And Love Affair, and the timeless one-note hopscotch jangle of funk rhythm guitar has been passed down to The Rapture to reignite four-piece guitar music. Indulge my trainspotting below:

LCD Soundsystem - Get Innocuous!
Junior Bryan - Dance To The Music (Dub)

The Juan Maclean - By The Time I Get To Venus
Baby Oliver - Primetime (Uptown Express)

And this is just so euphoric:

Donald Byrd And 125th Street, NYC - Love Has Come Around

The Villalobos mix is all his own production, thereby blurring the edges between artist album (often a bad idea in techno anyway) and club set. As with all his production, it's a subtly uplifting, terrifying experience, the music crawling inside you for better and worse. Its chief strength lies in the way elements of tracks are bled across the entire record - for instance, the addictive melody of "4 Wheel Drive" is brought in over the previous two tracks, leaving the notion of distinct tracks redundant in favour of a throbbing, dangerously organic whole.

So of course, it's almost absurd to try and blog this because its pleasures are only fully revealed during total immersion. But here's the 12-minute track that comes at the heart of the set, "Andruic & Japan". A quick, metronomic pulse beats against rumbling, unpredictably violent drumming and a drunkenly free-associative train of thought from some woman. It's totally unhinged, truly gone mad in the disparity of its elements. And it features a truly heartstopping moment when a vocal stab suddenly invades the shaking structure. I won't say where, but for me it ranks with "KICK OUT THE JAMS, MOTHERFUCKER!" in terms of all-time vocal thrills. The best moments in minimal techno are these, when you have earned those unexpected, adrenal bumps in the road after minutes of smooth cruising.

Ricardo Villalobos (with Andrew Gillings) - Andruic & Japan

Stranger than Screaming

I can't get enough of this song, it never gets old. I first heard it in Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise.

Stranger Than Paradise starred jazz musician John Lurie, former Sonic Youth drummer-turned-actor Richard Edson and Hungarian-born actress Eszter Balint.

Both the song and the film have really stuck to some part of me, I see lots of things that remind me of it. It's possibly my favourite Jim Jarmusch, I like its simplicity and it's minimalism. It's shot in a series of long takes; tracking shots with nothing but the visual and aural scratchy white noise of the old recording equipment.

Stranger Than Paradise was responsible for me buying a Screamin' Jay Hawkins album. Just for this one song that's played over and over, round and round. The version here is unfortunately a lot cleaner, not so soulfully gritty, without the grainy black and white of the film woven through the recording.

'I Put A Spell On You' is a recurring feature of the film. It echoes cracked and tinny from Eva's stereo, a unifying thread to a film with no purpose or formula. The camera follows her tramping around New York, or dancing sloppily around the kitchen dressed in baggy cardigans and mens trousers, smoking cigarettes lazily.

The version I've posted is a slightly different version of 'I Put A Spell On You'. The Jim Jarmusch version has more parp, more oom-pa, the squawk of sax. This one is smoother, has more of a slow grind; a drive towards the chorus peaks and the slapstick animalistic shrieks and brays that constitute the breakdown.

I don't know which I like better, but the Jarmusch version does not appear to be readily available. This one is still great. Decide for yourselves...

Screamin' Jay Hawkins - I Put A Spell On You
"Ooooooooohhhhhh..................spell"

Joik Like Me

“It is important to stress that the joik itself, and certainly my version of it, is a matter of receiving an expression, and mediating the inner voice that a human experience has in itself. A strange fact is that sometimes the joik comes first, and then you realize to what feeling or experience the joik pertains afterwards." - Lawra Somby

Adjagas are a Norwegian duo, Sara Marielle Gaup and Lawra Somby. They are 'Sami joikers': people who make a weird 'yulk' type noise while they sing, and are from Sapmi, a cultural region which covers parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia.

Somehow, on its release in the early part of this year, it managed to turn heads, receiving glowing reviews in pretty mainstream publications (e.g. Q, The Sun, Time Out and the Metro).

Adjagas is Sami word for the state of mind somewhere between sleeping and waking; the ethereal vocal sounds flow like muttered dreams, like the peaks and troughs of soundwaves. A Joik is like a vocal flick with the back of the throat, a sort of spasm that sometimes goes unnoticed.

What seems to have captured people's attention is their less traditional approach to joiking; they use a more accessible backdrop and allow a small influx of electronic elements. Lawra says "We wanted to create new joiks, not just present traditional ones in a novel musical context." I hardly know any old yoiks, but Adjagas sound contemporary, not so stringently traditional as other 'famous' joikers like Mari Boine. (Stream a Knife remix of Boine here).

There is something entirely otherworldly about Adjagas that remains connected by small delicate threads to this dimension; the echoing strum of a banjo or an acoustic guitar and the subtle influx of modern electronics put it in context, where the vocals carry it away into distant snowy lands.

Adjagas are remarkably accessible, a beautiful soporific venture into something off the beaten track of the very American folk revival we're in the thick of.

Adjagas - Dolgematki

Adjagas - Lihkolas

You can read more here and get another free download here.

A Crimson Grail (for 2 electric guitars).

I've still not made up my mind about the new Interpol record, which has me simultaneously battling an impulse to unconditionally love it and a desire to take the easy "they've lost it" route. It's hard to listen to your favourite bands with ears clean of past brilliance. Perhaps it's just a bit middling. It certainly contains some of their worst work in the noisily bland "Mammoth", and opener "Pioneer To The Falls" which is much, much less than the fleshier progression from "Untitled" that it aspires to be.

Yet there are things I like about it, like the bilious, nasty chrous line from "The Heinrich Manouever", and things I love, in particular "Who Do You Think?", with its elliptically rendered lover's tiff set to a sashaying backbeat that shakes off the cloying grey that clouds some of the album. And while some have groaned at Paul Banks's lyrics on this record, including me, sometimes they can be really evocative. You could argue that some of his deliberately poetic moments verge on facile; I happen to really like their honest reach towards beauty, images such as "the coast of hypnotic" and "follow the speed in the star-swept night". He also makes some nice puns, like "I only call them when I know I don't see them", the classic phrase retooled to soothe a jealous, paranoid girlfriend.

But where I think he really succeeds is at expressing the hopelessness of mechanically rebuilding love. In "No I In Threesome", for example, he declares romantic banalities by rote - "through the storms and the light / baby you stood by my side", "I see your lips are on fire" - before invoking the clichéd, euphemistic entreaty "Babe, it's time we gave something new a try". Rather than this being parodic or po-faced, it occupies a space between the two. He takes the inadequacy of American relationship vocabulary, all embarrasingly bald emotion and unsexy practicality, and wears it with a wry, defeated smile.

Anyway, what struck me originally about the album before I got to intellectualising it was the similarity of closing track "The Lighthouse" to "A Crimson Grail" by Rhys Chatham. (Chatham's work is subtitled "for 400 electric guitars"; Chatham recruited 400 axemen to perform it in and around the Sacre-Coeur in Paris - heavy). "The Lighthouse" creates a shifting, tidal guitar sound through some freely strummed chords before some symphonic low end kicks in; "The Crimson Grail" does the same but dispenses with the "kicking in" part in favour of constantly ebbing religious might.

I think that considering Carlos D's new-found affinity with classical music, "A Crimson Grail" may well have proved the ultimate rock band-to-philharmonic gateway drug. Spot the difference:

Interpol - The Lighthouse

Rhys Chatham - A Crimson Grail (For 400 Electric Guitars) - Part One

Be patient with the Chatham to download, it is 20 minutes and 43 seconds long).

I want to dance like this.

I've been a bit of a grandad recently in terms of pop music - poking around on blogs means that you know the new Sunset Rubdown inside out but you have no idea what's at number one. So this video of Chris Brown and Rihanna at the VMA's is totally stale and happened weeks ago, an eternity in blog years, but fuck it, I'm posting it anyway because it rocks my world and I've only just seen it.

Rihanna looks incredible, sings a bit out of tune, but it's "Umbrella" so it's still great. This video is really all about Chris Brown's dancing, particularly to "Wall To Wall". Those of you who know me will know my dancing is a poor drunken acme of this boy-genius. The robo-Chaplin stuff at the beginning is pretty awesome (though clearly David Elsewhere-inspired); his Michael Jackson impersonations at the end are foolishly ambitious but he just about pulls it off.

But it's the sequence from 1:10 to 2:50 (and 1:30 to 1:50 in particular) that has me itching in frustrated dance dreams, hampered by my indie-boy frame and white, white skin. I could watch this slicker-than-slick choreography all day and not get tired of my vicarious thrills. Chris Brown is the whole package. Check:



The song itself is very good too, and strangely became a total flop in America, a disappointment considering last summer's successes with "Run It" et al. Still, if you can move like that, you can die happy.

Jen For Jens

Jens Lekman is a lovely and peculiar creature. On the eve of the release of Night Falls Over Kortedela, Play It As It Lays is using him as a vehicle to compensate for our relative abscence in the last fortnight. (Which was due to attempts at fortune making in the big smoke. Result: partial success.)

To celebrate my own proper return to Sheffield and a rekindling of my love affair with Secretly Canadian I, Jen, present a Jens super-post of sorts, two brand new tracks, two hidden treasures and a classic from the Scando I love the most. (Well, nearly the most).

'No Time For Breaking Up' was the very first Jens Lekman track I ever heard. It's a little unusual for him, there's no airs of the cabaret, the glint of a showtune, or the parp of some excitable brass sections. It came on a free CD fom the late Comes With A Smile magazine.

It opens with the sound of Christmas - bells and a choir welcoming in the glorious melancholy of Lekman at his most moving. It's a slow burner, a sombre plea; quite beautiful, sparse and careful.

The next two tracks are from his new album Night Falls Over Kortedala. The first is the penultimate track, 'Kanske Ar Jag Kar i Dig', which opens with some gorgeous barbershop style harmonies and fingerclicks. The slow jaunt of the track is irresistible, doused in cheese; in ooohhs and aaahhhs and Lekmans delicious croon. My favourite part: "My words are c-c-c-comin out all wrong". Perfect.

On the fourth track 'And I Remember Every Kiss' the majestic arrangements and Lekmans voice smacks of a Scando Scott Walker. His voice is smooth and thick - chocolatey almost. He drapes it in great velvety swathes around simple lovelorn lyrics, splashed with a lovely bit of accent.

The fifth track is from the Secretly Canadian compilation released this year, on which Secretly Canadian artists covered other Secretly Canadian artists. Lekman's rendering of Scout Niblett's 'Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death' is full of dinky percussion, whistles and maracas. Niblett's vocals put the original in sharp heavy relief, just her imperfect voice and a basic drumbeat. Lekman turns the statement of mortality into something positive, the choir singing together with arms outstretched.

There's something I find very captivating about Scandinavian oddballs such as Lekman, especially when he's such a softie. If you still need convincing, then get a load of 'You Are The Light' - the perfect pick me up, sung in slightly warped English - "Yeah I got busted, I painted a dirty word on your old man's Mercedes Benz cos you told me to do it". It is perfectly endearing in your ears, if not on paper.

Jens Lekman - No Time For Breaking Up
Jens Lekman - Kanske Ar Jag Kar I Dig
Jens Lekman - And I Remember Every Kiss
Jens Lekman - Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death
Jens Lekman - You Are the Light

Jens has presents for you here. To say thanks, and to stop him threatening to quit again, buy something of his here. There's much more on his website, including a very readable news blog.

Incidentally, if you too have a soft spot for Scandos, have a look at swedesplease, a blog run from America by someone only interested in Swedish music.

Arve Henriksen - Strjon

One of this year's absolute best albums has to be Arve Henirksen's Strjon, released on the peerless Rune Grammofon label. Arve Henriksen is a Norwegian jazz trumpeter whose tone is absolutely unique - breathy sighs give way to the occasional burst of brilliant purity, tortured moans lie alongside pretty delicacy. I can't recommend enough the experience of listening to this outside at night on headphones, and all the way through. It is an album absolutely in tune with the natural world, the creaking seismic fact of the physical earth alongside the foggy unknowns of spirit and fate. Played amongst the elements it really blooms.

"Black Mountain" opens the album after a short introduction and is atypical of Henriksen, but is certainly one of the highlights. Electrical bursts and tones invade the space with terrifying unpredictability, while underneath it all rides a mother of a bassline, like a minimal techno record found staggering weakly around after days alone in the tundra. In a perfect world Carl Craig would slap a pitch-black 4/4 beat behind this for the ultimate in introspective dance music...

"Green Water" is more familiar territory, a meandering trumpet line soaring over traditional piano and synth washes laid deep in the mix, plus gamelan stabs that coalesce to form a clanging groove, before dissipating into the mist again.

"Wind And Bow" is a stunning close-up of Henriksen's trumpet, the most intimate track on the album. Headphones an absolute must for this one to pick up every smeared note and tremor.

These are just to give a flavour of the different types of sounds on this record, and like I said, it really bears listening to in one sitting; its progression from oppressive dislocation through tentative curiousity and quiet understanding to ultimate sublimation into the elements is moving and wholly satisfying.

Arve Henriksen - Black Mountain

Arve Henriksen - Green Water

Arve Henriksen - Wind And Bow

And yes, he's playing an "ice horn" in that photo. Brilliant.

Maybe she's born with it.

Skipping across the music video channels over my cereal this morning I was agog at the sheer lameness of some of the trumpeted indie bands out there - I Was A Cub Scout ripping off the pacy emo-motorik (emotorik?) of Bloc Party, without any tunes, and Air Traffic were like Keane attempting the martial bits of Arcade Fire, without any tunes. Truly desperate.

Cue L'il Mama over at MTV Base. She doesn't need any "angular guitars" or played-out synths or doe-eyed Bambi-pamby vocals. In fact, she doesn't need any fucking instruments at all, just some clapping and some E-number-amped flow. The lyrics don't try to articulate why the girl left me or what's wrong with the state of things, they're about how great lipgloss is. She can dance too. An infinite number of Wombats clapping an infinite number of hands together could never come up with something this catchy, let alone be able to jack to it afterwards.

Lil Mama - Lipgloss

Of course, there are precedents for this sort of production, not least of all this all-time classic:

Clipse - Grindin'

Still absolutely fresh after five years. The funk holy grail is surely to reach the point, as these tracks reach towards, where a single rhythm barely coheres yet is still totally danceable. Any suggestions on the ultimate examples?

Malo in your face...

Las Malas Amistades are a bizarre musical anomaly. Signed to Honest Jon's they eke out what might be described as an 'individual' sound for themselves. Their latest offering is much the same as the first, only they move from the garden (Jardin Interior) onto the patio (Patio Bonito). Patio Bonito is a much more upbeat jaunty affair, with more fake trumpets, maracas and fiesta castanets.

At times they are just straight up weird, singing jolting out of key ditties on out of tune guitars, and third world keyboards with a stuck demo button. As much as I enjoy this, I'm aware it's a bit indulgent of me. However, at other times they sound like the soundtrack to a Wes Anderson film, the tinny samba beats on the cheapo casios placed in their element next to underdeveloped wah-wah synths and off-kilter vocals that just won't settle on a melody.

It's rare that any of the tracks hit the two-minute mark, often breaking off after one, but this works on their side, the ridiculousness not indulged too much - just the toes dipped quickly into a wildly individual and anti-intellectual musical experiment.

Las Malas Amistades - Hay Zombies En La Playa (I would like this to be my theme tune as I walk jauntily down the street with headphones on.)

Las Malas Amistades - El Mismo Pesimiso

Las Malas Amistades - Estrella De La Cancio

Read more and look and the cut and paste artwork here, make sure to flick to the blog, its not in English, but the artwork is super, I selected some for this post: bearded children (entitled 'crimino'), humping motorbikes, what to pick? I chose the gnomes on the settee.

NB: Malo in your face is in reference to track 2 from Jardin Interior, the lyrics for which are all about things that are bad, 'malo'. They translate to (courtesy of the sleeve, not google):
bad like a dog with a limp
bad like a kid with messed up hair
bad like a borrowed shoe
....and ends with the lines...
bad like a loan left hanging or like synchronised swimming.

Gastr Del Sol - dream examples.

In between listening to a luscious stack of new CD's (more from which soon on these pages), I've been enjoying drifting around work and Sheffield's pavements to various mid-90's Chicago bands, a scene which I can't get enough of. Jazzy beard-stroking guitar pop, full of melodious noodling and genuine warmth, with a playfulness that belies its intellectual image. The Sea And Cake's Oui has been heavily repeated as has Tortoise's TNT, plus the most simple and most skronked-out ends of Jim O'Rourke's spectrum. And above all Camofleur (1998) by Gastr Del Sol, an outfit made up chiefly of O'Rourke and David Grubbs, but which also featured Chicago legends like John McEntire back in the day.

Camofleur is a beautiful album, well worth buying for its invaluable whole-album listening experience. (I'm aware of how Chicago jazz-rock geek that sounds, but it's true). It's a blend of delicate chamber strings and piano, squiffy O'Rourkean polyrhythms, soft electronic effects and glitches, hypnotically repetitious guitar patterns, and careful, naive singing from Grubbs. What makes it unique is the way is hovers ecstatically in the space between the stricture of pop songwriting and the loosened world of free jazz and musique concrete, the aural equivalent of the gorgeous period between dreams and lucidity.

"Each Dream Is An Example" is my current favourite, setting a very traditional piano motif against fizzing electronics and muffled horns, before emerging suddenly into a new space at 2:50, a clearer, balladeering tone taking over, with chiming backing vocals from Edith Frost. Grubbs sings about the nature of dreams while simulataneously allowing dream logic penetrate the song - its soft 45-degree turns into new musical ideas without warning are the same turns our subconscious takes as we dream, at once nonsensical and natural, as it makes its wandering path through recent history. The lyrics make these synaptic rambles as well - the lucid "compress the days' events" segues into "the loss of a spouse is spice for lice", a line that I love for its silly somnabulent word games. (If you listen closely you can hear Grubbs smile as he sings this, imperceptibly heightening the loveliness of it all). Gastr Del Sol manage to create something that truly deserves the descriptor "dreamlike", music that is blithely absurd and skipping across the face of waking life.

Gastr Del Sol - Each Dream Is An Example

Thanks to Ian for lending me this and a bunch of other Chicago-based genius. Camofleur is out of print but you can get it on this listing at eBay for not that much. Maybe I'll burn you a copy if you ask me nicely.

Miho Hatori: A break in the clouds

Miho Hatori appeared in the Steel Press promo box a long time ago, when all we knew was cold and shadows. luckily, that day I was feeling optimistic, feeling I should make more of an effort to listen to all the bullshit we get sent, as some of it may turn out good. This one time, one and only time mind, it turned out good.

Ecdysis was released on Rykodisc last year, with some truly terrible artwork (above). It's quite patchy, making use of a hotch-potch batch of instruments with no connecting thread. It does, however, have this truly lovely stand-out track, "Barracuda", which I need to post before the sun goes in again and it gets all inappropriate.

Hatori's voice sweeps shallow and soft, tarnished with a strong accent. But don't get me wrong, this isn't some sort of insipid Beach Party job. The club-style organ is jaunty - off the mark, and the maracas and flashes of brass (listen carefully) in the back all sound as if played by some smooth-ass guys who dropped in from a tiki party. There's little bits of harmonica or something; some of those crazy wooden percussion instruments you get in primary school. It all adds up to something really catchy, floating along all top-heavy - hardly there without the plastic um-pa of that organ - it gets me every time.

Miho Hatori - Barracuda

Bird By Snow - Sky

Bird By Snow were a band that often played gigs in people's houses or on the beach when I lived in Santa Cruz, and it's good to see that they've grown to the point where they release their first CD in Europe this week, entitled Sky and released on Swedish label Kning Disk. They share the same underground Californian psychedelic folk sound as bands like Whysp and Little Wings (and more famously Vetiver and Devandra Banhart), a kind of tousled organic intimacy that forms a dusty niche away from the sheen of modern life. You can definitely hear the influence of Phil Elverum's Microphones/Mt. Eerie, the latter of whom Bird By Snow has supported in the past. This track has a fantastic slowly loping groove to it, overlayed with wheezing accordian and shamanic repeated vocals.

Bird By Snow - The Sound And The River Within The Sound

Takes me right back to magical SC, where I often used to share my walk to lectures with a family of deer, and bought incredible paintings by homeless hippies on walks back from the beach. Despite relocating to the Bay Area and travelling all over the world, Bird By Snow seems to have retained some of that Santa Cruz acid-hippie ethos:

"Open eyes wide, and take in “Sky,” bird by snow’s outrageously lush follow-up LP. Cloudy or clear, day or night, let us be absorbed in the one-always-giving moment, and know the sky not as vacuous hole, but as container (whole)."

You can buy Sky from the label website or from Bird By Snow's website, including the original LP version in mouth-watering gold sleeve with transparent blue vinyl and luxury booklet:

What a beauty. There's also a free live album from a gig on an island in the Baltic Sea you can download.