Frode Haltli

Words like "transcendent" and "sublime" get bandied about a great deal in music journalism, but Jen and I were lucky enough to see something recently that we both agreed merited both words - Norwegian accordianist Frode Haltli performing his recent album Passing Images, the concert which closed this year's Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

The record is a series of traditional Nordic folk songs reinterpreted in a contemporary way alongside Haltli's own compositions. Playing on the record and with him in Huddersfield were singer/vocalist Maya Ratkje, viola player Garth Knox and trumpeter (and PIAIL fave) Arve Henriksen.

Knox ranged from sudden dramatic swathes to near-inaudible high-tensile rapture; Ratkje, as well as providing effortlessly soaring passages, contributed an astonishing range of clicks, whistles and ululations to evoke an organic, outdoor sound-world.

Henriksen is simply perfect here. Not only does he make having sloping shoulders look cool (jealous), his own interests – the natural world, acknowledging heritage alongside sonic envelope-pushing – match those of Haltli. His signature sound, a kind of freeze-dried Don Cherry, dovetailed precisely with the coolly alive physicality of this music. But his instrument burst towards other poles, from 808-like robotics on “Lude” to the warmly brash Miles Davis of “Vandring”.

As for Haltli, he wrings every possible sound from his accordion, from piercingly blank high-end to convulsing mumbling; from doom-laden drones to hymnal beauty. The sight of an accordion being played with such sensitivity is mesmerising, the impossible full length of it exposed like a conjurer’s trick, its crenelated curves like some strange Scandinavian mollusc.

The inexorability of its ebb and flow is the perfect visual complement for his work, which folds in every drip of snowmelt and rustle of pine, every faded footprint and half-remembered melody, before unfurling it all in a thrillingly fresh way and yet still on its own terms. This concert was uplifting in a way that only the most wondrous natural sights can usually create – this is music that moves with the logic of starlings, with the half-life of sunset.

Here's a couple of tracks from the record, which has shot straight to the upper echelons of my year's best list:

Frode Haltli - Vandring (alternative ZShare link)
Frode Haltli - Jag Haver Ingen Karare (alternative ZShare link)

60 Watt Kid

This track came upon my person from I'm not sure where. My iTunes keeps playing it without me noticing - apt, I'd say, due to its swirling phosphorescent nature. They are the musical offspring of West Coast art-pop - Animal Collective are an influence 60 Watt Kid wear on their sleeves in 'Ocsicnarf Nas' - but often more mellow. Vocals are warped in sunshine warmth, distorting like heat off the road.

'Ocsicnarf Nas' is impressionistic - colours blurring and smudging into a palette of dancing guitars with spinning skirts; vocals like a tuned-out radio at twilight; a sonic backdrop of dense, ambiguous programming.

'Every Day' is more manic - scrappy garage rock smacked up by bleepy synths and splashes of feedback grind. It is scruffy and frayed, a Fuck Buttons remix of an indie-pop song - squiffy casio exhortations failing to completely obscure the hooks and melody.

Their debut was released earlier this month on Absolutely Kosher (also home to Sunset Rubdown, Frog Eyes, The Wrens, Xiu Xiu) and have a hand-painted limited edition cassette on the way. It's also on iTunes, and the tracks can be heard on their myspace and website.

60 Watt Kid - Ocsicnarf Nas

60 Watt Kid - Every Day

Sam Amidon + HEALTH

Sam Amidon is a New York folk man with a voice the now-sadly-defunct Stylus likened to "a more assertive Kermit The Frog", which isn't far wrong. Some of his stuff, like his ill-advised cover of "Head Over Heels" by Tears For Fears, crosses into wet-tissue feyness and I have to listen to some strident disco to get the wobblyness out of my head. However, "Saro" is easily one of the years best songs.

It's a rendition of an old folk song, so Amidon can't really take the credit for the awesome vocal melody. It's absolutely effortless and timeless; and like all great melodies sounds as if it's been hewn from the natural world rather than forced out of a mind. Particularly affecting is the way the line "for to be alive" falls, a beautiful little moment. To give Amidon his due, its a very moving performance, managing to convey both a resignation to lost love, and the awful time it took to get there.

Sam Amidon - Saro

Sam's album featuring this track, All Is Well, is out in February, and was produced by Valgeir Sigurðsson, who has worked with Bjork, Bonnie Prince Billy, Mum, Sigur Ros, CocoRosie and, er, Kate Nash.

At the other end of the melodious prettiness spectrum we have HEALTH. They recorded their record (and are regulars) at the not-really-underground-anymore underground L.A. club The Smell, which has also nurtured such experimental-hipster-punk luminaries as No Age and Mika Miko. The Smell has a habit of putting on bands with silly names, try these on for size: Heavy Face, Vomit Bomb, Disposable Thumbs, Child Pornography, Bipolar Bear, Pocahaunted, This Moment In Black History, Good For Cows, Toxic Loincloth, Stay Fucked, Mattress, Moth Drakula. Lovely.

Anyway, HEALTH (why the block capitals? Smell-brand silliness again) may look nu-rave and even sound it on the Crystal Castles remix of their "Crimewave", but they actually play a brand of punk that fans of Liars and Black Dice will dig, garage rock meets noise bursts meets electronic noodles with tribal drumming and eerie vocals. I love "Perfect Skin", in which titanic chords call on the po-faced monolithic riffage of metal to slowly lay waste to the landscape. The way they fall fractionally off the on-beat is just great. Turn this one way up.

HEALTH - Perfect Skin

Hello blues, whatcha doin in here so soon?

The cold has set in good and proper up north. I get wrapped up to go outside - hats and coats and scarves. The last two days, Sheffield has been draped in a thick grey misty rain that settled as fog this morning. It was cold, and everywhere sounded empty, voices echoing hollow in the morning chill. This is the weather for blues, for the down and out blues infront of wide log fires - since I don't have a log fire, I'll settle for the blues.

Bessie Jones was the principal in a special form of gospel singing called the 'ring shout' which was practised on the St Simon's Island where she lived with her husband. This song was one she'd learnt as a girl, along with lots others from her grandfather - an African ex-slave. This one she made up "when she was young and still 'out in the world'(not a church goer)"

Alan Lomax discovered her in 1959, and she later convinced him to record her music and her biography. 'Beggin' The Blues' is featured on the 2CD Alan Lomax Songbook, it was recorded in 1961 and as a result, the recording is pretty much spotless. Lomax captures her voice in sharp focus and almost unbearably close-up. She sings completely a capella here - her voice is rich and powerful but tied down and softened for this personal lament, tarnished by a beautiful lilt that carries off the last syllable into a dark blue wilderness.

Bessie Jones - Beggin' The Blues

Life Force

Recently I have been enjoying the pleasures of rediscovery, spending half an hour here and there rooting around in a shoebox full of electronica and avant-rock promos from the last three years. I keep chancing upon albums buried in my memories, blurred undeservedly into a generic subset of mediocre strings and electronic mutterings.

The Life Force Trio are one of the things is listened to the most. This one track (in tribute to Alice Coltrane) stood out the most and I am glad to find it again. Unfortunately the album has terrible artwork and an even more hideous title: The Living Room. Well done guys, you really convinced us all that your good album was actually some flaccid lounge bullshit. (No points for imagination either - it was recorded in a living room)

They were conceived by Carlos Nino, who was also part of AmmonContact and Hu Vibrational among others. As far as I can tell, they've only ever released this one full length on Plug Research, with a guest appearance forDwight Trible and a 7" here, 12" there.

'Alice!' is six minutes of strings gliding; soaring like starlings over the high notes; caressing and adorning the helpless looped melody as it falters, is retrieved and heaps around and upon itself - a beautiful tangle of wind, string and the carefully disguised hum of programmed monotones.

Alice! - The Life Force Trio

And the footprints on your ceiling are almost gone...

This track is from a compilation released about two years ago called Back to California. It's the only track I really listen to, but I'm glad I found it, even if the rest are twangy white man country. But this one song, it never fails me.

'Trouble' is originally a Lowell George track; this version is by Nicolette Larson and was recorded live. What makes it more exciting is Van Dyke Parks on piano; you can hear him counting her in. She's most famous for being Neil Youngs woma' for a while, and recording a cover of "Lotta Love". She died in 1997 from a cerebral edema at the age of 45.

It always picks me back up, every little bit, one play is never enough. The gutsy drawl of Lawson adds bite to the lyrics, which carry the perfect sentiment. Parks' piano follows her voice, tracking the parts where she drags the heavier parts from the pit of her stomach, and when they linger on her tongue and in her mouth.

I find it impossible not to join in as she bawls: "You're an island and oooon yourrr own!", or the determined but soft drawl of "and your eyes are tired; and your feet are too; and you wish the world were as tired as youuuu"

I listen to it when I feel exhausted, and feel guilty for being so pathetically tired, because I've just worn myself out doing things I like and nothing I don't. Drag yourself out of bed to this, your day will be all the more productive. I think I'll need it tomorrow, so I'm gonna write a letter, and I'll send it away, put all the troubles in it I have todayyyyy...

Nicolette Larson - Trouble

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.